Word: alda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...UNCOMMON FOR FILMMAKers to have problems with their stars, but writer-director David O. Russell had an unusual conflict while shooting his second feature film last year: Should he or should he not tell Alan Alda he had been a waiter at Alda's daughter's wedding just a few years earlier? "Every time I was about to, I thought, 'Don't tell him. He's not going to take your direction the same way if he knows that...
...made since his first film, Spanking the Monkey, two years ago. An alternately droll and disturbing work about mother-son incest, it became a cult hit. His new film, Flirting with Disaster, establishes Russell as a unique comic voice. The movie boasts a name cast that includes Alda, Lily Tomlin and Mary Tyler Moore, as well as such Gen-X faves as Patricia Arquette and Ben Stiller. Oh, and dyed-in-the-wool George Segal fans will have a reason to go to the movies again...
...faded Southern belle (with, naturally, a glass menagerie) who conceived Mel on a warehouse floor? Could Dad possibly be this truck-driving former Hell's Angel? Mel should be so lucky. For he turns out to be the get of the Schlictings (Alan Alda--as deliriously offcast as Moore--and Lily Tomlin), '60s dropouts who remain dangerously loyal to certain bad habits of their generation...
...audience--too hard, perhaps, for he once told an interviewer, while musing on the human condition, "Life beats us up so much. We worry if our breasts are too small, or too big..." Ickily presumptuous? Aggressively empathetic? What could be more redolent of Phil Donahue, who along with Alan Alda was one of the twin pillars of '70s-style sensitive guydom...
...years later, the researcher was crucified by reporting in the Chicago Tribune, and Michigan Congressman John Dingell demanded a government investigation. Perhaps the low point for Gallo came this year when Alan Alda portrayed the scientist as a self-promoting snake in And the Band Played On, an HBO movie about the AIDS epidemic...