AVA: THE SECRET CONVERSATIONS
Full disclosure: I’ve written a one-woman show about the actress Ingrid Bergman that is currently being workshopped in Denmark prior to further development and production (hopefully soon!) in London and New York. So I go into a show like Elizabeth McGovern’s AVA: THE SECRET CONVERSATIONS at the Geffen Playhouse having attempted to slay a few […]
Read MoreZohra Lampert
I’ve become enamored of an actress named Zohra Lampert. You can make the most interesting discoveries watching black-and-white medical dramas of the early 1960s. In two different episodes of DR. KILDARE she has a spooky real quality that jumps off the screen: in “The Thing Speaks for Itself” as a woman willing to risk death […]
Read MoreWe currently have no opportunities.
In my determined search through the Dramatists Guild Resource Directory for places to send my two new stage plays, this is now my favorite quote from a theater company: “We currently have no opportunities.” You almost want to fly out there and give them a hug.
Read Moreafraid to say
March 26, 2023 I had a consultation with a young executive on Friday about my screenplay DRAMA DEPARTMENT, which I’ve been trying to get right for about 25 years(!) and which has gained startling mileage in the MeToo era. Not only did she say it was the best script she’d read in a long time, […]
Read MoreTen Years…
February 7, 2023 Facebook reminds me it’s been ten years since my brother Greg died. I still vividly remember when I posted this from what seemed then like my “dark, cold hotel room” in Vancouver. I heard Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” in the hotel bar and lost it. Commiserating, the Irish bartender said, “It’s the saddest […]
Read MoreTed Bessell
January 5, 2023 In my recent binge-watching of THAT GIRL, my admiration has grown for Marlo Thomas’s sidekick Ted Bessell. He was a stage actor and had been a child prodigy on the piano (he performed at Carnegie Hall when he was 12), but he’s best known for the hit sitcom. He died suddenly at […]
Read MoreMarlo Thomas turned 85
Marlo Thomas turned 85 this past Monday, and it’s got me watching THAT GIRL again. I’ve said it before, in plays of mine in fact, that the New York of that series was the one I wanted to move to when I was a kid. Watching it now, I realize that I fulfilled so many […]
Read MoreHappy Birthday to Julie Andrews
Happy Birthday to Julie Andrews, who is 87 today. I was honored to be her copy editor (twice), and she thanked me in print! (top right). I also wrote a play with this exchange in it: JIMMY: First, Julie Andrews gets passed over for the movie of MY FAIR LADY, then Walt Disney sees her […]
Read MoreEarl Graham
I just found out that my former agent Earl Graham (pictured below to the right, next to his star client, Ernest Thompson of ON GOLDEN POND fame) died recently of Covid. Earl fell in love with my first produced play, a one-act called CERTAIN DOUBTS, about a young gay man in love with his straight […]
Read MoreHERE COME THE BRIDES
Well, I’m hooked. I discovered that the Roku Channel has every episode of HERE COME THE BRIDES, the show I fell in love with at the age of nine, and great prints, too (the photography by Fred Jackman Jr. is exquisite, especially when mated with that immortal score by Hugo Montenegro — if you remember […]
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