Frances McDormand & Cynthia Nixon read Tales Of The City!

From Beatstreet Productions

Over the past month, we’ve recorded several titles from Armistead Maupin’s classic series Tales Of The City.  Oscar-winner Frances McDormand read the first and third books in the series, Tales Of The City and Further Tales Of The City, and Sex And The City star Cynthia Nixon recorded the second, More Tales Of The City.  Scott Sherratt directed the books for Harper Audio while Jared O’Connell & Jeff Malinowski engineered.

http://beatstreetnyc.com/?p=422

Tales of the Tales

This article originally appeared in The Advocate May 22, 2001

An oral history of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, which marks its 25th anniversary with this month's debut of the Further Tales of the City miniseries By Michael Giltz

Further Tales of the City-the third miniseries based on Armistead Maupin's Tales novels-begins its four-week run May 6 on Showtime, just in time to mark a quarter century since the stories first appeared as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle.  To mark the occasion, The Advocate spoke to some of the people connected with the serial, the books, and the miniseries.

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN, author of six Tales of the City novels and cowriter of the three miniseries:  in 1974 I wrote this single functional piece, and an editor at the Pacific Sun [a San Francisco weekly] suggested that I do it on a weekly basis.  I think I did an episode on the baths with Michael, and I can't even remember what the other four were, but the paper folded after five [installments].  When the editors at the San Francisco Chronicle told me they were interested in continuing it [in 1976], I had one of those great revelatory moments when you run down the street and click your heels in the air--and I mean that literally--because you know you're on to something really good.  I was filled with excitement because I had an idea that was completely fresh and subject matter that had not been tapped.

EDITH STEIN, Maupin's coworker at the Chronicle:  I worked in the People department of the Chronicle, [which] had evolved from the old "women's pages."  We were all in our 20s and early 30s--very conservative and all on our first marriages.  When Armistead first wrote the serial, he used to come in every day and bat out these stories--these wicked, wicked "Tales of the City."  We'd all gather around and he would spill the beans about everything--the true stories behind what he was writing.  We'd say, "Is this true?  Is this true?"  He was larger than life.

MAUPIN, This first five years in the city bouncing from job to job had given me all the material I could possibly need--not to mention that I'd been working at the opera and witnessing the peregrinations of San Francisco society up close.  It was as if every crappy little job that had ever bored me silly was suddenly going to be put to use.

The deadlines were enormously useful because they got me past my natural instinct to be self-critical.  I had to do 800 words a day, come hell or high water.  There were times when the editor of that section would come by and tap her fingernails on my typewriter out of sheer impatience.

My parents subscribed to the newspaper in order to follow the column.  So as the hairpins began to drop, they got more and more concerned.  And I eventually used the column as my vehicle for coming out.

STEIN, He was terrible with deadlines.  [But] he's a very, very fast writer.  It was like a sportswriter--he was writing on deadline but producing this really beautifully written copy.

MAUPIN, Rock Hudson [the basis for the Cage Tyler character in the Further Tales miniseries] showed up in San Francisco and took a bunch of [us] out for dinner.  Then we went up to his suite at the Fairmont hotel.  I had bragged to him that my column was going to start running the next morning.  He secretly went to the desk clerk and bought an early edition of the Chronicle.  So here's a dozen guys in Rock's suite, and he rises rather drunkenly to his feet and says, "I have a reading I'd like to do," and he read the first chapter [of Tales] to the group, attempting to approximate the voices of Mary Ann Singleton and her mother.  The great irony was that Mary Ann's mother warns her that San Francisco is a dangerous place because she just saw this horrible thing that happened on McMillan and Wife.

TODD HARGIS, resident of San Francisco during most of the Tales era and friend of Maupin's:  I [left San Francisco] to help my sister move to Arizona and ended up getting stuck in Phoenix.  A friend of mine came out to visit and brought me the first Tales  in book form.  I read it in one sitting.  I could not put it down.  I remember reading it and thinking, God, look what I'm missing.

After I got back to San Francisco, one of my roommates took me out to [the gay bar] Badlands.   I looked across the pool table and saw this guy sitting there reading the newspaper, and he kind of lowered the paper and looked over at me.  We smiled, and I went over and said hello.  It was Armistead.

MAUPIN,  [As the fourth novel, Babycakes, was being serialized], people were very, very angry with me for killing off Jon Fielding, their favorite character.  I had lost a very close friend in 1982, one of the very first victims of [AIDS-related] pneumocystis:  Daniel Katz.

HARGIS,  I had friends who were really upset.  "How could he do this?  We know he's got to make a political statement.  But why do it with our friends?"

MAUPIN,  Jon Fielding's death was, as far as I knew, the first AIDS death in fiction when it appeared in the Chronicle in 1983.  I knew that I had to be faithful to the rules that I had laid down for myself, mainly that I would try to reflect the reality of my own life as much as possible within the context of this protracted fairy tale.  I wanted to make other people feel some of the pain that I was feeling over this loss--the pain and the panic.

HBO had optioned the books in 1982, [but as they developed the project, it] felt like they couldn't do a story about the freewheeling days of 1976, and they couldn't update it without making AIDS a part of the equation.  So it sat on a shelf at HBO for many, many years.

ALAN POUL,  executive producer of all three miniseries:  HBO actually took it to the script stage.  But the rights fell to [the U.K. Producers] Working Title [and its U.S. production partner, Propaganda, where Poul worked].  I jumped up and down and screamed at the possibility of being involved.

OLYMPIA DUKAKIS, who has played Anna Madrigal in all three miniseries:  I hadn't read the books, and I was advised by the director [of the first series, Alastair Reed] not to read them until it's over.  So I did what he said; I waited until it was over.

MAUPIN, You can imagine Olympia's amazement when she began reading the novels and discovered her own family being discussed in [Sure of You, which includes a visit to the Greek island of Lesbos].

DUKAKIS,  I know, isn't that interesting?  That my paternal grandfather and grandmother come from that Island?  Then, of course, you know Anna gets involved later on with a Greek fisherman.  I'm waiting for that.

MAUPIN,  I remember the night that we final shot the kiss scene [in the Tales miniseries] with [Marcus D'Amico, who played Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, and] Billy Campbell [as Jon Fielding].  I was standing at the top of the Barbary steps, looking down on the car where the kissing was going on.  In between takes, Billy would come up and join me and talk about his current heartbreak, because he'd just broken up with Jennifer Connelly.  I remember thinking how blessed I was that this simple act of a kiss between men was finally being filmed.

POUL,  The first series [which was financed by British television and aired on PBS in the United States], we did 12 days in San Francisco, and the rest of it was shot on stages and locations here in Los Angeles.  Barbary Lane completely occupied a big stage.  At the time, it's just crazy and you never have enough money and you're trying to cobble together a production.  So the depth of the reaction from the critics and the incredible ratings success that PBS had with it took us by surprise.  And then we were completely flummoxed by the hostile reaction it got from certain parts of the country.  At first we were just kind of amused, and then we realized it was not necessarily a laughing matter.  Then PBS got cold feet.

DUKAKIS,  PBS said, "We don't like to repeat them."  Meanwhile, we had six years of Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect with stories about murder and pedophilia.  And this is just about people struggling to find love and be loved.

POUL,  We had absolutely given [a miniseries sequel] up for dead.  There was about three years of somewhat cautious hope followed by absolute despair and resignation.  And then we made the [second] show.  [Laughs] The way we were able to finance the second series was by shooting it primarily in Montreal, and financing dictated that we must hire a Canadian director who qualified as a resident of Quebec.  So I must have looked at the work of a dozen directors before we found Pierre [Gang, who directed More Tales and Further Tales].

HARGIS, I was working with computers in a hotel accounting office.  It was good pay, but it wasn't very stimulating.  Armistead and my mom both said I should do something with horticulture.  It really wasn't because [the character] Michael did it; I just really enjoyed it.  [But] one of the things about Tales I learned early on is that you never know where the fiction leaves off and reality starts, or vice versa.

STEIN, The Chronicle has talked over the years about doing something like Tales of the City [again].  but it won't work now.  Silicon Valley?  Those people aren't going to be interesting in that same way.  Everyone was living on the edge, and if they weren't, they wanted to know all about the people that were.  It was an outrageous time.  Armistead was just the right person at the right time.  now, when you think about those days you can hardly believe that they were true.

