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Audio: Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast – #220 Bruce Vilanch
By Earwolf and Gilbert Gottfried.
August 13, 2018

Gilbert and Frank welcome an old friend, legendary comedy writer Bruce Vilanch, who looks back at the “golden age” of TV variety shows and specials, including “Donny & Marie,” “The Brady Bunch Hour,” “The Star Wars Holiday Special” and “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.” (all co-written by Bruce himself). Also, Margaret Hamilton makes her move, Robert Reed channels Carmen Miranda, Jack Benny does “The Match Bit” and Gilbert takes over “Hollywood Squares.” PLUS: Jack Palance! Bob Hope’s filing cabinet! “Wayne Newton at SeaWorld”! Bruce hangs with Tallulah Bankhead! And the Oscar joke that never made the air!

The post Podcast: Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast – #220 Bruce Vilanch first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

The red carpet is ready, the paparazzi are prepping their lenses, the stunning dresses are being chosen, and the golden awards are ready to be handed out to the lucky winners. Yes, it’s time again for the Toscars ceremony. No, that’s not a misprint. The Oscars are being held in March, but a few days before that on February 28th, Brits in LA’s 11th annual Toscars will be held in Hollywood at the Renberg Theatre.

This affectionate, spoofy homage is based around this year’s Oscar nominations for best movie. After the Oscar nominations are announced, in three weeks, parodies are made, judged by the Whacademy and then shown at the awards ceremony.

It has been said of this annual event that it is “like the Oscars, only funnier.”

Past presenters and hosts have included Skeet Ulrich (Riverdale), Academy and Golden Globe nominee Eric Roberts, Alex Newell (Glee), Candis Cayne (Dirty Sexy Money), Craig Young (The Last Ship), Jai Rodriquez (Queer Eye), Brianna Brown (Dynasty), Asian Oscar winner Bai Ling, Sean Maguire (Once Upon a Time), DJ Paul Oakenfold, Academy Award Winners, Hakeem Kae-Kazim (Dynasty), Ruth Connell (Supernatural), Luke Evans (Dracula Untold), Rex Lee (Young and Hungry), Janina Gavankar (Sleepy Hollow), Emmy Winner Bruce Vilanch, Brit Award Winner Siobhan Fahey (Bananarama), Bradley Walsh (Law & Order: UK) and the BAFTA winning comedian Jim Tavaré.

Who will take home the coveted ‘Golden Fist’ for Best Whactress, Best Whactor, Best Scribbler, Best Tunes and more? All will be revealed on February 28th.

Date: February 28th, 2018
What: The Toscars
Where: Renberg Theatre, Hollywood

The post The Toscars 2018 Date Has Been Set! And What Are The Toscars? first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

When it comes to Hollywood insiders, few come close to Bruce Vilanch. Over his thirty-year-plus career, he has worked with virtually every major talent in the entertainment industry: Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Elizabeth Taylor and (famously) the late Robin Williams. He has also been writing special material for the Oscars since 1989 – a collaboration that has had its ups-and-downs, but also given Vilanch an insider’s view on the film’s industry’s biggest party. He is also no stranger to other award shows, having written for the Emmys, Tonys and Grammys. Or Broadway, where he starred in “Hairspray” after taking it on the road.

Vilanch may be best-known for his stint on “The Hollywood Squares” on which he appeared for four seasons as well as being the show’s head writer. He has been in numerous films (including having made his film debut in “Mahogany” with Diana Ross in 1974). He has even been the subject of a documentary film – “Get Bruce” – which has one of the most star-studded casts in history. For Vilanch, they were his friends.

He’s been a tireless supporter of LGBT causes over the years, including being one of the first to take part in benefits for AIDS in the 1980s. It was from those experiences that he found himself working for the Oscars. And speaking of awards, Vilanch has won some six Emmy Awards for his writing.

That he one of the funniest celebrities in Hollywood is no secret. Part of what has made his solo dates, such as the one that comes to Club Café on Saturday, August 16 at 8pm, so endearing is his ease at making good-natured fun at not only Hollywood royalty, but himself. “I am frequently mistaken for Shelley (Winters) by people that don’t know she’s dead,” he said recently in a freewheeling conversation this week from Saugatuck, Michigan, where he was performing.

EDGE: So what are you wearing?

