The Longreads Blog

The actor reflects on his career choices, the films he passed on, and his early days working for Mister Rogers:

Michael: What people don’t realize is what his crew looked like — they almost all had hair down to their lower backs, one guy just dripped with patchouli and marijuana smoke, worse than Tom Petty. But everyone was really funny and would do these insane things — and Fred just loved them. And they loved him back.

Daniel: So he’d never just lose his shit and scream at a gaffer for getting in the shot?

Michael: No! In fact, one time, my friend Nicky Tallo, who was this really funny, big Italian kid who was his floor manager — and I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school when I say generally Nick was feeling the effects of smoking dope the night before — or maybe even that morning …

Daniel: It was a different era …

Michael: So one day, we were taping, and Fred comes in, and starts singing, ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day … ’ puts the shoes down here, goes to hang up the sweater in the closet. And he’s singing, and he opens the door — and there’s his floor manager, Nick, this big guy with his long goatee, pierced ears, hair all over the place, totally nude, just standing there naked in the closet. Well, Fred just fell down; it was the most hysterical thing you’ve ever seen. He was totally cool.

“Dinner with Daniel: Michael Keaton.” — Daniel Kellison, Grantland

Two friends decide to participate in the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona:

We talk about our plan of action one last time. We remind each other to stay to the inside on the turns. We remind each other that the most important thing is to keep our center of gravity so we stay on our feet.

‘If you lose a shoe, keep going,’ Dan says.

‘Yeah, glass in your foot is better than being trampled—by people or bulls.’

‘If you fall, don’t try to get up. Just cover your head and roll to the side.’

‘And if you see a bull on its own, try to get out.’

This last point may be the most important in terms of living and dying. From what we’ve been told, bulls together are not as frightened as bulls alone. Bulls together tend to stay on a path, assuming they keep their footing. Frightened bulls directly charge people.

“The Bull Passes Through.” — Kevin Chroust, The Morning News

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[Transcript] A conversation between the actor and late-night host—and memories of working together:

David Letterman: We did a sketch on the old ‘Late Night’ show, and it was with one of the writers, Tom Gammill, and it was ‘Dale, the Psychotic Page.’ We had to set up nine holes of a miniature golf course. He would come in with a NBC page blazer, and he would play miniature golf. And with each failing attempt on the hole, he would become more and more psychotic. There’s your comedy, America! This is what you’ve been waiting for. Aren’t you glad we’re here?

Alec Baldwin: Yeah. They’re holding their breath. I love on your show – I haven’t done this in a while, I miss it when – ’cause everything – I guess they can’t do this stuff all the time. Maybe this bit is a victim of global warming, but I get there one time and they want me to ride the snowmobile on the roof of the building years ago. They’re all very droll, and Biff always calls me ‘Alex.’ I love that. You’re on the roof and it’s snowing, and we’re on the roof of your building and it’s snowing, and Biff’s like, ‘Okay, now Alex, you’re gonna ride the snowmobile around the roof a few times, and gonna be men on every corner to catch you to keep you from goin’ over the side. Is that all right? All right, Alex!’ I’m like, ‘Great. Let me go.’ Danger, I love it. Elements.

Letterman: Well, I was thinking about a year ago, I was looking around the Ed Sullivan Theater. What a tremendous stroke of luck that was! I used to love working in the studio, and I remember one day running into Lorne Michaels, and he said to me, ‘How long did it take you to get used to doing a TV show in a theater?’ And I knew exactly what he was saying because to him, TV comes out of a studio, and I always felt that way myself. But I’ve really grown fond of the theater at CBS, the Ed Sullivan Theater, for reasons like that and many more. It’s comfortable; it’s fun; it smells of decades and decades and decades of show business. There’s tunnels, and alleys, and rats, but it’s fantastic. I mean it’s just so versatile and so great. And also the way Hal set it up in the beginning, it’s fairly intimate. You can have a pretty reasonable conversation there in this 500-seat room, and so I think it works fine as a TV studio now.

“Here’s the Thing: Alec Baldwin Interviews David Letterman.” — WNYC

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week: SCOTUSblog, Esquire, New York Times Health, Outside magazine, The Classical, fiction from Nathan Englander, winner of the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, plus guest picks from Laura Nelson.

How authorities broke up an extortion ring in the 1960s that targeted gay men:

Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, had used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment, among them a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities. The ring had operated for almost a decade, had victimized thousands, and had taken in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down ‘on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.’

Though now almost forgotten, the case of ‘the Chickens and the Bulls’ as the NYPD called it (or ‘Operation Homex,’ to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging.

