That, of course has pretty much nothing to do with two of the new version’s real-life father and son producers, Irwin and David Winkler. For the remake of the 1971 actioner, the pair have teamed up with another parent-and-offspring team, Irwin Winkler’s long-time producing partner, Bill Chartoff and his son, Robert. (For the record, there are a total of ten producers and five executive producers credited on the film.) Both individually and with Bill Chartoff, the elder Winkler has been involved with a remarkable number of good movies and a few genuine classics, starting with Sydney Pollack’s pitch-black Oscar winner, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and also including two of Martin Scorsese‘s signature works, “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” Winkler and Chartoff also, of course, produced “The Mechanic,” the first time around when it was as much of a chilling look at sociopathy as it was an action flick.

Like any great producer, Irwin Winkler has had his share of interesting financial failures.  There was the ultra-culty early John Boorman film, “Leo the Last” and Martin Scorsese’s big budget 1977 disappointment “New York, New York.” Fortunately, there was also the occasional modest but high quality success like Bertrand Tavernier’s great 1986 love letter to jazz and jazz fandom, “‘Round Midnight.” He and Bill Chartoff were also key players in one of the most enduring franchises in film history, the one that started with a low-budget boxing drama called “Rocky.” Since 1991’s “Guilty by Suspicion,” Winkler has also occasionally directed. His most recent films include the musical Cole Porter biopic, “De-Lovely,” and the Iraq war drama “Home of the Brave,” which received a speedy burial.

For his part, son David Winkler has worked on a number of television movies as well as with his father on 2006’s “Rocky Balboa.” He also directed the 1998 drama, “Finding Graceland” starring Harvey Keitel.

I was personally anxious to talk to Winklers during a recent L.A. press junket for “The Mechanic” because of an oddball “only in L.A.” family anecdote. I was nevertheless beaten to the punch by an Italian reporter with a rather distinctive interviewing style who tended to dominate the discussion.

“Father and son,” she said, “and in the movie there is a conflict between father and son. How did you live?”

“We didn’t have any conflict,” Irwin Winkler responded.

“Any conflict, whatsoever?”

“Nobody’s made that comparison.” David Winkler couldn’t take a question like this seriously. “I do what I’m told,” he said

“Me, too,” said the elder Winkler.

Then I was able to play the parental card with a question, though on the maternal side. At some point in the 1980s, my mother was dabbling in commercial real estate and found herself escorting Winkler to some potential locations for one of the “Rocky” films. By this time, the films were an institution and Sylvester Stallone a genuine international superstar. However, then as now, my mother had minimal interest in, and less knowledge of, any movie made after 1965 or so. When she escorted the producer to a potential location, Winkler supposedly said words to the effect of “Sylvester might not like this place,” she responded, “Who’s Sylvester?”

“And what did I say?” asked Irwin Winkler.

“You laughed,” I replied “You apparently found it adorable that she just wasn’t that interested in the film business.”

Winkler nodded and clearly had nothing to add. It was time to segue quickly as David Winkler had been making jokes about telling his mother of his dad’s meeting with my mother. Did the venerable producer have any memories of that time — not of my mom, of course — but simply relating to how the film business has changed in thirty years?

“Basically, it’s still hard to make a good movie. It’s still hard to make a small movie. It’s still hard to make a big movie. It’s still hard to make a movie with a big star. Those things have always been difficult. I don’t think it’s changed very much. It’s just tough.”

Speaking of film-making being a hard slog, someone mentioned the fact that this new remake of “The Mechanic” has been in motion since the early 1990s. That’s a long time to keep working on a project.

“Yeah. Probably the second biggest item in the budget is unproduced screenplays. We had a lot of writers writing them,” Irwin Winkler said.

Were any of those discarded drafts by writers we would know?

“I think you’d know ’em all. They were all really high priced. I don’t think it’s fair to them to mention the fact that they took a lot of money and didn’t deliver anything.” After time for a laugh, the elder Winkler added, “They weren’t too bad, really. It’s enough to say that the Writer’s Guild didn’t give them any credit on the movie, but we did a lot of screenplays. We spent a lot of money. What happened was, a lot of the writers would write more interesting and bigger action sequences. It started to work for us when we went back to [Lewis John Carlino’s] original script which really dealt with the relationship between the Ben Foster character and the Jason Statham character. ”

So, what specifically worked about the screenplay they went with?

