Word: actors
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Paul Giamatti is the very definition of the phrase "working actor," the kind of guy who does small parts in big pictures and looks forward to doing big parts in small pictures. Ever reliable, never anyone's idea of a movie star, he has soldiered for Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, played a character known as Pig Vomit in the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts and portrayed a cowardly orangutan in the remake of Planet of the Apes. So when he was approached to play Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, it seemed to be just business as usual--except...
That's something Giamatti, 36, never does. He's shy and literally self-effacing as an actor but fiercely committed to his craft. Married with a young son, he's a bookish, family-oriented private-school and Yale graduate and the son of the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, once Yale's president and Major League Baseball's commissioner...
...sharp contrast to Weinstein's brutish antics, Sundance founder Robert Redford's influence over the indie world is portrayed as Zen-like, though the actor's enigmatic, elusive nature keeps him mostly in shadows throughout the book. (Unlike Weinstein, Redford refused to talk to Biskind.) Still, Redford emerges long enough to double-cross his former protege, Steven Soderbergh, whose sex, lies, and videotape was shown in Park City in 1989, by plucking the movie Quiz Show out from under him. Redford sabotages his own efforts to launch a Sundance Cinemas chain by hooking up with a financially unstable partner...
...needed them for a new project, they demanded $2 million in cash up front before signing on. Weinstein arrived at their meeting with a tote bag filled with Monopoly money, hurling it at Affleck before handing over the real checks. "We should have asked for four," says the actor...
DIED. ALAN BATES, 69, bluff, beguiling English actor; of pancreatic cancer; in London. A modest giant bestriding nearly a half-century of excellence, the Derbyshire lad co-starred at 22 in the original London stage production of Look Back in Anger. But the Angry Young Man tag never quite fit Bates' protean gifts. As a charming killer in Nothing But the Best or a Jewish prisoner in The Fixer, wrestling nude in Women in Love or incarnating the lonely spy Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad, he brought strength, delicacy, wit and humanity to each role. In films he often...