You know, we're always keeping a lid on our own autism."Īt the end of a long day of speaking about "Rain Man," Hoffman was spent. ![]() "We all go through life not hugging quite as much as we'd like to. "It touches something in us that I can't explain," he said. He described Temple Granden, an engineer and high-functioning autistic who designed a "squeeze machine" that she could sit in, with foam rubber pads and levers that allowed her to simulate the pleasure of human touch without actual contact.Īs he talked, Hoffman became more and more emotional and finally cried. Hoffman had spent a year preparing for the role - "I was obsessed with it, " he said - and spoke about the heartbreak of autism: the people who are locked inside it, the parents who long to connect with a child who won't be hugged. Speaking to a small group of reporters in a New York hotel suite, Hoffman described his character, an autistic savant who can't bear to be hugged and never makes eye contact. In 1988, Dustin Hoffman was promoting "Rain Man," the movie that won him his second Oscar. Invasive jumping worms spotted in California.Why Hawaii’s Uncle Robert’s Awa Bar is ‘different than any other place in the world’.San Francisco home that has no square or rectangular rooms is for sale for $3.3M.Biotech company Genentech to close South SF production facility, lay off workers.Northern lights appear over Northern California in rare event.One dead after reported active shooter incident near South Lake Tahoe 2 held.The ex-Meta recruiter who says she made $190K a year ‘to do nothing’ speaks out.She was so open and endearing that when I spotted her on MTV a few weeks later, bikini- clad and shak-in' her stuff, I felt something unexpected - a tinge of admiration. He even brought up the urban legend about him being a sex addict, bless him.Įlectra treated her "Scary Movie" press day like therapy, recounting her failed marriage to Dennis Rodman, her hard-partying past and her pride in having forged a career in Hollywood, even a lightly regarded one. So far, there are two members, Michael Douglas and Carmen Electra - opposites on the celebrity continuum but comrades in candor.ĭouglas, promoting "Traffic," was commanding, expansive and savvy enough to know that by pre-empting potentially embarrassing questions, he could put his own spin on things. Some stars graciously volunteer information about their private lives, thereby earning automatic induction into my Junket Hall of Fame. So at the roundtables, where 10 or so journalists interview a star, one must endure actors fielding questions about co-stars (they're always great to work with) or the difficulties of location shooting (yes, that Toronto soundstage was chilly).Ī colleague of mine once noted that people reading about celebrities want to know only a) how attractive the person is and b) what he or she is wearing.īut that's too simplistic: I firmly believe readers also want to know c) how tall the person is and d) who the person is sleeping with. There's a tacit rule at junkets that the press should stick to questions about the movie. Now that she has her Oscar, Julia Roberts similarly turned down requests to be interviewed for "America's Sweethearts." - Ruthe Stein HALL OF FAMERS ![]() For "Gladiator," he declined to talk to newspaper scribes at all. I went one on one with Russell Crowe for 40 minutes at the "L.A. Presumably, I would still be talking to him if I hadn't made my excuses.Ĭircumstances change. Nobody came back to tell us the time was up. To give you an idea of a star's relative merit, I got 15 minutes with Madonna and Meg Ryan, 20 minutes with Keanu Reeves and Cate Blanchett, and a half hour with Andy Garcia and Jim Caviezel. One young actress who isn't famous enough for that kind of behavior kept a roomful of reporters waiting for 45 minutes while she talked on the phone to her sister about what to buy their mother for Christmas. But I've observed the long lunches certain stars take on junkets and the periods where they disappear completely, causing schedules to go haywire. The bigger a star, the more he or she is in demand, so the pie has to be cut into smaller pieces.Īt least that's the ostensible reason a movie star's time is parceled out so sparingly. The people who are paid to handle actors make them available for a limited amount of time. An actor's importance can be measured by the number of minutes journalists are allowed to interview him or her during a junket.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |