The paper reprints several of Heston's epistles, including this one about O.J. Simpson trial jester Brian "Kato" Kaelin:

(Via LA Observed)

The programming announcement arrived on the heels of the news that Mr. Heston died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. at the age of 84. Long-time TCM host Robert Osbourne is slated to host, but we're hoping Rose McGowan will take some time from her The Essentials duties. TCM's lineup includes an interview and some of his less-touted films like The Buccaneer, Major Dundee, and The Hawaiians. Ben-Hur will play at 9 p.m. But, alas, no The Omega Man.

The decision of the court will either uphold or strike down the Washington, D.C. ban on handguns, which was passed in 1976 and has become a rallying point for the gun-rights organizations and gun-control advocates alike. Here's McCain's statement:

Dante Camara (not Alighieri) is the maître d’ at A Voce (which means “word of mouth”), a new Italian restaurant near Madison Square Park. The team behind this venture is impressive. Chef Andrew Carmellini cooked for six years at Café Boulud, where he earned a Michelin star and two James Beard awards (including being named best chef in the city last year). The sommelier, Olivier Flosse, is also from Café Boulud, as is Mr. Camara. And the pastry chef, April Robinson, worked at Alain Ducasse and Café Gray.

A Voce is on the ground floor of an office building on 26th Street. It’s a very noisy place because it’s all hard surfaces—or as one friend put it, “The only soft surface here is us.” The dining room, done up in chocolate and vanilla with stainless steel, is minimally decorated in a modern, corporate style, with a maple floor, moss-green, leather-topped tables and swiveling leather Eames chairs. It feels like a staff cafeteria for the upper echelon.

Picture windows down one side of the room offer a view onto the street where, come summer, tables will be set out on a piazza landscaped with lemon trees and plants in tubs. The additional seating, enough for 80 to 100, should be a saving grace for A Voce.

Lining one wall of the L-shaped dining room is an art installation, backlit with a pink glow, constructed out of more than a dozen towers of Lincoln Log–like blocks. A blue painting that looks like a computer screensaver decorates another wall.

At our request, Dante sat us in a corner where it was somewhat quieter than the main section. But the overhead lighting here was bright enough for interrogation. It couldn’t be turned down, he explained apologetically, because it was controlled by a computer. “The lights don’t dim until 10 o’clock.”

Why?

We turned our attention to the wine list. It’s superb, ranging in price from $18 a bottle to $9,500 for a bottle of 1947 Pomerol for that special occasion. Half the bottles are Italian; the rest are from France and America. Forty percent are less than $80. The waiters, dressed in bright blue shirts, are as enthusiastic, confident, knowledgeable and interested a group as I’ve come across in a while.

Mr. Carmellini cooked mainly French food at Café Boulud, but he’s not new to Italian cuisine. He worked for two years at San Domenico and spent a year studying in Italy. At A Voce, he’s serving straightforward, rustic Italian dishes such as tripe, braised lamb shank, grilled pork chop and chicken cacciatora. There are also novelties, like duck meatballs with dried cherry sauce and ramps with spaghetti. The menu is printed daily and reflects the seasonal produce available at the market.

If you go to the Union Square greenmarket these days, you’ll see chefs lining up to buy ramps—small wild leeks that are piled up in gritty heaps. These ramps, to paraphrase P.G. Wodehouse, cause the sap to rise in a chef’s veins. They have a subtle, garlicky taste, and Mr. Carmellini tosses them with strips of speck in a bowl of spaghetti coated with a creamy sauce of Parmesan and olive oil. This dish couldn’t be simpler or more delicious.

The duck meatballs are on the level of some of the fancier stuff Mr. Carmellini turned out at Café Boulud. They’re soft and satiny, mixed with foie gras and pork, and served on puréed celery with a dark cherry sauce. Quail saltimbocca is so tender under its crisp skin you don’t need the steak knife that’s offered. It’s rare, on a bed of lentils, with a rich fig sauce. Duck glazed with fennel and honey is sliced in meaty, pink pieces and garnished with duck sausage, chopped sugar snap peas and a bracing olive sauce.

Much of the food at A Voce is good without knocking your socks off. Grilled octopus was tender and nicely charred, with peperonata, tomatoes, lemon and tiny pieces of chorizo. Steak tartare is seasoned with truffle oil and mixed with walnuts. It arrives Italian-style, with Parmesan and arugula, and it was pleasant but bland. The squid-ink risotto, topped with a cuttlefish stuffed with shrimp, was bland too, although perfectly cooked. But tripe with borlotti beans and spring vegetables was excellent, light and clean-tasting. I also liked the rigatoni with broccoli rabe, chickpeas and tiny, spicy pork meatballs in a subtle tomato sauce.

Halfway through dinner, the lights dimmed. I checked my watch: 10 o’clock. But by now the restaurant was so noisy we had to shout to make ourselves heard.

One of my friends said he’d once sat next to Charlton Heston in a Hollywood restaurant. “When he spoke,” my friend said, “his voice sounded as though the sky had opened and the tablets had been given to Moses.”

A Charlton Heston voice is required here.

Desserts are uneven. A ring of pineapple, topped with ice cream, is far too sweet. Lemon sorbet, on the other hand, is pleasantly tart. Tiramisu, served in a brandy snifter and sprinkled with shavings of chocolate, is cloyingly sugary and doused with too much liquor. Chocolate cake isn’t the molten kind but a hearty sponge, subtly flavored with amaretto.

At A Voce, Mr. Carmellini is serving some very good food, but I won’t come back until I can eat outside under the lemon trees, and have a conversation sotto voce.

This is the fourth film by Paul Thomas Anderson, the pretentious, long-winded writer-director who brought us the 12-inch plastic penis in Boogie Nights and the apocalyptic rain of frogs that destroyed the San Fernando Valley in the numbing Magnolia . His films consist of pointless ideas strung together with technically innovative camera tricks, neither of which contribute to any kind of coherent narrative. A small band of critics respond with breathy accolades. I love the quote whore who calls Punch-Drunk Love "a toothless, frothy margarita of a film." I mean, do they get paid for this stuff or what?

We are back in the streets where Boogie Nights and Magnolia are probably still unfolding. This time, the camera focuses on another card-carrying California neurotic (it's all those mung bean sprouts they eat out there, you know) named Barry, a sub-mental mook who sells retail merchandise from a storage warehouse. Barry has seven sisters who all look exactly alike and interrupt his day trying to set him up with girls. Barry is so inarticulate, unloved, emotionally impacted and low in self-esteem that he wanders through supermarkets reading labels without knowing what he's looking for in the first place. When this meek, oddball creature finds himself victimized by a phone-sex sting that first extorts money from his credit card, then dispatches a trio of goons to beat him up and wreck his life, Barry finally turns violent in a series of dopey explosions that are supposed to make you cheer. But in the director's typical fashion, more time is spent on the way he stocks up on instant pudding to take advantage of a special offer for frequent-flyer miles. Out of nowhere, a pretty but equally weird girlfriend materializes in the form of Emily Watson, and there's a side trip to Hawaii. Everything is intercut with the kind of color bars TV networks use for test patterns. None of this makes any sense. Nor, I presume, is it supposed to. The film exists primarily to show off the director's technical wizardry, and the freaky charm of a boring comedian whose perverse popularity eludes me completely.

Adam Sandler's blank stares and self-aware detachment lack the engagement, warmth and innocence in the face of dissolution that the role requires. A certain ennui sets in fast-partly a result of the contrived and unfunny material, partly a result of Mr. Sandler's monotonous voice, which sounds like the dead dial tone you get when you try to phone Afghanistan. Mr. Anderson says he wrote this film specifically for the star because he's such a big fan. How odd that a tribute to a wildly theatrical presence should turn out so dull and prosaic. When I came out of the screening of Punch-Drunk Love at the Toronto Film Festival, a small group of critics stood around scratching their heads. One dismissed the film as "moronic kid's stuff." Another defended it in a broader context because "it respects the obligation to fill every inch of the screen from wall to wall." Uh, yeah. But it depends on what you fill it with .

Moore Says: Guns-Bad!

In the disappointingly uneven documentary Bowling for Columbine , rabbity rabble-rouser Michael ( Roger & Me ) Moore, looking more like Yosemite Sam than ever, is up to his whiskers again in knee-jerk liberalism, examining America's neurotic obsession with firearms. His targets are easy, and he plays them too often for laughs. As Mr. Moore moves from a propaganda film for the National Rifle Association to a bank that offers a free gun with each new account, the irony is instant. With 500 guns in the bank's vaults, for instance, Mr. Moore's first question to the bewildered bank executive is: "Don't you think it's a little dangerous hanging out with guns in a bank?" There's more where that came from.

Challenging the grass-roots philosophy that anyone without a gun is a derelict American, all Mr. Moore has to do is roam around his native state of Michigan (also home to Charlton Heston and, at times, Timothy McVeigh) to find children raised on the bang-bang of a TV set and women who pack guns in their panty hose. He moves on, to a town in Utah where every member of the community board is required by law to carry a loaded gun. In Colorado, he extracts devastating surveillance-camera footage of the shootings, violence and panic from the April 20, 1999, massacre at Columbine High School, pointing out that all of the weapons that killed the students, teachers and finally the suicidal mini-marauders themselves were purchased at the local Kmart. Then it's on to Canada, a peaceful world one hour away by plane from the site of the former World Trade Center, where the crime rate is surprisingly low (America's gun-related deaths outnumber Canada's by an astounding 11,000 to 165 per year), there's a great system of education, culture and health care, nobody locks their doors, and everybody thinks Americans are screwballs. From sharks to anthrax to diet warnings and food scares, America, according to Moore, is afraid of everything-and the frenzied media is always on the case, fueling the paranoia. I'm not sure what this has to do with the subject of gun control, but after all the miles, interviews, statistics and research, Moore arrives at one conclusion: America is fucked!

Tackling myriad subjects simultaneously, the film is like exploding buckshot. Hypocrisy in the American military is a foregone conclusion; the drumbeat of terror instilled by the media, as annoying as it is strident, keeps the gun industry profitable. We know that already. So what is the point of this movie? Guns are bad? We know that, too. Mr. Moore aims at so many targets and tilts at so many windmills that his arguments lose persuasion. He tells us that on the day of the Columbine shootings, the U.S. dropped more bombs in Kosovo than any other single day of bombing in history. I'm not sure I get the connection. The polemic widens. The U.S., he says, trained Osama bin Laden to kill the Soviets, and the U.S. helped to enable Saddam Hussein's reign of terror and now wants to kill him-never mind the fact that the U.S. has already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children in Iraq, as well as Chile, Colombia and Southeast Asia. As the irrelevant facts multiply, the focus jumps all over the map and the point of the movie blurs. Any movie in which freaked-out rock singer Marilyn Manson makes more practical sense than everyone else has obviously been tweaked in the editing room, while poor old frazzled Charlton Heston comes off looking senile. I never thought I'd live to see the day when I found myself siding with Moses, but Mr. Moore uses gonzo tactics to lie his way into the gates of Mr. Heston's home, refuses to vacate the premises, then corners and bullies his subject into submission through the same fear he accuses him of instilling in others. I'm an advocate for gun control, but I found myself disappointed that Mr. Heston didn't pull out a loaded gun and say, "Now you know why I consider it a Constitutional right to protect my own property." In any case, Mr. Heston's scattered, bumbling confusion makes Mr. Moore's relentless insults doubly irritating, now that we know the right-wing gun lobbyist was already suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's at the time of the inquisition.

Acting like a pit bull, Mr. Moore makes you raise an eyebrow about his own liberal manifesto. (He's a member of the National Rifle Association himself, just like Mr. Heston.) Sorting through the ideological debris, you realize that Mr. Moore's case for disarming America has too much anger and not enough insight, and you begin to question his motives. A grand act of patriotic idealism begins to smell like a craving for controversial self-promotion thinly masked as crusading journalism. In Bowling for Columbine , Mr. Moore's famous sense of humor is dragging. He's just mad at everybody.

