By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine February 2012

When writer David Milch and director Michael Mann set out to make their new HBO series, Luck, about the seedy, high-stakes world of horse racing, there was never a question about where it would be shot. “I’ve been to most of the tracks in Europe, and to me, Santa Anita is the most beautiful track in the world,” says Milch, a thoroughbred owner himself who loves how the Arcadia park “seems benign and pastoral but in fact it’s a jungle.” Mann had never been to Santa Anita until Milch took him, and he, too, was struck by the way the San Gabriel Mountains illuminate the stretch. That the series is partly about gamblers and degenerates only made the setting more perfect. “If this was My Friend Flicka or Secretariat, you would never shoot at Santa Anita,” says Mann. “It’s only because our people—and the language they use—are so not pretty that you’re able to get away with it.”

Had Grove developer Rick Caruso succeeded in building his proposed Shops at Santa Anita in the track’s parking lot, Milch and Mann’s mise-en-scène would have been dramatically different. The expansive family-oriented outdoor mall with a horse-drawn trolley wending its way past luxury retailers never materialized, leaving the 77-year-old Santa Anita (it’s on the National Register of Historic Places) in a state of degraded gentility. Of course that makes it a poignant stage for Luck’s hucksters and dreamers, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, Dennis Farina, and seemingly every other craggy-faced actor in Hollywood. Milch, whose previous series include Deadwood (talk about craggy) and the short-lived John from Cincinnati, hopes cable watchers will thrill to Santa Anita as he does (racing season began the day after Christmas). “It’s a very arcane environment,” he says. “One enters at one’s peril.”

Mann agrees, sounding like a convert. “If it’s January at 6:30 in the morning,” he says, “and you’re out there and there’s snow on the mountains and the air is crystal clear, it’s fantastic.”

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, January 2012

How do I say this? A white person’s upbringing in Los Angeles is different from a black person’s upbringing in Los Angeles. Even if both grew up in affluent neighborhoods, it’s totally different. I grew up in Windsor Hills, which is considered an affluent black neighborhood. My school was 54th Street, which was all black, but I was one of the first round of kids who were bused to make schools more integrated. I was in the fourth grade—maybe ’78 or ’79. I was bused to Castle Heights Elementary. I was in one of three busloads of black kids from different areas—we made up less than a third of the school. It freaked me out. It’s not that I didn’t want to be bused—I dug the idea of checking out different areas. But I didn’t like Castle Heights. No one was mean to us—it was clearly just strange for them that we were there. And it was strange for us.

In the ’80s, I’d been on the NBC series 227, but I still had to audition for Boyz N the Hood. I was going to USC at that time. I said to one of my girlfriends, “This guy named John Singleton is directing this movie.” And she says, “You know he goes to USC, right?” And I’m like, “No!” Maybe if I’d spent more time there, I would have known that. I read five or six lines for the casting director, and she said, “OK, I just wanted to see if you could be ghetto.” Everybody’s idea of me was Brenda from 227—a shy girl who one day will come out of her shell.

All of us who worked on Boyz N the Hood were excited to be part of a story that was told from our point of view. It’s been 20 years since that movie came out, but people still talk to me about it. People will tweet me the lines from the film. I think the reason it resonated was that it was a POV shared not just by people who lived in South-Central, but by people across the world who lived in neighborhoods like South-Central.

There’s a scene in the movie in which some bad cops are roughing up these teenagers—who are not bad kids—just because of the color of their skin and the neighborhood they’re in. For me growing up, that was our perception of cops. They were not our protectors. When things went down, there were some neighborhoods that wouldn’t even call the cops for help. One, they wouldn’t show up, or two, it would end up being a worse situation than what was already existing. I’ve been in cars with some of my black male friends in the ’90s when cops pulled us over, and the first thing my friends would do is roll down the window and stick their hands out—before the cops said anything. It was like, “Don’t accidentally shoot me and say that I had something in my hands!”

