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Since 1975 nearly a thousand hosts have graced the stage at Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center for “Saturday Night Live.”

Actors, comedians, musicians and even politicians have taken the stage to make America laugh on Saturday night for 50 seasons. Twenty five of these hosts have been inducted into the “Five Timers Club.” The club was first introduced during Tom Hanks’ 1990 monologue, featuring Steve Martin, Elliott Gould and Paul Simon.

During Martin Short’s December 2024 appearance, several Five Timers Club members popped up on the show to welcome him into the club, including Emma Stone, Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Kristen Wiig and more, to give him the ceremonial robe.

Alec Baldwin has hosted the show 17 times, the most in the series’ history, with Martin, Hanks, Buck Henry and John Goodman following close behind.

As the show celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, we have rounded up every person who has hosted the sketch show.

The episode of Wtf Happened to This Horror Movie? covering Summer of Sam was Written by Mike Holtz, Narrated by Tyler Nichols, Edited by Victoria Verduzco, Produced by Andrew Hatfield and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

These days it’s commonplace for True Crime stories to fill the corners of any entertainment outlet. Whether it’s film, TV, or podcasts. Hell, we probably wouldn’t bat an eye were we standing in a McDonald’s at 9 Am on Easter Sunday and heard the grizzly story of a banker sticking his ex-wife and her chihuahua into a wood chipper coming at us from the TV in the corner. We’re pretty desensitized when it comes to using the tragedies of other human beings as entertainment. I’m not judging you, Peter. I’m just as culpable. But in 1999, when Spike Lee set out to direct a film about serial killer David Berkowitz,...

Burt Young, a former boxer who was in Sylvester Stallone’s corner as his brother-in-law Paulie in the six Rocky films and received a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his turn in the original, has died. He was 83.

He died on Oct. 8 in Los Angeles, his daughter, Anne Morea Steingieser, told The New York Times Wednesday.

A tough guy in real life who usually played tough guys onscreen, Young portrayed a rotten client of gumshoe Jack Nicholson’s in Chinatown (1974), was mobster “Bed Bug” Eddie in The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) and played Rodney Dangerfield’s protector/chauffeur Lou in Back to School (1986).

Young also appeared in four movies in four straight years with fellow Queens guy James Caan — Cinderella Liberty (1973), The Gambler (1974), The Killer Elite (1975) and Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) — before they worked together again in Mickey Blue Eyes (1999).

He played a getaway driver in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite,...

When you consider the evidence, the 1970s was the greatest crime movie period since the 1930s. Maybe it’s because of the grim film stock, but those 10 years were so filled with the criminal element even a highly-rated political journalism feature like All the President’s Men (1976) is really an investigation into indictable acts. The decade is defined by Francis Ford Coppola’s first two The Godfather movies, but those tell the story of the dons who live in compounds on Long Island. Most illicit infractions are committed on the street, and so many fall between the cracks.

Crime and gangster movies historically and consistently break boundaries in motion picture art. This is especially true when independent filmmakers muscle their way in packing something heavy. The 1970s was an experimental decade for motion pictures with wildly varied visions behind the lens. Some of these films were considered old-fashioned, others have proven...

Sterling Lord, who represented Jimmy Breslin, Art Buchwald, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gordon Parks and most famously, Jack Kerouac, died Saturday in Ocala, Fla. He was 102 and his death was confirmed by his daughter, Rebecca Lord. No cause was given.

The list of literary greats represented by Lord over his long career included Frank Deford, David Wise, Nicolas Pileggi, Delores Kearns Goodwin, Joe McGinniss, Pete Gent, Pete Axthelm, and more. But it was Kerouac’s book that is likely his lasting legacy, sold for 1,000 after four years of trying. It went on to sell more than five million copies.

Lord was born in Burlington, Iowa, on Sept. 3, 1920. His father was an amateur bookbinder and nourished his son’s passion for books. Oddly, Lord himself publilshed only two works, a how-to on tennis and a memoir, neither of them massive sellers.

He graduated with an English degree fro Grinnell College in Iowa, then...

Richard C. Wald, a former president at NBC News and a senior vice president at ABC News who worked behind the scenes with Tom Brokaw, Jane Pauley, Ted Koppel and Roone Arledge, died May 13 after suffering a stroke earlier in the month. He was 92.