Giltz writes regularly for the New York Post and other publications.

EXCLUSIVE: Armistead Maupin Confirms New Tales of the City Novel

The author Armistead Maupin has revealed to a So So Gay writer that he has began the process of writing a brand new installment in the beloved Tales of the City series. Through his Twitter account, Maupin announced the novel would focus on the nonagenarian transsexual Mrs Madrigal, the wise and witty mother-figure to Michael, Mary Ann and Mona, and should be expected to become available “within the next two years”.

The Days of Anna Madrigal continues a similar pattern laid down by the two most recent novels in the series – Michael Tolliver Lives in 2007 and Mary Ann in Autumn in 2010 – by returning to focus on one particular central character, as opposed to the multiple-storyline serialised format of the earlier instalments. It seems Maupin is still in a period of creativity regarding the Tales series, after an eighteen year drought between Sure of You in 1989 and Michael Tolliver Lives. The collection remains enormously popular with it’s solid base of loyal readers. Being introduced to the first novel is seen by some as a rite of passage for young gay men and women with its blissfully positive and open-minded portrayal of liberal men and women, young and old, in 1970s San Francisco.

http://sosogay.org/2011/exclusive-armistead-maupin-confirms-new-tales-of-the-city-novel/

Ziemienski named Sonoma Treasure

BY DAVID BOLLING INDEX-TRIBUNE EDITOR
Sep 26, 2011 - 07:16 PM

Dennis Ziemienski, an internationally-known Glen Ellen artist and prominent supporter of Sonoma Valley art events, has been named the 2011 Sonoma Treasure Artist.

Ziemienski's work is collected across the country and beyond and has been featured prominently in countless Sonoma Valley nonprofit campaigns. He created the inaugural posters for the Sonoma International Film Festival, the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art Wet Paint event and the Sonoma Valley Olive Festival, among others.

Ziemineski has donated numerous paintings for auction lots to raise funds for Valley nonprofits, and organizations his work has benefited include the Sonoma Community Center, Friends of Sebastiani Theatre, Sonoma Plein Air, Sonoma Salute to the Arts,  Sonoma Jazz Plus, the Glen Ellen Village Fair and Dunbar Elementary School.

His paintings are featured on many well-known book covers including, "Tales of the City," by Armisted Maupin and several covers for authors James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard.

He was chosen to create the poster for Super Bowl XXIX, the 2006 Kentucky Derby, the California Railway Museum in Sacramento, the San Francisco Zoo and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Ziemienski has taught at the California College of the Arts, the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Syracuse University graduate class, Hartford University Masters Program and the Sonoma Community Center. And he has volunteered his time to teach art throughout the Sonoma Valley, including at Hanna Boys Center, Dunbar Elementary School and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

In 2011 he has had three separate solo exhibitions in Santa Fe, Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Los Angeles.

Ziemienski is married to artist Anne Ziemienski and their daughter, Sofia Ziemienski, is a 2010 graduate of  Sonoma Valley High School.

http://www.sonomanews.com/News-2011/Ziemienski-named-Sonoma-Treasure/

Alastair Reid obituary

Director of television drama, including the ground-breaking Tales of the City and Traffik


Peter Ansorge
guardian.co.uk
Friday 9 September 2011 18.42 BST

Alastair Reid, who has died aged 72, was one of Britain's finest directors of television drama. In 1989 he directed all six episodes of Simon Moore's epic drug drama Traffik for Channel 4, which won him both a Bafta and an International Emmy. The Oscar-winning film Traffic (2000) was based on the mini-series; the consensus among critics today is that Alastair's Traffik is the more successful of the two productions.

In 1991 he directed the five-part Selling Hitler, adapted by Howard Schuman from Robert Harris's book, with Barry Humphries as Rupert Murdoch and Alan Bennett as Hugh Trevor-Roper. Then came Tales of the City (1993), an adaptation by Richard Kramer of Armistead Maupin's novel set in the San Francisco of the 1970s, and the only instance to date of an American drama series being entirely funded by a British broadcaster – Channel 4. Tales of the City had always been intended as a co-production – but pre-HBO American television couldn't countenance onscreen kissing between men.

Alan Poul, the American producer, says that when Tales of the City was finally transmitted in the US, with great success, it "forever changed the landscape of American television", paving the way for shows such as Six Feet Under and Sex and the City. It was quite an experience for me, as head of drama at Channel 4, to visit the set in Los Angeles and to be told by both Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney that Alastair was the best director they had ever worked with.

Alastair was born in Edinburgh. His father was a schools inspector and his mother a well-known antiques dealer. Alastair graduated from Edinburgh College of Art, with the intention of becoming a painter. He then studied directing at the Bristol Old Vic. In 1960 he was taken on as a trainee director by Lew Grade at ATV where he worked on the UK's first twice-weekly evening soap opera, Emergency – Ward 10.

He directed well over 100 episodes, which were broadcast live. By his last year on the Ward, Alastair had become extremely bored and chose to direct a whole episode entirely from the point of view of the characters' feet. Unfortunately, Grade happened to be watching at the time. He rang the studio gallery during the commercial break and demanded that the cameras return to their standard positions for the second half of the show.

Alastair went on to direct highly popular series such as South Riding (1974) and Shades of Greene (1975, from Graham Greene's short stories) for ITV but it was a stint at David Rose's innovative drama department at the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham that proved a turning point. There he directed two series of the ground-breaking crime drama Gangsters (1976-77), a highly eccentric musical Curriculee Curricula (1978), with words by Alan Plater and music by Dave Greenslade, and David Rudkin's astonishing futuristic nightmare Artemis 81 (1981), starring Daniel Day‑Lewis and Sting.


Gangsters brought multi-racial Britain to a mainstream audience on BBC1 as never before, or indeed since. At the time BBC drama productions were a mix of studio and outside filming. The joins always showed. For Gangsters, Alastair introduced a handheld camera into the studio that created a seamless match with film.

Alastair planned and storyboarded like Hitchcock, who was his hero. Gangsters contains a brilliant homage to the crop-spraying sequence in North By Northwest, while Vertigo was a crucial influence on both Artemis 81 and the San Francisco of Tales of the City. After Gangsters came Hazell (1979) for ITV, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1980) with David Hemmings and the first episode of Inspector Morse (1987), followed soon afterwards by Traffik.

Nostromo (1996) was Alastair's last major work, filmed for the BBC in Colombia in the midst of a drugs war, during which he befriended the Nobel-prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez and his mentor, Alvaro Mutis.

With his wife Jane, a gifted set designer, Alastair opened a vineyard at their house in Stoke St Gregory in Somerset. Famous names would visit, receiving the same welcome from Alastair and Jane off-set as they had once experienced on it. Day-Lewis spent a famous night there – not in the house, but outside in a tent, calling out to the wilderness, preparing for his 1992 role in The Last of the Mohicans.

Alastair is survived by Jane, his son Alex, his stepdaughters Lucy and Leo, and his two grandchildren.

• Alastair Reid, television director, born 21 July 1939; died 17 August 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/sep/09/alistair-reid-obituary

Parker Posey

By Joel Keller August 22, 2011


The actor: Parker Posey excels at playing prickly, condescending snobs as well as free-spirited ingénues. She made her name in the ’90s in a series of cult-hit independent movies like Dazed And Confused, The Daytrippers, Clockwatchers, and Party Girl, then went on to more memorable roles, including making regular appearances in the mostly improvised Christopher Guest movies. On Aug. 22, she starts a four-episode stint on the Showtime comedy series The Big C, playing a new friend for the teenage son of Laura Linney’s character.

The Big C (2011)—“Poppy” 


The A.V. Club: What’s the name of your character and what’s the role?


Parker Posey: Do you have the name? I forgot her name. I just got in from Canada. I just drove a 12-hour drive that should have been 10 hours. So I’m kind of like, rolling around. I’m trying to stretch my back out. I’m gonna say Darlene. [Laughs.] I play a woman with a little bit of arrested development, someone who has someone in her family that is sick, and I meet Gabriel [Basso]’s character in an online chat room for kids with cancer. I still see myself as a kid, I have intimacy issues, which explains why I befriend, a 15-year-old. We have a lot in common. There’s a lot of laughter, a lot of silliness, and it was a good time.