Until I started making Southland, my feeling about the LAPD still remained stuck in that era. But that’s changed as I’ve spent time with the officers who help us make the series realistic. These people are putting their lives on the line for people they don’t know. The LAPD has worked hard to clean itself up. I can see that now.

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, November 2011

My family’s biggest pet peeve about me is that whenever we get in the car, I tell them that wherever we’re going is 15 minutes away. Because I remember that it used to be 15 minutes away. I’m shocked that it doesn’t take 15 minutes to get from Santa Monica to West Hollywood. Shocked! If I have an appointment in West Hollywood and I’m at Ocean Avenue and Arizona, I leave 15 minutes to get there—knowing full well that crossing the 405 alone is going to take me an hour. As an L.A. native, I refuse to grow up in this one area: traffic. I’m just not going to allow L.A. to be different than it was in 1978. Otherwise I’d have to move.

I was born and spent my early childhood in Santa Monica and the Mar Vista area, so I love it there. And Beverly Hills means a lot to me, too. I lived there for quite a while, and my godmother, the actress Shelley Winters, lived within a couple of blocks of us. Chasen’s and the Beverly Hills Hotel were the meeting places for other actors with families or for Sunday brunch. It was the neighborhood, but it was also kind of fantastic. Oddly formal, but also the traditions were very of the era—the ’70s. My mom would go to the Beverly Hills Health Club, and Jack LaLanne really did give classes there. We’d walk along the empty train tracks—which actually had trains periodically—down Santa Monica Boulevard. And I watched the slow development of West Hollywood.

I remember people planting themselves here. Whether they were actors or artists or people of a particular sexual orientation, everyone was sort of finding their home, defining themselves in a city that was young in that way. No one was into glamour. There weren’t tabloids like today. Actors like my parents and my godmother didn’t really “do press” in the ’70s. If anything, if it was a big movie, maybe you’d do the cover of American Film magazine. But that was it. There was no Us Weekly. And actresses weren’t on the cover of fashion magazines; supermodels were. There were no paparazzi. It was a very naive time. More homespun. Remembering that makes me feel as if I can say “Oh, I grew up in L.A.” like someone would say they’re from Omaha.

I’m blessed to have been raised by actors, not celebrities. My mom lived in town, but my dad lived in Malibu, and it was really beat up. All dirt roads. There was one good restaurant—John’s Garden was there—and that was it. There was nowhere to go. It was funky hippies everywhere. Dad, Lou Adler, Hal Ashby, and Burgess Meredith—those were the people out there. Oh, and Robert Altman. I was hanging out with artists who were doing their own thing and who never took no for an answer. And actors studied. You didn’t stop studying acting because you were famous. Studying was part of what you did. Growing up, I felt that acting was a vocation people chose. You didn’t necessarily make a lot of money doing it. You did movies because you loved them. Everyone was in it together, and there wasn’t a lot of separation between crew and cast. It was familial.

When I’m on a set now, I expect the environment to feel like that. I just worked with Paul Thomas Anderson, who also grew up in L.A. We went to the same high school, Buckley in the Valley. On set I felt that I was working with my friend who I went to Buckley with. We were all just here, making our thing. Familial and without frills. None of the lame stuff.

Obviously I’m a fan, too, or I wouldn’t do what I do. I was really lucky to see Jimmy Stewart at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre once, which was one of the great excitements of my life. I remember also going to the premiere of Superman at Grauman’s—my mom and my godmother were close friends of Marlon Brando. It was springtime, and Shelley took me and she wore jeans because, of course, that’s what you had to wear to a premiere in 1978, with a fur coat over them. I remember walking into Grauman’s, and all the actresses were there in their jeans and mink coats. But it was also very small town.

By Phyllis Diller as told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of Los Angeles magazine

Why did I get my face done? I’ll tell you why. First of all, I didn’t touch it until I was 55. That’s when I saw myself on television, on the old Sonny & Cher show. I was playing a witch, and I threw my head back and it gave me a couple of chins. I had bags under my eyes. I’d always had irregular features. My nose was too long, and I’d broken it, which made it crooked. It was a real witch nose. I also had crooked teeth. Ugly nose, crooked teeth. Which meant I had a lot of things wrong right here in the middle. Wrong! Wrong!

