I never thought Chris [Farley] would die, because first of all, I don’t think anybody will ever die. It just seems like if you’re alive you’ll stay alive.
Norm Macdonald, Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
It’s a uniquely difficult task to write a review of a book that’s an oral history told by many disparate voices about a TV show that, when this book was published, was 26 years old. Also, it’s a monster of a book, coming in at nearly 600 pages (!). But it’s such a pleasure to read what luminaries of the comedy world remember about their time on a show that, as Dan Aykroyd put it, was like “the Master’s Program in comedy.” Every single person interviewed for this book, without exception, REVERES the show. And they look back with so much love and gratitude for having had the opportunity to be a part of it, while also recalling hurt feelings, power struggles, experiences of misogyny and racism, 18-hour days (some cocaine-fueled, others not), but still, a time they all remember as the greatest days of their lives.
But it’s also hard because this book contains interview snippets with, like, 150 different people involved in the show who shared their memories. That’s a lot of different, contradictory, FUNNY viewpoints.
When SNL premiered on October 11, 1975, I was 16. I saw that first show live. There wasn’t much else to do at that age, television had always been my friend/teacher, and there were only three channels available back then (and sometimes, if you were lucky, a PBS station). I had no idea WHAT this weird new show was about, but I will never forget seeing the very first cold open: John Belushi and Michael O’Donoghue (head writer) do a sketch titled simply, “Wolverines.” If you haven’t seen it, you should, because none of us, nobody, had ever seen anything like it on TV or anywhere else:
Delightful, strange, and HILARIOUS. The show has changed in many ways since those days, but the premise and the format have basically stayed the same, and well past the publication of this book, up to and including last Saturday’s 47th season opener. This show has been on the air, performed the same way as the first show, for FORTY-SEVEN YEARS straight. Just think about that. How is it possible? This particular oral history strongly suggests that the main reason for its longevity is one man: Lorne Michaels.
Lorne is the rock of SNL. He liked to hire unknowns—potential comedic geniuses who were crushing it in the comedy clubs of Chicago, L.A., and New York, then throw them together in a high-pressure environment and see what resulted. The performers, writers, and writer-performers (almost all performers had to write for themselves and castmates, too) are LEGENDARY. I’m going to give you a PARTIAL list of the comedians who passed through SNL in some capacity at some point in their careers:
John Belushi
Gilda Radner
Dan Aykroyd
Garrett Morris
Chevy Chase
Jane Curtin
Bill Murray
Al Franken
Eddie Murphy
Joe Piscopo
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Billy Crystal
Martin Short
Christopher Guest
Robert Downey, Jr. (True! For one forgettable season in 1980.)
Anthony Michael Hall
Damon Wayans
Jon Lovitz
Dana Carvey
Dennis Miller
Kevin Nealon
Conan O’Brien
Larry David
Bob Odenkirk
Phil Hartman
Chris Farley
Mike Myers
Adam Sandler
David Spade
Chris Rock
Rob Schneider
Norm Macdonald
Will Ferrell
Jimmy Fallon
Colin Quinn
Tina Fey
Tracy Morgan
Molly Shannon
Maya Rudolph
Chris Kattan
Rachel Dratch
Every person on this list still living at the time gave extensive interviews for this book. There are segments from guest hosts like Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, John Goodman, Lily Tomlin, and Robin Williams. Executives behind the curtain, producers, casting agents, and actual titans of the entertainment industry also contributed excellent background on the “suits” and the power they had (or didn’t!) over the show’s content, personnel, and format.
I mean, that is a mindblowing list, and again, this is only up to roughly 2001! None of these people are still there now, but their influence is everywhere. I feel it every time I watch. I’m a comedy person. I LOVE to laugh. I’m definitely the target audience, so I bought this book when it was first published in hardback, and have hung onto it through several major book downsizes I’ve done over the years. I remember my first read as just an immensely enjoyable experience—an epic dive into all this fascinating background minutiae. And just exactly how do they write and perform these 90 minutes, every Saturday night from 30 Rock, at 11:30pm, live without a net, year after year? The answer to that is in these pages, and it’s a process of extraordinarily hard work done by all these talented people, week after week.
Nobody remembers the name Charles Rocket, but he was a main cast member in the 1980-81 season. He said “fuck” on air, the censors didn’t catch it in time, and the then-executive producer, Jean Doumanian, was fired as a result. She took over from Lorne after the first five, magical, original-cast years. She lasted 10 whole months, and was replaced by the network suit who’d gotten SNL on the air, together with Lorne, in the beginning. His name was Dick Ebersol, and he lasted four years. The show was in a grave decline in the early eighties. Everyone left when Lorne did—all the brilliant, iconoclastic, talented writers who were tuned into the specific tone SNL had maintained for its first five years were gone. Lorne returned in 1985, did the work, and turned the course of the show around. In later years, they kind of had a revolving door policy: you might have quit, you might have been fired, but if you bided your time and did good work somewhere else, you could always ask to come back (even if only for one show).
This is a recurring cycle in this show’s history—there’s an upward trend of “oh, everybody watches this show and it’s funny and relevant and irreverent simultaneously” followed by years when the quality declined so much the media started referring to the show as “Saturday Night Dead.” Then the evolution begins anew as changes are made/happen. Cast members and writers come and go (in many cases, fired outright), and so the phoenix rises. Again.
The huge tragedies the show has survived are detailed extensively, and the quotes and interview segments used are very emotional. The death of John Belushi from an overdose at age 33, in 1982, devastated everyone who knew him. His death left an enduring legacy on the 17th floor at 30 Rock, the show’s home since day one—no more drug use at work. At least not openly. And if that seems really weird from a 2021 perspective, I’m telling you—the seventies were different. People quoted in this book who were there for those first five seasons tell of a pervasive smell of weed emanating from the offices. Coke was ubiquitous. Nobody knew Belushi used heroin, and generally, people simply didn’t know such a new and “innocuous” drug like cocaine could, in fact, kill you. And after John died, drugs vanished from the offices, studios, and sets. Gilda Radner’s death of ovarian cancer in 1989 was a similar shock. But it was the accidental overdose of Chris Farley in 1997, from the same drug combination that killed his idol, Belushi, and at the same age of 33, that was maybe more personally devastating to the cast. Farley, Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Chris Rock were an extremely close-knit group who had all come onto the show together and subsequently had become lifelong friends, and they’d also done some of their best work of their careers together. Chris died mid-season, and the heartbreak wouldn’t end there, because five months later, in May of 1998, the world learned that former cast member Phil Hartman, considered the “glue” of the show during his years in the cast, had been shot and killed by his wife, who then shot and killed herself.
The book doesn’t linger on the worst times, however, and there are plenty of wonderful stories and funny anecdotes. The majority of people who worked on the show describe it as exhilarating. It’s a purely joyful thing when a group of highly motivated people produce a finished product that is also a quality product. The barometer of quality with this group is simple: to KILL. To leave the audience laughing. In the earliest days, the prevailing attitude was, “WE think this is funny, and if you don’t, you’re WRONG!” I got the impression that while they loved to make themselves laugh, they were acutely aware that their humor needed to translate to an audience. Everyone ever involved has been so, so good at that, and Lorne, with his incomparable instinct, has always had the final cut.
Notable Quotes:
On Belushi:
Lorne Michaels: “In the beginning, there were two things John didn’t do: he wouldn’t do drag, because it didn’t fit his description of what he should be doing. And he didn’t do pieces that Anne [Beatty, a writer) or Rosie [Shuster, Lorne’s wife and writer] wrote. So somebody would have to say a guy had written it. Yet he was very attached to Gilda and Laraine [Newman, original cast member.]”
On the show’s youthful appeal:
Steve Martin: “When you’re young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and then as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don’t make fun of them anymore. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people—that kind of iconoclasm.”
On writing with drugs:
Tim Kazurinsky (writer, cast): “Having grown up in the sixties, I was kind of done with my drugs by the seventies. And so here it was the eighties, and I particularly hated cocaine. And whenever a new shipment arrived on the floor, I would come in and see everybody grinding their teeth. I came in one day, and pretty much the whole floor was just craving it heavily, and I went, ‘Oh, this is not good. I’m going to write at home.’ Because everybody was running into my office with giant pupils and grinding teeth saying, ‘I’ve got an idea!’ And you know, I’ve always found that cocaine causes constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth. In the time it would take to sit and listen to people’s ideas while they were coked up to the tits, I could get more work done at home.”
On the long hours in enclosed spaces:
Lorne Michaels: “I used to say that you only get so many hours that you can be with someone for a lifetime, and you can kind of use it all up in a very intense four or five years, or you can spread it over a lifetime. Friendship really needs distance and space. Not that we’re overcrowding like rats. But the schedule is built so that after three shows in a row, when people are really getting on each other’s nerves, there’s a hiatus and you get some distance from it, and you appreciate what a good place it is to work.”
