Salon.com > Jon B. Rhine

Bernie Brillstein: Alive and dishing

Wed, 01 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Bernie Brillstein may not be a household name unless of course you've been anywhere near showbiz in the past 30 years. The arc of Brillstein's career as a manager and producer detailed in his new memoir "Where Did I Go Right? You're No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead," resembles a Saul Bellow novel in the way its protagonist rises from the obscurity of the William Morris mailroom to the head of his own firm. In a recent conversation, the Hollywood titan who helped launch programs such as "Saturday Night Live" and "The Muppet Show" among others, talked about the deal-making, skirmishes and rivalries that have shaped his life.

I was amazed to discover your involvement with a lot of shows I'd watched over the years including "Saturday Night Live," but the strangest connection was that you're the guy who came up with "Hee Haw." What's a nice Jewish guy from New York doing with a show like that?

It was my concept. I tried to sell the networks on "The Muppet Show." They said a puppet wouldn't work at night and I was furious. So I got really angry, I woke up at 3 o'clock one morning and I said, "OK, I'll give them what they want." I broke down the top 10 -- it was "Green Acres," "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Laugh In." So I said "I'll do a country 'Laugh In.'" There was more brains than luck in that.

What's luck got to do with it?

Mon, 22 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Denise Rossi knows what good luck is. Nearly three years ago she hit a $1.3 million lottery jackpot, divorced her older husband and started a new life with the winnings. Last week Rossi found out the meaning of bad luck: A Los Angeles judge ruled that she must forfeit every cent of the $1.3 million to her ex for concealing her good fortune in divorce proceedings. Coincidentally, also last week, Rossi's former husband discovered the meaning of good luck.

Tales of luck abound. I was lounging at a local cafe some months back when a neatly dressed older man nursing a heavily bandaged arm took a seat near mine. "What happened?" I asked him, expecting to hear about a tumble in a slippery tub. He'd been on a 747 landing in New York a few days earlier, he told me. The plane skidded off the runway, several people were killed, but he walked away slightly battered and boarded a flight to San Francisco. Not a bad piece of luck.

Nicholas Rescher, a University of Pittsburgh philosophy professor, has spent a good part of his career trying to clarify our fuzzy notions of luck, authoring what may be the definitive book on the topic: "Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life." Rescher points out that a traveler, like the man in the cafe, would have to jump on one flight daily for 4,000 years before the odds of an accident caught up with him.

Anti-smoking camp takes on Rite Aid

Wed, 10 Nov 1999 13:00:00 +0000

The clamp on any smoking-related business may be getting cinched even
tighter in California, where a coalition of health advocates is demanding
that the state's largest pharmacy chain, Rite Aid, stop selling cigarettes
alongside medicine and sundries.

Timed to coincide with a media blitz that includes mobile billboards and a
hard-hitting New York Times ad, the campaign to force 600 California Rite
Aid drug stores to ban tobacco sales was launched at a strip mall in a quiet
neighborhood here Wednesday.

The negative campaign only compounded problems already facing the ailing
drugstore chain, whose stock price has plunged from more than $40 a share early this year to a Wednesday close of $8 amid
speculation that the company could be broken up. The Times ad, which reads,
"To help a persistent cough go to aisle 8. To get a persistent cough go to
aisle 14," won't bolster shareholder confidence.

The Pharmacy Partnership, the state-funded organization that launched the
campaign, is hoping to promote a nationwide movement among the company's customers to force the country's third largest pharmacy chain to discontinue cigarette sales.

I gave at the virtual office

Tue, 02 Nov 1999 18:00:00 +0000

Just when you thought the Internet had been given over to instant riches and
gimmicky contests designed to lure eyeballs with glorious prizes, a newly
launched nonprofit site is proving the popularity of another sort of
"giveaway": Donating food for clicks.

The Hunger Site, launched in June, has grown so quickly that founder
John Breen, a 42-year-old Indiana computer programmer, says he barely has
time to answer phone calls and see his family.

"My original idea was to supply educational materials, pencils, paper,
books, to children in developing countries," Breen says. "Then I found out
that hunger was a major factor in preventing students from being able to
learn, so I shifted the focus of the site."

With nearly 24,000 people dying every day from hunger, Breen decided that his
strategy should focus on feeding the world's most impoverished people. What
resulted was a site backed by corporate donations that allows visitors to
painlessly participate in the largesse by simply clicking on a "Donate Free
Food" button.

May the best sex win: Man vs. woman in the ring

Sat, 09 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Boxing, called the "sweet science" by devotees with pinkie rings and cigars clenched in their teeth, is about to be changed forever. On Saturday, for the first time in history, a man will fight a woman -- in the ring.

The event has ringside pundits like the Runyonesque fight writer Burt Sugar squirming like a man on the receiving end of a proctologist's glove. The unlikely match-up in Seattle will feature a lean and slightly taller Margaret McGregor against a fellow named Loi Chow. McGregor has the better record. Both are lightweights. My money's on McGregor.

Clearly there is more at stake here than another notch on either fighter's win-loss record -- especially for Chow. On Chow's narrow shoulders rests the future of all dealings between men and women in bedrooms, offices and cocktail lounges across the land.

Unlike Chow, I know something about the reptilian confusion that can cloud a male fighter's mind when stepping into the ring with a woman. I have strapped on the gloves and gone toe to toe with a female. It all goes back a few months, when I decided to try one of those "combat" aerobics classes that have sprung up at local fitness clubs around the land.

The stalking of Chris Isaak

Wed, 06 Oct 1999 13:00:00 +0000

Is Chris Isaak being stalked by a match-happy, potentially murderous stalker? The terminally melancholy crooner is reportedly running scared after two mysterious fires and a spate of threatening letters.

Isaak's San Francisco house was set ablaze on Sept. 10, according to a police report obtained by Salon People. Investigators on the scene say the fire was "intentionally set." The blaze was the second mysterious fire for Isaak in the past few months. During a recent appearance on the Rosie O'Donnell show, Isaak mentioned a previous fire at a house he was in the process of buying outside of San Francisco, though he didn't specify where.

A source close to Isaak says the singer had been getting threatening letters prior to the incident. Isaak is rumored to be making plans to sell the house he's lived in for the last 10 years due to concerns for his safety. And in a recent interview with the online publication Launch, Isaak revealed that his record "Speak of the Devil" had been criticized for what some have called its satanic content. The latest fire raises speculation that the pop star and actor may be the target of a stalker retaliating over the lyrics of his newest release.

Donn Pohren, flamenco’s hero

Sat, 02 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Inside Suristan, a club near Madrid's Plaza Santa Ana, flamenco fans are assembling for a show featuring two of the city's newest generation of flamenco stars. Jeronimo Maya, a cherubic 20-year-old guitarist, and Dieguito, an Armani-clad Gypsy singer, quaff pre-gig drinks at the bar.

Heads turn as David Byrne, with an armada of Spanish record execs, parts the cloud of cigarette smoke on his way to a stage-side table. Byrne, uneasy as a nun, is surrounded by a group of boisterous Gypsies cheering the performers who take the stage.

Maya's sinewy hands fan over the strings in the first slow, sad passages of a Soleares. Dieguito, eyes closed, emits a low throaty cry that hushes the room. Byrne's eyes lock on the singer in either a moment of primal conversion or recognition of the next recording contract bonanza.

After weeks of travel through Spain sampling flamenco music in clubs, outdoor festivals and the ubiquitous private flamenco clubs called peñas, it became clear that Spain's flamenco music scene was moving toward a flashy rock-style promotion evident in Madrid's clubs.

The flamenco man: Hampton Fancher

Sat, 02 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Hampton Fancher's career spans 40 years and includes credits as an actor,
screenwriter, producer and, most recently, director of "The Minus Man."
It's an eclectic mix, from appearances on "Gunsmoke" to screenwriter for the
futuristic noir classic "Blade Runner." Fancher spoke to Salon People about his passion for flamenco dancing, which led him to board a freighter bound for Spain in the '50s and adopt a new identity.

You mentioned that you first heard flamenco as a kid.

I was fascinated by
dancing, my sister was a dancer, my mother used to be a dancer, though not
flamenco. You know, I didn't have other means of expressing myself. I used
to see movies and try to interpret them. But when I was 10 or 11, I went to
see a really dumb movie, called "Valentino," I think. If I saw it now I'd probably be horrified. In the opening sequence the
guy who played Valentino in the film, Anthony Dexter, was with a Spanish dancer
on a ship. It started out with him doing heel-work on the table with a
guitar. At that moment the duende (the spirit
that inspires flamenco at its most magical moments) entered me. I went crazy. At that
moment I fell, literally, in love. It got me big.

He remembers Papa

Wed, 14 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Soon after the American soldiers were pulled out of the civil war in Spain in 1938, Ernest Hemingway wrote this description of Milton Wolff, commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion: "Twenty-three years old, tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg. He is alive and unhit by the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed."

Now 83, Wolff will leave his small apartment outside San Francisco this week and fly to Illinois to pay his own tribute to Hemingway. The ceremony, at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, marks the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth and coincides with the publication of Hemingway's last "posthumous novel," "True at First Light."

Wolff first met Hemingway when Wolff was a 22-year-old private in the International Brigades, a force made up of volunteers from more than 50 countries who went to Spain to fight alongside the troops of the liberal government of the Republic against Gen. Francisco Franco's military revolt. While the two men would call each other friend until Hemingway's death, their first encounter was not promising. Wolff stole Hemingway's girlfriend.