Bruce Vilanch What am I wearing? Hmmm. A t-shirt with an actual photo of Batman and Robin kind-of embracing. It’s a still from the old show. And they have this expression on their faces that make it seem they’re fascinated with each other. So the caption reads, ‘Batman and Robin: Let’s Hook Up.’ You look at their faces and you think, that’s what they’re really thinking. They’re in love with each other. Look at those expressions! And is there anything better to wear in the Provincetown of the Midwest?

EDGE: Speaking of Provincetown, did you hear that a ferry was nearly capsized by a wave this week?

Bruce Vilanch Really? No. But are you sure it wasn’t a convention of Shelley Winters impersonators just hoping to get capsized? If it was, I would be one of them because I am frequently mistaken for Shelley by people that don’t know she’s dead. They think she still slinks amongst us.

EDGE: Did you know her?

Bruce Vilanch Yes. She was a great actress and a hysterical person. Literally a hysterical person – when I would see her she shout, ‘my God… you’re all sweaty? What are you doing?’ Every meeting was an Academy Award winning performance. Most people didn’t realize she was a bombshell when she was a kid. Or realize how great she really was. She was one of the prime movers of the Actors’ Studio with Brando and James Dean. And a lot of her really good work was on stage… And on screen? There’s always ‘South Seas Sinner.’

Maybe I could do a one-woman show about Shelley Winters. When she wrote her book it was all about her many affairs and everyone she had an affair with was dead, because she didn’t want to write about anybody that was still alive because they would deny it. I think she could have called the book ‘Fuck Shelley and Die.’ My show will be like that. ‘Shelley Winters, Killer Pussy.’

EDGE: What are you doing in Boston?

Bruce Vilanch: What can I plug? How can I get them in? Tell some rude stories about Justin Bieber? I don’t have any of that. I do have stories about my life and times – my illustrious career in show business and all the bizarre people I met and all the backstage stories. It’s funny and dishy. Funny and dishy. (Slipping into a professional phone voice) ‘Funny and Dishy… could I direct your call?’

I don’t know what I am going to say and I’m not so sure what I say now would look good in print, so it’s a good idea not to say anything. But I’ve done 23 Academy Awards shows and everyone has trooped through that extravaganza, so there are stories about plenty of them.

EDGE: You dished James Franco when he did the Oscars – will you mention him?

Bruce Vilanch: Yes. Sure. Why not? I’ll get in trouble again. They’ll never ask him back, so why do I care?

EDGE: Have you started to work on next year’s Oscars?

Bruce Vilanch: Oh, no. Not yet. It starts around October when the producer comes in and gets active and figures out how he or she wants the show to unfold. And then the host comes onboard and it gets deeper as it goes along. Most of the show is written after the nominations come out in January because you don’t really know what you are going to talk about. It doesn’t make sense to prepare stuff about movies that get shut out; and you don’t know who is going to actually appear on the show until after the nominations come out and people sort out their feelings. Whether they want to be on the show or exercise the ritual taking of umbrage because they or their friends were not acknowledged. There use to be the honorary awards, but they made the show so long, so they moved them to separate event – the Governor’s Award – in November that I wrote this year and show excerpts on the awards.

EDGE: Do any of the celebrities as the Oscars take umbrage with the jokes you write?

Bruce Vilanch At first, yeah. A lot of times. But first you have the gauntlet of their people – their manager, their agent, their publicist, their holistic pet psychiatrist, their gardener, their Pilates instructor. Everybody has an opinion. Then they get back to you with what they want changed. By the time it gets to the show, they’ve signed off on anything, so it’s rare if somebody goes off-book on the night of the show. The spontaneous moments come from the winners, who can be depended upon to do something ridiculous because they’re over-excited. And the host commenting on what’s going on during the show. That’s where the spontaneous moments come from.

EDGE: How did Ellen’s selfie-seen-round-the-world happen at last year’s show?

Bruce Vilanch I don’t know. I wasn’t on the show last year because it was all Ellen and her staff. She has ten dedicated people that write her show every day and they did the Oscars. I did Ellen’s first time in 2007 and we did a version of the selfie that year, so I suspect whoever had the idea to do it again watched the show that year.