On Lorne:
Tracy Morgan: “It’s like Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whenever Luke was in trouble, Obi-Wan would come out of nowhere. That’s who Lorne Michaels is; he’s Obi-Wan. That’s what I call him. Everybody has their little nicknames for him. Chris Farley used to call him the Chief. Some people just call him boss. And some people call him Daddy. I call him Obi-Wan.”
2021 gave me new perspectives on events discussed in these pages, and it was both more fun and more time-consuming. This time, I could find and watch important moments as they occurred, via YouTube. Wikipedia helped me with individuals’ background details that weren’t familiar to me. I had many laughs and a lot of fun doing extra research. Just before I started reading, Norm Macdonald died of leukemia he’d been fighting for nine years. Nobody knew. Even Conan, arguably the closest to Norm, didn’t know he was sick. Norm got to do the popular “Weekend Update” segment after Kevin Nealon left, and he was able to snag a writer “held in awe” at the show, Jim Downey, to co-write and produce his weekly segment.
Jim and Norm decided to do “Update” with Norm giving a deadpan delivery of fake “news” one-liners as savage as they were funny. Sometimes, the audiences didn’t seem to get it. Other times, the jokes would kill. Hilariously, they started writing O.J. Simpson fake news pieces, containing jokes whose punchline invariably outright called him a murderer. O.J. had been acquitted, but that didn’t make any difference to them. Unfortunately, Don Ohlmeyer, at that time head of NBC west coast programming, was a longtime friend of O.J.’s, and he didn’t think any of it was funny. He waged an all-out assault against Jim and Norm, which eventually resulted in Norm being fired from the show. To paraphrase Norm, Ohlmeyer thought every single joke in “Update” should elicit a strong response, like laughter, cheers, and applause. Jim and Norm didn’t care if a joke didn’t get a laugh. They only cared that the jokes were good, even if most of them flew over the audience’s heads.
Re-reading this book was an immersive and highly enjoyable experience for me. I would recommend it to comedy fans, SNL fans, and fans of the talented comedians who have been a part of this extraordinary TV show. I do wish there was another book, done in the same oral-history style, covering the last 20 years. Still, I loved the experience, and it was good to spend some time with people whose work I love and admire.
Danny was adorable. He was lovely. He’s just your classic codependent and caretaker. Once I almost choked on a brussels sprout and he did the Heimlich maneuver on me. He wound up saving my life. When he asked me to marry him, I thought, ‘Wow, I probably better.’
Yeah, Danny proposed to Carrie. Then she ran away and bought him some clothes. That’s how she handled that.
Carrie Fisher and Penny Marshall, on Dan Aykroyd and Carrie Fisher, 😊 Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
Nicholson, Redford, Eastwood, Move over! Bud Cort has supped his noose and he's hell-bent for glory! - by Tom Shales for Oui Magazine, April 1977.
"I can't stop the bleeding," says Bud Cort, first thing. He peers over his glasses and over the shoulder-high walls of a small kitchen stuck in a corner of his log-cabinesque Hollywood house.
"I was using a butcher knife and I sliced my thumb. See?" He holds out a peaked left hand partially wrapped in a slightly bloody paper towel. What to do? Call a doctor? Call a psychiatrist? Kiss his thumb? There's something about Bud Cort that makes you want either to help him or humiliate him.
Oddly enough, he thinks he's a normal person. "Am I a normal person? Frightfully so," he says. If he projected an image of normalcy, however, then Cort couldn't be what he is: an Andy Hardy for the screwed-up Seventies.
What the moviegoing public believes is that, beneath Cort's baby face, there beats the brain of a true pervert-anarchist, a heretic, a child child-molester, an all-American boy in the manner of Norman Bates. Certainly no one had any trouble accepting Cort as a necrophile with the hots for an 80-year-old-battle-axe in the classic cult movie Harold and Maude. Even co-star Ruth Gordon says that the first time she met Cort she knew: "He was Harold."
That was 1971, and Harold and Maude was Cort's second major movie role. His first was Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud, in which, to the tune of Last of the Unnatural Acts, Cort played a boy bird-nut who lived in the Houston Astrodome. The critics went wild - with ambivalence. The public went mad - with ambivalence. Harold went on to become one of the cultiest films of all time, but poor Cort didn't realize until much later. After being "crushed...stabbed in the heart" by the initial lukewarm reception, he ran away. And when he did, a great adventure was launched:
Cort drops out. Cort falls in with the wrong crowd. Cort goes to the mountaintop. Cort goes to Paris. Cort hangs from a paper moon and is pelted with chickens. Cort snorts bad cocaine. Cort comes home; has an accident; moves in with Groucho Marx; recovers from concussion; moves in with Sally Kellerman; moves in with lots of people; picks himself up; dusts himself off; starts all over again.
It's 1976, America celebrates her Bicentennial. Cort finally gets to make a movie in which he doesn't play a depraved tot. It is called Why Shoot The Teacher? Cort plays the teacher; he does not get shot. He decides to put the analysts, the loonies, the bad agents, the chickens behind him. Orpheus has had enough of the underworld.
In 1977, the movie is released. Cort appears on television in Joan Macklin Silver's Bernice Bobs Her Hair from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story. He gets a night-club act and an album together. He feels good. And a grateful nation opens its arms to welcome its prodigal stepson, an ethereal and anemic culture hero, one of the fine young actors of the film world: Bud Cort comes crawling home.
"Gee, it won't stop bleeding," says Cort, staring at his thumb. He continues making breakfast: cheese pie, he calls it, fried in peanut butter. He thinks you should fry things in peanut butter, because it tastes good raw and Crisco doesn't. He also says he got tired of being stereotyped as a screen weirdo. "Every part I got after Harold and Maude was a crazy person. I see myself in a whole new light now and I want others to see me that way - as a young leading man, not a young leading crazy."
It wasn't so long ago that Cort turned down the part of B-B-Billy B-B-Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, because he didn't want to play a character who was that cuckoo. He arrived to the audition dressed in black and told the director Milos Forman that he was more "emotionally equipped" to play the lead character, Randle P. McMurphy. Forman disagreed: It was Bibbit or nothing. Nothing, said Cort.
Earlier such typecasting had turned Cort into a recluse at the Chateau Marmont, a fashionable dump off Sunset Strip. Cort left the hotel's shabby gentility only to hang out with a bunch of religio-karmic freaks who ran The Source, a health-food restaurant down the street. "They kept putting me on a ninety-day diet where I could eat only seven kinds of food," he recalls. "I had long hair and a beard then, and I looked like D'Artagnan; I also had a great fur coat that they wanted to get their hands on. I used to sleep in it. I had a standing invitation to join them for the end of the world. I said 'No thanks, I'm going back into showbiz.'
"They used to meditate next to a microphone in the parking lot of the restaurant. They said to me, 'Bud, your masculine and feminine centers are not balanced.' It was a very primal moment for me. They said, 'We have a ceremony to combat this. Be here Friday at 3:30 in the morning and we'll leave for Griffith Park.' I said, 'Oh, what the hell, I'm not doing anything at 3:30 Friday morning,' so I went. We climbed and climbed and climbed to a very, very high place overlooking all of California. We all joined hands and started doing a breathing exercise they call the breath of fire. It's very intense. I fainted twice.
"And then suddenly, I felt this blinding white light shooting through me. I felt like I was really going to leave my body and go on to a higher vibration. I thought this was it. And just as I was ready to leave my bod, I hear this voice say, 'What the fuck are you people doing down there?' The blinding white light was not my lifeforce - it was the spotlight from a police helicopter."
The health freaks moved to Hawaii, where their leader jumped off a cliff and died. Cort moved to Malibu Beach, where he was traumatized by a Vietnam veteran who broke into his house and "terrorized" him for two and a half hours. The guy didn't steal anything; in fact, he left his wallet, complete with identification. "He decided I was crazier than he was," says Cort.
Cort continued his acting career. There was a lead role in a Broadway play called Wise Child. It closed very quickly. "And just as well," says Cort, "because I had to be hysterical on stage from the moment the curtain went up until it went down again. I played this street-wise kid with platinum-blond hair who blackmails Donald Pleasence into dressing up as his mother." Critics were displeased; audience dumbfounded.
Cort went to Paris, where he had an offer to sing in a night club. He'd always wanted to do that. His father, back in Rye, New York, where he was born, had been a piano player, and Cort himself has had extensive musical training. "Here's five thousand dollars worth of piano lessons," says Cort, dashing off some boogie-woogie on a piano which the Beach Boys gave him - the very piano on which Brian Wilson composed some of the group's high-tide hits. Cort's playing is cute but primitive. He didn't like the piano lessons he had when he was a kid; says he spent 55 minutes of each hour hiding from the teacher.
