He starred as the troubled lounge singer Lou Canova in Woody Allen's classic 1984 film Broadway Danny Rose.
Forte never had a big acting career after that but he had a long and distinguished singing career. He was brilliant as the sad sack, love lorne singer and it would have been great to see him in more stuff. But how many non-actors can claim to have starred in one great movie?
While the presidential races heats up, it's important for us citizens to remember that there are many other elections coming up this year that will have as much, if not even more, impact on our lives than who does or doesn't win the presidency in November.
Here in NYC there are a batch of Democratic primaries for state legislative seats that are shaping up to be very competitive -- at least if some of the latest campaign financing reports mean anything. A number of challengers are outraising incumbents and snagging endorsements. Also, the primaries are in late June so they're not that far away.
The problem is that some of these people aren't real Democrats -- they are stealth Republicans -- so it's important for people voting in these primaries to understand who they may or may not be voting for. I strongly suggest you check out City & State and Gothamist to get more information about the upcoming primaries -- make sure sure you're not accidently giving your vote to a Trump supporting fraud.
In 2014, Harvey Weinstein went on the Howard Stern show to promote a new movie. Towards the end of the freewheeling interview -- where Harvey and Howard talked about the great movies Harvey's company had produced over the years, about what an idiot former Disney head Michael Eisner is, about how Harvey came to love movies and theater and culture of all sorts -- Howard asks the now fallen producer about the "casting couch."
Harvey denies ever having taken part in this ages-old traddition, that this kind of practice is long gone and outdated in the new corporate movie business -- and that the "risks are too great" and the "budgets are too big", no one would think of transgressing in this way without suffering severe repurcussions.
I remember hearing this interview at the time and totally believed him -- it seemed like in the era of social media, 24/7 cable news, TMZ, litigousness, etc. this kind of nasty behavior was long dead.
Guess not.
Not only was Harvey a participate in the casting couch culture, he was one of its chief offenders -- and now it's sent him to jail. So much so, in fact, that Howard pondered several years later, "When did this guy have time to make movies?"
The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is an aging, deteriorating beast, and there's currently a proposal in the City Council to tear it down completely and replace it with an underground tunnel. Thus a massive amount of land between the city's two biggest boroughs would be transformed and made available to the public.
Many other cities are doing this -- replacing their old highways with tunnels and making their surfaces more pedestrian and people friendly.
Obviously the cost and difficulty of this would be immense but, if it could be pulled off, would be an amazing and wonderful thing for roughly 6 millions New Yorkers.
There's nothing better than being out and about in NYC and spotting a piece of history, a living memorial to the city's past. Recently I took my kids to the park and, as they and a bunch of other children ran around and climbed on structures and hit the swings, I noticed this small plaque in the concrete ground.
Nearly every NYC public playground has one of these plaques and it's really fascinating to get a snapshot of who was in charge when these playgrounds were built -- and rebuilt. It's one thing to read the history of NYC and learn about the master builder Robert Moses and the hapless Mayor Vincent Impelliteri -- but it's another thing to see a living piece of their legacy at the very place where your children are blithely having fun. It's also bizarre to see Rudy's name there (the former currently mayor stinking up America) along with the legendary parks commissioner Henry Stern who recently died.
These plaques are a reminder that this city was built and tended to over time -- and that nothing here happens by accident. History, literally, is at our feet.