She did it with Spielberg. She had Spielberg take a picture of her and Clint Eastwood. It was the exact same bit. All that was missing was the dozen stars chomping to be in the shot, which they knew would be seen around the world. So you don’t get to see poor Liza, who was too short to get in on the thing. But on the other hand we got a nice full face of Lupita Nyong’o‘s brother, who oddly didn’t capitalize on that. I would think his people would have had him all over the place; but somewhere good taste prevailed. Either that or she said, ‘this is my night. Stand back.’ Maybe she let him wear all her dresses.

EDGE: Every year there seems to be different producers of the Oscars, but you remain a constant with the ceremony. What’s the key to your longevity?

Bruce Vilanch It’s like inventing the wheel every year, yet every year it looks pretty much like the year before; because it’s the nature of the beast. It’s a format to which you must adhere, that makes the show pretty much like every other show. New producers come in and say they’re going to change all that, but they can’t. As they go along they realize it’s a big, unwieldy piece, and it helps to have people around that have done it before; which is why you end up doing it for 23 years. That and various relationships you have with performers – hosts and what not – they want you to be around with them.

EDGE: You’ve also been involved with the Grabby Awards…

Bruce Vilanch Yeah. I’ve done them many time. Of course, they’re porno, and I love the porno business… and the people in it. Fascinating to me. But how I got initially – a lot of those award shows were the first AIDS fundraisers because a lot of the people involved in them was affected by the disease at the beginning. They weren’t raising money and wanted to find a way to raise money, and it was an easy way to do it. And it was an industry willing to chip in. So I ended up getting involved in it because it was a fund-raising device, and then, of course, once I got to the picnic I didn’t want to leave until I had every corn on the cob.

EDGE: What do they look for with a good host for the Oscars?

Bruce Vilanch They’re always looking for someone peaking at the box office at the moment, but what really helps with the ratings is a good year at the movies. It hasn’t been a good summer, but they’re not the kind of pictures the Academy pays attention to except for technical awards. And the year is back-loaded with the stuff they want to win awards, so people haven’t seen anything that will be talked about on the show next year. They’re have been a couple that will get included; but most of the stuff reveals itself in October. I just saw a trailer for “Into the Woods” that comes out on Christmas Day with that tornado movie.

EDGE: You mean, ‘Into the Storm?’ Wasn’t it hilarious when the storm hit that international airport in the middle of nowhere and started picking up 747s…?

Bruce Vilanch I loved that. Suddenly it was ‘Sharknado.’ I want to do a politically-aware disaster movie and call it ‘Ralphnado.’ A group of left-wing lawyers get picked up by a tornado and become Ralphnado, crashing into corporate America.

EDGE: Wasn’t it a terrible movie?

Bruce Vilanch Yes, but I love terrible movies. I use to go with a group to the movies every week back when going to the movies was a ritual and we’d go see a piece of shit movie. That was back when going to the movies was more of a rituals, and we’d pick terrible movies, like ‘Killer Fish’ starring Karen Black or ‘The Lonely Lady’ with Pia Zadora. So we decided to go to a movie and see ‘Into the Storm’ at the Mann’s Chinese Theatre. It wasn’t on the big screen, but on a smaller one; and it was heaven. We were half the audience – there were six of us and the audience was 12; so we could talk out loud, that was if you could be heard over the tornado. There was girl that was like Sandra Bullock and I said, she was going to have to take over the van but won’t be able to go over 50 because there is a bomb on it. They should have borrowed anything from every other action movie ever made.

EDGE: Didn’t the high school principal in the film look like President Obama?

Bruce Vilanch He looked exactly like Obama. It was hysterical – is the subtext of this that Obama winds up a high school principal? Is this what we are suppose to take from this? Is this a right wing moment here?

And the girl in the Helen Hunt part – the weather expert – she was a little bit too old for it and had a little too much work done to be that woman and pretend to be the mother of that baby. It was just enough to put it into The Asylum territory.

EDGE: And the vice principal, who was the movies hero, didn’t he look like Mitt Romney?

Bruce Vilanch Now that you mention it, yes. About him. He was this single guy raising two boys single-handedly and working as a vice principal at the school, but found time to get to the gym. He was really built under the white shirt and tie, which came in handy when he had to move Volkswagon buses off of people and stuff like that. This man knows how to multi-task! At least they spared us how he ended up with the weather expert. Here they were – he’s a single dad with two kids, she’s a single mom with a baby; I thought they were going to end up together, but they didn’t, which violates a cardinal rule. But then there will always be a sequel because they’re always be a tornado somewhere.

