popular thinking

So how did Keith Richards do in his much-ballyhooed cameo as Johnny Depp's pirate daddy in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End? Read my story in today's New York Daily News and find out.

Labels: celebrities, movies

I first met Nick Swardson earlier this year at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. We were hanging out in the “Sierra Mist Lounge,” a popular free food-and-grub afterparty area in the hotel, and Swardson and I quickly got into a prolonged chat about comedy and the backlash within the stand-up community against its biggest stars of today (that’d be Dane Cook, Carlos Mencia, and Larry the Cable Guy, all provoking scorn and jealousy for different reasons). And then we got down to fun.






See. Here is a photo of him with a Sierra Mist girl at the foosball table.


















Later that night, things got sloppy at the after-after-afterparty – the grand finale bash at the Goldberg mansion up high on the opposite mountain. People hunted and fought over cars to make the trek, and at one point, a woman yelled at Swardson: “I’m not f---ing driving him anywhere!” Owen Benjamin and others tried to defend Swardson, to no avail. Eventually, though, everyone made it to the mansion. And back again. And before we parted ways, Swardson said I needed to remember to talk to him before his tour showed up in Boston (May 5, Berklee Performance Center, $27.50 via Ticketmaster).

Fast-forward to this week.

Swardson already could laugh at himself about Aspen. He said his manager, Bernie Brillstein, worriedly chewed him out about his post-show partying. “The guy who managed Chris Farley and John Belushi is telling me I’m a train wreck!” Swardson said.

It’s not going to stop him from looking for a party in Boston on Cinco de Mayo.

Any chance of you doing anything worthy of being called a train wreck?
“Ah, possibly. But I really only drink. I don’t do any drugs anymore.”

Swardson, 30, won’t have to look far to find someone to party with – his friend and sometime collaborator, Jamie Kennedy, rescheduled his own comedy show at the Paradise to the same time as Swardson’s gig. Swardson appeared in many episodes of TV’s The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, and together, they co-wrote the 2003 film, Malibu’s Most Wanted. I jokingly informed him of this booking situation.

Really, though, doesn’t this just mean there are two Nick Swardson shows on Saturday, since you’ve written most of Jamie Kennedy’s funnier stand-up bits?
(laughing and catching his breath) “No f---ing way! Oh, that’s wild. Holy s---! I don’t even think he knows I’m there. If he did, he didn’t tell me. That’s really wild. What an idiot.”

“That’s funny. When I first moved to Hollywood …they said, ‘Yeah, we want you to be our next Jamie Kennedy.’ I said, ‘F--- that, I’m going to be better than Jamie Kennedy. I told him that and now we laugh about it. He’s always been one of my best friends.”

Swardson explained that Kennedy tried stand-up first at open mikes before getting his big break as an actor in the films, first Romeo + Juliet, then memorably in the Scream franchise. By the time their careers crossed paths, Swardson had the comedy credentials as a national headliner with a half-hour Comedy Central special, but Kennedy had the name draw. So when the pair traveled to the Tempe Improv a few years ago, Swardson found himself opening for Kennedy.

“When he did that club, he was already famous. I wasn’t a normal MC. I was just doing the Improv a favor. It was one of those situations where he could’ve been threatened by me, but he was really nice and cool to me.”

No one can question who the star of this comedy tour is, with MySpace as its sponsor. Swardson said he has put “a lot of original content, like videos” on the site. A lot of the photos and videos feature the comedian without his shirt.

So if you and Matthew McConaughey ended up at the same party, who’d go topless first?
“Wow. Tough question. I would say I would be topless first. But my being topless would probably bum more people out. Whereas his would start the party. Matthew took his shirt off. Hooray!”

Your tour alternates between theaters and clubs. Was that a conscious decision? Or logistics?
“I wanted to do theaters and my agent was like, I don’t know why, but he’s married to comedy clubs. The only clubs I’m doing are Chicago and New York. Whatever. I shouldn’t say anything. I prefer doing theaters just because it’s less draining for me, to do 1,500 people in one night than to perform to 400 people in a club several times in a weekend. Especially since I still go out and party after the shows.”