Wald was involved with the creation of “Nightline,” the signature ABC News late-night program that grew out of special coverage in 1979 on the taking of U.S. embassy staff in Tehran by Iranian militants. Wald gave the show, which devoted itself to a single topic each night under the aegis of Koppel and remains on the air at ABC in modernized form, its name, trying to create an analogue to the “morning line” at a race track. He also put Brokaw on NBC’s “Today,” and hired Pauley, while working to modernize the format of “NBC Nightly News.”

His time in TV news, however, was preceded...

George Ferencz, a longtime mainstay of the Off Broadway scene who directed premieres and revivals of plays by Sam Shepard, Aishah Rahman and Amiri Baraka, died Sept. 14 following a long illness. He was 74.

Showbiz & Media Figures We’ve Lost In 2021 – Photo Gallery

His death was announced today by the three-time Emmy-winning costumer designer Sally Lesser, his wife of 35 years and collaborator on more than 65 theater productions.

Among the other then-new playwrights directed by Ferencz in significant stagings were Jean-Claude van Itallie, Mac Wellman and Yasmine Rana. Ferencz also directed established works by playwrights including Eugene O’Neill, Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Sean O’Casey and Agatha Christie.

“We would regularly run into his colleagues and former students on the street,” actor Jenne Vath, who worked in numerous Ferencz productions, said in a statement. “They would invariably say that George changed their life. George was a great spirit and a rock star...

Exclusive: Kyra Breslin, the granddaughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jimmy Breslin, is following in her grandfather’s footsteps, but in audio.

She is launching Finding Lauren, a true-crime documentary podcast series that looks at the ongoing investigation of missing Indiana University student, Lauren Spierer.

The series, which launches on September 20, explores the story of the disappearance of Spierer, who went missing on June 3, 2011. The 20-year-old student disappeared after a night out partying with a group of college students at Indiana University. She was never seen again.

The series explores the timeline of the night leading up to Spierer’s disappearance while also telling the story of the host, Kyra Breslin’s, personal experience attending Indiana University during this time and living in the aftermath of this tragedy.

Kyra Breslin, who now runs her own public relations firm in New York City, graduated from Indiana University in 2014 with a degree in Journalism.

Netflix‘s new docuseries The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness aims to restructure a deeply ingrained story. New York City’s most notorious serial murderer wasn’t a serial murderer after all. If David Berkowitz was part of a team of street level satanic power brokers, the entire story is a false narrative.

The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness is an impressive entry in the true crime documentary premiere run at Netflix. It focuses on the work of journalist Maury Terry, whose investigation into the Son of Sam case was criminally sidelined. Terry was convinced that convicted lone serial killer David Berkowitz was part of “a highly motivated and well-organized cult group whose various criminal enterprises included the .44 homicide.”

Terry’s 1987 book The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation of America’s Most Dangerous Satanic Cult, is a must read. But it got lost in the Satanic Panic,...

The new Starz documentary series Confronting a Serial Killer is captivating, immersive and infuriating. One of the first things we learn is how victims are parsed through the criminal justice system. On the scale of homicide priorities, “pretty white college students are the most dead, black hookers are the least dead.”

Because it tells a story about an under-represented and largely dismissed cross-section of the community, Confronting a Serial Killer focuses on the victims. Even the journalist spearheading the investigation is a survivor. Putting a human face and voice to statistics is a slowly growing trend in true crime coverage. It was recently done in Peacock Originals’ John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise. But the Killer Clown is one of the most recognizable names in the history of homicide. While Samuel Little may have racked up a higher body count, his is a lesser-known name.

Little extinguished 93 lives over four decades.

Pete Hamill — the celebrated journalist, novelist, columnist, and a titan of the New York City tabloid and journalism world — died Wednesday morning, the New York Times reports. He was 85.

Hamill died after his kidneys and heart failed while in the hospital, his brother, journalist Denis Hamill, confirmed. Hamill had fallen Saturday, August 1st, and was rushed to the hospital where he underwent emergency surgery; he was then placed in the intensive care unit.

Hamill was born in Brooklyn in 1935 to immigrants from Northern Ireland. He got his first newspaper job...