Anyway, I looked terrible. So the next morning I called my skin doctor and said, “Who do I call for a face-lift?” He referred me to Franklin Ashley, the top man at UCLA. So I called him—he was the grandfather of all cosmetic surgery. You know, he did a lot of work on John Wayne.

Men have certain things they have to have done—if they care. One is their upper eye; it sometimes needs opening. And it’s OK to get the bags removed and get the chin done. But a man should never have a face-lift. All wrong! They don’t look like any man you’ve ever known. It kills at least one ball. And on some guys, two balls.

I didn’t have to tell Ashley that my nose was badly broken. He took one look at me and said, “Oh, God, look what I get to do!” I get goose pimples just talking about it. He shortened my nose. It gave me a little room between my nose and my mouth. I also had my teeth all done, straightened with some kind of veneer.

Oh, baby, he did such a great job on my neck. Look! This ain’t bad for 94! I had that original face-lift in 1972. I was in the hospital a whole week. I’m not one to sit at home and cringe in the corner. So everybody saw, for the first time in their lives, what it looked like: strings hanging out of me. My being open about it became a big deal. People love honesty.

There were people who were against my getting my face fixed. My publicist was sure it would be the end of my career. Bob Hope loved my old face—the one he found me in. But the thing is, my new face improved my personal life. Isn’t that amazing? Now that may be because it changed my attitude toward me.

For the first time in my life I began to have affairs. Real affairs! Oh, hot dang! With my old face I never felt that I would be worthy of any kind of an affair. I never expected anyone to be serious about taking me out in a boy-girl way. And it didn’t happen until I changed my attitude. The external affects the internal. It’s all one machine.

Later I had another eye job. I had cheek implants. Isn’t it mahvelous, dahling? Somebody insisted on giving me a forehead lift. Oh, and a peel. An old-fashioned acid peel! It was like taking your kidney out without an anesthetic. But child, it was worth it. It takes off all the freckles. See?

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in September 2011 issue of Los Angeles magazine

In case you didn’t know, I’m not that tall. I’m five feet two on a good day. Growing up here, I’ve seen a lot. I was never the right height or the right look. I was one of those kids—like on American Idol or The X Factor—who would do anything for a chance.

My first memory of being affected by a performance was seeing Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. I was four. We lived in these condominiums in North Hollywood—just off of Coldwater, right across from the Victory Drive-In. I would gather up the kids in the courtyard of our building and was directing and choreographing musicals before I even knew how to say the words. The Tower of Power horn section lived in our building, and around the corner were the Porcaro brothers, who started Toto.

I had gone to a couple of Laker games when they were beginning to have cheerleaders. I’d taught cheerleading at dance camp with a few girls who were part of the new squad. They said, “You really should try out.” I auditioned. There were close to 1,000 girls. I was 756th. When I made it as a Laker Girl, almost immediately it became my responsibility to choreograph. My whole goal was to get rid of the pom-poms and make us a dance team.

It was Magic Johnson’s second season, and all of the greats were there. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would talk to me while he was at the free-throw line. People assumed I was married to him because of my last name. Five years ago we had this reunion with all the old Lakers, and I saw Kareem. He said, “Come here.” I sat on his lap, and he goes, “Remember when they used to think we were married? You know what I get now? People saying, ‘You must be proud of your daughter!’ ” I think he was joking.

The Jacksons were season ticket holders. They saw me at a game, and suddenly, at 22, I was choreographing reunion tours and working with Michael and restructuring the Janet Jackson campaign. I started trends. I’d go to the imports section at Tower Records and buy whatever got under my skin and choreograph routines to it. I fell in love with Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science.” No one had heard it. We performed it with the Laker Girls. And the next day Rick Dees on KIIS introduced it with “As heard on the Lakers floor.” I was taking songs and making them number one. “Freak-A-Zoid” by Midnight Star and “One Thing Leads to Another” by the Fixx. We took so many songs platinum. It was like I was in A&R without even knowing it.

