New York Newsday June 18, 2006 SUNDAY All Editions SECTION: FANFARE/ FAST CHAT: Q & A: Kathy Griffin By Frank Lovece Special to Newsday She can't get no respect, no respect at all. On the new second season of her reality show, "Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List" (Bravo, Tuesdays at 9 p.m.), she goes to Louisville, Ky. — and Louisville slugs her. No respect at all. She auctions off a weekend with herself for charity — and the winner turns it down. I'm tellin' ya, she gets no respect. OK, so the idea isn't new — it's all in the execution. Kathleen Mary Griffin — a successful standup comic with TV specials, commercials, everything but her own sitcom — isn't on any celebrity D-list any more than Rodney Dangerfield really got no respect. It's a satiric hook with which she baits Hollywood's hyperbolic, hypersensitive and just plain hyper. Born in Oak Park, Ill., outside Chicago, and reared both there and in nearby Forest Park, Griffin went to L.A. with her retiree parents, John and Maggie, who appear on her show. She did improv with the Groundlings and teamed with Janeane Garofalo on the comedy act "Hot Cup of Talk," later the title of Griffin's 1998 solo HBO special. By then Griffin had made a splash as Brooke Shields' helplessly venomous office antagonist on the sitcom "Suddenly Susan." Married in 2001 to IT consultant Matt Moline, and divorced in 2005, but now reconciled and living together, Griffin has performed for the troops in Iraq and appears in the upcoming "National Lampoon" movie, "The Last Guy on Earth." We interviewed her at a midtown Manhattan hotel, so tony and expensive, freelancer Frank Lovece had to wonder: If she's D-list, what list are the rest of us on? Griffin jump-started the interview by raising the issue of airbrushed photos on her Web site. NEWSDAY: I was gonna say, who is that? GRIFFIN: I dunno! I met her one time at a party and took her picture. No, that's me with a lot of hair extensions, airbrushing and hand cream. Yeah, and, um, Photoshop. So much Photoshop! In fact, I don't even know that it's Photoshop; it might be something beyond. I have to tell you, you're prettier here in person than I'd expected. People constantly say that! And that's a compliment how? It's worse when you get, "You look good in person!" That's what I get a lot. Or, "Wow, you're thin in person!" As opposed to what? How fat and ugly I look on television? Or I'll get "You look soooo much better in person." OK, c'mon — you looked good in the "Tyra Banks Show" clip on your second-season premiere, and in that bra-and-panty weigh-in thing. And that was with 17 pounds to go . But anything for a laugh. See? You didn't look "fat" there. Good. "You don't look fat there." How is that a compliment? You don't go to a woman and say, "Hey, you don't look fat tonight!" Honest, I was just responding to your "17 pounds to go." But you didn't say I looked great, either. If you were like, "Oh, you look hot there," that's a compliment. No. "You don't look fat there." Oh, thank you. Let's talk about your act. One good audience you've found is gay men. Another is soldiers. So — would the perfect audience be gay soldiers? Oh, would it! Believe me, whenever I meet a gay soldier I am so happy. But, y'know, you can't ask. Do they tell? No. Not without getting their --- kicked. It was really hostile over there [in Iraq] toward gays. "Don't ask, don't tell" was more like, "Don't ask, or you'll put my life in danger." I was shocked at the hostility toward gay men over there. And also toward women, in large part. You're talking about the Iraqis? No, the soldiers! We're supposed to be better than that. I was shocked at the stigma still against gay guys. Your act still seemed to go over well, regardless. There was no gay stuff [in it there]. It's not the place to get on my gay soapbox. I teased them a couple of times about it. I said, "Normally, I might start a show by saying, 'Where are my gays at?' but I know I'm not supposed to do that here!" And I asked 'em, "You guys watch 'Oprah,' right?" And they got all nervous, and I go, "It doesn't make you gay to watch 'Oprah'! Don't worry!" And they laughed at stuff like that. But I wasn't gonna lecture them about it. You've gone through some hard times, what with your dog passing away, the divorce/reconciliation roller-coaster, the Lasik surgery that's led to some truly tragic eye problems and the indignities we see you go through on your show. Even with your professional success, do you ever get angry at it all? Yeah. I am angry all the time. The only thing I can say that makes me different from a lot of other comics is that, like, I'm also pretty happy. A lot of comics sort of manufacture tragedy. I feel really strongly that life throws enough --- your way. You don't have to manufacture ---. Y'know? — top — New York Newsday January 7, 2007 SUNDAY All Editions SECTION: FANFARE/ FAST CHAT: Alan Arkin By Frank Lovece Special to Newsday Alan Arkin is the male Meryl Streep. He does accents ("The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming") and ethnicities ("Popi"), has played a deaf person ("The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter"), is adept at both comedy ("The In-Laws") and drama ("Glengarry Glen Ross"), can sing (he started his career with the folk group The Tarriers) and collects accolades the way some actors collect residuals (a Tony Award for "Enter Laughing," a Golden Globe for "The Russians ...," four Emmy nominations and two Oscar nominations. Despite Arkin's Renaissance Man talents - he's also a director, musician and published science-fiction and children's book author - he's never drawn the audiences or the bucks of a Tom Cruise. That probably says more about us than about Arkin, 72, whose diverse four-decade career has included adapting the folk hit "The Banana Boat Song," improv work with Mike Nichols, Elaine May and others in the fledgling Second City, films, theater and TV (the Sidney Lumet series "100 Centre Street"). Small wonder that the Film Society of Lincoln Center honored him in December with a tribute and a screening of the indie hit "Little Miss Sunshine" (which recently came out on DVD), in which Arkin inhabited the wholly original role as a bitter but Bacchanalian grandfather who loves both his granddaughter and his heroin. It's a role that many critics say deserves an Oscar nomination. The razor-sharp Brooklynite, who moved to Los Angeles at 12 and now lives in New Mexico with his wife of 10 years, Suzanne, alternately grumbled and twinkled across breakfast at a diner with frequent contributor Frank Lovece. Critics all loved your work in "Little Miss Sunshine," but to everybody's surprise you didn't get a Golden Globe nomination. I try not to think about it. The only reason I have to think about it is that people are calling me all the time [asking], "Hey, you gonna get the blah-blah-blah?" You wanna just say, "Leave me alone. I have no life and what happens happens." I'm a firm believer in a lot of what [author Carlos] Castaneda talks about. He said there are pitfalls to the ups and there are pitfalls to the downs. I try to stay away from both of them as much as I can. You once said you found a profound philosophy in something bandleader Benny Goodman said, that "one thing a man must have is an activity that destroys time's terrible rush." Is that the reason you've stayed so busy in so many different fields? I haven't thought about that for a long, long time. You have a dossier on me? (pause) I don't need to do that anymore. No. Benny Goodman said that in reference to death. I'm not that afraid of it anymore. I'm not afraid of Benny Goodman either. How about "The Banana Boat Song"? Are you afraid of getting asked for the millionth time about adapting "The Banana Boat Song" ? Yes! There's only a limited number of answers I can give! We combined two songs! We put two songs together and wrote new lyrics. OK, now see, that's new. All my research, and I never knew it was two songs. What was the other one? "Hill and Gully Rider," which is a song about waves. At the Lincoln Center tribute, they showed a clip of your Soviet sub commander from "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming," and afterward the entire audience was saying, "My God! Borat was doing Alan Arkin!" Oh, yeah, I know! (laughs) Well, my kids think he was! Is your middle name really Wolf? Yeah. But also recently I was given an Indian name by some Native American friends in Santa Fe. It was Grey Wolf. And not only that, but I bonded with some wolves a couple of years ago, so I have some connection with wolves somehow. How does one bond with wolves? I was at a zoo in Mobile, Ala., that mainly took in animals that had been abandoned. And they said, "You want to hang out with a couple of wolves for awhile?" I said yeah. I'd heard stories that they're formidable but not as bad as people make out. For example, there's no reported evidence of anybody ever having been hurt by a wolf. In history. So it's all a myth, perpetrated by fairy tales. So they put me in this enclosure with these two wolves who come bounding over to me and start licking me and are all over me, like the friendliest dogs I'd ever met in my life. I have pictures of them all over me. Didn't you have a moment where you were maybe thinking about Sharon Stone's husband and the Komodo dragon? I don't know that. What was that? In 2001, she brought her husband to the Los Angeles Zoo for his birthday, he was invited into a pen with a Komodo, was barefoot, and the Komodo attacked his foot. He went into a pen with a Komodo dragon? That's nuts! What happened to him? I guess he recovered. He and Sharon Stone aren't together anymore. Sure. She wanted a guy with toes. — top —