Pete Hamill, the Brooklyn-born journalist whose street-savvy writing style and editorial hand lent an authentic, even quintessential voice to city tabloids The New York Post and The Daily News over a 50-year-career, died today in his native borough. He was 85.

His brother, the writer Denis Hamill, told The New York Times that Hamill fell at home on Saturday after returning from a dialysis treatment. He was taken to Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital were he died apparently from kidney and heart failure.

Hamill began his newspaper career at the Post in 1960. Over the next decades he would write for the Daily News, Newsday, The Village Voice, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and many other publications. Along with columnist Jimmy Breslin, Hamill popularized a streetwise writing style that could seem equal parts Norman Mailer, Damon Runyon and the millions of outer borough residents he both championed and chronicled.

The...

It’s been quite a week for the fourth estate, or the enemy of the people, depending on your viewpoint. Most notably, BuzzFeed has had a bipolar ride and NBC’s Savannah Guthrie took heat for being either too tough or too soft on the Kentucky high school student accused of harassing a Native American man. So consider it a momentary balm that three classic 20th century journalists — about whom few questioned their honesty and craft — are back in the news.

Speaking about Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in the HBO documentary “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” new Oscar nominee Spike Lee says, “These guys were superstars.” Breslin and Hamill were as colorful as any characters they covered in their long New York City newspaper careers. They — and the film — were even mentioned in the New York Times obit for Russell Baker, another award-winning New York-based columnist, who passed away...

“Revolutionary,” “superstars,” “the voice of true New Yorkers” — that’s how Spike Lee and other influential figures describe journalists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in the trailer released for HBO’s “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists” documentary.

The film, which premieres Jan. 28 at 8 p.m. Et/Pt, follows the two newspaper columnists whose dedication and wit spoke for everyday people and transformed reporting about New York City and the country.

The doc also aims to take viewers back to the charm of the old New York, while delving into issues of race, class, and the practice of journalism that resonate powerfully in our own time. It will also touch on classic stories like the Bernhard Goetz, Son of Sam, Central Park Five, and Crown Heights cases, as well as many of the major events of the last half century, including the Kennedy assassinations, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, and...

Even Murphy Brown has Trump fatigue. In last week’s episode, she threw down her remote and said, “I’m not watching anymore!” Ironic, of course, since millions of viewers stopped, or didn’t start, watching the new edition of CBS’ “Murphy Brown.” Conservatives figured, correctly, that she’d be trashing their leader weekly, and it seems liberals would rather watch Rachel Maddow.

Creative folks are learning they need to tread carefully doing anything dealing with politics these days, even if only tangentially winking at the chaos in the current White House. Despite possible resonance with the Stormy Daniels brouhaha, “The Front Runner,” a movie about the sex scandal that brought down Sen. Gary Hart, was a quick bust at the box office. Despite constant Nixon-Trump comparisons, Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Watergate” made little noise. “The Parisian Woman,” a Broadway show from the man who gave us Netflix’s “House of Cards,...

America’s largest documentary festival, Doc NYC, has revealed its full lineup for its ninth edition, running November 8 – 15 at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village and Chelsea’s Sva Theatre and Cinepolis Chelsea. The 2018 festival includes 135 feature-length documentaries among over 300 films and events overall, including 42 world premieres and 17 U.S. or North American premieres.

Today’s lineup announcement follows the fest’s previously announced Short List titles, which include 15 of the year’s award contender documentary features and an inaugural list of 12 of the year’s leading nonfiction shorts.

Read More: The Doc NYC and Oscar Documentary Feature Short Lists: How Close Will They Match Up?

The festival will close out with the world premiere of HBO’s “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” following the beloved New York City journalists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, while the festival’s Centerpiece presentation will go for a touch more humor, thanks to...

Doc NYC, the documentary film festival set to run Nov. 8-15 in New York City, will open with the New York premiere of John Chester’s The Biggest Little Farm, which recounts efforts to establish a biodynamic farm, and will close with the world premiere of Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, a portrait of journalists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill directed by Jonathan Alter, John Block and Steve McCarthy. Its centerpiece presentation will be the world premiere of Original Cast Album: Co-op, an episode of IFC’s Documentary Now! series that parodies D.A. Pennebaker’s classic doc Original Cast Album: Company, followed by a ...

