Category: Interviews (Page 66 of 69)

Two questions (and answers) with John Walsh of “America’s Most Wanted”

November 2, 2006 /

Can you believe “America’s Most Wanted” has been on the air for nineteen years now? It’s one of the longest-running programs in television history, and – unfortunately – it will probably never be lacking for material. To promote a few significant episodes of the show that will be airing in November and will include appeararances by Bernie Kosar, Daryl Hannah, and Rev. Al Sharpton, the Fox Network set up a teleconference with the show’s host, John Walsh…and we were able to get in a pair of questions.

Bullz-Eye: Hi, John, how are you?

John Walsh: Good, William, how are you?

BE: Not bad. I know you mentioned the various celebrities you’re having on the show this month. Are you regularly contacted by celebrities who want to assist with the show?

JW: Over the years, we’ve been contacted by lots of celebrities. For example, we did a case in Nashville, Tennessee, of a wonderful guy by the name of Skull Schulman who ran a bar that was the kick-off point for many country and western stars…and many of them – in that example, Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, and about ten other stars – asked us to profile the senseless murder of Skull Schulman. He was beaten to death for, I think, about sixty dollars at the closing of this bar, and we caught two guys. One was in prison, the other guy was in a homeless shelter; I don’t think they ever would’ve been caught if the celebrities hadn’t brought the case to “America’s Most Wanted.” So we’ve done lots of cases over the years where different celebrities or sports figures have reached out to us and said, look, this is a friend or relative or mentor, someone who has helped me in my life, could you maybe put this on “America’s Most Wanted”? So it’s not unusual. We’ve done a lot of them over the years.

BE: And one other question. Not too long ago, you were immortalized in comic book form in the DC series, “Outsiders.” How bizarre was that for you, and how did that come about?

JW: Well, I’ll tell you, I considered it an honor. I had been the only guy ever written into the “Dick Tracy” comic strip, I’ve been characterized on “South Park” and all those things my kids think are very cool. I have a 12-year-old and a 21-year-old son, and they think that’s cool. But the “Outsiders” actually reached out to me, the guys who write and draw that very successful comic book wanted to team up with me and have some of the Outsiders who were, in the fictionalized world, victims of sexual abuse. One of the girl characters had been a sex slave to a pimp, and they wanted to create a comic book with awareness about exploitation for children and to track these guys down. And I looked at it as a real honor, actually. I mean, the storyline was very, very serious. They approached it in a very serious way; it was kind of an educational way. And I thought…it really was an honor. They’re very, very talented people; it’s a hugely successful comic book. But as my 12-year-old son said to me, “Dad, you gave a pretty good message in that comic book, and it was pretty cool.”

BE: Great, thanks very much.

JW: Thank you.

Interviews, TV

A quick Q&A with Darrell Hammond

November 1, 2006 /

Not so long ago, Darrell Hammond set the new record for longest-running cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” possibly because – as he admitted recently – he never walked into the show with the agenda of moving on to bigger and better things. Whatever his reasons for sticking around, he’s been rewarded with the honor of being the first cast member to receive a retrospective of his best work while still remaining within the show’s ranks. NBC offered Hammond up to the press for a teleconference earlier this week, and Bullz-Eye got the opportunity to ask him a few questions. Our only disappointment was that he offered kind of a non-answer to the one we were hoping would result in a really juicy response. Oh, well…

Bullz-Eye: Hey, Darrell, how’s it going?

Darrell Hammond: Hi, Will!

BE: So who were some of your impressionist influences? Or did you really have any?

DH: I think that my mother was probably better than I was, although she wasn’t interested in that as a career; she was a secretary and a homemaker. Beyond her, I think it was Rich Little, Frank Gorshin, and then particularly as time went by, Eddie Murphy.

BE: Is there any impression that you tried to get but you just didn’t feel like you got it?

DH: Well, I think that it would be the two times I tried to do President Bush on the air. It just went so poorly for me, and I was aware when I was out there that I had no real basic understanding of how to do this guy. I knew he was so complex, and I got the thing on short notice, and this is one of those instances where, in the time that was allotted to me, I was never able to get it. I was never able. I ran out of time.
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Interviews, TV, TV Comedies

“Heroes”: 3 questions, 3 answers

October 16, 2006 /

Due to the phenomenal success of “Heroes,” NBC kindly put together a teleconference with the show’s creator, Tim Kring, and two of the shows stars; their names are Ali Larter and Santiago Cabrera, but you may know them better as Stripper with the Crazy Reflection and Artist Who’s The New Nostradamus. It was a packed call, so we only had the chance to ask one question per person, but here’s what we got out of them…

Bullz-Eye: Ali, in a series that has its fair share of disconcerting moments, yours is definitely the story that’s playing out the most like a horror film.