“The Chickens and the Bulls.” — William McGowan, Slate

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An eight-year-old autistic boy disappears into a densely forested park in Virginia for five days. The frantic search to find a child who doesn’t understand he’s in danger:

Because of his autism, Robert probably didn’t know that he was lost. If he heard people coming through the woods, he might well have taken cover from them, thinking it was a game of hide-and-seek. Or he might not have wanted to be found by a stranger, even one calling out his name. This made efforts to locate him extremely difficult, and it’s how Robert managed to elude what would soon become one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in Virginia history.

When he disappeared that day, Robert began an unlikely adventure that placed him at the center of the newest concern in the search-and-rescue (SAR) world: lost autistic children. Why autistic kids have the tendency to run off is not known, but the urge is strong in half of all children diagnosed with the disorder.

“Catch Me If You Can.” — Dean King, Outside magazine

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Steven Thrasher has been named the 2012 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association journalist of the year. After gay marriage was legalized in New York last year, he followed two same-sex couples who finally earned the right to consider whether or not they wanted to get married:

‘We never did this saying, “We’re going to go out and marry right away,” ‘ Howard says. ‘We won the right. Now, we have the choice.’

Besides: ‘I was waiting for Kevin to bring it up.’

Kevin hears this and replies, ‘Really? That’s interesting,’ without adding more.

It turns out that although same-sex couples now have 1,324 new legal benefits in New York State, there are actually some big economic incentives for Kevin and Howard not to wed. Kevin receives state insurance for his disabilities, and marrying Howard would end that. While it would allow Kevin to go onto Howard’s insurance plan, the co-payments for the drugs and procedures he needs could be prohibitive.

This is exactly the kind of conundrum cohabitating straight couples of certain means have had to face from time to time.

“Maybe I Do And Maybe I Don’t.” — Steven Thrasher, Village Voice

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A writer of made-for-TV movies reflects on his middling successes and near-misses from a career of steady but not spectacular work in Hollywood:

On occasion during my 30-year screenwriting career, the amount on these checks has been life-changing, enough money to buy a car or temporarily pay off our credit cards. But I don’t really expect to see that kind of windfall again. I haven’t had a movie made in eight years, and my current career status is somewhere between emeritus and irrelevant. Still, the check that came yesterday was a nice surprise. The total was $2,588.95. Included with the check was an itemized list of movies for which I had received sole or shared screenwriting credit and that had been shown again and again around the world. The biggest amounts were for Cleopatra ($716.41), a lavish and maybe-just-a-little-bit-cheesy ABC miniseries, and for King of Texas ($854.30), a Western retelling of King Lear with Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden that had originally aired on TNT. A half-dozen other movies were on the list. They included a few boilerplate TV movies like In The Line of Duty: Blaze of Glory (56 cents), an ‘inspired by a true story’ bank heist movie starring those then-titans of the small screen Bruce Campbell and Lori Loughlin; a steamy Lifetime murder mystery called Widow on the Hill ($341.60), which remains the only thing I’ve ever written that my mother implied she would just as soon I hadn’t; andThe Colt ($122.53), a nicely rendered little Civil War movie that aired on the Hallmark Channel that I had adapted from a seven-page short story by Mikhail Sholokov. The Guild statement provided scant information about which parts of the world embraced these movies most fervently, but I doubt that I’m far off the mark in imagining an unwatched TV screen in the back of a kebab stand in Kota Kinabalu.

“I Was an A-List Writer of B-List Productions.” — Stephen Harrigan, Slate

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Abigail Woodcraft was seven when she indoctrinated into the Church of Scientology via an arm of the church known as Sea Org. What she endured, and how she escaped:

One of my first jobs as an official member of the Sea Org was in the security department, meaning I had to make sure people obeyed church rules and ethics. It seemed that people were always in some kind of trouble—the place felt ruled by fear. You could get in trouble for random things; for instance, someone might question why there were so many loose papers on your desk. Another thing you could get in trouble for: masturbation. Early on in my new job, I had to sit down with a man in his 40s who had admitted to masturbating, and tell him to cut it out. I was 15 years old.

“Scientology’s Sea Org.” — Abigail Woodcraft via Abigail Pesta, The Daily Beast

More on Scientology

In the early 20th Century, six-day bike races were some of the biggest sporting events in the U.S.—not to mention grueling and dangerous:

In the four corners of the old Chicago Stadium, faux-Greek sculptures depicted the premier indoor athletes of the day: a boxer, a track runner, a hockey player, and a bicyclist. Though outdoor road races were king at the turn of the century, promoters figured out that track racing on a wooden, banked, 1/6-mile oval could sell more tickets. Instead of watching the competitors whiz by once from the side of a street, people could pack into arenas and see them run thousands of laps.

“The Bell-Lappers.” — Rob Mitchum, The Classical

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