GQ’s Comedy Issue: Jerry Lewis at 85

Written by amywallace on August 12th, 2011

Jerry-atrics!

He’s the original lord of lowbrow, the king of the pratfall, the last surviving link to the bedrock of American comedy—vaudeville, burlesque, slapstick. Sure, he’s ancient, but he’s juggling half a dozen new projects and still found time to sit down with Amy Wallace for an eleven-hour interview. Call it the Jerry Lewis Marathon that covered, well, just about everything that’s ever been funny

Originally appeared in GQ, August 2011

Jerry Lewis sits behind his huge desk, neatening the items that stand like sentries between us: a can of Diet Sunkist; a container of silver pens, tips up; a container of red pens, same position; a handful of green plastic surgical scalpels he uses to open mail, a dish of lemon drops. When you’ve been on the planet for almost nine decades, like Lewis has, and when you can’t throw anything out (“I’ve kept everything!”), and when you’re slightly nuts (“Did you ever see a man who can look at one eye with the other?”), you require order. At 85, Lewis employs three full-time people to help him stay organized. He loves them fiercely—and drives them bonkers.

“Have you done anything today? Why not?” Lewis likes to bellow, his voice—three parts affection, one part curmudgeon—thundering through Jerry Lewis Films, a sprawling suite in an office park about four miles from the Las Vegas strip. He looks good—a little stooped, sure, but still sharp-eyed and quick-tongued and up-tempo, his red silk shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal the scar from his double-bypass surgery twenty-nine years ago. On his feet are red velvet slippers embroidered with those iconic faces of Comedy and Tragedy. “Can I get another orange soda?” he asks, and when it arrives twenty seconds later: “What took you so long?”

Suddenly, Lewis’s face goes blank and his hazel eyes get big as quarters. Slamming his chair back—boom!—he reaches for a trash can under his desk and Click to continue »

 

L.A. Story: True Blood’s Sam Trammell

Written by amywallace on August 12th, 2011

What do you do when fate threatens to derail your dream job? If you’re this star of HBO’s True Blood, you trust the burnt surfer dude with the needle and thread

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 Click to continue »

 

My final NYT Prototype column: Wah-wah!

Written by amywallace on August 6th, 2011

With a Flip of a Knob, He Heard the Future

The path to the invention of the wah-wah pedal — which lets an electric guitar take on aspects of the human voice — shows the twists and turns of the creative process.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the New York Times on August 7, 2011

DEL CASHER has done a lot of impressive things with his guitar over the last 50 years. He has performed with Gene Autry, Lawrence Welk, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He’s appeared, strumming, in movies with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. He’s been a featured player on dozens of film and TV soundtracks.

But there is one accomplishment that Mr. Casher, now 73, wishes more people knew about: his role in the invention of the wah-wah pedal.

The story of this device, which enables an electric guitar to take on aspects of the human voice — and which helped define the sounds of rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton — is complicated. But that very complexity drives home a point: While it is easier — and more romantic — to talk about innovation as the domain of lone inventors who hit pay dirt while tinkering in solitude, creativity is more often than not a collaborative, and messy, affair. As such, Mr. Casher’s story seems an apt one to tell in this, my last Prototype column.

“There’s a lot of players in this whole thing,” and a brilliant engineer named Brad Plunkett was one of them, says Mr. Casher, who is Click to continue »

 

NYT Prototype: Science to Art, and Vice Versa

Written by amywallace on July 9th, 2011

Science to Art, and Vice Versa

A sculptor and a lighting artist have very different techniques but the same goal: to promote understanding by finding new ways of seeing the world.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times, July 10, 2011

Nathalie Miebach's Antarctic Explorer

NATHALIE MIEBACH uses science to make art. A sculptor who lives in Brookline, Mass., she translates weather data and other scientific measurements into three-dimensional objects that accurately display temperature variations, barometric pressure and moon phases, among other things.

Matthew McCrory, on the other hand, uses art to benefit science. A former lighting artist at DreamWorks Animation, he now uses his skills at the Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging at Northwestern University to help researchers in Chicago see their work in 3-D.

Ms. Miebach and Mr. McCrory may appear to be engaged in very different pursuits, but their goal is the same: to promote understanding by finding new ways of seeing the world. They’ve never met, but both are invested in the idea that better visualization leads to better thinking.

“You make discoveries much quicker when you have a different way of viewing your data,” says Mr. McCrory, whose official title is lead visualization engineer. “And your brain doesn’t have to work as hard to try to figure out what things are really like.”

