What with all the movies being filmed in Chicago, the Windy City is quickly becoming Hollywood on the Lake. But Billy Crystal is one actor who`s in no hurry to come back, at least not in winter, after he filmed ”Running Scared” in the city in the middle of a really cold spell. One scene was shot on a street corner with the wind whipping him. ”Well, it`s 3 in the morning, and we do Take 1,” recalls Crystal in the January issue of Celebrity Focus. His line was, ”Why here, a government building crawling with security?” It came out as, ”Wha heah, a guv building cwaling wit security?” Cut! ”It sounded like a bad Japanese science-fiction movie,” he says.
If there`s one thing that writer Dorothy Parker was, it was direct. J. Bryan III, who numbered among his friends the writers who made up the famous Algonquin Round Table, recalls in ”Merry Gentlemen (and One Lady)”
(Atheneum) that when he met Parker, she said: ”I`m about to ask you an impertinent question. It`s not, `Will you collaborate on a play with me?` but, `How soon can you start?` ” The two then made a date to meet the next morning to discuss the project. Bryan showed up, but Parker, who was known to like her liquor, had no recollection of the offer. ”It proved to be even worse than that,” writes Bryan. ”She had no recollection even of our having met.”
As a musical, ”Camelot” was more of a tragedy than a comedy, notes Benny Green in ”A Hymn to Him: The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner” (Limelight). But tragic as it was, the action onstage was mild compared to events backstage: Alan Lerner suffered a burst ulcer during preproduction, and while he was recuperating, his mentor, Moss Hart, had a heart attack. Said Lerner:
”I saw a hospital bed, obviously occupied, being wheeled into the room I had just vacated. As we rode down in the elevator, the nurse told me who it was. It was Moss.”
REPLAYS
”A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry Adams
”Thoroughly to teach another is the best way to learn for yourself.”
Tryon Edwards
”Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
Oscar Wilde