In Paris, Cort discovered he was a big star. In fact, the French gave him a big star - a Lucite one (the star had only been awarded to two other Americans - James Dean and Henry Fonda). Cort won it for Harold and Maude, which was a cult item in France even before it was in the U.S.
Just walking down the Paris street, Cort would often be engulfed by fans. It was a kick at first. Then it got boring. "But every acting success I dreamed of came true: I rode around in a white Rolls-Royce; I stayed in this crazy L'Hotel room where Oscar Wilde died; I went to the Rothschild estate for lunch, caddied for Guy and abandoned him on the ninth hole to play with the swans."
On Cort's opening night at the big French night club L'Alcazar, he sang Gershwin and Porter and Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup while swinging from a cutout moon 45 feet above the stage. When he took his bows, the crowd threw live chickens at him. Chickens?
"Well, that's the French," Cort reports. "That's their humor. They're very passionate, you know, and drunk all the time. They're always trying to give each other a knuckle sandwich. I broke up a lot of knife fights. There was this choreographer who was stealing ideas from our revue without the permission of the guy who put together our dances. So one night I went backstage and saw the choreographer lying in a big pool of blood with his nose of the side of his face. Well, that was the end of that show for me. I said 'I don't want my nose on my ear. Let's get out of here.'"
Cort had a wonderful time in Paris. While he was there, the great French actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault turned Harold and Maude into a stage vehicle for his wife. It was such a sensation that a public seminar was held to discuss it. Cort had tickets to Dionne Warwicke that night, but someone talked him into stopping off at the seminar before the concert.
"It was the most boring thing I've ever been to."
Near the end of the seminar, a young man stood up and compared the play with the film, saying that he liked the play better and that the boy in the film was not a sympathetic character. Cort couldn't take this sitting down. He stood up in his box seat, he recalls, and "shrieked out at the top of my lungs: 'Fuck you!' And then, just so everyone would know what I said, I did it again 'Fuck you!' And then I sat down." Director Barrault pleaded with Cort to come to the stage.
No, no.
But please.
Oh, all right.
"I was wearing a black cape, black shirt, black dress pants, and black boots. When I got to the stage, I got the greatest ovation of my life. And then they went right on with their boring dissertation! So I left. I went outside and said 'Take me to the nearest home. I'm ready to commit myself.'"
Instead, Cort said he snorted cocaine that had been given to him by a person he had taken to be a friend. But, ah zee French, zey give him zee rat poison instead. Or so he thinks now. He got very, very sick. He had to leave Paris. He would not be able to make that film with Bianca Jagger after all. "They wanted me to play a transvestite on the Bois de Boulogne. It was to be a comedy. Bianca would play a man; I'd play a woman. Eventually they made a ballet out of it."
Fate took young Cort by the hand and escorted him to Beverly Hills and the home of Groucho Marx. This was a strange turn of events, because of what happened the first time that Cort and Groucho met. Cort and a friend were going to a party at Groucho's, but when Groucho opened the door and saw Cort, he shut it immediately. "I thought you were Charles Manson," Groucho later explained.
In the meantime, Cort had been in an auto accident and had suffered a concussion; he needed quiet to recuperate. He was installed in a bedroom at Groucho's house, but Groucho kept coming into the room and telling jokes. Somehow, Cort recovered. He then stayed at Groucho's house for several months. "I call him Grouch and he calls me Bud. Sometimes, he calls me 'you.' One night when I was ten minutes late for dinner, he didn't speak to me at all."
Occasionally they go to dinner at Chasen's. If Groucho doesn't feel like talking, he puts a napkin over his head. "You can do that if you're a living legend," Cort observes.
Last fall, Cort went to Groucho's 86th birthday party. He tried to get director George Cukor to come with him, but Cukor wouldn't hear of it. Cort wants Groucho and Cukor to make up. "Groucho told me a story about his having a date with Olivia DeHavilland; he wanted to impress her, so he took her to a party at Cukor's house. Groucho got bored after a while, so he started tap-dancing on Cukor's 5000-year-old Chinese table. And was promptly thrown out.
"When I finally got to meet George Cukor, I told him Groucho's story and asked him if it were true. He said, 'Well, if you want to set the record straight, it was Miss DeHavilland who was invited to the party, not Mr. Marx, and he did not tap-dance on my Chinese table, he set the dining room on fire. That is why Mr. Marx was not invited back."
