The last real movie stars were probably Redford and Newman. And things were different then. There wasn't this amazing amount of magazines and information about them.
When I was younger I saw a movie called 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Those two actors and that movie was my inspiration to want to be an actor.
The magazines were born out of a need that my parents saw: that there were no magazines that really spoke to black people. 'Ebony' wrote about architects and artists, the share cropper who sent his nine kids to college, real African Americans at a time when everyone else only covered them as entertainers and athletes.
I never looked at magazines before I started modeling. I was 13 or 14 and none of my friends were into magazines. We were into the fashion of the day, though. Designer jeans were really popular - Sasson, Gloria Vanderbilt, Calvin Klein, Jordache. Once I started modeling, I began to learn about these things, and magazines helped me to understand who was who.
My mom was a big Elvis fan and a general pop culture buff, and so I grew up in a house filled with what were then called "movie magazines,"Before Elvis when Rhona Barrett wrote her column about the stars. And so it seeped in.
I was the last one of nine kids - eight girls and me last - and my sisters were going out. They were teenagers. And as they were getting ready, I would sit on the bathtub and watch them put on makeup and transform themselves - you know, putting on clothes and giggling about the boys they were going to meet and everything. So for me, that was an amazing thing - the fact of transforming themselves.
In the studios days, the public's perception of movie stars was much different, because the stars were so much less exposed. This made them seem more special, more unearthly. Today they're no longer perceived as different - they've become human, so to speak.
All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all the stars are silent. You--you alone--will have the stars as no one else has them--
I was a real serious kid, real intense, and there were a lot of things that I was doing by myself I took seriously, like organizing little pieces of paper, cutting out things from magazines, and filing them away.
You have to understand where the camera needs to me. There were times where you were suddenly aware where the cameras were, then you were in a different place and it didn't feel like the same movie.
I'm not making a movie about the real people. I'm making a movie about what they did, and what happened to them. But I will create characters so that I can have the freedom to make them say and do what I want. The real-life journalists were fine with that.
When I first started, in 2006, it was an exciting time. Independent, cool, weird artists were being successful, and magazines were writing about them, and people were getting played on radio that were, like, really good.
One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.
Where did all the women come from? The supply was endless. Each one of them was individual, different. Their pussies were different, their kisses were different, their breasts were different, but no man could drink them all, there were too many of them, crossing their legs, driving men mad. What a feast!
I see a great lack of stories around. I bought six literary magazines and looked through them to see what people were doing. There wasn't a story in them. They were all about how poetic the feelings of the author were.
I think that's something that always enticed me about the '40s - back then, the glamour and the style - you couldn't really make it up. You just were or you weren't. You either fit in that world or you fit in the other. Things were very cut and dry. Things were simple. There wasn't a whole lot of excess or flash to be flashy; it was real flash, and real excitement.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.