With Friends Like These
An oral history of Friends:
“JIM BURROWS (director): Based on the [live] audience for the Friends pilot, I knew how popular that show would be. The kids were all pretty and funny, so beautiful. I said to Les Moonves, who was head of Warner Bros., “Give me the plane. I’ll pay for dinner.” I took the cast to Vegas.
“MATT LeBLANC: Who goes to Vegas on a private jet? And Jimmy gave me 500 bucks to gamble.
“LISA KUDROW: On the plane he showed us the first episode of Friends. None of it had aired yet.
“Jimmy took us to dinner, and he gave us each a little money to gamble with. He said, “I want you to be aware that this is the last time that you all can be out and not be swarmed, because that’s what’s going to happen.” And everyone was like, ‘Really?‘”
The Costa Concordia Sinking: Inside the Epic Fight for Survival
Survivors and crew members recount the Costa Concordia crash, in which 32 people lost their lives:
“The Concordia’s loss is also a landmark moment in naval history. It is the largest passenger ship ever wrecked. The 4,000 people who fled its slippery decks—nearly twice as many as were aboard the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912—represent the largest maritime evacuation in history. A story of heroism and disgrace, it is also, in the mistakes of its captain and certain officers, a tale of monumental human folly.
“‘This was an episode of historic importance for those who study nautical issues,’ says Ilarione Dell’Anna, the Italian Coast Guard admiral who oversaw much of the massive rescue effort that night. ‘The old point of departure was the Titanic. I believe that today the new point of departure will be the Costa Concordia. There has never been anything like this before. We must study this, to see what happened and to see what we can learn.'”
Hollywood’s Vial Bodies
More actors, filmmakers and execs are using human growth hormone (H.G.H.) in an attempt to reverse the aging process. But is it really doing what its Beverly Hills evangelists are claiming?
“He has been giving himself H.G.H. injections for more than 20 years. And he does look terrific, with smooth skin and a lean body. And, by the way, H.G.H. needles are extremely thin, like those used by diabetics or acupuncturists. H.G.H. therapy, doctors say, is virtually painless.
“There’s just one catch. The vast majority of endocrinologists, when asked about the widespread treatment for H.G.H. deficiency, agree.
“It’s baloney.”
The Girls at the Front
A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland:
“Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were ‘mini– training camps’ and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. ‘We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,’ says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing ‘Horse Killer Pass.’ Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. ‘It’s my party patch,’ says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. ‘I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.'”
Shark in the Kiddie Pool
Nick Roses is a 22-year-old Hollywood agent who specializes in working with child actors. But former clients say he’s scamming families with promises of Disney stardom:
“Howard Meltzer, a longtime casting director, calls Roses ‘Bernie Brillstein in a 20-year-old’s body.’ Many others in Hollywood deem him either a gimlet-eyed child prodigy prone to the occasional youthful indiscretion or a shark-eyed huckster with the face of a Mouseketeer. Or both.
“Roses’s status as a communal lightning rod began in April, when the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office charged him with seven counts of, in essence, criminal Hollywood skulduggery. Parents of children that Roses represented complained that he, among other things, baited them into moving to Los Angeles and becoming clients at a poorly run management company which bilked them out of money. In July, the case was settled when he pleaded no contest to violating a new law prohibiting managers from charging fees to clients for the promise of work or auditions. Such fees are deemed red flags by the Hollywood Establishment; mainstream talent managers work on a commission basis—they don’t make a penny until the client does.”
Guantánamo: An Oral History
Ten years after the arrival of the first detainees, officials, lawyers, prisoners and soldiers speak out on how it all started—and how difficult it has been to close it:
“When I first got down to Guantánamo, I, along pretty much with everybody else in my group, thought that we were going to be dealing with the worst of the worst. That’s what we had been told.
“When I started to get a broader view, I realized that a large majority of the population just had no business being at Guantánamo. Maybe they had been picked up on the battlefield, and maybe they were involved in low-level insurgency. That would’ve been the worst of it with a large portion of these characters. The majority of the ones that I saw—really, we just didn’t have anything on them. So it was kind of a shock to the system on the level of the detainees.”
Heroes of the Hot Zone
On the Japanese workers—some 18,000 of them—who have ventured into the radioactive exclusion zone following the meltdowns at Fukushima, and the work of radiation expert Dr. Robert Gale:
“The worries about the spread of radiation have hardly abated, but the workers remain all but nameless and faceless; they rarely speak to the press—for fear of being fired—and all that most of us see of them are pictures of virtually extraterrestrial figures in HAZMAT suits and masks clomping around a wasteland eerily emptied of 100,000 people. (It is estimated that more than 19,000 people have died in the disaster.) They’re shedding a little of their anonymity today, though, because word has gotten out that one of the world’s most celebrated experts on radiation has come to talk to them, and to try to put their concerns into perspective. As Gale walks the streets of the small town 115 miles north of Tokyo, one set of workers after another asks to talk to him, if only so they can share their worries as they can with few others—even if his reassurances may echo some of those given by their government. One worker, at the end of a long evening, even wraps Gale in a bear hug, an all but unheard-of show of affection in reserved Japan.”
Lowe, Actually
From A.N. Devers’ ‘Top Bathtub Longreads of 2011’: Rob Lowe on his audition for The Outsiders:
I start talking to the kid from back East. He’s open, friendly, funny, and has an almost robotic, bloodless focus and an intensity that I’ve never encountered before. His name is Tom Cruise.
It will be survival of the fittest for all of us. We will need to intimidate, dominate, and crush our competitors for these roles of a lifetime. But there’s no reason we can’t try to stay friends while we do it.
“What part are you reading for?” I ask Tom.
“Christ, up until today, it was Sodapop, but Francis has everyone switching parts, and bringing us all in and out while everyone watches everyone else! I just got done reading Darrel.”
The Han Solo Comedy Hour!
The night The Star Wars Holiday Special broadcast on CBS, Lenny Ripps threw a party. “I had lots of people over, and lots of food, and lots of anticipation,” he recalls. “And we sat in front of the TV, and after the first commercial, I turned it off and I said, ‘Let’s eat.’”
The special is not easy to sit through by any stretch of the imagination, but fans of old-school comedy or show-business carnage will find some guilty pleasures. As a karmic reward for his reluctance to participate, Harrison Ford gets to open the show in a scene where his and Chewbacca’s efforts to get back to Kashyyyk are stymied by a dogfight with Imperial forces. As the Millennium Falcon’s cabin is rocked by what seems to be a tired, off-screen Teamster, Ford gets to say lines like “That’s the spirit! You’ll be celebrating Life Day before you know it!” This leads into the special’s opening credits, where, if you look closely at the insert shot of Ford when he is introduced, you can actually see him fuming.
The Book of Jobs
The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years ago to less than a tenth of it today. The pace has quickened markedly during the past decade. There are two reasons for the decline. One is greater productivity—the same dynamic that revolutionized agriculture and forced a majority of American farmers to look for work elsewhere. The other is globalization, which has sent millions of jobs overseas, to low-wage countries or those that have been investing more in infrastructure or technology. (As Greenwald has pointed out, most of the job loss in the 1990s was related to productivity increases, not to globalization.) Whatever the specific cause, the inevitable result is precisely the same as it was 80 years ago: a decline in income and jobs. The millions of jobless former factory workers once employed in cities such as Youngstown and Birmingham and Gary and Detroit are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers.