Here's my latest ploy to exploit Star Wars: The Force Awakens for blog traffic

A shameless confession: Carrie Fisher still looks pretty smoking hot to me. Of course, my wife still gets all swoony when she sees Harrison Ford, so I guess it all averages out.

Star Wars: "Chewie, we're home!"

Must admit: After viewing the last few seconds of this trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, even I am super-geeked to see the movie. And remember -- I am old enough to have seen (and reviewed) the first Star Wars adventure during its original theatrical release many moons ago.

Blast from the past: Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in The Devil's Own

Not very long before the 1997 release of The Devil's Own -- the late Alan J. Pakula's thriller about an IRA terrorist (Brad Pitt) who hides out under an assumed name in the home of a too-trusting New York cop (Harrison Ford) -- Pitt was quoted by interviewers as being highly displeased by the way IRA activists were depicted in early rewrites of the script. (Midway through production, he denounced the movie as the  "most irresponsible bit of film making — if you can even call it that — that I've ever seen." He seemed to have changed his mind about the project by the time I caught up with him at the New York junket for Devil's Own. (At the very start of the video, we're caught briefly chatting about the long-delayed release of Hard Eight -- a.k.a. Sydney -- which starred his then-sweetheart Gwyneth Paltrow.)




But I have to say: Looking back at my interview with Ford at the same junket, it strikes me that he was still a tad unhappy about his co-star's going public with complaints. Come to think of it, Ford doesn't seem much happier about the then-upcoming re-release of Star Wars movies, does he?

Happy Birthday, Harrison Ford

Yeah, he turns 69 today. And, sure, he admits that his agent thought he might be too old to "get" Cowboys & Aliens. But you know what?  Jon Favreau told me that Harrison Ford can still do some serious ass-kicking. And I believe him.

The Death of Newspapers, Part II: The End of Free-Lancing

From California Progress Report, a very distressing story about the decline in demand for free-lance stories by writers already hit hard by newspaper closings and cutbacks. Money quote: "For me, the freelance life is not sustainable... I need a job of some kind to support my journalism habit." And this: “I used to get up to $750 per article and then I could turn around and market the same article to European magazines … Now I am lucky if I get $350 per article and of course, because of the Internet, I can no longer resell any article. On a daily basis I see offers from as little as $5 to $50 for articles! And worse, I know many writers who are submitting because they don’t have a lot of choice.”

Trust me: I feel their pain. Back in the mid '90s, for a year or two following the closing of The Houston Post, it wasn't uncommon for me to sell the same free-lance interview with a Harrison Ford or a Patrick Swayze to two or three different papers. Hell, I managed to market only slightly different versions of a Tom Hanks interview to five different papers -- including the Los Angeles Times -- around the time Apollo 13 was released. Those were the days, my friend, I thought they'd never end. But they did. (For more illustrations like the one above, check out the website of writer Stephen Beale.)

Blast from the past: Harrison Ford -- really, that's him! -- talks about Sabrina

As I've said before, here and elsewhere: I realize my original rave review was (and remains) a minority report, but I was moved and amused by Sydney Pollack's 1995 remake of Sabrina. And in this November '95 interview, I'm not at all ashamed to say as much to Harrison Ford, who gave one of his most affecting and under-rated performances as the movie's male lead. (A role originally played, in Billy Wilder's original version, by Humphrey Bogart.) And before you ask: Yes, that really is Harrison Ford hiding behind that mustache. He grew it while preparing to play an Irish-American cop in The Devil's Own -- but, obviously, shaved it off before actually filming that Alan J. Pakula thriller with Brad Pitt.

Yet another transparent attempt to draw readers to this site by posting something vaguely connected to that new Indiana Jones movie

Harrison Ford is the narrator of Lord of the Ants, a profile of ant expert E.O. Wilson. I'm sure it's only a coincidence that PBS is airing this NOVA documentary on Tuesday, May 20, just a couple days before the opening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. You know, that movie where Indy and his buddies are menaced by some really, really nasty ants.

'Indiana Jones' redux

From Lucasfilm Ltd.: "For the first time since 1989, Harrison Ford dons the familiar costume on Thursday, June 21, 2007, as the upcoming Indiana Jones adventure begins production under the direction of Steven Spielberg. The new Indiana Jones movie is set in the 1950s and stars Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, John Hurt, Ray Winstone and Jim Broadbent. The Lucasfilm Ltd. production will be released by Paramount Pictures worldwide on May 22, 2008. Photo by Steven Spielberg."