Cort's other friends are mainly on the loony fringe of show business, which is not necessarily a criticism. In fact, they are all interesting people. There're Stockard Channing and Ruth Gordon (who turned 80 last October 30th) and kinky rock poet Lewis Furey and Sally Kellerman, whom Cort met while filming M*A*S*H and who put him up for a while, and Shelley Duvall and Bette Midler. Midler once went to dinner with Cort, Ruth Gordon and her husband, Garson Kanin, and began to throw up; "We rushed her into the ladies' room and there was this woman who kept saying 'Oh, Better, we love your singing,' and 'We love your dancing,' and between heaves, Bette would say, 'Oh, how do you like my throw-up?'"
Another old friend is the daughter of a famous showbiz woman. She's also the girl who, Cort says, copped his virginity. Sort of. "It was such a mess. Do you really want to hear about it? It will turn everyone off sex. First of all, I don't think I lost my virginity, but the girl insists I did. You can't print her name or I'll get in terrible trouble.
"It was the night of the big senior prom and this girl was my date. Everything went wrong. I was a mess in high school - fat and pimply. I had hoped to have my driver's license by this time, but I didn't, so my mother had to drive us into New York City for the prom. After the prom, I rented a hansom cab in Central Park. I thought it would be romantic, but the girl kept saying stupid things to the driver like 'Why do you have the horse out at this hour?' and 'Don't pull so hard on the reins," and 'Isn't that ringworm by his tail?' I put my arm around her and she said, 'I know what you want. Let's get some pizza.'
"So now we're talking up Eighth Avenue and she had elastic pizza dripping out of her mouth. Finally we got to a hotel room and go to bed, and we start smooching, and one thing leads to another, when she suddenly shrieks, 'You came! You came!' I said, 'I did like hell,' but she kept insisting, 'You came! Isn't that sweet? Oh, I think that's so sweet! Should I get up and make breakfast or something?' I said, 'I didn't come at all,' but she insists on it to this day. Actually, I didn't come - I went, I got on a train and went home."
He hates agents, and he should know - he's had several. One ex-agent says Cort's "difficult." Cort says that's bullshit - he just knows what he wants, and one thing he wants is a good agent. He fired one after a few days because the agent didn't get sufficiently enthused over Cort's work in Why Shoot the Teacher? Cort thinks an agent should get enthused. "They're starfuckers at best, most of them." One agent left Cort when he turned down Cuckoo's Nest. The agent told Cort "You're the most self-destructive motherfucker I've ever met." Cort says that's bullshit, too.
Cort also turned down a part in the 1976 release Harry and Walter Go to New York. It was not Harry or Walter. Cort thought it would be Walter because this is his real name: Walter Edward Cox. He would be known as Wally Cox today if someone hadn't been using that name already. When Cort interviewed for Harry and Walter, he was a little put out to find that his character only had two lines. "Bud, you are not a star any longer," a staff member told him. "You're a character actor. You've got to start taking little character parts."
Cort was upset. "It's painful and humiliating to listen to these assholes. I said, 'Go fuck yourself.'"
One thing Cort does not mind is his youthful look. He appears today to be exactly the same as he was when he played that cherubic demon five years ago. He won't give his real age. It's 27. "Tatum O'Neal said to me yesterday that I looked 20, and I said, 'That's amazing!'"
Cort will be a star again. Just you wait. Besides the movie, the night-club act, and the TV play, there is also an Italian picture in the can that he made a couple of years ago. He plays the superheroic leader of a Communist youth group. "It's a political thriller. The original title was Darkness of the Brain. I said, nobody is going to come to see a movie called Darkness of the Brain. Why don't you call it something flashy? Like Flash? And they did. But then they called me from Italy and said, 'Bud, we gotta the American title for the picture: 'Teenage Hallucination.'"
Whatever happens to Cort, he, like Blanche DuBois, will always be able to depend on the kindness of strangers. People simply feel compelled to look after him. Sometimes they adopt him. "People assume I need more help than I actually do," he says. "I like to take care of myself. That's a big challenge. I've broken through on many levels. Look how calm I am. I am very calm. My astrologer says that I'm a damaged Aries - that I have everything an Aries has but more of it. Now, I've had a very wild and colorful life, and I want to settle down. I want to live as normal a life as I can.