AVC: Any weirdness with playing the girlfriend of a teenager?

PP: No. No, I’m not his girlfriend.

AVC: Then was there any weirdness in the dynamic, or when you read the role, did you think she was a little oddball?

PP: I really didn’t want her to be too weird. I was begging, I’m like, “Please don’t make her too weird.” But I think weird is fine. I think there’s room for some. You know, it’s a half-hour comedy about cancer. There are all sorts of personalities and complexes that these characters have in that show to make them funny and tragic and worthy of the big personality of television. You kind of have to stick out when you’re on TV.

AVC: What is it about the character that spoke to you when you read the script?

PP: Well, I ran into Laura Linney on the street, and my mom’s friends had just been in town and they were just talking about her show. And I said, “You know, my mom’s friends really, they love your show.” And she said, “You should come on and do it.” And that’s how it started. I was pitched the part from the creator, Jenny Bicks, on the phone, so I never read anything. The idea was really interesting to me. There’s certainly a lot of people out there who have family and friends who have cancer.

AVC: The prospect of working with Laura Linney couldn’t have hurt either, right?

PP: Oh my God, I know. Well you see, 20 years ago, one of my very first jobs was with Laura in a PBS show called Tales Of The City that was a six-part show based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City. Then Showtime picked up the second book, More Tales Of The City. So I worked with her a day on that in Montreal. It was really a long time ago. And I’ve worked with John Benjamin Hickey [who plays Linney’s brother on The Big C] in The Anniversary Party. He played my husband. I’ve never had the honor of working with Oliver Platt [who plays Linney’s husband], but I’ve certainly seen him around. So they’ve got a bunch of great actors. So it felt really good just to get up and go to work not too far from New York where I live. So I really, really enjoyed that.

Tales Of The City (1993)—“Connie Bradshaw”

PP: I played Connie Bradshaw, Mary Ann Singleton’s friend from her hometown, and I believe the only person that she knew in San Francisco when she moved there. I played a young woman who was sleeping around, had a big heart, turned to some bad relationship with a real player, right? And you know, she danced a lot. I remember shooting a disco scene and when I saw Laura, she said, “Do you still have that shirt?” And I do still have it. I have this great, long-sleeved shirt with a horse printed on it. That kind of influenced me for dressing the part on The Big C, where I’m kind of the female version of John Hickey: counter-culture, baggy, bell-bottom jeans, flannel shirt, grubby, drives a Dodge Dart—you know, kind of stuck in the past, or born at the wrong time.

AVC: Tales Of The City was pretty risqué for public television. Was there a feeling around the set of, “Hey, we’re doing something new and revolutionary”? 

PP: I know! That was a big deal. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, you know, there was [that feeling], but to me it felt like an independent movie that was going to be shown on TV. There was a lot of excitement about it because the books are so loved. Armistead was around all the time. We had a great director, Alastair Reid, that was such a sweetheart and so fun. There was just a lot of laughing. We had a really good time. And then there was a big letdown when they didn’t get the second part [filmed], and then there’s also a third part. Eventually, Connie has a daughter and dies [during childbirth], and she gives her daughter to Mary Anne, and her dying words are, “Name her Shawna.” And she leaves us. I’m still looking forward to playing that, although I don’t think it’s going to get produced. But it was such a great serial. Have you read Armistead Maupin? He has a really good book on tape called The Night Listener that’s kind of autobiographical that he reads. I remember listening to it on an airplane and really enjoying it. Working in San Francisco is the best. I love San Francisco. It’s one of my favorite cities. I just had so much fun.

More Tales Of The City (1998)—“Connie Bradshaw”


AVC: What was the difference when you came back to do the sequel for Showtime a few years later?

PP: The big difference was we were in Montreal. That was the really big difference, and going like, “Why Montreal?” Oh, you can’t afford San Francisco. San Francisco’s such a character. So it’s a shame that we couldn’t shoot there. Maybe they did some exteriors there. I only worked a day. And I think Armistead wrote, I think he might have written me into that. I can’t remember what I played. I think it was something like a new-ager, something at a flotation tank or some kind of new age spa.
Clockwatchers (1997)—“Margaret Burre”

PP: That’s a good little movie. You know what’s really good in that movie? The music was really good. I mean, the cinematography was really good. The movie’s by two sisters named Jill and Karen Sprecher. I remember really loving my part in that. There’s this woman in the workplace named Margaret who hates her job. She thinks any job in an office is not the way to live. She thinks she’s invisible. She carves into her desk, you know, “Margaret was here.” There’s a big scandal because someone was taking money from the tip jars. It’s nothing, but it’s a big drama in the office. And because Margaret’s really loud, people start to turn on her and she gets taken away from the premises. I remember having to shoot this scene where I get carried away, and I was so mad—I wasn’t mad, I was upset, because the camera was literally on the floor. And what I didn’t know was that I was really already in it, and feeling like this huge injustice that I was losing my job. I was walking around going like, “I can’t believe the camera’s on the floor” and I’m about to be taken out of here by the police. You do these little movies that are 20 days, you know, they go so fast and you’re so in it. There’s no time to even go to the craft-service table to eat a carrot stick. It’s just fast and focused.

AVC: Were you upset that the movie was ending and trying to use it to get into your character?


PP: No! No! I was upset because I think I was just kind of taken with the part. Margaret wasn’t seen, then I wasn’t seen, and it just kind of all bled together. The camera department became the corporate system that she was so mad at. I remember this one scene, I have a roommate that works for an airline, that I never see. When the Toni Collette character comes over, I offer her something to drink and it’s like a tray of airplane food, and airplane liquor bottles. [It was] a lonely, kind of trickster part. And then I wore my roommate’s flight jacket to work, her stewardess outfit. I was doing all these provocative things. Like, Margaret would steal from the restaurant. I think she stole a bunch of matches or something, like lemon drops, saying this thing, “Well, they take from me, why can I not take from them?” Just this real counter-culture rebel.

AVC: Do you have an affinity for those kind of parts? A lot of your early career was these kind of independent movies.

PP: Well, I think that’s because that’s what was around. I don’t know. I feel like it was also around a time where they could write things for me. Like, people could write a part and then I would do it, you know? Like The Daytrippers or Party Girl was written for me. But I don’t know if Jill and Karen had it in mind when they wrote Margaret for me to play. But also, you know, you couldn’t get someone that demanded a salary. Directors couldn’t go to an agency like CAA and get Winona Ryder for their little million-dollar movie. But they could come to me and my agent, and go, “Is she doing anything, will she work for free?” And I’d say yeah. It’s great. And that’s it. It’s nothing deeper than that. Of course, it’s all changed now.

Party Girl (1995)—“Mary”


AVC: But you said the part in Party Girl, for instance, was written for you.


PP: No, it wasn’t. No. But I remember when they did press for that, people wanted to know, because they thought that it was written for me, right? And then I started making stuff up. Like I said, “Yeah, I was discovered at the makeup counter at Barney’s.” And that’s why. It was a total lie.


AVC: Do you ever read those clips again and just laugh at them?

PP: No! No, but I can tell you, it makes me laugh when you say you’re going to go through my résumé and talk about my movies, because I’ve lied on my résumé and I’ve made up names of movies, I’ve made up certain things about myself. Because it’s just, you know, whatever. I shouldn’t be taken that seriously.


AVC: What are some of the fun things you’ve made up?

PP: I don’t remember. But I know that when I hear them back, I’ll be like, “Oh, I was really bored.”

AVC: This was back in the ’90s, earlier in your career. Do you still do it now?

PP: [Laughs.] I don’t. I think that was early on, when I was doing a lot of press. Because you just get silly and it’s that horrible thing where you’re joking but the other person doesn’t think you’re joking, and there’s no time to clear it up.


Waiting For Guffman (1996)—“Libby Mae Brown”

AVC: Did Christopher Guest know you from your other projects? When did he come and say, “Hey, we want you to come in and do this part”?