Doc NYC, the documentary film festival set to run Nov. 8-15 in New York City, will open with the New York premiere of John Chester’s The Biggest Little Farm, which recounts efforts to establish a biodynamic farm, and will close with the world premiere of Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, a portrait of journalists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill directed by Jonathan Alter, John Block and Steve McCarthy. Its centerpiece presentation will be the world premiere of Original Cast Album: Co-op, an episode of IFC’s Documentary Now! series that parodies D.A. Pennebaker’s classic doc Original Cast Album: Company, followed by a ...

Robert De Niro is attacking Donald Trump again, this time while honoring a group of award-winning high school students.

The Oscar-winner, who has repeatedly criticized the president, reportedly slammed Trump while speaking at the ceremony for the Jimmy and Rosemary Breslin “American Writer Award” at the Tweed Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.

“The one characteristic that comes through all of your work that I read, and that is the same quality of everything that Jimmy Breslin wrote, is the truth,” De Niro said, according to Page Six.

“Our country is lead by a president who believes he can make up his own truth.

Four decades ago, a lowly postal worker from Yonkers held all of New York City in the grip of terror, carrying out a deadly string of late-night shootings that killed six and injured seven, triggering one of the largest police manhunts in the city’s history.

David Berkowitz — the self-proclaimed “Son of Sam” — evaded police for more than a year but was arrested on Aug. 10, 1977, outside his apartment building.

Investigation Discovery’s two-hour documentary, Son of Sam: The Hunt for a Killer, ran Aug. 5 and is now available on ID’s TV Everywhere platform, ID Go. (A clip is above.

In the years since his arrest ended a reign of terror over New York City that peaked in the summer of 1977, David Berkowitz — the serial killer known as the “Son of Sam” — has rechristened himself the “Son of Hope,” claiming he’s a born-again Christian who wants to remain behind bars, according to his visitors in prison.

The redemptive identity is an attempt to replace the menacing one that Berkowitz, now 64, adopted in taunting letters written to police and a newspaper columnist during a deadly rampage that gripped the city in fear 40 years ago.

His 13-month shooting spree, which killed...

Skip Williamson (L), Jay Lynch

In this space two weeks ago, I wrote about the death of cartoonist and comix legend Jay Lynch. I noted his half-century friendship with Skip Williamson; despite their physical distance, I don’t think two people could have been closer.

As fate would have it, Skip died eleven days after Jay. Each was 72 years old. For long-time friends of the pair, for long-time fans of the pair – and I count myself among both groups – the timing was crippling. Skip long had heart problems so even though it was shocking, it wasn’t totally unexpected. However, there’s a kind of appropriateness about that timing that makes complete sense.

I won’t repeat their mutual history other than to mention the first comic book they pioneered was Bijou Funnies. Both had contributed to Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! Magazine and, later, to Playboy. Skip’s most revered character was Snappy Sammy Smoot,...

Editor’s Note: Harvey Weinstein is an occasional contributor to Deadline when he has something on his mind. This weekend, two icons of my youth passed. One was a fiery musician, Chuck Berry, the other a fiery journalist, Jimmy Breslin. I didn't know either of them well but had great encounters with the two. When I was 19 or 20 years old, I started my concert company with a partner named Corky Burger. The first concert we produced, because our university ran out of money…...

Death has been everywhere lately this March of 2017. Actor Bill Paxton. Rock and Roll pioneer Chuck Berry. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Jimmy Breslin. The great artist Bernie Wrightson. Underground comics’ Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. ComicMix’s Tweeks Maddy and Anya Ernst’s grandmother. Fellow columnist Marc Alan Fishman’s college friend. My dad.

As Martha Thomases said last week, although in an entirely different context – Too Much! Too Much!

Radiolab, which airs on NPR – check your local station – is a show that features issues both philosophical and scientific. In its 15th year, I was listening on Saturday as the hosts, Jay Abrumrad and Robert Kulwich, discussed a case brought to their attention by reporter Ike Siskandarajah. It was called “Mutant Rights.”

Two international tariff lawyers, Sherry Singer and Indie Singh, discovered that the legal classification of “doll” were taxed at a higher rate – 12% – than the legal classification of “toy,...