Both have been in the news of late. In March, Northwestern unveiled what it calls Click to continue »

 

L.A. Story: Blair Underwood

Written by amywallace on June 16th, 2011

The versatile actor, who plays the commander-in-chief on NBC’s alien-invasion series The Event, on having his face on billboards, Driving While Black, and getting the part

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.

 

Prototype: Help for Amateur Inventors

Written by amywallace on June 11th, 2011

You Bring an Idea, and They’ll Do the Rest

Edison Nation, the Big Idea Group and other companies are bringing the inventions of regular people to market.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times, June 12, 2011

BETSY RAVREBY KAUFMAN is a lot of things — a freelance television producer, a former anchor, a wife and mother, a resident of Houston. One thing she is not, she insists, is an inventor.

“Let’s get that on the table right now,” she says. Which is why it’s so crazy — that’s her word — that an idea that popped into her head one morning as she stood boiling eggs in her kitchen has led to her name being on a patent.

“If I’d made a list a year and a half ago of 100 things that could happen to me, this wouldn’t have made the list,” Ms. Kaufman says. Her daydream inspired a product called Eggies, which allows chefs to boil eggs in a classic hard-boiled shape but without their shell on. “I would have had a better chance — being old with no singing voice — winning ‘American Idol.’ ”

Ms. Kaufman, who is 56, is hardly old. In fact, some say she’s a child — a poster child for a new movement of amateur noodlers whose brainstorms are finding their way to market through partnerships with companies that seek out people just like them: folks with inspiration, but no business expertise.

“We focus on the people who have great ideas but want to keep their day job,” says Louis Foreman, the chief executive of Edison Nation, the company in Charlotte, N.C., that teamed up with Ms. Kaufman. “We’ll never compete with the people who are hard-wired to go out and start their own business — and we don’t want to.” But risk-averse people have eureka moments, too, he says. And that’s Edison Nation’s sweet spot. Click to continue »

 

NYT Prototype: Cross-generational Innovation

Written by amywallace on May 14th, 2011

Innovation, Gliding Across the Generations

Expanding on their grandfather’s ideas, two brothers have created the Sporting-Sail, which lets skateboarders harness the wind to decelerate on steep terrain.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times May 15, 2011

DOES inventiveness run in families? Is there a gene that awakens the entrepreneurial urge? A look at the Smith family offers at least anecdotal evidence that the answer is yes.

Nick and Billy Smith, California-born brothers, grew up admiring the derring-do of their father’s father, a mechanical engineer and sometime race-car driver named H. W. Smith Jr. — or Bill to his friends.

“He was all about having a good time — still is,” says Nick, 22. That’s why, in 2006 on a visit to their grandfather’s ski cabin in Vail, Colo., the brothers were drawn to its dusty attic. They were certain they would find something fun to do there. “We were looking for schnapps or fireworks, one of the two,” Nick says.

“I think it was both,” says Billy, 26.

Instead, poking around, the Smith brothers found a crate filled with 24 cardboard boxes, each about the size of a travel umbrella. A drawing on every box showed Click to continue »

 

LA Magazine Interview with Tim Burton

Written by amywallace on May 13th, 2011

L.A. Story: Tim Burton

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 Click to continue »

 

Los Angeles magazine wins 2 Ellies!

Written by amywallace on May 13th, 2011

Los Angeles magazine won two National Magazine Awards, or Ellies, earlier this week. Here’s a photo of the editing crew standing around one of them (I’m in the middle)….

 

NYT Prototype: A Teen’s Idea for Changing the World

Written by amywallace on April 18th, 2011

Serving a Cause, 25 Cents at a Time

CherryCard Pairs Charitable Giving with Everyday Purchases

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared the The New York Times, April 17, 2011

IN February, Noah Fradin turned 18 — finally. It’s a relief, he says, that he no longer needs his mom to co-sign the nondisclosure agreements and other documents related to his plan to change the world.

Mr. Fradin, a high school senior and budding entrepreneur who lives in Studio City, Calif., is the creator of CherryCard.org, a new Internet start-up that seeks to make it easy for consumers to give money to the charities of their choice.

Last week marked CherryCard’s soft launch — very soft, because Mr. Fradin is still lining up retailers to participate. As of this weekend, thanks to a group of sponsors that include NBC Universal and the Milwaukee Brewers, anyone who visits the site will be given 25 cents to spend for a cause. But the underlying mechanism of the venture — retailers distributing CherryCard vouchers that customers can redeem and donate to charity — has yet to materialize.

“It’s a chicken and egg thing,” Mr. Fradin says, referring to his simultaneous need to attract consumers to use the site and retailers to pass out vouchers. While he believes his youth is an asset, not everyone he has approached sees it that way. Click to continue »

 
Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes