The singer Glenn Yarbrough died in August at the age of eighty-six after suffering from dementia for years. His voice and his songs were such a pivotal influence on my adolescence, I can’t imagine how I missed the news of…
The singer Glenn Yarbrough died in August at the age of eighty-six after suffering from dementia for years. His voice and his songs were such a pivotal influence on my adolescence, I can’t imagine how I missed the news of…
Arriving on the San Francisco set of The Towering Inferno—the downtown Bank of America building was standing in for the film’s fiery skyscraper—there was no one around. In the Bank of America lobby I found extras dressed to look like…
I hated high school. All the more ironic, then, to find myself, nearly fifty years after I had successfully made my escape, back inside the Gulag of my youth. The Brockville Collegiate Institute (BCI, as we called it) celebrated its one hundred and twenty-fifth…
Paul Newman was handing out popcorn late one cold night on the San Francisco set of The Towering Inferno. The disaster film–the world’s tallest skyscraper is on fire–that was to become 1974’s biggest hit was in its final production stages,…
In 1975, I went down to Newport Beach, California to interview John Wayne at the rambling seaside bungalow where he had lived for ten years. Wayne promptly pumped me full of tequila, a drink I had never had before, and…
My favorite Norman Jewison movie is Gaily, Gaily. I was only twenty and just starting out in the newspaper business when I saw it in 1969. I, of course, identified with the movie’s innocent reporter-protagonist, played by a very young…