Jimmy Breslin, the Pulitzer-winning reporter and columnist whose life was as outsized as the New York City characters he depicted and exposed in print, died Sunday at the age of 88. He died in his Manhattan home from complications from pneumonia, according to the New York Daily News. The Queens native — who never shook his accent from that borough — became a fixture of big-city journalism, primarily for the New York Daily News, by championing the little guy. Also Read: Hollywood's Notable Deaths of 2017 (Photos) He also was the source of both scoops and controversy through the years. In the summer...

There is a long tradition of hard-drinking American newspaper columnists who write about big city street life in a romantic and comic way. From Damon Runyon to Jimmy Breslin, these writers are fascinated by violence, criminality, gambling, infidelity and family strife. They see the humour and pathos in stories that, in their basic details, are often sordid or banal. They also relish the eccentricities of types others regard as thugs, slobs and deadbeats.

Calvary director/writer John Michael McDonagh with Kelly Reilly at the Explorers Club: "Well, in Ireland, 'dirty little whore', it's almost like endearing."

John Michael McDonagh's Calvary stars Brendan Gleeson, Kelly Reilly, Chris O'Dowd, Isaach De Bankolé, Domhnall Gleeson, Dylan Moran with The Diving Bell And The Butterfly's Marie-Josée Croze, Aidan Gillen, Dylan Moran, M Emmet Walsh and David Wilmot. Fox Searchlight Pictures celebrated with a luncheon at the Explorers Club in New York with guests including Jimmy Breslin, Dana Delany, Jodi Applegate, Annette Insdorf, Eugene Hernandez, Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Gross.

I spoke with Kelly Reilly and what started out with Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert and Tippi Hedren's style in Hitchcock's The Birds, quickly turned to themes of forgiveness which brought us to develop a quick theory of a Holy Female Trinity holding Calvary together, before lunch was served.

Brendan Gleeson...

Just a week after the release of a feature film directed by a prominent actor, I’m speaking of Fading Gigolo by John Tuturro, comes another one helmed by an actor. But this is his feature film debut, oh, and he’s not in front of the camera (but Tuturro is, the busy guy!). God’S Pocket is helmed by John Slattery who has attained TV immortality as indulgent “bad boy” Roger Sterling on AMC’s “Mad Men”, where he cut his film making teeth calling the shots on five episodes. With this feature he’s back doing a period piece (his TV show is set from 1960-69, while this film appears to be from the late 70′s early 80′s…no cell phones or computers and everybody drives a big ‘gas-guzzler’), but the characters are laborers and petty thieves, not ad execs. Same general East Coast area though. The film...

That Alec Baldwin can play a cocky, know-it-all New Yorker should not be a surprise. 

That he can do so as a newspaper columnist with an innate sense of decency and play him quietly -- against type -- is.

In "Criminal Stories," Wednesday's (March 19) episode of "Law & Order: Svu," Mariska Hargitay makes her directorial debut and the episode is flawless. Baldwin is Jimmy MacArthur of the New York Ledger and is modeled after great tabloid columnists like Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin and Mike McAlary.

Mac visits the squad room to do a profile of Benson (Hargitay). She is not pleased and becomes even less so when she learns that 1 Police Plaza has given him full clearance. He can go on ridealongs and into meetings and isn't to be shut out of anything.

Though she puts him off, Mac is persistent and they finally meet for a late dinner. 

"I have...

Tony Sokol Sep 19, 2019

Unquestionably one of the greatest mob movies of all time. We look at the true story of the real Goodfellas who inspired the flick.

Goodfellas is The Rolling Stones of crime movies. Criminals aren’t supposed to be allowed to reap the spoils of their crimes, but the Lufthansa Heist at Kennedy International Airport in 1978 made a lot more money than just the original $6 million ($20 mil if you account for inflation), which is the biggest heist in American history. The Lufthansa heist has, so far, produced two made for TV movies, The 10 Million Dollar Getaway (which I’ve never seen) and The Big Heist (with all its Donald Sutherland Irish accent mashup glory). Goodfellas, directed by Martin Scorsese, is of course a gangster classic.

The Beatles of crime, in case you were wondering, is the Gallo Profaci wars, which launched the stories of The Godfather.

The Lufthansa...

The first Chicago bar I drank in was the Old Town Ale House. That bar was destroyed by fire in the 1960s, the customers hosed off, and the Ale House moved directly across the street to its present location, where it has been named Chicago's Best Dive Bar by the Chicago Tribune.