The Cabaret Cure

What with the threat of war, the erosion of consumer confidence that is bankrupting us all, and the fate of Martha Stewart, nothing distracts like music. At the Algonquin's fabled Oak Room, I heartily invite you to check out Made for the Movies , a Hollywood songbook of the wonderful take-home tunes that quickened the pulse of moviegoers in the golden age of cinema. This is the critically acclaimed revue that was cut short a year ago by the events of 9/11. Happily, its spirit-lifting vigor and savvy are just as exhilarating the second time around. The polished cast-pianist-singer Eric Comstock, accomplished jazz pianist-vocalist Dena DeRose, and jovial blues and jazz stylist Bill Henderson-is both diverse and homogenous. Everyone gets a chance to shine in duets, solos and three-part harmonies. The three all-time-great title themes from the MGM music department- "Invitation" and "Green Dolphin Street," both by the genius Bronislau Kaper, and "The Bad and the Beautiful," by David Raksin-are showcased brilliantly in a variety of moods and tempos. Ms. DeRose's lightly sugared "Lover" and Mr. Henderson's raspy, loping and lazily amusing rendition of Johnny Mercer's "I'm an Old Cowhand" are the highlights in an eclectic collection that includes songs by Burton Lane, Frank Loesser, Rodgers & Hart, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mandel and Hoagy Carmichael. Mr. Henderson stops the show with a slow, sliding arrangement of "Hooray for Hollywood" that was copied almost bar for bar from Doris Day's famous recording of the same song. The three-part a capella barbershop harmony on "You'll Never Know" would make Alice Faye smile. Ms. DeRose demonstrates her jazz fluidity on a cool and mellow interpretation of Dorothy Parker's haunting lyrics to "I Wished on the Moon," and Mr. Comstock belies his early training as a saloon performer with a hip, daring and vocally decisive approach to "Laura" that catapults him from promising boy singer to confident and dynamic male crooner. The cabaret doctors will cure what ails you, through Oct. 19, and you don't even need a prescription. All you have to bring is some sophistication; Comstock, DeRose and Henderson will do the rest.

Upcoming Tributes

Two memorial services you should know about: The life and songs of Roy Kral, the innovative jazz pianist and one half of the legendary husband-and-wife vocal team of Jackie & Roy, will be celebrated at St. Peter's Church in the Citicorp Building on Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. The all-star lineup of performers includes George Shearing, Mark Murphy, Helen Merrill, Bill Charlap, Marian McPartland and Phil Woods.

Oscar-winners Kim Hunter and Rod Steiger will both be honored in a dual tribute on Oct. 11 at 2 p.m. at the Actors Studio on West 44th Street. The partial list of luminaries scheduled to share stories and reminiscences of these two theatrical giants and re-create scenes from famous plays already forms a Who's Who in American film, theater and television. Ms. Hunter lived above the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village, which will open its doors on Monday, Oct. 14, at 6 p.m. for another memorial celebration of her career. These events are open to the public, but seating is limited, so plan ahead.

John Scherlis, a zoologist, rose from the audience to issue a challenge to Hollywood.

"All the best data show that the great apes are headed for

extinction," he said. "Possibly in just 20 years. Best case, 100-but that will

only be isolated pockets of apes who happen to be in

protected areas where research is going on. Meanwhile, $80 million is spent on

a movie like Mighty Joe Young that

says nothing about the 600 real mountain gorillas on earth-when $15 million

could set up a permanent endowment for their protection. And now, again, $100

million on Planet of the Apes , when

it appears that earth is about to become the Planet of the Ape, where the only

ape is us.

"Isn't there a way for the great apes to have their story

told? To let real-world issues piggyback in some way on the hype? There's

product placement-what about issue placement?"

Mr. Scherlis' questions nagged at me (we were boyhood

friends, growing up in Baltimore),

and I went to Planet of the Apes in a

zoological frame of mind.

The most obvious thing about the film is that it fully

deserves its dismal reviews. It's about nothing. Poorly written and thinly

plotted, it is in essence a war movie in which a group of wild humans is

captured and enslaved by apes, then escape and wage a liberation struggle.

There's lots of action and little character. Mark Wahlberg is wasted. The surprise

ending is silly and unearned.

Compare the new Planet

of the Apes to the Charlton Heston version and it's even more dismaying.

The original had a prideful character (Mr. Heston) in the lead, whose

humiliations made for wrenching drama. The moral

climax came when Mr. Heston saw that a fellow astronaut had been surgically

rendered an automaton. The film is disturbing, caught up in issues of

intolerance and racism.

It was made in the late

60's, when somehow the expectation was that an entertainment could be about

something real.

Jump cut to 2001, and an era of global companies focused on

international markets, and the new Planet

of the Apes is about nothing but Tim Burton's ability to create an exotic

world. I can't remember a thoughtful moment in the picture. (Right-wing nuts

used to say that globalism would cost us our sovereignty, and in this respect

they're being proven right: Our media grow less and less pointed as they're

pitched not to an elite people schooled in 200 years of democracy, but to a

world audience brought up on authoritarian newspeak.)

As for the extinction issue-well, in one scene, Mark

Wahlberg does mutter that apes were wiped off the planet Earth. But it's an

aside. ("It's a cavalier statement," says Steve Baer, of the Coalition to End

Primate Experimentation. "The atrocities enacted on the humans don't begin to

approximate the atrocities we practice on non-human apes.") It doesn't really

get at the issue.

Some of the apes in the film seem to be based on orangutans,

because they're orange.

"New research shows that it's entirely possible that

orangutans will be extinct within 10 years," said Josh Ginsberg, director of

the Asia program for the Wildlife Conservation Society,

at the Bronx Zoo. "I don't think people get that we are about to exterminate

one of our closest relatives on the earth. We're not shipping them off to

another planet, we're killing them right here,"

Orangutans live chiefly in Indonesia

and depend on large trees in forests for food and shelter. Their habitat is

being overtaken by loggers and palm-oil plantations so that we can have exotic

hardwoods and cosmetics.

The great apes in Africa are also on

a steep curve.

"Gorillas and chimps are facing tremendous pressure from the

expansion of all kinds of commercial exploitation," said Tony Rose of the

Gorilla Foundation. "The incursion of logging roads and mining roads and

pipelines has given people access to forests they could never reach before with

trucks, guns and bullets."

Here the issue is one that has only gained serious attention

in the last three years: the bushmeat trade-illegally hunted meat from wild

animals. Expanding human populations are moving into areas where they've never

been before in the Congo Basin.

They need food. Poaching numbers may be as high as 6,000 to 8,000 apes a year.

With experts putting the ape population at 100,000 chimps and 100,000 gorillas,

they have 30 years at the outside, and the crisis will only deepen if it's not

addressed. (For more information, check out the Web sites www.bushmeat.org and

www.4apes.com.)

"Virtually every species of animal that is visible to the

naked eye in African forests is threatened by the bushmeat trade," John

Scherlis said. "More elephants are killed in Central Africa

for their meat now than their ivory. Apes are more vulnerable because of their

low reproductive rate and the consequences to such a social animal of losing

individuals."

Mr. Scherlis has spent years in Africa,

and last year he helped to get great apes on the American agenda. The Great Ape

Conservation Act was passed by Congress last November. Jane Goodall showed up

on Capitol Hill to explain the issue in her intense, soft-spoken way. The bill

drew bipartisan support and was authorized at $5 million.

So far, Congress has only appropriated $750,000 for the apes.

The money is to go in small contracts to projects that work on the ground in Africa

(where the real heroes operate-people like Eugene Rutagarama in Rwanda,

who kept the mountain-gorilla conservation program alive through the genocidal

wars there).

But imagine if Twentieth Century Fox had done what Mr.

Scherlis suggested this summer and put some energy into the plight of the real

creatures from which it was making such great art. At the very least, it could

have fostered public pressure to fund GACA at its ceiling of $5 million in

public money. Or set up a Planet of the

Apes matching fund. Or put together a short of Mark Wahlberg with Jane

Goodall talking about the real apes. What if such a promotion had been tacked

on to the end of the film?

"Attention on these animals is entirely lacking," said Josh

Ginsberg. "One could have woven a really wonderful conservation message through

the film. Why were they angry at humans? Well, why not? The kernel of their

hatred was they were being eaten by men …. "

O.K., nobody wants wildlife guys at the Bronx Zoo dictating

the plots of movies.

But Planet of the Apes

shows what a blind alley the culture has wandered into. Is there any connection

between our pleasure and obligation, between making money and idealism? The first

Planet of the Apes actually thought

so. But now we're globalized, and markets stop our tongues. Everyone believes

in the rain forest-but look who's buying sport-utility vehicles: urban liberals

who always vote environment. (Lately one public radio reporter claimed to have

seen Joni Mitchell, of all people, driving an S.U.V. in Los

Angeles.)

It is only to be expected that a highly accomplished Hollywood

director makes a big movie about apes that is a piece of idiocy.

"There's a dissociation," says Mr.

Scherlis. "You see the nymphet from Planet

of the Apes [Estella Warren] offering a chimp a baby bottle on the cover of

Talk magazine [August], or Mark

Wahlberg holding a chimp on the cover of Premiere

[July], and there's not a word about the real life of these animals. They're

just a prop."

We won't even talk here about the unhappy lives of chimps

that are used in the entertainment business. This kind of stuff makes me

cynical, but John Scherlis is engaged, and he's optimistic.

When African hunters are shown videos that demonstrate the

family structure of apes and the consequences of killing them, scales fall from

their eyes, he said. "They say, 'I'm not going to do that anymore.'"

Americans need education just as badly, and Mr. Scherlis is

something of a connector, to use a pop-psych term. He's courtly, passionate and

charming. He has integrity as a conservationist (several years in the bush in Tanzania,

along the way suffering many illnesses and losing some sight in one eye) and is

media-savvy; he knows how to use the word "mega-fauna" in a sentence.

"We seem to be ambivalent about apes," he said. "Perhaps

because we're apes, and they remind us of ourselves. But they tend to get left

out of the vision of many philanthropists who support the charismatic mega-fauna-elephants,

rhinos, tigers, pandas, whales."

Last year, Mr. Scherlis spent weeks on end working to

connect the conservationist community to the political one in Washington.

For instance, he got the only scientific report with hard data on ape

extinction from one colleague and helped convert it into language that

Congressmen could understand.

"I'm only acting on something that I care about," he said.

"I don't want this to be a world where apes are extinct. You look in their eyes

and you know these are fellow beings. I don't want our grandchildren to talk

about apes and elephants as if they're talking about dinosaurs."

I found myself desolated by seeing Planet of the Apes , but Mr. Scherlis still has hopes for the media.

"The challenge is telling the story right. How do you tell

it so that it works?" he said. "It certainly won't happen if we feel anything

other than that it will."

Ernest Borgnine was at Bravo Gianni, a Italian restaurant on East 63rd Street, where you can always get a table and there's always someone there like Anthony Quinn, Ben Gazzara, Don King or, once upon a time, John Gotti.

The 82-year-old actor was just back from Milwaukee, where since 1972 he has served as the head clown at the Great Circus Parade. Now he was wearing a blue serge Brioni jacket, regal-looking Versace tie and black glasses. He'd just consumed a meal of antipasto, roast potatoes, mushrooms with garlic, mixed fried fish, clams, mussels, fried oysters, soft shell crab and a little white wine. A bowl of pasta was on the way.

"My mother was the one who said to me, when I first came home from the Navy and I was going around looking for work and one day I came home rather disgusted and disgruntled, she said, 'What's the matter, Ernie?' And I said, 'Mom, for two cents I'd go back in the Navy and do my other 10 years and get a pension–at least I'll have something coming.' And out of the clear blue sky she said, 'Have you ever thought about becoming an actor?' And I looked up and I said, 'Mom, that's what I'm going to be.' I was 28 years old, having done 10 years in the Navy. And 10 years later I had an Academy Award–ha-ha-ha!"

He won it for Marty in 1956.

"You know, I saw the picture not too long ago and, by golly, it stands up. I'm very happy for that."

His fifth wife, whom he married in 1972, came over. Tova Borgnine, possibly in her late 50's, is the Norwegian-born chief executive of Tova Corporation, a cosmetics company, and author of the book Being Happily Married Forever , in which she advises, "He's the lion, king of the jungle: Let him be the leader of your pack." She was wearing a sea green Armani suit and a heart necklace.

"She's been honored with the Fifi," Mr. Borgnine said, "which is the highest award you can possibly get in perfumes, believe it or not."

They met on a blind date in 1972.

"He was going through a terrible divorce," Mrs. Borgnine said. "I didn't know it. But the minute I met him, saw him, I fell in love with him, and that was 26 years ago. I know this is so anti what 1999 is about, but I can tell you that I have more love, more respect, and I would do anything for him."

"And she does," he said. "I've had that feeling all along. The idea is that it was such a terrible time going through my last divorce that I said to myself, 'I quit women. I quit because I've been through four terrible marriages.' I never got married to get divorced, I got married because I'm a family man and I love my family–I want kids around me and everything else, but it just didn't seem to be my thing. So I said to hell with women. I said, as a matter of fact, I'm going to take up with men! That's when Marty Allen, my good buddy, said, 'Look, you gotta come to my birthday party and bring a girl.' I said, 'Are you kidding? I wouldn't come with a woman for nothing.' He said, 'No, no, no.' He said, 'Listen, you've been married so many times to people who are your boss, you need a woman.' I said, 'Yeah, where do you find 'em?' He said, 'We've got one for you. I want you to pick her up at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Bring her over to Chasen's.' I said, 'O.K.' And I went over and … I was sitting there alone and suddenly this redhead walked through the door and I looked at her and something happened. From then on, we forgot everybody around us. Didn't we, honey? We forgot everybody around us. That night, I took her home–and of course that's another story unto itself."

His wife took up the tale.

"At that time, they still had elevator operators. So now I'm inside the elevator, he's outside, we're shaking hands."

"À la Marty ," he said. "I said, 'We're shaking hands à la Marty ,' right? Ha-ha-ha!"

"Ernie is the best audience. With Ernie, when he sees the flag, he gets emotional. When he sees a sunset, he explains it, and wants you to appreciate it."

"I want to tell you something," Mr. Borgnine said. "You gotta listen to this. You know, I have just written the story of my life, from the time that I was born to the time that I was in the Navy, the time I got started in show business, and everything else. And I have entitled it"–a woman in a straw hat, Francine Farkas, came over to say how beautiful Mrs. Borgnine was–"after a thing that actually happened to me while I was walking up 10th Avenue one day bemoaning my fate, saying, 'Why did you ever become an actor? Why?' I mean, hell, I could act rings around Charlton Heston any time, you know that. This was way back in 1951, '52, '53. I wasn't working, you know what I mean? You could only appear once a week on television because people said, 'Oh, if you're seen too many times, they get disgusted with you, you know?' And I'm saying 'Why?' Charlton Heston was appearing every day. So were other people, but not me because, hey, I wasn't well known. And suddenly, coming up that 10th Avenue, I smelled hot chestnuts, and it reminded me of my mother, who used to put those chestnuts on the stove after having cut them a little bit, and you smelled all this beautiful chestnut smell in the house and it permeated all the way through, and I walked a little closer, not to buy any, because I didn't even have any money to buy a chestnut, but just to smell, because of the remembrance. And I walked up closer and I saw a sign on this vendor's cart that became my philosophy of life. And the title of my book which nobody wants to buy now because they said, 'Well, we got so many books already about people's lives, it doesn't amount to anything.' But the title is to be: I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, I Just Want to Keep My Nuts Warm."

– George Gurley

Brian Lane on Directing

We spoke with noted director Brian Lane, whose films include Assassins Again , Today and The Fault . His latest film is Awkward Hill . He is staying at the Osgood Hotel on East 47th Street.

Q. What is Awkward Hill ?

A. Awkward Hill is a coming-of-age story about two peasants in northern California. All day, they work the land and in the evening they play the lute.

Q. They both play the lute?

A. No. You're right. One plays the lute. Paul is his name. The other one sings. He invents songs about his environment. Sheep. The local farmers. The smell of grapes. Then a cataclysm happens and their lives change.

Q. What is the cataclysm?

A. I can't tell you.

Q. Please.

A. No. It must remain a secret. Every film has a secret. Even a naval training film. Sometimes I'll be watching a movie which I believe has no secrets, then I'll notice a name in the credits that surprises me–a name like Bruno Helzog. That name is the secret of the film.