Ali Larter (“Niki Sanders”): (Laughs)

BE: Given your history with “Final Destination,” did you slip into the role pretty easily…?

AL: You know what? I’m in a bit of fear and distress right now, but if you hold on for just one more episode, we’re gonna get a little romance, you get a little bit of cheekiness in it, and, actually, what’s amazing about this writing is that it really pushes me and makes me kind of find all different tones within our show, so…you’re getting there. That’s just the first couple of episodes. It definitely opens up to a whole new world.

BE: Oh, please let the romance be with Hiro’s buddy…

AL: (Cheekily) Maybeeeeeee…!

BE: Santiago, I’ve been blogging about the show for our site, and I have to wonder: if you had the ability to see the future, do you think maybe you’d spend maybe a little more time trying to change the events you were seeing and less, uh, kind of…whining about it?

Santiago Cabrera (“Isaac Mendez”): Well, I think it’s, uh…I think it depends whether you’re in control of it or not. I think that’s the interesting thing about the surprises that this character can have. It’s that, at the moment, he’s not conscious of what he’s doing, so it’s a pretty freaky thing, and there’s maybe that nature of, “Am I evil, is this coming from inside of me?” Or, “Why is this all happening?” But obviously, if you’re in control of it and you can put it to good use, you can do what you want with it, and that’s a different story. And I think that’s the great thing about this show: that it starts from the beginning of everyone discovering these things for the first time, and, obviously, it’ll be a process of going through each character, and it’ll take people to different places.

BE: And Tim, when I did our fall preview, I opened my comments about “Heroes” by observing, “Whoever had ‘21 years’ in the pool on when NBC would finally decide TV critics had forgotten about ‘Misfits of Science,’ you’re a winner.”

Tim Kring (creator): (Laughs)

BE: And then I proceeded to laugh out loud when I saw on your IMDB entry that you were actually a writer for that show.

TK: Oh, is that right? So that was just a lucky guess…?

BE: It was. Have you been hoarding ideas for 21 years?

TK: Actually, “Misfits of Science” is so long ago that I barely – literally – barely cannot remember what I wrote. But, y’know, I’ve had a long and varied career, so when you look back at it, there’ve been many various genres that I’ve been involved in.

BE: So it hasn’t been haunting you ever since?

TK: No, not really; I’ve just been going where the road takes me. As a writer, if you look back at your career, it’s hard to make any sense of it. It just goes where it wants to go.

External Entertainment, External TV, Heroes, Interviews, TV, TV Dramas

I heart Tina Fey.

October 11, 2006 /

Seriously, I really do. She’s totally the kind of woman who I’d make a fool of myself over if I were still single…but I’m not, so I won’t. And I was very proud of myself for keeping my cool when I got to talk to both Fey and her “30 Rock” co-star, Jane Krakowski, about their new show. Clearly, I was more focused on Tina than Jane, but, honestly, that’s more because – as I explain to Jane – I hadn’t yet seen the new version of the pilot when I was talking to the two of them. (Krakowski was added after the fact, as you’ll read below.) In closing, let me just say that it’s a good thing it was a phone call rather than an in-person conversation; it allowed me to get away with victoriously pumping my fist in the air whenever I succeeded in making Tina Fey laugh.

Bullz-Eye: Tina, do you happen to recall the obscenities that you uttered when you first heard about “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”?

Tina Fey: (Laughs) I swear so much all the time, anyway, that it probably wouldn’t even have interrupted my constant flow of swearing. That was probably happening over just the quality of my lunch.

BE: Did you find yourself a little disconcerted knowing that there was going to be a similar-premised show on the air at the same time?

TF: Well, it’s funny, because I had friends coming up to me, saying, like, “Oh, I’m so sorry that you’re not going to get to do your show!” And I said, “Well, y’know, I haven’t really heard anything…” And, really, within the same day, (NBC President) Kevin Reilly called me at home to assure me that we were still…because we were in pre-production for the pilot, and he assured me that we were still going to shoot the pilot and that he believed in both shows, and so I took him at his word. And so far, so good.

BE: And I’m one of those who has not seen the revised pilot yet, but I’m led to understand that, Jane, you’re taking over the role that more or less belonged to Rachel (Dratch) in the original pilot…?

Jane Krakowski: Um, well, I’m playing the star of “The Girlie Show,” which is the fictional show within the show. The role has been quite rewritten, I would say, and made a little bit different, but I love the show so much, and I was so thrilled to be asked to join into the cast.

TF: And what sort of what happened was, once we realized after doing the pilot that we were never going to see sketches, then we wanted to take Rachel, who’s a sketch player, and use her differently. She’s still in the show and she’s going to play a series of characters; if you do get a chance to see the revised pilot, you’ll see she plays a cat wrangler in that pilot, and then she’ll come back another week as a different character, and a week or two after that, she’ll come back as a different character.