I told my record company I wanted to do a video homage to Gene Kelly with the song “Opposites Attract.” We dedicated it to him, and he reached out to me. We got to know each other toward the end of his life. I’d just done a successful Diet Coke campaign with Elton John, and they asked me to do a tribute to dance. They took Frank Sinatra out of a scene, and I got to dance next to an image of Gene. And he rehearsed me for it at his house. He was like a drill sergeant. It was thrilling.

A lot of amazing things happen in Los Angeles. I think I’m on my fifth reinvention. L.A.’s a tough city, but it’s a magical city.

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, August 2011

It’s 6:55 a.m.—a Winchell’s morning. That means my friend and I have agreed to meet at Winchell’s on Melrose to go surfing. But he isn’t here. At 7:05 I text him—“u coming brah?”—then after a cup of coffee to work off the margarita hangover, hit the road without him.I get to my secret spot, a little farther north than usual, and put on my gear, then walk all the way to one end of the beach and all the way back. No waves.

I decide to get in anyway, picking a house under construction to be my lineup. I make it out, paddle south, and catch a few. But it’s cold and no good. My feet are getting numb. I keep thinking I’m going to go in, but then I catch a wave and go back out. I feel tired. And I’m alone.

I have a couple bad falls where I land weird and do a somersault. I bang a heel, and my leash hurts my foot.

I’m thinking I’m going to tell my girlfriend, Missy, “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it out here.” I’m calculating in my head—is it the worst?—when the wave hits me. I fall in front of the board and get turned around and—bam!—my board hits me in the face and I hear a crunch, like ice cubes in a canvas bag being stepped on. I can feel a flap of skin somewhere, either by my eye or on my nose. I know it’s bad.

I paddle in. Blood is everywhere. I’m freaking out. Nobody notices me. There are some kids fishing at the shore break. They don’t even look my way. Neither does the couple I walk right in front of lying on the sand. Or the guys playing Frisbee. I get to my car. The cut is bad—so deep I can’t tell how deep it is. I’m getting out of my wet suit, not sure what’s next, when this very skinny man with a huge belly—probably 65 to 70 years old—walks up with his very small dog. He informs me he’s lost his keys and needs a ride home. He says nothing about my broken nose.

I’m standing next to my car, shaking, with blood all over my face. There are other people in the parking lot. Why did he come to me? I tell him I’ve just been cast in a new show called True Blood. For me, landing the role of Sam is a big deal. I had a Tony nomination on Broadway, but in Hollywood this is my best role yet. I say, “I’m feeling like my life might be over, because I’m an actor and I’ve done something awful to my face.” No reaction. Instead the man tells me the waves look good. “Get in,” I say.

On the way he tells me there’s an urgent care place nearby. When I drop him off, he points me in the right direction. It’s in a strip mall. It doesn’t look like a doctor’s office. The shades are drawn. I don’t have my insurance card. I’m dabbing a Kleenex on my nose. The nurse gives me a tetanus shot. I hardly feel it. I am despondent. Will I get fired from the show? I look at my feet. They look blue.

The doctor doesn’t tell me his name. He looks like an old burnt surfer. He has this shaggy blond hair and he’s totally tan, like he’s been in the sun his whole life. He apologizes that I’ll have to wait five minutes for a room (which I don’t think is a long time). He also says, which I find odd, “You can’t tell by looking, but all the rooms are taken. There’s a woman down the hall with a very terrible headache.” He leaves. What’s up with the woman with a headache?

The nurse leads me to a room, and Doc comes in and says to shut my eyes. He starts sewing me up, and that paper thing over my face is sliding all around and seems makeshift. I ask him if he’s a surfer. He says he used to live in Hawaii. “I used to sew up guys from Pipeline.” This blows me away, since I’m obsessed with Pipeline—one of the most dangerous waves in the world. Then he asks, “Do you like Magnum, P.I.?” I tell him I don’t actively seek out Tom Selleck movies, but yes, I’ve watched the show. He tells me he was the show’s doctor.

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, 6/2011

A few years after I moved to Los Angeles to be on L.A. Law, I did a TNT movie called Heat Wave about the Watts riots. I played the L.A. Times journalist who led a team whose reporting won the Pulitzer Prize. Then two years after that, the 1992 riots broke out. Martin Luther King said it best: A riot is the language of the unheard. I had this beautiful home in the hills of Los Feliz from which I could see South-Central, and I just had to be down there. Why? Because along with all the incredible wealth and all the glamour and glitz and red-carpet affairs—which are part of my life—I’m also an African American man. And while I wasn’t beaten like Rodney King, I’d been pulled over by the cops. Four times. It’s happened to a lot of African American men who drive nice cars.

Once a cop stopped me and put a gun to my temple. Another time my wife and I were coming home from church at 1 a.m. on New Year’s Eve. Coming up Gower near Hollywood, two cops stop us. I know the dance. They pull us over, guns drawn. “Get out of the car!” I put both my hands out the window and get out. “Get up against the wall!” My wife is in the passenger seat, and she’s watching. They tell her, “Turn around!” and she says, “No. I want to see what you’re doing to my husband.” So they’re patting me down, and one recognizes me. Then they start backtracking, apologizing. Later I called my friend Johnnie Cochran, the lawyer, and I told him about it. He said, “Your offense was DWB: Driving While Black.”

So on the night the riots began, I went to First AME Church, where the Reverend Cecil Murray was holding a service. Afterward I came out of the church, and the palm trees were on fire. My car was parked at a Laundromat that was on fire. People were running and screaming. And what was so surreal was I felt I was in a scene of a movie I’d already shot: Heat Wave. That was a pivotal Los Angeles moment for me.

I don’t get paid to put my face on those billboards for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. When the idea first came up, some people warned me it would cost me. “Don’t you worry that people will think you have HIV or AIDS?” they asked. But I thought it was the right thing to do. My experience with AIDS started with an organization I cofounded 23 years ago: Artists for a New South Africa. Then you see the need in your backyard, where the African American community is disproportionately impacted by HIV. AIDS is rising in the heterosexual community, too. I felt I could bring that message to people.

Here’s what’s ironic: Last year when they were casting The Event at Sunset Gower Studios, one of our AHF billboards was right outside. They had been looking for a Latino actor to play the president, but that wasn’t working out. A week before they were to start shooting the pilot the casting director came to work and passed my billboard, like she had every day for weeks. She went in and said to the producers, “Why aren’t we talking to him?” That’s how I got the part.

The Burbank-born movie director (who now lives in London) on Walt Disney’s frozen body, Christmas in L.A., and his new show at LACMA

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles, May 2011

You’re often compensating for things that are lacking in your life. If you’re in the cold all the time, you want sun. You need that for chemical balance. So if it’s always sunny and bright and warm, you want the opposite. Ever since I was three years old, I can remember I loved monster movies and dark, expressionistic kinds of things. Being a fairly quiet sort of nonverbal child, you look inward to explore your feelings and communicate through drawings.

When I was growing up in Burbank, the environment was very middle-class suburban, and I felt like an alien. I made models and fooled around with them and burned them and filmed them. I liked to make animated Super 8 films. That seemed like a relatively natural pastime.

I like weather, and I like to walk. In L.A. neither can happen. That’s kind of why I don’t live there. When I did, the only way you got seasons in L.A. was to go into Thrifty or Sav-On during the holidays and walk down the display aisles and say, “Oh, it’s Halloween” or “It’s Christmas.” And that’s your seasons.