PP: I was a dwarf extra on a movie called the Coneheads that Lorne Michaels produced with Dan Aykroyd and Chris Farley and David Spade. That was my first paycheck that was… [Starts shrieking and laughing.] [To someone off the phone.] Can you get me a towel? A spider just crawled on my back. [Back on the phone.] Hello? I’m so sorry! [Laughs.] Um, it was a really gnarly spider. It just scared the shit out of me!

So I guess a year goes by, and I happen to be in L.A., auditioning for a recurring part on Murphy Brown. This is when they would fly me in to audition for things, when TV was still in its narrative form. So I was in L.A. for a week and that’s when I met Chris Guest. Karen Murphy, his producer, had called Lorne Michaels and asked him if he knew anyone who could play 18 and improvise, and Lorne Michaels recommended me. So I went in and I met him, and we hung out for a half an hour. I’m from the South. I couldn’t wait to play that part, and already had so much to give to it. And I just couldn’t wait.

AVC: Was the improvisation something you’d done before? 


PP: I hated rehearsing in college. No one wanted to rehearse with me, because I would say, “You’re killing it.” I never wanted to overdo things or even rehearse because it always embarrassed me. I’m not that good at it. I’m not good at auditions either. I’m uncomfortable just being there on set. So no, I hadn’t done it. The first day, I was in the van and I was holding my knees up to my chest and my back was killing me, and Eugene [Levy] said, “That’s from holding in laughter.” Then I went to my room and drew a bath. I took a bath and I cried my eyes out. And I felt like I had been thrown into water that I just didn’t know. It’s not like, “Oh I’m gonna come up with something and say something funny,” for me at least. I think all the actors in that had various ways of improvising. It was really like, find your character and just be in the moment, and it was crazy. Chris would say, “You guys should come watch dailies,” and I said, “No, I really don’t want to.” He’s like, “Come on! What else are you going to do?”
So we watched them, and I couldn’t believe that it was all funny. It was really, really funny. And, you know, you would just talk until the mag rolls out. Everything everyone said, when they weren’t trying to be funny, was funny. It was so strange. I have so many memories from that, like Fred Willard sitting in one of those fold-up aluminum chairs in Lockhart, Texas, smoking a cigar and looking out into the little town. It leaves my mind reeling. I’d take a nap every day at lunch. I’d get so tired, right? But it was so much fun. By the time it was over, I was so sad. I think I felt like I would never see [Guest’s character] Corky again. It was like I lost that world.


Best In Show (2000)—“Meg Swan”


AVC: When he got you back together for Best In Show, did it feel kind of like...


PP: Different world! Different world. That’s dogs, you know? It’s so strange to me, because when I got back to New York [after Guffman], I went to the Joyce Theater and I saw Corky. I saw a gay man that had the same haircut, the same little earring, and I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Oh my God, there’s Corky.” But Best In Show was totally, totally different. Totally different. I thought Guffman was, because we’d all rehearse and make up silly dances on Monday, on our day off. And oh my God, Chris cut himself out of those movies. That’s the sad thing. He had to edit it, and he was just like, “Ugh, enough.”

AVC: He’d rather show everybody else over himself?


PP: He just got bored. I think he was bored with himself. It’s just really hard to cut, because you have to cut for jokes. And it’s so funny, because, you leave those movies and everyone’s upset. All the actors are like, “Aw, Chris cut that scene,” and they’re really funny. These movies are really funny.

AVC: Which scene that got cut were you most unhappy to see go?


PP: It’s not from me. Do you want to get Fred Willard going? You can just [ask], “Fred, what did Chris cut of you in Best In Show?” But I don’t remember, honestly, I know he doesn’t like anything that gets too mean. Like where the joke is at the expense of someone else.

AVC: And Meg was a kind of prickly, mean character. 

PP: Yes, she was. You know, there was a lot of pill-taking and pot-smoking and alcohol with Meg that is not in the movie at all. There were interviews with me and [Michael Hitchcock’s character] Hamilton where I’m taking pills. I smoked, took a puff of the pipe before work, and Hamilton’s like, “Meg, what are you doing?” And she’s like, “What does it look like I’m doing?” He goes, “Do you know what time it is?” And I was just like, “Yes... [Laughs.] It’s like, 7:00.” But there’s other stuff too that was really funny that he cut. Like the dog pooped in [Hamilton’s] slippers, and I’m shouting at my maid. With stuff like that, you’re going, “Oh, why did he cut that?” It just didn’t move the movie along. Fred Willard worked three hours on that. He came in and left. He worked for two days. Isn’t that amazing? And he’s like, the last act of that film. The movie wouldn’t work without him.

AVC: So how was it working with the dogs in that kind of improvisational environment?

PP: I felt like it didn’t really matter, the dog, with Meg. She’s really just talking about herself. So that was something that my husband did. So I wasn’t at the training classes at all with him. We shot together, Michael Hitchcock and I. We had a pointer initially, so we shopped at J. Crew, but then the dog changed to a weimaraner, so we started shopping at Banana Republic. So there was a poodle, the standard poodle—Jane [Lynch] and Jennifer [Coolidge’s characters’] dog got fired because she was misbehaving. So there’s somewhere on tape that has auditions for the poodles that day. It was really funny. In the lobby of the Sheraton.  So there’s a scene where we’re grooming PJ—that was her real name, I don’t remember her name, I think it was Bea in the movie. Chris would say, “You know, let’s get the groomer over here, the owner, to come give another little talk, just to refresh how you position the dog on the table, and how you hold its neck and tail and all of that before they’re going to go out and show.” And as we’re just about to start to roll, she came up, she started critiquing the dog’s coat and said the dog would never win the competition, we’d never even be able to compete, that the coat was not perfect. And we’re like, “Well, we weren’t asking for a critique of the dog. We’re just, ‘How do you hold your scissors?’” So it was a really intense scene, and really, really funny and charming. There’s a really funny documentary on PBS about cat competitions and it’s really, really good. You see how different cat people are from dog people.

AVC: What was the difference?

PP: Longer hair. You know, cat earrings. I don’t know. Just more homey. Just a little witchier.


Parks And Recreation (2011)—“Lindsay Carlisle Shay”


AVC: The character you played on Parks And Rec seemed to have that same prickly personality. You seem to play that a lot: snooty, prickly, kind of condescending.

PP: Yeah, society lady. I think because I can look like that, do you know what I mean? And yeah, I get cast as funny, bitchy people. I like them. I think they’re funny.

AVC: Do you have any trepidation when you come in as a guest on an already established show?

PP: I was so happy to land in Parks And Rec. I don’t remember what I was doing. But yeah, what is this world? What’s the town? What’s the vibe? And I’d worked with Amy [Poehler] before, and I just love her. She’s so silly. I love that silly sense of humor. Absurd. And it’s kind of crazy; you shoot in a week. Those people go home at like, 5 o’clock. We shot in the Valley. It was 120 degrees. It was so hot. And Nicole Holofcener directed it. But it’s weird. It’s a different world. Like, the walls could move if they weren’t screwed in enough.

The Return Of Jezebel James (2008)—“Sarah Tompkins”

AVC: Amy Sherman-Palladino was coming off Gilmore Girls at the time, so Jezebel James got a lot of attention. Were you aware of all the attention the show was getting? And had you been a fan of Amy’s work before? 

PP: No. I read the pilot and thought it was interesting, and that the writing was really good. We shot it in New York and Amy didn’t like office scenes that had editing in them. So one day out of the week, we would shoot a Steadicam shot. On Wednesday, we’d have a film day, and then on Friday, we’d do it live, and it was a 60-page script a week. It was so hard. I would have these fantasies of words coming out of my tear ducts, or my ears. She was a stickler, too. It was like, “Don’t say ‘and,’ say ‘but.’” So it’s hard to do a seven-page scene and keep it fresh every time. So on Friday night at 1 o’clock, it was really, really hard. I don’t really like to repeat myself, because then it kind of loses the life of it. But TV can be very—you know, it’s so much a writer’s medium. It can just be all about the words. Some TV, it gets to be like that, where every word you say has been approved by the network.

AVC: Because her dialogue is very dense and rapid, how did you prepare?

PP: I had a reader. I had someone that would follow me around with my lines. [I read] every time I could have a little time off. But it was hard, because there’s only a few options when you play someone that talks that fast. And it’s neurotic and crazy, and someone that’s really ahead of themselves. They’re not really thinking when they speak.

AVC: How was it shooting in front of a studio audience?

PP: I did it on Will & Grace a little bit. It’s kind of like, “Why are you guys sitting there?” You know? It’s a little in-between.

AVC: Did you feel when you were onstage with the audience that the timing was off? Or did it feel right when you were filming it? 

PP: I think it’s something that people get used to when it’s a half-hour studio audience, the timing of the jokes, so that rhythmic “Someone says this, someone says that, and then you have the punchline.” So anything more in that format, people just aren’t used to. But I wasn’t really thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was doing it. It was just a lot of dialogue. It felt like I was at boot camp.

AVC: So there’s obviously not a lot of room for improvisation there.

PP: I kept thinking she should write period plays from the ’40s, you know? There’s something about her jargon that’s very screwball. She’s got a real talent for it. I don’t read anything or follow up on whether it was a success or not. I just kinda take the jobs when they come and see how they turn out. But I’m glad I went through it. I’m glad I had that experience. It was probably one of my most difficult ones.


A Mighty Wind (2003)—“Sissy Knox”

PP: I think Eugene Levy’s work in that is so brilliant. He’s so good in that movie. So committed as a damaged guy, you know? I think what I took away from that was traveling and going on tour, and watching Catherine [O’Hara] and Eugene every night sing to each other. There’s a punk club in Washington, D.C., I think it begins with an S. I don’t remember. Well, we played there, and there were bands in the audience who knew those songs by heart. Watching Catherine and Eugene every night sing those love songs to each other was amazing. So moving.

AVC: How was the tour experience?

PP: I think we did seven or eight cities, maybe. I remember we went to Canada. We were in San Francisco, we did Town Hall, that was really amazing. Because there was a lot of singers in the group that just loved to harmonize. Like Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins and Catherine O’Hara, those three especially: When we were in the arena for Best In Show with the dog competitions, they were always harmonizing. People would just stand in groups and just be singing during breaks. I think that’s why Chris got that idea. He’s like “Oh wow, we should do something about music.”

AVC: How confident were you in your singing for the movie?

PP: I can carry a tune, but I am not a harmonizer. But I loved her. The Main Street Singer, it’s like they just found God. Everybody’s laughing all the time. I remember we did this exercise, I don’t know if it made it into the movie, but we would all stand in a circle and sing a song of the colors of the rainbow that Jane and Higgins made up. It was, [Singing up the scale] “Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet!” But we’d have our hands just inches away from each other’s crotch. [Laughs.] And that was the exercise we did. And that was part of our vocal warm-up.

AVC: The crotch part?

PP: Yeah, it’s just the vibrations. [Laughs.] It’s so silly. I loved how competitive Higgins and Jane were. They were really into practicing. Fred Willard had a moment that that didn’t make it into the song that I thought was so funny, where he had a bottle of Vermont’s Own Maple Syrup, in those little moonshine jars. You know those jugs that maple syrup comes in? And he’s holding up a shot glass and holding up that maple syrup, and he says, “I don’t drink and I don’t smoke, but every now and then, I just pour myself a shot of some of this stuff!” And he pours himself a shot of maple syrup and drinks it. [Laughs.]

AVC: It does seem like Fred Willard was the life of the set in those movies. 

PP: It just doesn’t stop. And he’d be like, “One more Chris. One more.” Chris would be like, “I think that’s fine. I think we got it.” [Laughs.] The big thing on set is that it’s very real. He’ll come up and he would say, “This could really happen. This isn’t too far from the truth. This is it. This isn’t really funny. This is how people are.” I get so many comments about, [how] people really relate to those characters, because they really see people who are really like that.

AVC: When you come off those movies and then you go back to doing scripted stuff like The Big C, is there an adjustment there?

PP: Yeah. There’s so much trust that you’re given as an actor. There’s so much freedom. When you go into something that’s scripted, especially in movies, sometimes there’s just more pressure and there’s an energy around it: “Will we be a success?” or, “We only have this amount of time to do it,” or whatever the pressures are, that never make their way into a Christopher Guest movie. Because it’s like the cameras aren’t even there. The main focus is what’s going to happen in front of camera, and it’s just kind of seamless. That’s what you strive for when you go on set. I think those movies are so special because of all of the people involved. It’s a huge group, but I feel like I’m still getting over the privilege to work like that. When you think about just the amount of faith and trust that Chris gives in everyone… Chris told me, “I had no idea Jennifer Coolidge was going to open her mouth and talk like that. I had no idea.” Isn’t that amazing? When you go into a situation in Hollywood and you have to read what’s in front of you on a piece of paper in a room full of other people, it’s hard. It’s a bummer. It can be so free to see that it could be so much more loose, and when it’s loose like that, people are free to have fun and take their time. I feel really lucky that I’m in that group.

But I got spoiled, creatively. I got really spoiled. And who knows. I don’t even know if he’s going to do another one. That’s the other thing. When I was in Canada, I ran into Catherine. And we were both talking, “I wonder if Chris is going to do another one?” Every time we see Bob Balaban, [we ask], “When’s he going to do another movie? When’s that gonna happen?” I mean, we all love each other. I love those people. I have a lot of love and respect for their intelligence and their sense of humor and their kindness. We need more of that.

As The World Turns (1991-1992)—“Tess Shelby”

AVC: A soap opera must be the opposite experience, because you’re pushing through every shooting, right?

PP: [Laughs.] They bring the kids in at the crack of dawn. We’ll be in a rehearsal hall at 6, and then around 7:30 you’re in the works. You’re in hair and makeup. I had a great time on that. That was great training. I remember sitting on a rock, or banging my foot against a rock on set, like on the lake, and it making a hollow sound. Like, “Oh, it’s not real.” Even the grass is plastic. Some of the directors were easy, kind of, “Camp it up and have fun with it,” and some of them took it really seriously. I remember when I first showed up on set, my first day, I took a nap in my dressing room and my [character’s] Aunt Barbara knocked on the door and she came in, and she was like, “Be careful what you say around here, because the walls have ears.” I thought that was so fabulously funny, especially since I was probably 21 years old. I just ran into her four or five years ago. Her name is Colleen Zenk. And she hadn’t aged a bit. She looked amazing. It was so good to see her. I remember learning lines and sitting on them. Unless [the actor] started screaming or cursing, that was what ended up on television. It was like, “That was great! Moving on.” You get two takes and you would move on, and you’re like, “What?” [Laughs.]  It was just bad, like, “Wow, I’m doing really bad acting.” I was straight from drama school, so I was projecting. But I had fun.

I did Dazed And Confused during that time. They wanted to give me a three-year contract, but I just got out of drama school and I told As The World Turns that I didn’t want to be anywhere for three years after being in school, so they gave me a year and a half. After a year, when they saw that I was getting a lot of independent work, the producer, Laurence Caso, came up to me—and I’ll never forget, it was so cold in the studio. It was like a meat locker. You’d put on your wardrobe and your pantyhose and everything else, and then I’d wear two robes and just walk around shivering, and go to the green room and talk on the phone. And he came up to me and he says, “Parker, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to get Holden in a coma before Labor Day. And that would have your contract be cut short. Is that all right?” I was like, “That’s amazing Laurence. Thank you so much.” He goes, “You’ll always have a place here if you ever want to come back. Just keep in touch.” And I cried. I thought he was so sweet. [Laughs.] “Holden needs to be in a coma by Labor Day.” So funny. I got my first couch and TV, and my first apartment that I lived in for 13 years, during my soap days. Then I did all those independent movies through the ’90s.

Dazed And Confused (1993)—“Darla Marks” 

PP: That movie is so popular. The Christopher Guest movies and Dazed And Confused are huge. I’m talking like, from bikers to strangers in a grocery store. That movie is so loved by so many people. This woman that I just worked with said that her autistic son who’s 11 knows every word to Dazed And Confused. I was like, “Come on set and be an extra.” So she was an extra. We had a 10-year reunion in 2004 or something. It showed at a drive-in in Austin to like, 6,000 people. We were all sitting down in the grass and people were standing up during the screening and quoting lines and singing songs to the screen, and drinking beer and smoking, and I crawled over to where Rick [Linklater] was sitting to just nudge him and say hi. He started laughing. He’s just giggling, and he goes, “I made a drive-in movie!” That’s genius. Because he did, and he didn’t know that’s what he was doing, but that’s exactly. That movie’s a drive-in movie.

AVC: And people have been quoting it, especially Matthew McConaughey’s character, for almost 20 years now.

PP: They’re still quoting me too, okay? [Laughs.]

The Daytrippers (1996)—“Jo Malone”

PP: I think The Daytrippers was a really special one, because it seems to capture what the independent film scene was like in New York in the ’90s. I had done a reading for Greg Mottola, that Campbell Scott and Liev Schreiber were in, about an MTV network. Investors came and said, “This movie’s going to be too much money. You can’t make this movie.” And Steven Soderbergh and Campbell Scott [tell Greg], “Just go and write a movie that you can shoot for a couple hundred thousand dollars.” So Greg said, “Okay, um, I’ll write something that shoots at my parents’ house, I’ll use my parents’ car, I have my apartment, I have my friend Andy’s apartment, we have Seth, we can use his apartment in Brooklyn, we can shoot in Campbell’s place.” And he pulled in all these favors. It was a 16-day shoot, 16 or 17 days. The production company was called Fiasco Productions, and the camera got stolen the first day. We brushed our own hair. We shot in film so it was like, we only had this amount of film and the sun is going down. Shooting in New York City. We were stealing shots. Anne Meara was hysterical. I just love her so much. I remember her in her bra and underwear getting dressed in Greg’s little apartment on Sullivan Street. Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis fighting in the apartment below when [her character] finds out, you know, when the end of the movie comes. It’s such a perfect movie. It took Greg almost 15 years to make another movie, which was Superbad.

After that, I remember doing, I think it was You’ve Got Mail. Meg Ryan had just read one of Greg’s scripts, and it’s a really, really good script. She didn’t know if she was going to do it or not. That was kind of when everything changed. At first, he could make movies with whoever he wanted. And then all of a sudden, the whole thing got co-opted by the studio system. So Greg moved out to Hollywood, and it took him forever just to make a movie again. And he’s so talented. It’s kinda sad. It’s kind of a bummer story, I’m sorry. But I think it’s interesting.

AVC: Is it because the independent system became less independent at that point?

PP: Yeah, it got co-opted, you know? It became something that was viable and could make even more money if it was made a certain way. So the budgets inflated, right? And once they got more money, then they became less dirty, then they became a little watered down. Less creative. But that’s a perfect little movie.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/parker-posey,60698/

Readers contest: 'Chronicles of the Bay'

May 22, 2011


More than 30 years ago, Armistead Maupin invented a bunch of characters who depicted the richly colorful life of San Francisco in his singular "Tales of the City" books. This month, those magical books will take on a new dimension as the basis for a world-premiere musical at the American Conservatory Theater.

Imagine if you were to write a novel about characters in your Bay Area town or city whose lives reflected what life is like today in Oakland, Orinda, Santa Rosa or Los Gatos, to name a few. Maybe you'd call it "Chronicles of the Bay."

We are asking readers to write an opening chapter of a novel set in your own city or town in the 21st century, with characters who reflect what makes your community unique. It should be in your own voice - not an attempt to imitate Armistead Maupin, who, after all, is inimitable.

The entries should be 250 to 300 words and must be submitted online only by June 13. The first-place winner will receive a voucher for a pair of tickets to "Tales."

Please e-mail your entries to pinkletters@sfchronicle.com or datebook@sfchronicle.com. We cannot accept entries submitted by mail.


http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-05-22/entertainment/29580170_1_chronicles-magical-books-armistead-maupin

Locating “Tales of the City”

By:  Drew Bourn
May 24, 2011

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is a series of eight novels set primarily in San Francisco, spanning from 1976 to the present. The stories recount the lives of a broad cross-section of the city’s denizens, and the transformative impact that the characters and the city have on each other. The first five novels were originally published as serials in The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner; the first installment appeared in the Chronicle exactly thirty years ago today. Beginning in 1993, the first three novels were adapted as three television miniseries starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis (the entire first miniseries can be seen for free online). This year, the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco is premiering a new musical based on the first two novels. When San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein installed a time capsule under the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square Park in 1979, the small collection of items intended to represent San Francisco’s most recent past included a copy of the first Tales novel.

Larry Rhodes first moved to San Francisco in 1982 – when Maupin was still publishing Tales of the City as a serial in The San Francisco Chronicle. However, it wasn’t until three years later, when Rhodes was living in Atlanta, that he began to read Maupin’s work. Rhodes became so engrossed with Maupin’s writing that he subsequently developed a website featuring Tales-related self-guided walking tours, Tours of the Tales, which launched in July 2010.

Rhodes’ initial impulse to create the tours came around 2001, when he was again living in the Bay Area and wanted to take out-of-town friends to sites mentioned in Tales of the City. At that time, Maupin’s website included a walking tour of locations mentioned in Tales, but the tour focused almost exclusively on the Russian Hill and North Beach neighborhoods. Rhodes was interested in developing something more comprehensive.

In 2003, Rhodes began in earnest to research the locations that appeared in the first six Tales novels and the first two television miniseries. Because some of the businesses mentioned in Tales had moved or closed by the time Rhodes began his investigation, he relied on telephone directories and Polk’s city directories going back to the 1970s at the San Francisco Public Library to establish their correct locations. He also sought information online, using sites such as Mister SF by journalist Hank Donat and Film in America by location scout Scott Trimble. Based on his findings, he made excursions to find and photograph the sites as they exist in San Francisco today (selected photographs can be found on a dedicated Flickr site). As Rhodes commented to me,

“ I want to place the locales not only in the context of the books or movies, but in San Francisco itself. I want the people who take the walking tours to have a feel for San Francisco – somehow capture the essence of the City that captured me.”

So far, Rhodes has created four self-guided walking tours that are available as PDFs on his website. These cover Acquatic Park and Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz, Russian Hill, North Beach, Jackson Square, Telegraph Hill, Chinatown, Nob Hill, the Tenderloin, and Union Square. He plans on extending the scope of his tours; additional areas for future tours might include the Castro, Noe Valley, Civic Center, South of Market, the Haight, and Golden Gate Park. He is also considering tours that cover sites outside San Francisco that are mentioned in Tales, including locations in Oakland, Marin County, Mendocino, Los Angeles, and Reno.

Because Rhodes provides these tours as PDFs, they can be printed out or read on e-book readers such as Kindle and Nook. Although he is considering a map-based presentation such as Google Maps would provide, it is not an option that he is actively pursing at present. He plans to lead occasional free group walking tours, but the primary focus has been on developing a means by which fellow Tales enthusiasts could explore the sites mentioned in the series at their own pace and on their own schedule. Rhodes’ website also includes a guestbook, which provides an opportunity for those using the tours to respond not only to Rhodes’ work but also to connect with one another.

To learn more about Larry Rhodes’ project, and to download the tours, visit his website: Tours of the Tales. 

http://usingsfhistory.com/2011/05/24/locating-tales-of-the-city/

Aron Kincaid dies at 70; actor appeared in 1960s 'beach' movies

(Note from Armistead Maupin's Facebook page:  Aron and I became friends in the 70's when he was modeling in S.F. He was charming, witty, and hugely supportive of my work. Yes, his real name was Norman Neale Williams -- and he was tickled that I'd named my most deplorable villain after him. The last time we talked he joked about getting ready for the Motion Picture Home, where ...he could hang out with all the old stars. Damn it, Aron, I needed more of you.)



The Los Angeles native appeared in 'The Girls on the Beach' and 'The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.' He later had careers as a model and an artist.

January 08, 2011
By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times

Aron Kincaid, an actor who appeared in 1960s "beach" movies such as "The Girls on the Beach" and "The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini" and later had careers as a model and an artist, has died. He was 70.

Kincaid, who lived in Beverly Hills, died of heart-related complications Thursday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, said his longtime friend Rodney Kemerer.

The tall and handsome Kincaid was a UCLA student when he was spotted in a Los Angeles stage production by a casting agent and signed to a contract with Universal.

That led to a regular role in the final season of the sitcom "Bachelor Father" in 1962 — as Warren Dawson, the junior partner of John Forsythe's Hollywood attorney Bentley Gregg. Dawson becomes engaged to Gregg's niece, Kelly, played by Noreen Corcoran.

Kincaid later appeared with Corcoran in the 1965 comedy "The Girls on the Beach" and had roles in "Beach Ball" and "Ski Party," and made what was billed as a "guest appearance" in "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine" — as well as appearing in "The Happiest Millionaire, "The Proud and the Damned" and other movies.

Kincaid, who also made guest appearances on series such as "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Get Smart," moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and launched a successful career as a model.

He also had a 20-year voice-over career in hundreds of commercials and did voice work on animated TV series such as "Smurfs," "Jonny Quest" and "The Transformers."

He was born Norman Neale Williams II in Los Angeles on June 15, 1940. His father, a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, died during World War II. His mother remarried and moved to Oakland, where Kincaid graduated from high school.

After graduating from UCLA in 1962, he enlisted in the Coast Guard Reserve.

As an artist, Kincaid used the name N.N. Williams II. He sold his landscapes and seascapes through galleries in Laguna Beach.

He had no immediate survivors.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/08/local/la-me-aron-kincaid-20110108

Castro LGBT museum reopens

by Matthew S. Bajko

After months of permit delays and last-minute construction issues, the GLBT Historical Society will open the doors to its new exhibition space in the Castro this Friday, December 10.

It has been a little more than a year since the archival group closed its first foray into opening a museum in the city's LGBT neighborhood. Now it is back in a new venue with a five-year lease and two exhibits showcasing numerous items among its collection that have never been shown to the public.

Society officials warn that it is a soft opening and that the installations may not be fully complete until the official opening Thursday, January 13. Nonetheless, they are excited to be back in the heart of the city's LGBT community.

"This is a preview exhibit. The doors are open but there still might be some rough edges. Signage still needs to be put in and some electronic displays may not be fully functional, but we want to let people come in and see" the new museum, Paul Boneberg, the society's executive director, told the Bay Area Reporter Tuesday afternoon.

Several times this year the society has had to push back the opening date for the museum. Boneberg initially had hoped to be open in time for Pride in June but permit issues caused that deadline to come and go.

The society then had hoped to be open last month and has been racing to install the two new shows into the remodeled storefront at 4127 18th Street. As it became clear that the work would not be completed over the Thanksgiving holiday, the unofficial opening date was pushed back to this weekend.

"This last project has been more difficult in some ways than we hoped," acknowledged Boneberg. "We lost six months. We wanted to be open six months ago and we lost it. The permits and build out process was more difficult than we had thought."

The archival group is renting the space from Walgreens, which signed a lease for the vacant storefront in order to expand its specialty pharmacy that is next door. When neighborhood opposition to those plans derailed the project, openly gay District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty helped broker a deal to allow the national drug store chain to share the building with the historical society.

In return for city approval to use a portion of the space for its expansion, Walgreens agreed to pay for the construction costs to remodel the remaining area for use as an LGBT museum. The historical society, in turn, will pay reduced rents during the first several years of its lease. Its first payment of $2,000 was made December 1.

"Walgreens did a wonderful job for us. They absorbed all the costs and hassles with permits and made it so we were able to open," said Boneberg.

New treasures go on display

With $100,000 in city funding to help mount the new exhibits, the historical society has created two brand new shows for the museum's opening. The first is called "Great Collections from the GLBT Historical Society Archives" and was curated by Boneberg.

The show is broken into various categories of the types of material in the archives, from posters and videos to textiles and ephemera. It is meant to educate visitors why various items are collected and preserved by the society.

Included are the pantsuits worn by Phyllis Lyon and the late Del Martin when they became the first same-sex couple to marry at San Francisco City Hall in 2004 and the kitchen table and personal effects that belonged to the late Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city's first openly gay elected official.

The second, larger show is titled "Our Vast Queer Past: Celebrating GLBT History." Founding society member Gerard Koskovich; former board member Don Romesburg; and Amy Sueyoshi, who is on academic leave as a director and associate professor of race and resistance studies at San Francisco State University, curated the exhibit. They took inspiration from items donated in 23 of the last 25 years since the archival group was formed.

"When we looked into the archives to see what to put in the show, we pushed ourselves to tell more interesting and less known stories," Koskovich told the B.A.R. during a sneak peek of the exhibit Tuesday, December 7. "This is all entirely new stuff. The vast majority of documents have never been show in an exhibit at the historical society."

Romesburg said they have attempted to tell "100 years of queer history in 25 years of the archive."
They have also strived to reveal hidden LGBT stories through the objects selected for the 23 different displays. A case inspired by the 1978 sales report for the now defunct Old Wives Tales, a feminist bookstore that had been on Valencia Street, led to the topic of "Consuming Queers: The GLBT Marketplace."

While shoppers can go into any number of gift shops in the Castro and buy gay merchandise, that wasn't always the case, explained Koskovich, yet people often overlook that fact.
"We are bringing forth these hidden histories," he said.

Another display centers around the papers of George Raya, one of the first fulltime gay legislative advocates in the country and the first to roam the halls of the state Capitol in Sacramento in the early 1970s. One black and white photo shows Raya, who lives in Sacramento, with then-Governor Jerry Brown, who will be sworn into a third term in the office next month.

"You know Jose Sarria was the first gay political candidate in the country. Both he and Raya were Latino men. It is not normally what we think of," said Romesburg, referring to the long held stereotype that the gay community is made up of primarily white men.

Other panels depict the lives of little known gay pioneers such as Jiro Onuma, the only known gay man to be interned in the Japanese camps during World War II, and Donald S. Lucas, whose work in the 1960s around poverty issues in the Tenderloin led to the creation of the first transgender and LGBT youth organizations.

Due to the large space they have to work with – it is 1,600 square feet – the society is able to display items it could not in its previous galleries. In one corner stands a gown worn by Baroness Eugenia Von Dieckoff (a.k.a. Henry Dieckoff) to the Grand Ducal Ball in 1983.

"It has amazing stitch work and rhinestones but we have never been able to display it because the cape is 15 to 16 feet long," said Romesburg.

Another outfit serves as the closing statement of the show: the dress that Laura Linney's character Mary Ann Singleton wears in the opening scene of the television adaptation of local author Armistead Maupin's novel Tales of the City.

"The object is meant to symbolize that both gay and straight people come here with the same hopes of coming to San Francisco and making your dreams come true," said Romesburg.

With the opening of the new exhibit space, the historical society is one step closer to achieving its dream of having a permanent home to showcase the city's LGBT treasures and forgotten stories.
"I think of this as our first real museum. The space was constructed to our specifications," said Koskovich.

The museum will be open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. It is closed Mondays and Tuesdays; general admission costs $5.

Due to support from the Bob Ross Foundation, named after the B.A.R.'s founding publisher, the museum will be free the first Wednesday of the month throughout 2011.

http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=5302

Jackie Burroughs 1939-2010

Published On Wed Sep 22 2010

By Martin Knelman
Entertainment Columnist

Jackie Burroughs, one of the most accomplished and beloved actors in Canadian stage and screen history, died at home in Toronto on Wednesday after a long fight with cancer. She was 71.

Burroughs — fondly known to insiders as Jackie B. — made many triumphant appearances on the stage, working in Toronto, Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake (where her family owned the Oban Inn). And she won awards for memorable movie roles in The Grey Fox and A Winter Tan.

But to millions of Canadians, she was best known as the eccentric and delightful Aunt Hetty King in the hugely popular and long-running TV series Road to Avonlea, co-starring with the young Sarah Polley. The show was a hit not only on CBC Television but also in the U.S. on the Disney Channel.

Well known as a bohemian adventurer, Burroughs had a special gift for playing eccentric characters. Born in Lancashire, England, she moved to Toronto at age 12 and was enrolled in the private girls’ school Branksome Hall.