I was taken to the Ale House by Tom Devries, my fellow college editor from the Roosevelt Torch. It was early on a snowy Sunday afternoon. I remember us walking down to Barbara's Bookstore to get our copies of the legendary New York Herald-Tribune Sunday edition. Pogo. Judith Crist. Tom Wolfe. Jimmy Breslin. I remember peanut shells on the floor and a projector grinding through 16mm prints of Charlie Chaplin shorts. I remember my first taste of dark Löwenbräu beer. The Ale House was cool even then.

I returned to the North Avenue drinking scene on New Year's Eve...

"The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir" (Harper), by William Friedkin

A self-made, scrappy professional reaches the top only to be brought down by conflicting desires and his own hubris. Amid the wreckage, he reconsiders what's important to him and begins anew, success attainable once again but not at all certain.

That sounds like the outline of a movie directed by William Friedkin, the Oscar winner behind "The French Connection" (1971), "The Exorcist" (1973) and more than a dozen other films plus plays and even operas. It's also the theme of a page-turning memoir in which Friedkin revisits his victories and defeats while taking the blame for dropping the brass ring.

If measured by ticket sales alone, Friedkin's filmmaking career peaked in the early 1970s. His first nondocumentary, the Sonny and Cher oddity "Good Times," was released in 1967. His most recent movie was 2011's love-it-or-hate-it shocker "Killer Joe." That's four years to reach the...

The first Chicago bar I drank in was the Old Town Ale House. That bar was destroyed by fire in the 1960s, the customers hosed off, and the Ale House moved directly across the street to its present location, where it has been named Chicago's Best Dive Bar by the Chicago Tribune.

I was taken to the Ale House by Tom Devries, my fellow college editor from the Roosevelt Torch. It was early on a snowy Sunday afternoon. I remember us walking down to Barbara's Bookstore to get our copies of the legendary New York Herald-Tribune Sunday edition. Pogo. Judith Crist. Tom Wolfe. Jimmy Breslin. I remember peanut shells on the floor and a projector grinding through 16mm prints of Charlie Chaplin shorts. I remember my first taste of dark Löwenbräu beer. The Ale House was cool even then.

I returned to the North Avenue drinking scene on New Year's Eve...

This one has been long in the works, but now Tom Hanks has committed to play Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy, the play that Nora Ephron completed before she died in late June at age 71. Early in my career, I worked with McAlary for five years at New York Newsday, and I must say I was in awe of the guy and his daily accomplishments. Despite his outsized reputation and accomplishments, Mike was this big unassuming Irishman, and you would say hello in the elevator and share some small talk, and then get into the newsroom and see that while most of us were sleeping Mike had broken some unbelievable crooked-cop story late that night. Like the time he met a cop who got caught up in a corruption case and bared his misdeeds to Mike. Then went home and blew his brains out. And there was Mike’s chilling account of it all.

I only met Judith Crist once, but her career had an enormous role in shaping the world of the movie critics who followed her. She was the first full-time female movie critic for a big American daily newspaper, but set aside her gender: By her success and fame, she created jobs for movie critics where there were none before.

When she went to work for the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1940s, few newspapers had movie critics writing under their own names (the New York Times was an exception). The movie reviews were considered a "house column," farmed out on a film-by-film basis to assorted reporters, who wrote under such punning bylines as "Kate Cameron" (New York Daily News) and "May Tinee" (Chicago Tribune). Crist was fearless, acerbic and merciless--"Hollywood's most hated person," it was said.

She wrote a sensational pan of "Cleopatra," saying Elizabeth Taylor's acting "often rises to fishwife levels.

Judith Crist, a blunt and popular film critic for the Today show, TV Guide and the New York Herald Tribune whose reviews were at times so harsh that director Otto Preminger labeled her “Judas Crist,” has died. She was 90.

Her son, Steven Crist, said his mother died Tuesday at her Manhattan home after a long illness.

Starting in 1963, at the Tribune, Crist wrote about and discussed thousands of movies for millions of readers and viewers, and also covered theater and books.

She was the first woman to become a full-time critic at a major U.S. newspaper and was among...

New York — Judith Crist, a blunt and popular film critic for the "Today" show, TV Guide and the New York Herald Tribune whose reviews were at times so harsh that director Otto Preminger labeled her "Judas Crist," has died. She was 90.