BE: How much of Tracy Morgan’s character is inspired by Dave Chappelle?

TF: Well… (laughs) …I will say that I don’t know Dave – I’ve barely ever met him – but I do know Tracy, and, so, I would say that it’s primarily Tracy if Tracy were nuts, more than anybody else. But I think anything any celebrity does, let alone an African-American celebrity, is gonna be fair game for Tracy to do. Maybe Tracy will leave a bag with a million dollars in jewelry in the airport, I don’t know!

BE: Will “The Girly Show” have guest hosts or celebrity guests?

TF: I don’t think it will. I don’t think it’s that kind of show…unless all of us change our mind and it does. But I don’t think that’s really on the horizon right now. I’ve spent nine years writing for celebrity guest hosts, and I’m very excited to write for just my cast.

BE: Tina, what “Saturday Night Live” joke or sketch are you the most proud of?

TF: Oh, that’s a good question! Most proud of… (Pauses) I wrote a sketch once called “Census.” It was about a census taker, and it was just Christopher Walken and Tim Meadows, just the two of them, and that was maybe my favorite sketch that I ever wrote. Unfortunately, it was on the same show as “we need more cowbell,” so it has long since been forgotten! But that was maybe the best show that we had in the whole nine years that I was here, that show with Christopher Walken.

BE: Was there ever a sketch that didn’t make it on the air that you were really thought should’ve?

TF: Usually, the ones that don’t make it, it’s for very good cause! They’re usually pretty stinky!

BE: And a throwaway closer: has anyone ever approached you that was writing an unofficial biography of Lindsay Lohan, looking for dirt from the set of “Mean Girls”?

TF: (Laughs) No…but I am open to offers if they’re extremely lucrative.

Interviews, TV, TV Comedies

Talking “Galactica”

October 8, 2006 /

Bullz-Eye had a chance to ask a few questions to members of the cast and crew of “Battlestar Galactica” on the eve of the premiere of the new season, but we figured we’d wait until just after the season premiere before posting it…

Bullz-Eye: Mary, at the end of last season, your character left office and went back to teaching. What can we expect from the new season after the occupation?

Mary McDonnell (“Laura Roslin”): She’s still teaching. But I think One thing you can trust about Laura Roslin is her passion for the fleet and her commitment to getting them to Earth doesn’t really go away, so whatever hat she’s wearing, I think the agenda remains the same.

BE: And, David, it was pretty bold to close out the season with the start of the occupation instead of ending it with the blast or just after. What went into the decision to end the season a year later, when the Cylons arrived?

David Eick (Executive Producer): I think that it was very clear to us that, in order to advance the story to that critical point, you needed a believable amount of time to go by. And that period of time, in order for all of the colonial society’s guard to be adequately down, they needed to exist through that period in such a way that they believed themselves to be safe. As a practical matter, doing several episodes in which everyone thinks they’re safe and fine and nothing happens didn’t seem like a wise thing to do! So we advanced the story to that point, that sort of event horizon, in which the safety that they believed themselves to be fortunate enough to have found, is suddenly yanked out from under them, and it was really for no other practical reason than that. I know some people…I mean, there seems to be some division. People had their minds blown by it, people thought it was a trick, people thought it was a dream, people thought it was a gimmick. For the most part, people seemed to really respond to it in a very favorable way. But the truth is, the motivation for it…it wasn’t a gimmick at all; it was really just a practical way to tell that story.

BE: And James, what do you think drives Baltar more: power, fame, or the love of a good Cylon?

James Callis (“Dr. Gaius Baltar”): (Laughs) Um…

Mary: (Laughs)

James: It’s, uh…I don’t think he’s particularly interested in power. I think that’s why he’s not so good at presidential stuff. So I would say it’s probably the love of a good Cylon.

Mary: (Laughs)

BE: Do you think he’ll seek redemption for his past actions?

James: He’s constantly seeking redemption, every day. And in some way, the axis of his redemption is built…there’s a fulcrum, and on the other side is everybody else, and he kind of has to, uh, meet everybody else to get his redemption, if you know what I mean.

Mary: Can I say something?

BE: Sure!

Mary: It’s one of the things that I love about the character of Baltar…as a viewer. I’m not speaking as Roslin right now…but even as Roslin, there’s something going on in him that she can’t put her finger on, and I think that what James said has something to do with that. There’s something in him that you understand is seeking something good. Otherwise, there’s no reason why, knowing my character, she wouldn’t have tossed him out an airlock by now if she could!

Actors, Actresses, Battlestar Galactica, External TV, Interviews, TV, TV Dramas

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