Q. How do you decide to make a certain movie?

A. First I decide not to make a movie. When I finished my last movie, I spend a month trying not to make movies. I go to bodegas every day–those little corner stores–and stare at cans of soup and flypaper and plastic forks. For some reason, they don't seem to mind someone standing there for hours. Sometimes I buy a small bottle of aspirin. At the end of the month, I suddenly want to make another movie.

Q. Do you have a theory of directing?

A. All my movies are based on the New Testament. Now and don't get me wrong, I'm not a believing Christian. One day, I was in a hotel in Paris and I began reading the Bible. Since then, the New Testament has been my main influence. For example, Awkward Hill was based on the Book of Mark. I try to imagine how Mark would make a movie. I know it sounds crazy, but that's what I do.

Q. Did you ever have any funny mishaps while directing a film?

A. I got hepatitis while filming Lost Window in Algiers. That was tricky.

Q. What is your favorite movie?

A. Tug Kerdraw's The Maze .

Q. Thank you so much, Brian.

A. It was my pleasure.

–Sparrow

Speaking of the globe, there are those who say that the globe is growing warm just a little bit too fast, that if we're not careful we might find ourselves on a fast track to a meltdown of a whole heck of a lot of infrastructure, but I am not one of those naysayers who drag their feet while ramping their way up the cloverleaf where their grandchildren are going to live, and you didn't hire me to do that, did you? No, you hired me the way you would shop for a sports utility vehicle. You wanted something maneuverable, with a lot of get-up-and-go, maybe not the best in the world at miles per gallon, but you can't have everything, can you? And then you hired yourselves a bunch of Republicans to answer the questions you didn't want me to answer, which is fine. We have an oil company leader here on the platform, and we have a fine young fellow who pumps the gas. We want to hear from the polluters and we want to hear from the polluted. It takes all kinds, and they all have something to tell us.

But as I was saying about global warming, which is a serious problem. What I was saying was, we should do our part to reduce our emissions, sure, but a billion Chinese and a whole lot of Indians and Pakistanis have to do their part, too. There are more of them than us, after all. I mean, if an American is going to be asked to give up his or her sports utility vehicle, then some Indian peasant can give up that old cow of his which is just standing around making disgusting noises and adding to the methane supply of the atmosphere, right? The developed countries have invested a super amount of resources to squeeze a whole lot of fuel out of old fossils, and nobody is going to tell us to leave our vehicles in a state of malaise or something while they expect us to give them a bunch of little bitty old solar-driven ox-carts and teach them to drive. And I'll tell you, I've listened to the Europeans tell us that we should cut back, but where do they get off telling us what to do when we produce two and a half times as many emissions per person as the Europeans do every year? I mean, there's a reason why we're a superpower, you know. The Europeans, the Japanese, they're good people, of course, but they make a bunch of raggedy-ass tinny little cars, which they're good at, and then they want to talk us out of the vehicles we're good at. That's not my idea of fair, and I know it's not your idea of fair. We're proud of our vehicles, and everyone in the world knows that we can smash clear through their little suckers. Our foreign friends got themselves stuck in the era of big government, let me tell you. That's why they worry.

You know, Americans are not a worrying people. We are an interacting people. You elected me to interact with you. You elected a Congress to have a whole lot of interactions with me, and you elected me to have a whole lot of interactions with them. You wanted a national dialogue and, boy, I tell you, that's what you've got. Now I don't have all the answers. You didn't elect me to be some kind of know-it-all. You elected me to host the national conversation. Some of you may say that we should not be asking everyone their opinions but instead we should just be doing the right thing. I just want to say, I hear you. I hear you loud and clear. Some of you want me to tell the national story. I respect your opinion. You have a right to say that, and it's an important part of the dialogue. But you did not elect me to ram a national story down your ears. That's not the way we do things. We have the Smithsonian for that. We have a whole lot of talent in this great country, from Bob Dylan to Charlton Heston. Talk about dialogue! We have George Lucas, we have Steven Spielberg. And speaking of our national artists, from this day on, each and every one of you will be able to continue our conversation by going to the Presidential Web site that has been generously placed on-line by the Dreamworks company in a unique public-private partnership. Don't stop clicking on tomorrow.