You began in improv, right? How’d you make the transition to stand-up?
“This is kind of funny, too. I did theater in high school but I joined an improv group. We did a ton of improv, long-from improv. I always looked down on stand-up. Thought it was kind of corny. Remember this was the mid-90s and the end of the boom. I thought stand-up was Seinfeld and Paul Reiser, guys talking about their wives. There was nothing really hip about it. There was a small alternative scene starting up with people like Janeane Garofalo and David Cross…But in 1996, when I graduated from high school, I wanted to take a year off…My improv group folded, though, so I was stuck without a format to perform. I was in Minneapolis. So I went down to an open mike and was going to perform with a bunch of my friends, but my buddies never showed up. So I just went up and performed.”

With two Comedy Centrals under his belt and writing credits on three films (Grandma’s Boy and The Benchwarmers are the others), Swardson’s fan base knows him just as well from his stand-up as they do from his memorable characters – most of them outrageous, like gay roller-skating prostitute Terry in Reno: 911 and the figure-skating stalker in Blades of Glory. He also created a show called Gay Robot.

Most reports say Gay Robot is going to get a second chance as a cartoon. True?
“Yeah, Gay Robot is still alive. Comedy Central had always wanted it animated. So I think this time will be more successful. But I really love that pilot. I really do.”

Have you ever caught any flack from the gay community over all of your flamboyantly funny characters?
“No. It’s usually the opposite. I don’t think you can be more outlandish than Terry in Reno: 911. That would be ridiculous. I was talking to a friend to think if it was the gayest character ever on TV. There’s no gray area to the character. We just did season five and the character has a girlfriend. It’s great. There’s some really funny s--- that we did.”

Anything special about your Boston show people should know about?
“This show I’m really really excited for. I grew up a big Celtics fan. I love the Red Sox. I’ve always had a blast there. The last time I did stand-up in Boston was like, seven years ago. I opened up for Anthony Clark on New Year’s Eve. It was freezing! All I remember is being black-out drunk, eating a sausage I had bought from a cart, watching three or four guys beat each other up. I can’t wait for the same situation to play itself out. Just warmer.”

NOTE: An abridged version of this interview appears in today's edition of BostonNOW.

Labels: celebrities, comedy

Labels: celebrities

My friends at Regan Comm (including Kevin Flight, seen at far right) got a nice PR hit yesterday for their client, Dunkin Donuts -- offering free iced coffees today -- by inviting Mr. Rob Van Winkle (aka Vanilla Ice) to Boston to judge a karaoke contest at the Copley plaza. Yes, it was what you were thinking. Contestants had to adapt the lyrics of "Ice Ice Baby" to "Ice Iced Coffee." At least Van Winkle seems to have come to terms with his infamy. See how he is smiling for the cell phone? Such is his surreal life.

Labels: advertising, celebrities

If you happen to visit New York City anytime soon, let me put in a word for a stop at the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea. Or is it the Meatpacking District? The site says it's in Chelsea, two blocks north of the Meatpacking District. Anyhow. I've already gotten away from the point. Point is, if you have several hundred dollars per day to blow on lodging here, you're likely to have casual encounters with celebrities. And not just all of the stand-up comedians who stayed at the Maritime last week. In a period of less than 24 hours, I exchanged words with Michael Stipe (whom I now realize was hanging around for Monday's induction of R.E.M. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!) and saw Tate Donovan hanging around in the lobby. I believe my exchange with Stipe went something like this:

5:50 p.m. Saturday, comedian Dan Boulger and I head down the steps and out of the Maritime. Just then, Stipe is heading inside. We almost collide. "Oh...hi!" I say. "Hello," he replies. Boulger stares oddly. And that was that. Stipe wore some sort of beret and was sporting a grayish brown beard.

And now for the rest of the weekend story.

Boulger invited me to hang out for Saturday night's tapings of Live at Gotham. During the day, all of the stand-up comics get to run-through rehearsal. They'll put anything on the teleprompter, even a word-for-word transcript of a comedian's routine. Odd to think you could get on TV and simply read your stand-up routine. Who does that? It's odd just to see a comic read off their notes during a major set. But I suppose Comedy Central might also offer this service just in case a comic gets a case of the TVs and freezes up. Plus, it turns out the teleprompter also can be used as an alternative to the light, sending messages such as "one minute left!" As for audience members, they're told no food, no bathroom breaks, the better to keep disruptions to a minimum. And the production hired a special audience coordinator to hand out specific seat assignments. Apparently, seating a comedy show can be looked at as a science. Put the best-looking best laughers front and center. Put industry people in the back corner. Audience members also got instructions on what not to wear (no logos, no whites). And then, as talent manager Max Burgos pointed out before the first taping began: "The smoke machine really does it, man." Suppose it adds an old-school comedy club feel, although it'd really be old-school if they let you smoke. The tapings also have an official warm-up comedian. Dan Ahdoot more than honorably worked this non-televised job, working the crowd (and adding another several minutes of material when the second show incurred technical difficulties) and helping establish pre-show shots of crowd applause and laughter.

The first show's lineup: Gerry Dee, Pete Dominick, Lisa DeLarios, Bryan Callen, with host Jim Breuer.

The second show's lineup: Michael Kosta, Julie Goldman, Dan Boulger, Eric Andre, John Hoogasian, Brian Scolaro, with host Jeffrey Ross.

Each comic got to work out about 10 minutes of material, knowing that Comedy Central might edit out a couple of minutes for the Web and other material for ad time. I'd think they might cut Callen's bit about wanting to change his own name to something along the lines of Meeeeowww Cah! (Um, didn't he see the whole online debate about Louis CK and Dane Cook?) Guess not. Also, Breuer had to come back onstage at the end of the first show for several attempts at pronounciating the Colbert Report. The second show had much more energy. Perhaps that had to do with the lineup. Goldman had so much more going on than when I'd seen her last year at a Laughing Liberally show at Jimmy Tingle's. Boulger, going up after her, looked nervous for the first time that I'd ever seen. Then came Andre, who blew the roof off the joint, took extra time out of his act to encourage the audience to make fart noises, just to see if Comedy Central would use it! Hoogasian, up next, tried to sound like Emo Philips but mostly sounded weird. And it seemed odd at the end when Scolaro went with a bit about cavemen having to determine what was edible (since in the previous show, Ramsey had a similar bit about the first guy to bite into a pineapple!). No matter. At least not for me to worry about. That's why they're on separate shows, right? Right. Anyhow, onto the after parties, first downstairs, and then out onto nearby streets and a place called Dusk which was small but had a good vibe, especially when a bunch of comedians and like-minded people took over the bar. Good times. Couldn't you tell from the photos I posted earlier? Of course you could.

Labels: celebrities, comedy, TV

You could say that about a lot of the characters in ABC's Lost, that they're seeking redemption. But even more so for Dr. Jack, played by Matthew Fox.

On Lost, he became, reluctantly or not, the leader for the survivors of Oceanic 815. He has made tough choices trying to lead them out of tragedy and into recovery, into redemption. Sounds not all that different from his first starring turn on TV's Party of Five, where he was the eldest child of sudden orphans, struggling to lead them. Or from his first major feature film, this winter's We Are Marshall, where he played the real-life assistant football coach who struggled to help lead his team and his college back after a plane crash.

So I asked Fox if this pattern meant something more significant. I had the chance to meet him in a one-on-one interview during his winter break from filming Lost.

“I’m obviously attracted to those types of things, darker material and heavy material, but you know, my friends and the people that are close to me will always say there’s a real, goofy, light side to me, too. And when I got the opportunity to do SNL, I knew that I was going to have a ball. But it even surpassed that so much. I had the greatest week over there,” Fox told me. “It was the most fun I’d have had doing something as a performer. It was really incredible.”

But what about those darker-themed stories?

“I think that’s one of those things that you probably have the objectivity on it well enough to see parallels on those kinds of choices that I can’t,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t ever really know why I choose certain material. I wish I had a formula to figure that out. But I don’t. Sometimes I read things that I think are quite good, but I don’t connect to. And then some things just become inevitable in a way. You kind of connect to them in a way you don’t understand and then you lay awake at night, sweating it and freaking out over it and trying to find ways to not do it, to eliminate it. And then you finally kind of fall over the ledge of that inevitability and you just freefall into the truth of the fact that you have to do it. You know? No matter how scary or difficult it’s going to be, or what it’s going to put you through, you just finally hit that moment where you’re like, I really have no choice but to be involved in the telling of this story. So, yeah, I do find myself making choices that are difficult. But there’s also a lot of challenge in that. I think, yeah.”

It certainly doesn't come from some tragedy in his own life -- at least not from what he told me, saying he “couldn’t feel more blessed in my personal life,” from his wife and children to his brothers and parents. Fox did suggest, though, that growing up in a small Wyoming town probably has unconsciously shaped his acting choices.

“There’s a beautiful sadness to those kind of places, and I am very much attracted to that. I love that. That’s a huge defining part of who I am, is growing up where I grew up. There’s no question about that,” he told me. “But then, there’s that thing that I go for, and then there’s the fun I had really letting the goofball side of myself go on SNL.”