Several years ago when I went back for a time, I tried to walk and I got stopped by the police three times: “What are you doing?” Then you walk in certain places and you realize that pretty much everyone who’s walking is crazy. If you’re an isolated person, it’s a place that accentuated that feeling. Not that I like interacting that much. I’m not a really social person. But there is something in L.A. that taps into a feeling you have inside that makes you feel even more isolated.

I was in CalArts’ Disney animation program. Like at any arts school, we did very little schoolwork and spent most of our time searching for the cryogenically frozen body of Walt Disney that was supposedly lurking in the bowels of the buildings. The school was meant to blend the arts and bring the worlds of music and film and theater and dance and animation together. Which is a nice idea, but I think the character animators were looked upon as the geeks and freaks of the school—as if Disney animation was not really an art form. There were a lot of very talented people there: John Lasseter, Brad Bird, John Musker. Some of them ended up going to work at Disney initially, where they languished in solitary confinement for a couple of years and then dispersed and turned into what they would really become.

When you get into making Hollywood movies and you get semilucky with something, people treat you as more of a thing than a human being. So I’ve always resisted analyzing what I do. I think about it when I’m doing a project, of course. But I don’t think, Do I have a style that’s like this or that? I find that kind of dangerous territory. So I look at this stuff in the LACMA show with an interested but slightly sickly feeling. The curators were great—I felt I was in good hands. But I didn’t grow up in a museum culture, unless you consider the Hollywood Wax Museum a museum, which I guess it is. I guess.

The 36-year-old star of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, who also writes and directs (his first film, happythankyoumoreplease, debuts this month), talks about traffic, the gold rush, and L.A. as a blank canvas

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, March 2011

There are a lot of actors in New York who get flown out to L.A. because they’re doing a network test. They get put up at the Universal Hilton. It rains that weekend. They get lost driving, and they can’t find their way. They get cut at the studio and have to go immediately back home. That’s their experience of L.A., and they hate it. They feel like the city didn’t welcome them somehow.

I had a different experience. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and spent a lot of time in New York, but I moved to L.A. in 2003 because a girlfriend had moved out here. We lived in the Hollywood Tower—that kind of creepy old building next to the 101 freeway. It was, Wake up, look out the window at the cars streaming by, go across the street to the 101 Coffee Shop, get some pancakes. Right away I found that if I wasn’t at a premiere, I didn’t feel like I was in Hollywood, really. I just felt like I was in this great sunny town.

I had all the cliché ideas about L.A. But my girlfriend showed me the hiking in Runyon Canyon and great little neighborhoods. She took me to El Matador, that beach in Malibu. We went to Idyllwild and to Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms. I don’t know why I’m talking so much about this relationship that ended a long time ago—we’re still very good friends. But she said to me, “If you know who you are in L.A., it’ll work out.” It’s true.

I go into this in my movie. There’s an extended argument between a couple played by Zoe Kazan and Pablo Schreiber. He comes back from Los Angeles and wants to move there. She’s a lifelong New Yorker, and the idea of moving to L.A. is like a coffin to her. Why would she ever want to do that? He tells her his philosophy about Los Angeles. He says it’s just this big collection of neighborhoods where it’s always sunny. It’s this blank canvas, and it reflects you back at you.

The only real evil is the traffic. There’s that phrase “If you think you’re enlightened, spend a weekend with your mother.” Well, I always say, “If you think you’re enlightened, drive in L.A. when you have to be somewhere and you’re running a little late.” Then you’ll see how much more work you have to do.

What I love about L.A. is that you can wake up on a Monday morning and not have much going on, and by Friday you can have this life-changing thing in your lap—or the potential for it. Things move very fast out here. You can get an audition, you can read for the casting director, read for the producers—next thing you know, you have a test deal, you’re reading for the studio, you’re reading for the network, and you have a pilot.

They say a place is infused with the character of whoever settled the land. Utah is always going to have a Mormon feel to it. Wisconsin is always going to be Protestant and liberal and cheese-y. And California is gold rush territory. People came out here looking to find that opportunity. It’s a great place for dreamers.