David Winkler answered first. “It was something you don’t see nowadays. You don’t see movies that are more serious in tone, that the action is not ‘Spider-Man.’ As much as I like those movies, I think people like to feel that there is something around the corner that is realistic and not necessarily big and high-tech. Here’s a man whose code of honor is to kill people in way that is a little more subtle than what the C.I.A. would do. It was very faithful to the original in terms of structure and tone. It’s got a satisfying ending, but it’s still somewhat dark.”

Our Italian friend then asked, in a rather long-winded way, which of Irwin Winkler’s many movies “lived in his heart” — i.e., was his favorite.

Winkler responded that it would have to be one of the movies he personally directed because of the greater commitment directors make to their movies, and his favorite was “De-Lovely.” “I loved the music. I loved Kevin Kline.”

Since “De-Lovely,” while not a giant hit, got a decent amount of attention, I wondered if there was something Winkler had done that he was less well known but which he wished more people knew.

“Yeah, my last movie, ‘Home of the Brave.’ It was the first film that really came out about the war in Iraq and about the soldiers coming home. I loved doing it because I did this big action sequence in the beginning. I’d never done anything like that either as a producer or a director. Then, I thought I really got into the character of these servicemen and women and the problems they had after [returning from] the war. I was very, very disappointed that we didn’t get any audience. We didn’t get reviewed…It really got almost no distribution. We had made a deal with MGM and they were supposed to spend a great deal of money on it. We opened against all these big movies over Christmas, which was probably crazy, in two theaters. We didn’t do any business and that was the end of the movie.”

Winkler continued. “I co-wrote it — it was my original idea and I got [story] credit for it from the Writer’s Guild. I worked very closely with the writer [Mark Friedman] who did a terrific job. We went off to Morocco to shoot it and then up to Spokane to shoot the American part. I was away from my family for a considerable amount of time. Whenever we showed it to servicemen, or ex-servicemen, they were very moved by it.”

Does that kind of lack of recognition really hurt, someone else asked, or after so many years in the movie business was Irwin Winkler able to just let it go?

“I’m still talking about it,” he deadpanned. “I haven’t directed another movie since,” he continued to further prodding. The poor reception of the film clearly bothers him more than a little, but he had to admit that the Iraq war has turned out to be a difficult subject to make a successful movie about. “‘Green Zone‘ was a terrific movie. Nobody went to see it. It was part of that trend nobody wanted to see the war in Iraq.”

One of us wondered about Irwin Winkler’s long association with MGM, as their star has very seriously faded in recent years.

“When I got there their star was fading! From 1966 on their star was fading!” Winkler said to some laughter. “I don’t know. I made movies for Paramount. I made them for Warner Brothers. I made them for Fox. I made them for everybody. But, you’re right, most of them were [with MGM], but it was U.A. [United Artists]. We made ‘New York, New York.’ We made ‘The Mechanic.’ We made ‘Busting’ [a just about forgotten action film starring Elliot Gould and Robert Blake]. We made ‘Raging Bull.’…Then MGM basically merged with UA, so it ends up with the MGM label, but a lot of them were U.A., which was a great place to work.”

Then came a question about the film’s production company, Millennium Films, which the questioner felt had a somewhat unusual approach to film-making these days.

David Winkler answered. “Thank God there’s somebody like Avi Lerner. CBS Films bought our movie and decided to distribute it after seeing it. Avi is one of the few remaining gamblers who will sell a movie based on its foreign sales, put his own money on the line to get the movie made, and then hope it sells. There used to be a lot of Avis ten years ago. Now it’s a difficult world to get a movie made.”

What are the Winklers up to now?

“We have a film in post-production right now called ‘Trespass,'” Irwin Winkler answered. “Joel Schumacher directed it for us with Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage.”

Looking at the press material, I got the somewhat incorrect impression that Irwin Winkler had been involved with a number of very tough “existential” films involving killers and not only the 1971 “The Mechanic.” In particular I was thinking of John Boorman’s somewhat arty, ultra tough first film adaptation of Donald Westlake’s The Hunter, “Point Blank” starring Lee Marvin.

David Winkler joked that maybe it was because he and partner Bill Chartoff were “closet hit-men.”

The elder Winkler responded, “Maybe I’m a closeted existentialist. Those are the two. We made more personal dramas. I kind of like ‘The Gambler’ a lot better.”

I couldn’t exactly disagree as the 1974 film written by James Toback, directed by Karel Reisz and starring James Caan as a gambling-addicted literature professor was a terrific piece of work that I suddenly had the desire to revisit the moment Winkler brought it up. I also mentioned another classic, Sydney Pollack’s film version of Horace McCoy’s bleak depiction of dance marathons during the Great Depression, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” It was the 1970s and that’s probably the best explanation of the tone of these films which, today, no major studio film producer would dare touch.

After that, what seemed like idle questions about what the two Winklers thought of “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech” (they both thought both were very good), led to an observation from Irwin Winkler.

“In all the press we’ve been doing, we’ve been talking about how difficult it is to make films today and all that. Then, when you look at the films that we think are going to be nominated for an Academy Award…they’re all kind of small, intimate, interesting films. The biggest one is “True Grit” which is budgeted at under $40 million. You don’t have “Lawrence of Arabia” — unfortunately, I’d like to see “Lawrence of Arabia” — but you have these small dramas like “Black Swan” or “The Social Network,” [and] “The Fighter.” All these films seem to be not only getting attention, but also getting business,” Winkler said, alluding to “The Hurt Locker,” which, despite being a Best Picture winner, was far from a box office dynamo. (The exception to the trend of smaller movies being major league Oscar contenders this year is obviously “Inception.”)

Was Winkler surprised by the unexpectedly large success of “True Grit”?

“I’m stunned by it. I’m not only stunned by it, we pulled out a screenplay we had from 1993 that was sensational that we literally haven’t done anything with in 18 years. We just put it in a drawer because we knew we couldn’t get anybody to finance a western in the last 15 years…We took it out of the drawer this week because we said, ‘Okay, now maybe you can get a western off the ground.”

Of course, the matter of which films succeed and fail at the box office has always been a mystery.

“I’ll tell you how the mystery is,” Irwin Winkler said. “We were in the mixing room doing the final edit on ‘New York, New York.’ My editor was Marcia Lucas, who at the time was George Lucas’s wife. ‘My husband can’t finish this film that he’s doing.’ She called it a ‘cockamamie film.’ He can’t finish because he’s running out of time at Warner Brothers in the mixing studio. So, [she asked if] he could come when we finish mixing ‘New York, New York’ at like 7:00 at night. Could George bring in his film and finish it up at night? So, I said, ‘Sure.’ I couldn’t say ‘no.’ That was ‘Star Wars.’ She called it a ‘cockamamie film.’ Nobody knew what it was gonna be. What William Goldman said is true, nobody really knows anything about moves, about Hollywood.”

“By the way, ‘New York, New York,’ we made it at almost the same time as ‘Rocky,’ United Artists, which financed both films, said ‘We’re going to make a fortune on ‘New York, New York.’ [It had] Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese directing it, a great song…First of all, nobody wanted to play the song. It took two years for Frank Sinatra to make a recording of ‘New York, New York’ for it to be a hit. ‘Rocky’ became the hit and ‘New York, New York,” nobody cared about.”

Changing topics slightly, did David Winkler want to follow in his father’s footsteps a bit and return to directing movies as well as producing them?

“I have a four year-old boy and a two year-old girl. The idea of being so engrossed in something from six in the morning until ten at night…I found something more fun than directing.”

So, is producing movies easy, compared to directing?

“I don’t know if it’s easier,” Irwin Winkler said. “It’s different.”

“It’s easier on your family,” David Winkler added.

After that, the Winklers and us journalists meandered through a few odd subjects, including praise for co-star Ben Foster and the popularity of animated family films, which they enjoy but are happy to leave to the experts at Pixar and elsewhere. Then, we returned to the topic of supposedly moribund genres like musicals and westerns. Someone’s gag about remaking “New York, New York,” a problematic musical drama which has failed to accumulate even much of a cult following over the years despite being directed by Martin Scorsese, led to a nice summation of the situation by Winkler as he commented on the success of “True Grit.”

“It also tells us you never know what genre is gonna work. The only genre that works is the ‘good’ genre. In other words, you make a good movie and people are going to see it…When we made ‘Rocky,’ everybody said ‘nobody wants to see boxing movies.’ ‘Women won’t go to see a boxing movie.’ ‘She’s not the prettiest in the world; he’s not the handsomest in the world — it’s not Robert Redford up there.’ Yet, people went to see it. I think the best advice we could have for ourselves is ‘make something good and, hopefully, they’ll come.'”

I personally don’t think “Back to the Future” is remotely a “classic,” but it is 2/3 of a great screwball comedy. (I didn’t care for the science fiction portions of the film.) However, it really looks here like it wouldn’t have worked at all with Eric Stoltz. Obviously, we’re not seeing nearly enough, but these very brief clips were obviously selected because something is just clearly off and perhaps not only Stoltz’s unfortunate hairstyle — which might not have been his selection.