And that's when Fox decided that, if anything, his choices reflect a desire for redemption.

“Redemption is a massive part of the choices, I know that. And you can look at almost any story and they’re stories of redemption. The basic premise and the structure of storytelling has an innate, built-in element of redemption to it,” Fox said. “But I find myself really attracted to stories that are more focused on that element of a man redeeming himself. And that, that’s tied into all of our -- men, women, the human species -- need to attempt to redeem yourself through your life. To try to become the person you want to be, and oftentimes are falling short of. And so, yeah, I think that. But you look at the choices I’ve made…there’s definitely something in it there, yeah.”

Labels: celebrities, TV

Now we know what "personal reasons" Kevin Federline had for pulling out at the last-minute on a Friday night appearance at Boston's Gypsy Bar. Instead of hosting an anti-Valentine's party, Federline chose to attend an exclusive pre-Grammy party that night featuring fellow Britney ex Justin Timberlake in Los Angeles.

Click here for a recap of that party (thanks to EW).

Click here for video (thanks to Team Kevin).

Labels: celebrities, music

Some people never get to enjoy their work. I have thoroughly enjoyed every step on my crazy career path, including the past two years in Boston, where I got to meet a lot of interesting people, including Playboy's December 2005 Playmate Christine Smith (shown here clearly enjoying my company! And notice how I have pen and paper at the ready!).

Anyhow.

Over the past 12 months, in particular, my life and my work increasingly revolved around celebrities.

Among the famous people whose lives and mine intertwined: Maud Adams, Ben Affleck, Dave Attell, Greg Behrendt, Maria Bello, Mike Birbiglia, Lewis Black, Josh Blue, Alonzo Bodden, Eddie Brill, the Broken Lizard guys, Albert Brooks, Jerry Bruckheimer, Bill Burr, Nic Cage, Cedric the Entertainer, Anthony Clark, Lenny Clarke, George Clooney, Sasha Cohen, Dane Cook, Allen Coulter, David Copperfield, Cindy Crawford, Nick DiPaolo, James Ellroy, Mike Epps, Craig Ferguson, Will Ferrell, Christian Finnegan, Jim Florentine, Harrison Ford, Matthew Fox, Judah Friedlander, Jim Gaffigan, Rande Gerber, Greg Giraldo, Bobcat Goldthwait, Al Gore, Gilbert Gottfried, Paul Greengrass, Christopher Guest, Gary Gulman, Chelsea Handler, DJ Hazard, D.L. Hughley, Mike Hoffman, Dom Irrera, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Grace Jones, Val Kappa, Barry Katz, Robert Kelly, Brian Kiley, Robert Klein, Johnny Knoxville, Larry the Cable Guy, Denis Leary, Jim Lehrer, Wendy Liebman, Eugene Levy, Richard Lewis, Josh Lucas, Stephen Lynch, Kelly MacFarland, Howie Mandel, Bob Marley, Marc Maron, Demetri Martin, Ralphie May, Mike McCready, Carlos Mencia, Eugene Mirman, Barbara Nedeljakova, Jim Norton, Patrice Oneal, Patton Oswalt, Todd Phillips, Paula Poundstone, Rain Pryor, Colin Quinn, Brian Regan, Joe Rogan, David Lee Roth, Eli Roth, Dan Sally, Ryan Seacrest, Jane Seymour, Harry Shearer, Michael Showalter, Sarah Silverman, Sinbad, Bobby Slayton, Kevin Smith, Fran Solomita, Sylvester Stallone, Doug Stanhope, Oliver Stone, Meryl Streep, Wanda Sykes, Tony V, Wally the Green Monster, the Walsh Brothers, Damon Wayans, Johnny Weir, Katt Williams and Steven Wright.

I also got to meet plenty of regular and extraordinary folks, playing one-on-one with a Harlem Globetrotter, spending a night as a clown in the Ringling Bros. circus, cavorting about town with a bachelorette party on a bus, watching the World Cup finale on Boston's Hanover Street in the increasingly Italian North End, watching the Red Sox home opener from the fanciest seats in Fenway, watching the Bruins from the bench, checking out new restauarant openings, magazine launches, nightclub parties, all of the comedians I've come to know, love and loathe before and after the Boston Comedy Festival, and of course, the aforementioned night on the town with some Playboy Playmates. It has been a fun run, indeed, and I look forward to even bigger and better adventures to blog about in 2007!

Labels: celebrities