Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Alec Baldwin In His Own Words

Alec Baldwin is on the cover of April's Vanity Fair, and instead of sitting down for an accompanying interview, Alec instead wrote an essay, which seems like a very Alec Baldwin thing to do. Here is an excerpt:

"The list of men I admire in the movies is quite long. It goes from Lon Chaney Sr. to Gable to Tracy to Fredric March. It includes Robert Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, Kirk Douglas, Lon Chaney Jr., Michael Douglas, Tyrone Power, James Garner, Burt Lancaster, Yves Montand, Colin Firth, Albert Finney, Robert De Niro, Robert Preston, Paul Newman, Peter O’Toole, Gregory Peck, Maximilian Schell, and Gary Oldman.

My favorite movie actor is William Holden. On-screen, Holden is handsome, graceful, charming, and funny. He is tough and resourceful enough to handle himself in any type of predicament. In a range of films from Golden Boy to The Bridge on the River Kwai and Sabrina, from Sunset Boulevard to Stalag 17 and The Wild Bunch, Holden could do it all. I knew that developing a style like his was not practical. He was an original and tough to imitate. Plus, the scripts in those days were tailored for him. Writers today, in most cases, don’t necessarily write for a particular actor. But what I wouldn’t give to have been born in 1925 or so, to have survived the war and gone on to a career in films in that golden age of the 1940s and 50s.

In small and not so small ways, many young actors seek to latch onto the persona of a particular star and channel that star in their early work. Some newcomers try to bring their Brando, Dean, Mitchum, Pacino, De Niro, or Nicholson to the roles. Women may try, especially when they’re young, to pull in everything from Monroe to Katharine Hepburn. They may try to emulate, not only in terms of style but also of career choices, someone who is a contemporary like Meryl Streep, Cherry Jones, or Cate Blanchett. Young actors have to come up with something and haven’t had much experience. So why not steal from the best?

...I suppose the contemporary actor who I most wanted to emulate was Pacino. Al’s passion, intensity, and sexuality, all of his now legendary signatures, took my breath away. The scene in Serpico when John Randolph presents Serpico with his gold shield—a bullet hole bored into Al’s face—his indignity, disgust, and rage are barely containable. As Randolph presses the badge onto Al’s chest, Pacino collapses in tears that, to this day, go straight through me. I didn’t want to imitate Al. But I wanted to learn from him. The task was to maintain a reservoir of emotional truth, pain, and love.

...I have always been madly in love with Megan Mullally. Some have compared her to Madeline Kahn, and although I hear some echoes, Megan is such an original in terms of her timing, her warmth, and her mixture of insanity and sexiness. Like Megan, Jane Krakowski went on to nail the self-absorbed, horny femme fatale on 30 Rock. In my mind, there is a line from Marilyn Monroe to Madeline Kahn to Megan to Jane. Scattered in between are a lot of talented female comics and actresses who are scoring in film and TV, of all ethnicities and ages, like Rosie Perez, Wanda Sykes, Sarah Silverman, and Tig Notaro. But with her high-pitched voice and loopy delivery, I’ve always found Megan irresistible.

,,,When I first met Tina Fey—beautiful and brunette, smart and funny, by turns smug and diffident and completely uninterested in me or anything I had to say—I had the same reaction that I’m sure many men and women have: I fell in love. Tina was then the head writer at Saturday Night Live, and I was hosting that week’s show. The writers and producers were packed, impossibly, into Lorne’s satellite office overlooking Studio 8H, where S.N.L. is produced. (This was once Toscanini’s private office, when he directed the NBC orchestra in 8H. The building has quite a history.) When Lorne finished giving his notes after the dress rehearsal, I asked Marci Klein, who coordinated the talent, if Tina was single. She pointed to a man sitting along the wall. Or maybe he was standing? This was Jeff Richmond, Tina’s husband. Jeff is diminutive. Tina describes him as “travel-size.” When I saw him, I thought, What’s she doing with him? With his spools of curly brown hair and oversize eyes, Jeff resembles a Margaret Keane painting..."

Read the full lengthy piece at Vanity Fair.

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