The irony is here that, as much as I like and admire Michael J. Fox as an accomplished comic actor and a public figure, in terms of sheer thespian ability, I’d say Stoltz is very likely the better actor — though being an actor and being a star are not the same gig. He’s certainly shown plenty in the way of versatility over the years and you can’t say he can’t be funny, especially given his brilliant turn as the world’s most relatable heroin pusher in “Pulp Fiction.” On the other hand, Fox clearly has something that Stoltz lacks in terms of being Marty McFly. It’s not just maybe knowing his way around a straight-up gag a bit better than Stoltz might have at the time, it’s an “everyman” quality, I guess. As the deformed Rocky in Peter Bogdanovich’s “Mask,” that very same year, Stoltz had that everyman quality, but I guess with his own face, it just evaporates and that slightly sarcastic demeanor of his can’t be entirely hidden without facial prosthetics.

Anyhow, just another reminder that “best actor” and the “right actor” are not the same thing.

h/t Michael Speier.

And, what is it with tough Bostonians in the movies lately? I mean, aren’t there any other cities full of tough guys with interesting accents? Next time, filmmakers, considering setting your tales of betrayal and redemption on the mean streets of, I don’t know, Tacoma or Milwaukee. Meanwhile, excuse while I paak the cah in Bastan yahd.

If we are to believe the prognosticators this weekend, testosterone will rule in a weekend which could turn out to be the most exciting movie three-way showdown since the climax of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” The impression is that it really does threaten to send the genders, and possibly even the generations, on their separate ways at the nation’s multiplexes.

Of course, when I speak movies of aimed at us penile-Americans, I speak of the R-rated mega-macho ultraviolent action fest, “The Expendables.” The ensemble-action flick is directed, cowritten and co-starring Sylvester Stallone and features Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, and assorted other manly men who are masculine males in supporting roles and cameos.

Cinema prognosticators Ben Fritz and good old jolly Carl DiOrio seem to think this movie will easily take the top spot for Lionsgate to the tune of about $30-35 million with its appeal to males of all ages. Critics, for the most part, aren’t overly impressed, though a sizeable enough minority are treating the film as a campy, action-packed good time. For me, Stallone’s career peaked 35 years ago with his hilarious performance in “Death Race 2000” — “Rocky” has never done much for me and “Rambo: First Blood 2” did even less — but I still might be checking this one out at some point. I do have an affection for the ensemble action film genre. If you do as well, you might want to check out the salute to the sturdy sub-genre posted over at the Bullz-Eye blog.

For the more femininely chromosomed, this week’s big draw is supposed to be “Eat Pray Love” from director Ryan Murphy, best known as the creator of TV’s “Glee” and “Nip/Tuck,” and starring an actress you may remember named Julia Roberts. It’s an adaptation of a memoir about a divorced woman going on a worldwide physical and spiritual “journey of self-realization.”  I don’t know about you but when I hear “self-realization” and especially “journey of self-realization” I check out completely. I don’t think that’ s just because I’m male.

While I haven’t seen a single episode of Murphy’s shows, I gather he is associated with a certain degree of offbeat innovation and has clearly touched a nerve on two on the small screen. That doesn’t seem to have translated into much interest from film critics, however, who are mostly kind of unimpressed. Rated PG-13, “Eat Pray Love” does seem to be doing a bit better critically than his poorly received prior adaptation of a hit memoir, “Running with Scissors.” Jolly Carl expects to film to hit the #2 spot with an amount somewhere over $20 million.

And then comes what I hope may be this weekend’s wild card. The consensus seems to be that, despite a torrent of Internet publicity and huge geek buzz, Edgar Wright’s comic book adaptation, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” will be lucky to get much over $15 million which, for a movie costing about $65 million, isn’t great. Though reviews initially looked as they might be “middling,” they are actually shaping up as rather excellent for a film that risks alienating a certain percentage of its audience with its blatantly video-game derived comic book/manga aesthetic. The consensus being that, as with the highly entertaining “Kick-Ass” before it, geek awareness and mass audience acceptance just are not the same thing and it’s entirely likely this will come in the #4 spot behind last week’s #1 film, “The Other Guys.”