Her son, Steven Crist, said his mother died Tuesday at her Manhattan home after a long illness.

Starting in 1963, at the Tribune, Crist wrote about and discussed thousands of movies for millions of readers and viewers, and also covered theater and books.

She was the first woman to become a full-time critic at a major U.S. newspaper and was among the first reviewers of her time to gain a national following. Roger Ebert credited her with helping to make all film critics better known, including such contemporaries as The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice.

With the growing recognition of such foreign directors...

“Luck is the residue of design.” Or is it? Whether or not Branch Rickey’s famous dictum – an appeal to reason and not the gods – is true lies at the heart of the fourth episode of Luck, written by staffer Jay Hovdey and directed by Philip Noyce (“Salt”). The question also illuminates what’s right and what’s wrong with the series. (If you don’t know Branch Rickey, the man who transformed baseball and with it American society, Jimmy Breslin’s fine short biography is a good place to start.) In the series as in life, there are gamblers who ignore the dictum entirely. They abandon themselves to the gods, who play...

Yep, the gift-giving holidays are upon us once again. Here’s three recent releases that are among the top of my list.

The Stan Lee Universe, by Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas TwoMorrows Publishing, $39.95 hardcover; also available in softcover and digital

If you’re asking “who’s Stan Lee and why should I care about his universe?” then I’m asking “why are you reading a website called ComicMix?” I’m not going to waste bandwidth establishing Stan’s street cred. The Stan Lee Universe is not the definitive biography of Stan Lee; even at 89 years of age (in three weeks), he’s continuing to create new comics properties and appearing on television shows and in movies and his story remains a work in progress. As a life-long comics fan and practicing professional, I find great comfort in that.

The Stan Lee Universe is a massive gathering of articles, interviews,...

Everett Ernie Pyle

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists has weighed in on the question of what it considers the finest example of its craft. And the short answer? No, Virginia.

In an online poll, the society’s members voted Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Warskow ” the best column ever published in an American newspaper, placing the 1944 story ahead of Francis Pharcellus Church’s classic 1897 editorial-page proclamation, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.” The announcement about the...

Robert Redford is set to star in a new biopic on legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson, and no he won't be playing Robinson, he will be taking on the role of Branch Rickey who was known for breaking Major League Baseball's color barrier by signing Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

The film is being written and directed by Brian Helgeland worked on films such as L.A. Confidential and Mystic River. According to the La Times, "Redford's film will look less at the specifics of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier and more at the complex relationship between Rickey, who scholars believed integrated baseball for reasons of both idealism and economics, and Robinson, the shortstop who faced tremendous discrimination when he signed with the Dodgers system in 1945." Redford had this to say in a statement,

No one really knows the Rickey part, the political maneuvers and the partnership they had to share.

Crazy Love

Directed by Dan Klores

Fisher Stevens (co-director)

I will freely admit to having a particular fondness for upsetting documentaries. I’m intrigued by first-person narratives where terrible things happen to those telling the stories, to John Irving-esq tales of lives diverging in some horrible and unpredictable way. I am also fond of trashy docs; films about serial killers that present conjecture and hyperbole as fact and poorly-researched docs about neo-Nazis and Christian right-wing movements and generally tabloid-worthy investigations are the focus of some of my favourite things to watch for fun.

Unfortunately, Crazy Love is really neither. Too well researched and competently presented to be a trashy distraction but with a story far too trashy to be interesting in any other context, Dan Klores’s new film is a confusing experience.

The story, beginning in the late 1950’s, revolves around Bert Pugach, a New York lawyer, and...

This is a Recap of Top Chef All-Stars (Season 8), Episode 7, entitled “Restaurant Wars: One Night only”, originally airing January 19th, 2011. It contains spoilers about penises, just Fyi. For the Quickfire, we head to Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin to meet the mythical folk hero Justo Thomas, the fish prepper who butchers “1000 pounds of fish every day” and when he’s out it takes “three trained sous chefs to do his job.” He also pulls crooked roads straight, drinks gasoline and farts Dom, and built the Empire State Building by hand as a life-sized replica of his d*ck. After a bunch of hobos spin yarns about Justo’s superhuman filleting feats, Bourdain declares “I think we know what comes next. That’s right – guest judge Jimmy Breslin will give you a New York street number and you have to cook a dish that represents the essence of that number, because...

