Alley Mills in bed with Patrick Duffy???

Her very proud husband, and my friend, Orson Bean, thought my readers might like to see his wife, my friend Alley, getting under the sheets (or maybe on TOP, considering this is a daytime soap opera?!:-) with Patrick Duffy on THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL! Things are steaming up between them and you're going to want to watch...AREN'T YOU?! I hope so! She's a terrific actress (Mom on THE WONDER YEARS and several other things, of course) and you all know Patrick Duffy, too! Just thought I'd mention it.........it's not OFTEN your friend makes love to another man ON TELEVISION and her husband emails to remind you to watch it all go down! (ummmm........never mind)
Z

Anybody living around ELLENVILLE, NY has a treat coming!

For those of you lucky enough to live in the area, my friend, the wonderful ORSON BEAN, will be appearing in Arthur Miller's play The Price in Ellenville, NY for three weeks at the Shadowland Theater from May 28 to June 14.

I don't know where Ellenville is, but a lot of you who read my blog are in New York and its surrounds and you really should go.... I sure wish we could all go! Please get tickets....This play is said to be as thought provoking and marvelous as Death of a Salesman. If you added Orson's talent to a play only nearly that good, and this is that good!, you would have QUITE an evening in store for you. GO!

Trust me, Orson Bean IS "Worth THE PRICE of admission"!! (ouch, I know, I couldn't resist)

Get Orson's book, too...
z

Orson Bean writes for Big Hollywood.......please give this a read and send what you can

The piece below the LA Times article below was just written by my friend, Orson Bean. He is the father-in-law of Andrew Breitbart and Andrew published this Saturday on the Big Hollywood part of his blog. You will want to check out Big Hollywood if you haven't already done so, he has some great articles there.

Sgt Curtis Massey was 41

From the Los Angeles Times, Thursday January 29th, 2009:

2 DIE IN HEAD-ON COLLISION

A Culver City police officer and a Van Nuys man were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision that closed several lanes of the 10 freeway for hours during the morning commute.

Sgt. Curtis Massey, 41, was driving east on his way to work when he was struck about 5 a.m. just west of National Boulevard by a silver Toyota Camry traveling the wrong way, said Officer Miguel Luevano of the California Highway Patrol. Massey’s unmarked police car, a four-door Dodge Charger, was engulfed in flames.

No one else was hurt and the CHP is investigating. Pete Demetriou, a radio reporter for KFWB-AM (980) was driving to work around 4:55 a.m. on the eastbound 10, when he saw a car, driven by the Van Nuys man, coming toward him.

“You’re used to seeing headlights coming at you, but you assume they’re on the other side,” he said. “At about 200 yards I realized he was coming in my lane.” Demetroiu said he called police after the car passed him traveling about 65 mph. All eastbound lanes and two westbound lanes of the 10 were closed at the 405 freeway until about 1 p.m.

Massey, who is survived by a wife and three young children, was a 17-year veteran of the police department and was most recently assigned to the juvenile detective bureau.

Police Chief Don Pedersen told reporters that Massey dedicated much of his free time to working with at risk-teens and every year volunteered for the Santa sleigh, a holiday event in which officers escort Santa Claus around the city and distribute presents to children.

“He was a friend and trusted colleague who could always be counted on to be the first one to volunteer for an assignment,” Pedersen said of Massey, who was a Medal of Valor recipient. “The community today has lost a dedicated police sergeant.”

Megan Gallagher, 28, a former community service officer who worked with the department for five years, was shocked when she heard the news about Massey, a colleague who had served as her mentor.

“He was someone I looked up to and someone I trusted at the station. Being one of the few females there, it’s kind of hard to talk to everybody,” she said. “When I started there, we have to get our uniforms and he offered up his jacket so I didn’t have to spend the money. He made my first days there comfortable. He was an automatic friend from Day One.”

On behalf of Massey’s family, the department has set up the Sgt. Curtis Massey Memorial Fund. Donations can be sent to Culver City Employees Federal Credit Union, 9770 Culver Blvd. Culver City CA 90232.

On the morning of the accident, I had a ten a.m. audition at Culver Studios at the junction of Washington Blvd. and Culver Blvd. for a chance to play Meryl Streep’s psychiatrist in a Nancy Meyers movie. My wife, the actress Alley Mills, had a ten a.m. rehearsal call at her soap opera, “The Bold and the Beautiful,” at CBS Television City, Fairfax and Beverly in Hollywood. We live on the west side in Venice.

At 8:45, I turned on 1070 News Radio to hear the traffic report. All lanes closed on the 10, it said, and as a result, eastbound traffic on Venice Blvd. and Washington Blvd. was virtually at a stand-still. Both of us panicked. “Damn it,” I muttered, reminding myself of Jack Bauer on “24.” “One more inconvenience in Los Angeles.”

We both flew out of the house. I shark-drove side streets and managed to get to my audition only ten minutes late. Alley was tardy by three quarters of an hour. So was everyone else in the cast. And as the day went on, we heard stories of actors, directors and crew people in the same fix all over the city. I remember thinking, “It’s like a movie, like ‘Crash,’ or something. One incident happens and dozens of lives are affected.”