I’m sure there’s a good chance this will happen. However,  “Scott Pilgrim” seems to me to be a film that, at least over the long haul, has a potentially much wider audience than some other films because of it’s unusual combination of relationship-driven and action-comedy. The fact that, as a young skewing film, it’s PG-13 but also relatively racy in its advertisements might not hurt either. Not to be put in the position of defending a film I haven’t seen and pre-release online mini-backlash notwithstanding,  there is one thing I feel sure about. In a few years, the new movie from this weekend that people will still be talking about is “Pilgrim.”

Actually, that’s perhaps not entirely true because there’s also a very interesting new film debuting in very limited release, and this one I did see a couple of months at the L.A. Film Festival. “Animal Kingdom” is an imperfect but highly assured debut from Australian first-time writer-director David Michôd. Though a bit overly dour and slack in the middle, to the point where it very nearly lost me, it’s one of the best crime films I’ve seen in a while with a real doozy of a last act. It’s opening on just small four screens but with a couple of brilliant bad-guy-and-gal performances, this is one I think you’ll be hearing about later on.

I’m no Hollywood insider. Nikki Finke does not rely on me for her tips and I don’t ever expect to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar after party. Nevertheless, there’s one thing I do know about show business: personality goes a very long way in “this town.” And so a few of us press people recently found ourselves the subject of a 50 megaton charm offensive by the four stars of the new Fox sitcom, “Brothers” — C.C.H. Pounder, Carl Weathers, and Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, and one extremely enthusiastic newbie, former New York Giants Defensive End and Fox Sports commentator Michael Strahan. I haven’t seen the show itself yet, which premieres tonight at 8 p.m./7 central, but the visit was certainly a performance I won’t be forgetting.

From long-time writer-producer Don Reo, whose credits run from “M*A*S*H” to “Blossom” and “Everybody Hates Chris,” “Brothers” stars Strahan as a former NFL star who winds up moving in to the house he bought for his parents when a financial reversal puts him in the metaphorical poorhouse. Since this is a sitcom, naturally there will be conflict with his brother, played by Mitchell, and the usual issues with parents Weathers and Pounder. One ace the show will be playing will be guest appearances by some fairly big names playing themselves, including former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, hip-hop star T-Pain, celubutante Kim Kardashian, and the great Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band. Also appearing will be well actress Tichina Arnold from “Chris” and, not playing himself, rap superstar Snoop Dog. Stand-up comic Lenny Clarke will be playing a neighbor on the show.

The show has been getting some additional attention for a perhaps less fortunate reason, in that while African-American actors are featured in more diverse roles these days, it’s the only current show on the networks schedules with a predominantly black cast. That’s largely a reversal of the trend of the past when the vast bulk of decent TV parts for nonwhite actors were on shows like “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times” as well as some of the later, more controversial shows aimed at black audiences like “Martin.”

The first to meet the press were Carl Weathers, perhaps still most famed as Rocky Balboa’s venerable opponent, Apollo Creed, and C.C.H. Pounder, who is taking a break from her usual intense, gravitas-laden, roles on shows like “The Shield” and seems to be enjoying every minute of it. In fact, I’m here to tell you that extremely skilled Ms. Pounder is downright bubbly in person. You heard me, “bubbly” — but in a very smart sort of way.

The mood was light right off the bat with more than one of us entertainment journos confessing a complete lack of knowledge of sports and Ms. Pounder joining in. Weathers was the exception. “Well, I played for the Oakland Raiders so I hope I know a little bit about football.” And that somehow prompted an impersonation of Butterfly McQueen from “Gone with the Wind” from Pounder. I guess you had to be there.

Anyhow, movie geek that I am, I was quick to ask the actress about her massively impressive resume, which goes back to the late seventies and includes her screen debut working with Roy Scheider in Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” and a role in “Prizzi’s Honor” working for the legendary John Huston. I asked how the business had changed over the years.

Apparently one big difference is that race is simply less of a barrier these days, finally. She explained the beyond-rude treatment — miming putting her feet on the table — that she would often get during meetings with agents and producers early in her career, and how she had to do research to prove that black female professionals existed in order to get jobs. “They were doing quotas…and so everybody felt that they were trying because they saw other races. I haven’t seen that at all in many, many moons. I really remember fighting to get a judge role on ‘L.A. Law.'”

Of course, there was also the aforementioned issue of “Brothers” being the only “black” show on network television at the moment. Was there any additional pressure because of that?

“I don’t have the pressure. Maybe it’s because I am old as dirt and I won’t take any pressure,” Pounder said with more than twinkle in her eye. “I don’t feel that pressure anymore of representing the race….Now I am 30 years into it I want to be an actor again and act.”

Carl Weathers, who began his career playing often ultra-macho, but somewhat nuanced roles — not only in the “Rocky” films but also in “Force 10 from Navarone” and his later starring vehicle, “Action Jackson” — was very much on the same page. “For me, it ain’t no pressure. It’s a funny show about people who happen to deal with their lives through humor and hopefully Americans will embrace that and give us enough episodes. I think for the most part everybody on the show is having a lot of fun, and it’s fun to be here to be here to play with them in this sandbox….”

Then came the day’s other inevitable topic — working with a famous first-time actor. We were assured that Michael Strahan — the personable, gap-toothed NFL record holder for sacks, dubbed “the Sack-0-Lantern” by Jimmy Kimmel — was definitely doing his homework as well as having that little something extra.

“Michael is a huge personality, [a] very funny and charismatic guy,” said Carl Weathers.  But that wasn’t all. “You don’t become what he has become and not get how to do the job. He walked on the set with the same kind of attitude that he had all those years in professional football and he is an amazing quick study.”

“He’s going into something that he has a natural knack for,” chimed in Pounder. “He’s got himself his version of a playbook which is really brilliant. That’s the attitude that he has that will make him a very successful man in all the other fields.” After a little humorous back and forth with Weathers, she added with multiple layers of irony, “Some people get to go to drama school for 29 years and other people learn in 20 minutes.”

Michael Strahan himself appeared shortly thereafter and was as “on” as anyone I’ve seen in a while, joking nonstop and, eventually, commenting on the subtle differences between acting in a four-camera sitcom shot before a live audience and playing pro football. “The whole process was different and foreign to me because I am used to when you make a play everyone goes ‘aaaah!!!,’ and when you don’t make a play everyone goes ‘Boo!!!!'”

When did he decide he wanted to be an actor? “I never decided that I want to be a football player, but next thing I know I look back and 15 years later it’s over. The commentating thing just kind of happened, I never made a plan that I wanted to be football player or a commentator or an actor. It just kind of happened. I just roll with the punches of what happens at the time and so far things have worked out.”

Not long after came the arrival of co-star Daryl “Chill” Mitchell — who people actually call “Chill” — and the two seemingly couldn’t stop teasing each other and generally showing off their brotherly rapport. Still, I was ultimately able to get in a question with a bit of effort. I mentioned how fellow PH-stable mate Mike Farley was a huge fan of the Giants and of Strahan personally, to the point where he and his wife, Jen, have — they assure us jokingly — talked of naming their next son “Michael Strahan Farley.” With the movie “Big Fan” very much on my mind, I asked if he had had any issues with weirdness or excessive emotion from fans.

“Of course I do. I’ve had a guy whose arm I signed and he went straight to the tattoo shop and got the autograph tattooed on his arm. That kind of freaked me out. I saw him like a week later and he was like ‘do you remember me?’ I met him at IHOP.”

“I am a normal dude,” Strahan said. “I don’t travel with 20 people. I don’t go in places where I feel like I need to have extra people for security and protection. I am more like that normal everyday, enjoy-my-life kinda guy. I’ve been very fortunate and that has helped me when I am not working. Who doesn’t hear about actors who have to have a certain color M&M’s in their trailers? But, from Day One, it’s been easy,” he said. And going into gag-mode, “I crack on [Chill] and Carl but I don’t crack on C.C. I don’t mess around with C.C too much. I am scared of C.C….Nobody here is easily offended and if we were then we are on the wrong show. [Chill] says the foulest jokes about my teeth, but I just suck it up.”

After some very funny, but hard to transcribe, back and forth banter between Strahan and Mitchell regarding the matter of teeth and, not at all offensively, Mitchell’s use of a wheelchair, the eighties rapper turned actor called a truce in the insult battle long enough to praise his new colleague. “I always tell everybody…if you forget your lines, ask Mike and that’s scary for someone to have a memory like that. He doesn’t act and that’s where actors mess up, because they act.”

He also found time to give props to the most experienced actors on the set. “People like Carl and C.C.H. hold seminars that you would pay to get in — that’s how I learned.” Mentioning his background on “Veronica’s Closet,” “The John Larroquette Show,” the wondrous “Galaxy Quest,” and other shows. “I learned from working with the greatest comedians of all times.”

Yes, it was a love fest, but mostly in a good way. We press were sent home in a very good mood. That was probably the idea.