EDGE: My question is, why do people live there?

Bruce Vilanch I get the same criticism from people about living in LA. Why do you live where you know there’s going to be a fire followed by a mud slide; which is true. We all know that, but it’s nice while it lasts. Like people say, why do you build where there are coyotes and bears? They build these subdivisions in the hills, then wonder why there are coyotes roaming the streets. They’re surprised – ‘oh, gee. Isn’t this LA?’ It was, until they built out there.

I am waiting for the movie about the wild packs of coyotes invading the suburb. It’s perfect for The Asylum, but they’re too busy doing ‘Mega-Octopussy.’ Oh, what is the one that’s they’re doing? ‘Pteracuda’ – it’s a pterodactyl barracuda combo that can fly and swim. And the only thing that can get it is ‘Sharktopus,’ which is a shark and octopus combination, which cannot fly, but can do a great slither.

EDGE: What is The Asylum?

Bruce Vilanch The studio that makes all those movies for the Sci-fi Channel. Leading up to ‘Sharknado 2,’ they ran a week of all those movies. The giant piranha one, ‘Mega Piranha.’ They’re cautionary tales about creating creatures in a lab. ‘Mega Shark’ was created to get rid of submarines – it can bite through the hull. And, of course, ‘Mega Shark’ goes wild and attacks Acapulco and chomps his way through the hotels.

EDGE: Have you been going to the movies this summer?

Bruce Vilanch Of course. In fact, my new drag name is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. I couldn’t resist her – she was too perfect. They’re carrying on out here that it’s been a terrible summer because not enough people went to the movies. I went to watch Helen Mirren in ‘A Hundred Foot Journey.’ It was a wonderful movie and I had a huge meal afterward. It sent you out looking for a French place or an Indian place or a really cute Indian boyfriend that can make a hollandaise sauce.

Bruce Vilanch appears Saturday, August 16, 2014, 8pm, at Club Cafe, 209 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA. For ticket info, visit the Club Cafe website.

The post Great New Interview With Bruce Vilanch first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Comedy writer Bruce Vilanch is normally not a praying man. But backstage at the Academy Awards, for which he has long served as head writer, he often gets religion.

“You pray that somebody will make a fool of themselves in the early minutes of the evening,” Vilanch says of the unpredictable live telecast, “then you take it and run with it.”

The classic example came during the 1992 Oscars, when Jack Palance celebrated his Best Supporting Actor win by doing a few one-armed push-ups. That sparked a night of priceless quips from host Billy Crystal, many written on the fly by Vilanch (“Jack Palance just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood Sign”).

With his Elton John eyewear, kooky T-shirts and trademark blond tresses on display, Vilanch might recount that story in delicious detail when he appears Saturday, Aug. 31 at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos. The event is billed as “An Evening with Bruce Vilanch.”

Avilanch_bruce_vilanch_normal_sizeAs this JCC performance shows, Vilanch is not just a behind-the-scenes funny man. He starred in a Broadway revival of “Hairspray” and currently stars in an off-Broadway hit, “Rubble.” He’s acted in films and for many years he was a familiar X and O on “Hollywood Squares.”

But his role as a writer for awards shows such as the Oscars and Emmys has given him his widest notoriety. Somehow, in a town famous for eating its young, Vilanch has lasted 23 years at the Oscars, serving up jokes for hosts great (Billy Crystal) and not so great (James Franco).

The New Jersey native credits the great Jewish comedians of old for his sharp wit. “I was exposed to so many of them as a kid,” Vilanch recalls. “I was a rabid fan of Henny Youngman and Alan King.”

He also salutes his mother, who was a master quipster like her son.

Vilanch tells the story of how his mom used to keep the living room furniture covered in plastic most of the time. Eventually she decided to reupholster the well-preserved pieces, and when Vilanch asked her why, she replied, “I’m telling people it’s because Sonny Bono died.”

The Vilanch family belonged to a local Conservative synagogue. Little Bruce attended Hebrew School three times a week, was a member of United Synagogue Youth, and was bar mitzvahed.