The next day, I looked in the paper to find out what had occurred that had driven me so nuts. The small piece on the inside of the California section I’ve re-printed above was what I found. When I read it I remembered that Alley, when she’d heard that the cops were distributing toys for kids, had gone to the toy store run by a Vietnamese couple next to the old Venice Fox Theater and bought three brand new bicycles. She’d loaded them into our Ford van and driven them over to the station on Culver Blvd. It was a nice black cop who thanked her for them, she said, so I guess it wasn’t Curtis Massey.

Later that morning I got a call from my daughter Susie Breitbart, Andrew’s wife and the mother of their four young kids. “Dad,” she asked me, “do you remember years ago a police officer stopped you for speeding and recognized you from TV and said, ‘You’re Susie Bean’s father; I went to Pali High with her. I can’t give you a ticket,’ and he let you go?”

“Sure I do,” I said.

“Well, that was my friend Curt from Pali. He’s the officer who was killed in that terrible accident on the 10 yesterday. He was a really good guy,” she said.

Later on that Thursday, Alley got a call from a friend of hers from Bible study. The cop’s wife’s best friend, it turns out, is in her class. Six degrees…

An extraordinary human being is wiped off the face of the earth in a split second and all over town we experience it as just one more annoyance in L.A.

I just sent off a good sized check. Perhaps you’ll do the same

Z: Orson asked me to publish this and ask for financial help for the family, at the address above in bold. Thanks, if you can help this family.

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"An Emptiness Only The Holy Spirit Can Fill"

Orson Bean's written a wonderful piece (title above) for Breitbart's BIG HOLLYWOOD.
Take a look! And enjoy................Z

WHERE ARE THE CINEMA HEROES TODAY? By Orson Bean

I think you will agree with Orson...this is a great read and tons to ponder:

The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape. Of course, this was true of everyone back in the thirties. Forgetting for an hour or two cost a dime. But the movies represented a lot more than escape to me. They represented moral guidance. What I learned at home was despair and hopelessness. What I learned at the pictures was don’t give up the ship, we have only begun to fight, it’s always darkest before the dawn.

Tom Edison (Spencer Tracy) fought against all odds to invent the light bulb (and just about everything else). Young Tom Edison (Mickey Rooney) fought to grow up to be that great inventor. Don Ameche was Alexander Graham Bell who struggled to invent the telephone (and ultimately got to say, “Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you”). Edward G. Robinson played Dr. Ehrlich, whose magic bullet cured syphilis. Clark Gable crossed the wide Missouri.

Greer Garson played Marie Curie who discovered radium. Paul Muni was the great Louis Pasteur, who revolutionized medicine by proving the existence of germs. Jimmy Stewart filibustered in Washington and soloed across the Atlantic. These were the movies I saw and when they were over, I would emerge from the theater into the afternoon sun, saying to myself, “Yes, I can. If they can do it, so can I.”

I truly believe that these pictures saved me, gave me the inspiration to overcome what I was going through at home and do whatever was necessary to make a life for myself.

The movie moguls who churned out these pictures were immigrants. They understood what made America great, what set it apart. They loved their new country. If they didn’t consciously set out to make movies glorifying the American dream, it never really occurred to them not to do so. Belief in it was as much a part of their psyches as non-belief in it is a part of the psyches of today’s filmmakers. Where are the cinema heroes today, the characters who refuse to surrender, who just won’t give up? Not in Hollywood pictures.

You think audiences aren’t hungry for heroes? There’s a little movie out there called Slumdog Millionaire, which almost didn’t get released and is now being touted for best picture. It takes place in India and tells the story of a young man who overcomes impossible odds to succeed. People are lining up to see it. Why aren’t the many genuinely talented folks in Hollywood making pictures like that? You’d think that simple greed would tempt them to do so. Cecil B. DeMille worshipped the almighty buck.

The truth is they’ve forgotten how. They went to college and were taught that their country is wrong, that the system stinks, that to be a hero is to be a sucker fighting for a lie. Like Louis B. Meyer and Sam Warner before them, they want to make picures that have meaning. But their “meaning” is very different from that of the movie makers of my boyhood. When they churn out what’s in their hearts (the depressing view of life as they actually see it), no-one buys a ticket. Then, because they have to make a living, they revert to meaningless special effect extravaganzas and tell themselves there’s no market for “serious” pictures.

There are a few rays of hope out here in LaLa land. Some raunchy comedies like 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN, SUPER BAD and KNOCKED UP come with the requisite number of bodily function jokes but also wear surprisingly sweet hearts on their sleeves. Mainly, though, it’s pyrotechnics and space travel. I see where they’re planning a new high tech version of Flash Gordon. I liked it better when you could see the wire holding up the rocket ship.

My son-in-law, Andrew Breitbart is premiering a new blogsite called BIG HOLLYWOOD, which deals with the questions of why Tinseltown is the way it is. He has asked me to contribute to it from time to time, which I am happy to do. I remember the glory days of film making. I used to go to the movies a lot.

Not so much, anymore.

Z: I loved this article by Orson and wanted you to read it. Please check out Andrew Breitbart's new BIG HOLLYWOOD.. This new Blog is dedicated to Hollywood and conservative values (or the lack thereof)... This Blog's a week old and there are already some very good pieces there. I urge you to check it out from time to time!

z