Tina Brown, Peter Beinart, John Avlon, Michelle Goldberg, and other Daily Beast writers and contributors pick their favorite books of 2010.

Tina Brown

Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads

It takes a daring biographer to turn her sharp eye on her own life as Antonia Fraser does so movingly and beautifully in her memoir Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter. It's a compelling diary of a passionate love affair, marriage, and 40-year conversation of two soul mates in the milieu of London's chattering classes.

Harvard superstar professor Niall Ferguson wrote a superb book, High Financier, that I hope every Wall Street banker is receiving along with their fat bonus checks because Siegmund Warburg was a banker with style, integrity, and a serious intellect-rare qualities these days.

Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome is one of the most important books of the last...

Olivier Assayas' epic but intimate treatment of terrorism and geopolitics, Carlos, has been garnering a well-deserved amount of exegesis since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May. (See the roundups from our own David Hudson here and here.) There's a lot to discuss, from the issues addressed by the film to the bravura performances by a cast led by the spectacular Edgar Ramírez in the title role. While there are more than a few artists who are either uncomfortable with or inept at discussing their work, Assayas, once a film critic himself, is not one of them. So when I sat down with him to talk Carlos and Carlos, I knew he'd have plenty to say, and now I think, for the purposes of this piece, I should just let him say it. So I'm putting up this interview with very little in the way of introduction...

Update: Former PR guy Dan Klores has spent the last decade making documentaries on New York-centric subjects. So, natch, he'll next focus his camera on Gotham's Jimmy Breslin. Klores will begin work in September on Breslin: The Great One, which will simultaneously chronicle the rise of Breslin and the heyday of newspapers. It will also explore their struggle to stay relevant in the digital age and why no one has replaced Breslin as NYC's dominant columnist. “He created the idea of a columnist who followed the news and personalized it, and his career expanded as newspapers did,” Klores said. “Now, he’s a man without a [...]...

By Todd Garbarini

The French Connection was screened Friday evening at the Walter Reade Theater in New York in a beautiful 35mm print. Part of a series of films that won Oscars and were filmed in the Big Apple, the series continues on Saturday with screenings of Klute, The Subject Was Roses (Ulu Grosbard in person), Kramer Vs. Kramer (Stanley Jaffe in person), and Raging Bull. Sunday will see screenings of The Godfather and Annie Hall.

Film director William Friedkin was on hand following the screening of his 1971 film to entertain the audience with anecdotes and answer questions about what went on behind the scenes. Joining the Oscar-winning director onstage was former New York City Police Detective Salvatore “Sonny” Grosso who, with his former partner Eddie Egan, helped break the actual 1961 French Connection case upon which the film is based, and who played the role of Klein in the film.

Oscar-winning director William Friedkin.

In July of 1997, I conducted the first of two lengthy interviews with director William Friedkin, regarded by many as the "enfant terrible" of the so-called "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls" generation of filmmakers who, for one brief, shining moment, seemed to reinvent American cinema in the late '60s thru the late '70s. Meeting Friedkin was something of a milestone for me at the time: I was still in my 20s, had been writing for Venice Magazine less than a year, and "Billy," as he likes people to call him, was the first person I interviewed who was one of my childhood heroes--a filmmaker whose one-sheets hung on my bedroom walls when I was growing up.

Below are the two interviews, conducted a decade apart from one another, and posted in reverse chronology. In both, Billy reveals a cunning intellect, a sometimes abrasive personal style,...

O'Rourke's was our stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago's Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night out in back. From the day it opened on December 30, 1966 until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.

Jay Kovar and Jeanette Sullivan behind the bar

Neil Steinberg,...

While his books captivated millions of readers around the world, Frank McCourt, who died Sunday after a recent health battle, spent the earlier part of his life enthralling a smaller but no less impressionable group of people: his students in the New York City public school system, where he taught for 30 years. It was when the Brooklyn-born, Ireland-raised McCourt reached his 60s that he decided to put memories of his impossibly impoverished childhood in Limerick - and his mother Angela - to paper, and the result was Angela's Ashes, published in 1996 to acclaim and awards, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.