After college he gave journalism a try, but when Bette Midler met him in 1970 and offered him a job writing jokes for her, the comedy die was cast, and a lifelong personal and professional relationship began.

A move to Los Angeles led to staff writer positions on variety shows, and hired-gun joke-writing jobs with stars such as Lily Tomlin and Joan Rivers.

He made his premiere as an Oscar writer in 1989, eventually becoming head writer in 2000. Once asked if he wanted to keep working on the show after so long, he replied, “It’s the greatest show on Earth. It’s like asking somebody ‘Hey, would you like to play in the Super Bowl?’ ”

Long before it was cool or commonplace, Vilanch, who is gay, was a major activist for LGBT rights. He says the social progress made on that front in the last two years has been “absolutely staggering.”

But now he has turned his attention to Russia, which recently instituted harsh anti-gay laws and has seen an uptick in anti-gay violence.

Says Vilanch, “All of a sudden comes [Russian president] Vladimir Putin, fresh from a midnight reading of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he decides to make gay people the new scapegoat in Russia.”

It’s a rare solemn moment for Vilanch, who prefers to make light of most situations.

And though he’s far from the first person to note the long, powerful link between Jews and comedy, Vilanch has his own theory as to why it’s been such a fruitful association.

“Any people who are oppressed find humor as a way to deal with it,” he says. “African Americans have, gay people have. It’s a common thread, and the Jews are really good at it.”

“An Evening with Bruce Vilanch” takes place 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 31, at the Addison-Penzak JCC, 14855 Oka Road, Los Gatos. $15-$20. http://www.svjcc.org or (408) 358-3636.

The post “An Evening with Bruce Vilanch” Saturday, Aug. 31, Los Gatos first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Bruce Vilanch has enjoyed what I’d call the ideal pop cultural existence: He’s written jokes for about two dozen Oscar ceremonies; he’s costarred in glamorous movies and insane Broadway spectacles (Mahogany, Hairspray); he took up Paul Lynde‘s mantle on Hollywood Squares; he’s become an icon himself thanks to his bright blond hair, red glasses, and goofy t-shirts; most fabulously, he’s relished casual and working relationships with everyone from Bette Midler to Lainie Kazan, the latter of whom costarred with him in the cute indie comedy Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay!! Though that movie was released in 2010, director Evgeny Afineevsky recently tried garnering the film greater distribution with the aid of a Kickstarter campaign. It’s a Bruce Vilanch/Lainie Kazan vehicle, guys. The world deserved to receive and cradle this.

To celebrate that effort, we phoned the awesome Vilanch to talk about working on that movie, the stars who’ve impressed him over the years, and the celebrity men who lived in his “cute boy cul de sac.”

TheBacklot: You shot Oy Vey, My Son is Gay!! back in 2010. What was the set like?
Bruce Vilanch: We shot in Spokane where I’d actually been before, but only for like a night. We were at a studio where they shoot a lot of Lifetime movies. They were very happy to see us because we were the only film to shoot there where no one in the plot had cancer. There were no women in jeopardy either; no one was being chased by her deranged Iraqi vet husband. No Post Traumatic Stress. It was a comedy, and they were relieved they could laugh. It was tremendous amount of fun, though it was the dead of winter, there were blizzards, and we pretended it was spring in New York. That cast: Lainie Kazan’s a riot, and Vinny Pastore, who you remember as Big Pussy from The Sopranos, Jai Rodriguez, Carmen Electra, such an eclectic group. We had a really good time. And it’s a throwback, a ’50s style of comedy.

TB: You’ve known Lainie Kazan for years, right?
BV: She’s an old, old friend of mine. We ended up working on a couple of movies, but we just knew each other for years. This was a chance to really hang out together intensely.

TB: I assume at this point in your life you’ve gotten to work with tons of people whose work you’d admired for years and years.
BV: Sometimes! It depends. In your mind’s eye you think they’ll going to be like their characters onstage or onscreen, but sometimes they’ll be all business. About 23 years ago I did a movie with Charles Durning, and at the time he was a very serious actor who had done all of those gangster pictures. He was a real tough guy. He was playing Santa Claus in this movie, and I was his elf. I was the elf who took steroids. I didn’t know what to expect from him, but he was hilarious and easygoing — and a great actor at the same time. He was nothing like the people he portrayed. One of the leads of the picture was seven years old and from Utah, because we were shooting around there. The second day of shooting, Charles said to me, “I was expecting a seven-year-old kid! Look what I got. Faye Dunaway.” He was going through the same thing I was; he was expecting one thing from his costar and got another.

TB: Do you have a favorite onstage moment?
BV: Oh, Hairspray. Two years of Hairspray onstage. I did Broadway for a year, then toured for a year. It was amazing. First of all, eight times a week with a different audience, it pushes an OCD button you didn’t know you had. Each show is different, and you find yourself making slight variations. I didn’t know that was what it was going to be like. You hear about people doing a robot version of a performance after six months on the same show, but for me, the minute I went out onstage I felt the excitement.

TB: I’m always interested to find out how knowledgeable pop culture historians like yourself stay interested in new media. Are you still excited by new, good movies, etc.?
BV: There are classics that I do watch over and over, but when you discover something that’s new that’s really good, you go completely crazy. You can’t get enough of it. If you close yourself off to the new stuff, then it’s over. You may as well find a Greek island that appeals to you and never emerge. I was watching the Tonys and saw Kinky Boots in Chicago when they were trying it out, and it’s fantastic. It’s a great show and has the same effect that Hairspray has. The audience goes through the roof, because it’s so artfully put together. They fall in love with the characters and want them to succeed. The writers have given them material to soar with. How can you not respond to that? If you become so jaded that you can’t respond to something that’s new, get your rope and do your Prometheus impression. Tie yourself to a rock and wait for high tide.

TB: Speaking of Kinky Boots, did you know Cyndi Lauper is an Oscar away from an EGOT?
BV: I hadn’t thought of that! I guess it’s true. I didn’t know that. They give out so many Emmys and so many Grammys, it’s almost hard to keep track. Now Cyndi’ll write a song for a movie and they’ll give her an Oscar, like Adele.

TB: Does that bother you, the way celebrities can phone in for an Oscar in the Best Song Category?
BV: No, because they’ve set up the category to work that way. The category was established back when there were lots of musicals and people were writing original songs for them. That period is long over. It used to be that people wrote a song for the closing credits, and at least they change that. Now it has to be somewhere in the body of the piece. It can’t be a song that gets tacked on at the end for an Oscar. Now it has to have more of a relationship to the actual movie. They bring top writers in, they write a song for the movie, and it’s not a song that they would write, you know, out of their soul. It’s a song they’re writing on assignment for a lot of money and the chance to have an Academy Award on their mantle. Those are the songs you’re getting a lot of the time. But the system has set itself up that way, so I don’t begrudge [the songwriters]. I mean, you can pretty much carry a movie and be nominated in the supporting category for political reasons and find yourself up against someone who had one four-minute scene and walks away with the picture. That’s the nature of it. That’s what they’ve set up. It’s possible for Judi Dench to win for one scene.

TB: Tatum O’Neal beat Madeline Kahn in Best Supporting Actress, which made no sense since Tatum is the star of Paper Moon.
BV: Exactly. It’s possible for someone nine-years-old to beat someone who had been in the business for 50 years. Tatum O’Neal also beat Sylvia Sidney that year.

TB: I’m glad to see you’re pretty encyclopedic about Oscar trivia still.
BV: [Laughs.] I’ve written 23 of the shows, so some of it does rub off.

TB: Do you have Oscars ceremony? One where you got to nail the perfect joke, etc.?
BV: I wish I could say that, but it’s never one line that makes the show. The Billy Crystal/Jack Palance year lives in memory because we threw away so much of the script and added new stuff as we went along. We rewrote it as we went along. That was pretty successful. There was the year that Quincy Jones produced, Whoopi hosted, and everything seemed to work. A lot of the time, the things you remember about the show are the spontaneous moments, the emotional moments, the stuff that can’t be scripted. That’s what people take away from the show. I thought the Hugh Jackman show was terrific. What I loved was Bill Condon’s idea of bringing out five previous winners in the four acting categories and each one singled out one of the nominees. It was a great idea, but it went by the wayside as it would have to because you run out of Oscar-winners. You run out of people who are willing to actually do that! Even though there are like 84 winning actresses — or less, really, because there are so many multiples — but a lot are dead or disinterested. Which will be the name of my memoirs, Dead or Disinterested.

