The Secrets of Hollywood’s Power Siblings. The Baldwins of Massapequa Nothing in the background of the Baldwin brothers foretold their individual achievements.
Their father was a schoolteacher and football coach. Their mother was a housewife. There were no signs, as the four boys were growing up in New York, that Alec would become one of Hollywood’s leading men, that Daniel would become a successful actor, or that William and Stephen would both become movie stars in their own rights. “We’re still kind of pinching ourselves,” Stephen Baldwin says. If their respective silver-screen futures were impossible to predict, though, there were clear auguries of a larger shared destiny.
Frat Packs History is rife with famous clans, successful siblings who intrigue us because they stand out from the pack and embody age-old questions of nature versus nurture. They walk among us, too. Most often, such families are intellectual curiosities. They impress and amuse, these star tribes, but they also vex. One on One with Matt Damon. Woody Allen's kind of crowd, patrons of the 92nd St. Y, pull up chairs for a nostalgia trip. The balding, the Yankee baseball–capped, the bespectacled, the young and the old—but mostly the old—all came to sit at the feet of their nebbishy guru, Woody Allen.
And they got a good dose of him, if they didn't exactly get an evening of stunning and incisive film criticism. Seeing Allen at the 92nd St. Y is the closest thing Manhattan has to seeing the Pope give a blessing in St. Peter's Square. And his followers come out in droves for the pilgrimage. Of course, as can be the case at the 92nd St. Even with a fellow legend like TV host and writer Dick Cavett sitting inches away, or with the brilliant film scholar Annette Insdorf (the director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia and the author of, among other books, Indelible Shadows: Film and Holocaust and Francois Truffaut) moderating, all eyes were on Allen as the three spoke. Then Cavett recounted a story of winning an award for young magicians at fifteen.
“Lincoln,” Cavett corrected. “Goyim!” Scandalous Diaries of the Famous. Writer Anaïs Nin didn’t just keep a diary, she made journaling an art form.
She began putting pen to page during her adolescence and continued documenting her most intimate, sexually frank thoughts — often involving famous friends and bedfellows like Henry Miller — until her death in 1977. The erotica maven’s birthday is today, and we’re taking a look at several other well-known, scandalous diarists who have shared their candid (and often naughty) thoughts and experiences for all to peruse. In the age of celebrity sex tapes, some of these admissions may seem timid now, but they certainly made waves during their time.
Who would you add to the list? Five Ways To Kill Audience Satisfaction. Being a writer tends to taint your experiences of film, TV or novels, albeit in a way which can improve your own work.
While absorbing fiction, I'll inevitably analyse why I'm enjoying, or especially not enjoying, a story. Finding faults can be brilliantly instructive, in terms of avoiding the same mistakes - provided, of course, that it's not simply an issue of taste. You don't learn much from not enjoying a gangster film, for instance, if you don't particularly care for the genre. Here are five of the mental notes I've made over the years, while trying to work out why some stories leave you feeling instinctively dissatisfied.
There's no exact formula for making audiences happy, with that indefinable sense of 'fiction fullness', but we can certainly try to avoid these pitfalls... 1) IMPORTANT CHARACTERS TURN UP LATE I've seen this happen in two horror films in the last three months alone. 3) COINCIDENCE OVERSTEPS THE MARK Sure, we'll swallow the occasional small coincidence in a story. Crushes on fictional characters. Wackiest New Year’s Eve Ball Drops. New Year’s Eve is ultimately about the countdown, and it’s made official when something drops at midnight.
Across America, cities have gotten creative. Some wacky drops pay tribute to local products or tastes, while others go all-out outrageous. Whether you’re braving the crowds or in a hotel room, cheering a drop is part of the year-end spectacle—before the hangover and resolutions kick in. The largest New Year’s party in the Southeast, for instance, culminates with the release of an 800-pound fiberglass-and-foam peach in Atlanta. Known for its multimillion-dollar melon industry, Vincennes, IN, raises an 18-foot watermelon, which opens to drop 12 real Knox County watermelons. Read on for more wacky New Year’s drops, worth celebrating no matter where you bring in 2012. Eastport, ME A big red plywood maple leaf honoring nearby Canada is released at 11 p.m. and an eight-foot sardine (paying homage to the local industry) at midnight.
Television. Dance. Art. Actors. The waiting will always be the hardest part: 64 of our most anticipated entertainments of 2012. Music.