After making her stage debut at U of T’s Hart House, she made an unforgettable screen appearance as a factory worker in Don Owen’s 1966 National Film Board classic Notes for a Film About Donna & Gail.

On stage at Stratford when Robin Phillips was artistic director, Burroughs starred opposite Hume Cronyn in The Merchant of Venice. At the Royal Alexandra Theatre, she co-starred with Peter O’Toole in Uncle Vanya and Present Laughter.

Among her many awards were the Earle Grey lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television (2001) and the Governor General’s Performing Arts award for lifetime achievement in 2005.

In recent years Burroughs divided her time between her Yorkville apartment and a winter home in Mexico.

She leaves her daughter, Zoe Yanovsky, from her long-ago marriage to the late rock star Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/theatre/article/865189--stage-actress-starred-in-road-to-avonlea?bn=1

Thanks to Kevin for sending me this article.

Revisiting 'Tales' with Armistead Maupin and Olympia Dukakis

May 1, 2010

 When in San Francisco, do as the San Franciscans do -- indulge in culinary pleasures while enjoying the conversation of freethinking originals.
 
While in town a couple of weeks ago to review “Girlfriend,” the new Todd Almond-Matthew Sweet musical at Berkeley Rep, I had a bright idea: Why not invite Olympia Dukakis, who was performing in Morris Panych’s play “Vigil” at American Conservatory Theater, and Armistead Maupin, fictional chronicler of San Francisco par excellence, to lunch to talk about the musical version of Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” which will have its world premiere at A.C.T. at the end of next season.

Dukakis, of course, starred in the three television miniseries that were adapted from Maupin’s books.  And though she calls New York home, her open mindedness (luminously evident in her sensitive portrayal of the transsexual landlady from "Tales," Anna Madrigal) matches the ethos of this Northern California Mecca for radicals, renegades and resplendent freaks.

As my Sunday Arts and Books feature fondly reveals, sensibility is a stronger glue than Zip Code in terms of keeping old friends connected.  

-- Charles McNulty (follow me on Twitter @charlesmcnulty)

Photo: Olympia Dukakis and Armistead Maupin. Credit: Randi Lynn Beach / For The Times

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/revisiting-tales-with-armistead-maupin-and-olympia-dukakis-.html

ACT to give 'Tales of the City' world premiere

Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic
Friday, March 26, 2010


"Tales of the City," a new musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin's famed stories - created with veterans of "Avenue Q" and members of the rock band Scissor Sisters - will receive its world premiere in the American Conservatory Theater's 2010-11 season. Bill Irwin, Harold Pinter, and a new take on Sartre's "No Exit" are also featured in the ambitious lineup to be announced today by Artistic Director Carey Perloff, along with the previously announced, three-theater staging of Tarell Alvin McCraney's "The Brother/Sister Plays" trilogy.

"It's a wonderful valentine to the community in which we live," Perloff says of "Tales," noting that Maupin began his opus as a series of columns in The Chronicle. It's the kind of San Francisco story, like her own "The Tosca Project" this season, "that's a big part of the kind of work we want to make at ACT."

Perloff acknowledges that "Tales" has Broadway aspirations, with the participation of "Avenue Q" librettist Jeff Whitty and director Jason Moore, and Scissors songwriters Jake Shears and John Garden. But the premiere "is an ACT production for ACT's audience," she says. "Clearly it's an extraordinary team, and it would be surprising if it didn't have a longer life. But that isn't the first imperative, which is to do a fantastic production for a fantastic city."

"Tales" is also such a large undertaking that it will occupy the last two slots of the season, to allow for added tech rehearsals, two weeks of previews and a possible summer extension. That means ACT is selling a six-play subscription season instead of its usual seven. But patrons will "have other opportunities to see the company" in a series of "alternative programming," Perloff says. Those shows will be announced later.

The season opens in September with Irwin directing and starring in his own (with Mark O'Donnell) adaptation of Molière's "Scapin," in a production that will reunite him with his former Pickle Family Circus clown and co-star Geoff Hoyle. November brings McCraney's "Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet," the third part of the "Brother/Sister" trilogy. The first two plays will open the Marin Theatre Company and Magic Theatre's seasons.

After ACT's annual nonsubscription outing with "A Christmas Carol" and a still undetermined play in January, Perloff will direct Pinter's "The Homecoming." She hopes to use the occasion for an overdue "main-stage memorial celebration" of the work of the playwright, who died at the end of 2008. Though she's staged many of Pinter's plays, this will be her first time with what she terms his "master play. It's outrageous and funny and dangerous and really trenchant, just an uncompromising play."

Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre arrives in April with Kim Collier's live-cinematic take on "No Exit," a piece Perloff compares to the Kneehigh Theatre's buoyantly theatrical "Brief Encounter," which opened the current season. "Tales" opens in May 2011 to close the season. Subscription and other information is available at (415) 749-2250 or www.act-sf.org.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/26/DDAF1CIO4M.DTL

Hearts and Flowers

The valentine was a handmade pastiche of Victorian cherubs, pressed flowers and red glitter.  Mary Ann Singleton took one look at it and squealed delightedly.

"Mouse!  It's magnificent.  Where in the world did you find those precious little...?"

"Open it."  He grinned.

She turned to the inside of the magazine-size card, revealing a message in Art Nouveau script:  MY VALENTINE'S RESOLUTIONS.  Underneath were ten numbered spaces.

"See," said Michael, "you're supposed to fill it in yourself."

Mary Ann leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. "I'm that screwed up, huh?"

"You bet.  I don't waste time with well-adjusted people.  Wanna see my list?"

"Aren't you mixing this up with New Year's?"

"Nah.  That's nickle-dime stuff.  Smoking-eating-drinking resolutions.  These are the--you know--the hardcore, maybe-this-time, kiss-today-goodbye, some-enchanted-evening resolutions."

He reached into the pocket of his Pendleton and handed her a sheet of paper:

1. I will not call anyone nellie or butch, unless that is his name.
2. I will not assume that women who like me are fag hags.
3. I will stop expecting to meet Jan-Michael Vincent at the tubs.
4. I will inhale poppers only through the mouth.
5. I will not spend more than half an hour in the shower at the Y.
6. I will stop trying to figure out what color my handkerchief would be if I wore one.
7. I will buy a drink for a Fifties Queen sometime.
8. I will not persist in hoping that attractive men will turn out to be brainless and boring.
9. I will sign my real name at The Glory Holes.
10. I will ease back into religion by attending concerts at Grace Cathedral.
11. I will not cruise at Grace Cathedral.
12. I will not vote for anyone for Empress.
13. I will make friends with a straight man.
14. I will not make fun of the way he walks.
15. I will not tell him about Alexander the Great, Walt Whitman or Leonardo da Vinci.
16. I will not vote for for politicians who use the term "Gay Community."
17. I will not cry when Mary Tyler Moore goes off the air.
18. I will not measure it, no matter who asks.
19. I will not hide the A-200.
20. I will not buy a Lacoste shirt, a Marimekko pillow, a secondhand letterman's jacket, an All-American Boy T-shirt, a razor blade necklace or a denim accessory of any kind.
21. I will learn to eat alone and like it.
22. I will not fantasize about firemen.
23. I will not tell anyone at home that I just haven't found the right girl yet.
24. I will wear a suit on Castro Street and feel comfortable about it.
25. I will not do impressions of Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West or Paul Lynde.
26. I will not eat more than one It's-It in a single evening.
27. I will find myself acceptable.
28. I will meet somebody nice, away from a bar or the tubs or a roller-skating rink, and I will fall hopelessly but conventionally in love.
29. But I won't say I love you before he does.
30. The hell I won't.

Mary Ann put down the paper and looked at Michael.  "You've got thirty resolutions.  How come you only gave me ten?"

He grinned.  "Things aren't so tough for you."

"Is that right, Mr. Gay Chauvinist Pig!"

She attacked the valentine with a Flair, filling in the first four blanks.

"Try that for starters!"

1. I will meet Mr. Right this year.
2. He won't be married.
3. He won't be gay.
4. He won't be a child pornographer.

"I see," said Michael, smiling slyly.  "Moving back to Cleveland, huh?"

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

-Rick


Excerpt from "More Tales of the City"