TB: Right, there aren’t many Eva Marie Saint-types left.
BV: Exactly right. Best Supporting Actor was impossible to cast. There just aren’t that many who are left who would make sense, who the audience would look upon with reverence.

TB: You mentioned Charles Durning earlier, but have you met many legends who were much funnier than you expected?
BV: That’s a great question. Bette Davis? She was funny, but I kind of expected that. I suppose Peter O’Toole because he’s so famous for doing classic roles and big serious things, but later in his career he started doing some really brilliant comic stuff like My Favorite Year where he made fun of himself and that tradition of hammy classical actors. But that was a role, and I didn’t know that offstage he still had that card to play. Offstage, he is an extremely droll storyteller. I expected that he would just be beautiful and stoic. Actually, Laurence Olivier was like that too. I met him late in his life, but though he got kind of quiet, he’d tell stories that were brutally funny and do subtle impressions of other people. That was really unexpected.

TB: Is it possible for you to be starstruck anymore?
BV: Oh, sure. All the big ones of the golden age are gone, pretty much, there are very few left. But I’m starstruck when I meet certain legends. I get can get dazzled when I meet somebody like Lady Gaga, who has created this thing for herself. She’s so smart and so talented. I think it’s more being in the presence of someone like her, you see the wheels turn. That’s pretty fabulous. Anybody who pulls themselves together in what my mother calls “get-ups” — when she walks into a room, it’s hard not to pay attention. I guess anytime you meet somebody you know is genuinely talented and not just artifice, there’s a quality of being starstruck.

TB: My dream is for Lady Gaga to play Laura Nyro in a biopic. She’s be perfect.
BV: Wow. That would be great because Laura Nyro was it for me. I play her music almost every day, and I only met her once for a minute. I was with Bette Midler, we were on tour, and Laura Nyro happened to be playing in town. We couldn’t see her because for some reason are shows were on the same night. So they arranged for a dinner the next night, and that was that. She was everything that I’d heard she was. She was crazy and mercurial, and there were mood swings, and then she was gentle and tender, and then she was manic and nuts. It was all in the course of one dinner. I realized that I was probably better off just listening to the music.

TB: Is there anybody whose jokes make you think, ”Damn, I wish I’d written that”?
BV: Sometimes you hear someone else and think, “They sound so coherent!” I hear myself and think, “You sound like you were grasping for air.” But Cary Grant never sat and looked at his movies — while everyone else said, ‘Cary Grant!’ — he would look at himself and think, my tie’s crooked, a spot of makeup is off or something. I’m always comparing myself to people who for some reason seem more collected when they talk. I used to be the press, so I understand the dynamic.

TB: Selfish question: You were in Mahogany with Diana Ross and Anthony Perkins. Any stories to tell us about the mysterious Tony P.?
BV: Well, I don’t have many Anthony Perkins stories to share because they’re so dark and sexual. [Laughs.] That was a strange movie because it was Diana Ross’ second movie and Berry Gordy fired the director, who was only Tony Richardson. You can imagine the set. We shot everything, then we had to reshoot everything because the picture had to get to Rome, which was prettier than Chicago. Things got rewritten and re-done. This one scene I had, we wrote ourselves. We kept looking down at a piece of paper in front of us, and that’s why we keep looking down — to make sure we knew the lines. The plot had changed. He was a part of that whole thing. He didn’t have too much to shoot in Chicago. I knew him later on when I moved to California because we were neighbors.

TB: Tell me you’ve had some amazing neighbors in L.A.
BV: Over the years, yeah. A bizarre collection. I had tons of people — Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland. That’s a couple no one ever talks about anymore. They almost got married. It was almost Runaway Bride! I was in a cute boy cul de sac once with Scott Wolf, Ian Ziering, Christian Slater, and uh, Paul Reiser. They were all my cute boy neighbors. I would think, “Would one of you mow the lawn with your shirt off? It would liven things up.” But no. No, they all had help. They all had third-worlders who did that. Now Ian Ziering’s a guest stripper or guest host at Chippendale’s in Vegas for a limited engagement, running the show. He’s close to 50, so he’s bulked up. He’s musclebound up there with those guys. He’s in unbelievably fabulous shape. Though he has a small daughter he carries around, so that’s maybe how he stays in shape. He’s a cool guy and a sweetheart.

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