I like Simon Cowell. As the only consistent truth-teller on “American Idol,” millions of us got used to his reflecting a lot of what we felt about various contestants. And he didn’t mince words when delivering his opinions. Unfortunately, the…
Sidney Aaron “Paddy” Chayefsky was riding high. Considered by many to be the dean of American TV writers for the classic stories he wrote for the small screen during the 1950s — most particularly “Marty” — Chayefsky was now writing…
The witness in question is Marilyn Wayne. I first came across her name when I read the article “Natalie Wood’s Fatal Voyage,” which is in the current special edition of Vanity Fair (VF) that’s subtitled “Hollywood Scandal, Sex and Obsession.” The…
As the news broke Thursday that "Two and a Half Men" star Ashton Kutcher’s marriage to Demi Moore was in fact over, CBS Corp. President and CEO Les Moonves was engaged in a conversation before an audience of hundreds of…
There’s an exemplary scene in the movie version of “All the President’s Men” that goes basically like this: Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein have been working their asses off on one of their stories about the Watergate scandal. They…
Last week, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the dazzling musical “West Side Story” was shown in selected movie theaters around the country for one night only. I’m going to assume that, like me, most of you missed this screening. If…
July 30th, 1990. The fashionable West Village in Manhattan. It had hit 84 degrees in New York that day, but Larry Schatz remembers that Monday night as clear as a starkly cold, crystal clear darkness in the deadest of winter….
One of my favorite channels on TV, hands down, is TCM—Turner Classic Movies. I’ve been in love with the movies since I was a little boy, and so, for me, watching TCM is like giving a kid a chance to…
It’s the "CBS Evening News," and it’s eerily familiar. The lead story is about Mitt Romney and his run for the Republican nomination for President of the United States The newscaster then intones, “Also tonight, a wallet full of worries….
Where are your customers today? With more than 800 million users, Facebook is a good place to find a chunk of them. In fact, says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an associate professor of business administration at the Havard Business School, if…