After 'Gremlins' came out, I should have packed up everything, moved to Los Angeles from New York, and dedicated myself to being a full time film actor. I had the world at my feet.
Los Angeles is where you have to be if you want to be an actor. You have no choice. You go there or New York. I flipped a coin about it. It came up New York, so I flipped again. When you're starting out to be an actor, who wants to go where it's cold and miserable and be poor there?
I eventually became an actor, starting with doing stand-up comedy in New York and then theater wherever they would let me. Finally, I moved out here to Los Angeles and got on a show.
I always thought I would move to New York after graduation, but, instead, I moved to Los Angeles. I realized I was more scared of that choice than I was of New York, and I thought, at 22, I should get it over with.
I don't live in Los Angeles. I work in Los Angeles, and even that - I audition in Los Angeles; I very rarely film in Los Angeles. I don't hang out with producers on my off-hours, so I don't even know what that world is like.
I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.
I took part in a theatre festival in Massachusetts two summers after I graduated from college. Then I was in Los Angeles thinking: "I'm going to go to New York." I'd decided that I would not have a chance of a film career, so I was about to make the move. I bought a plane ticket and found a place to live in New York, packed my bags and of course the universe "told me" that I was not meant to go. Suddenly, a week before I was supposed to leave, I had three job offers and one of them was my first movie.
I had two jobs coming out of school: I did a play, 'The Great White Hope.' I played the boxer Jack Johnson. And I was the lead in this indie film. Then I moved to Los Angeles because New York was cold and it was really too quiet for me at that time. I was out of school; I was hungry. The auditions were trickling in, and I was antsy and ready to go.
I'd always dreamed of being an actor and going out to Los Angeles or New York and being paid to do what you love, and then I went and did that, and it wasn't what I expected.
My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.
When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.
You can get stuff done in New York that you can't in Los Angeles. If you wanted to get some milk and get your shoes repaired and drop something off at the dry cleaner, that's an all-day adventure in Los Angeles. In New York, you can bang that out in half an hour.
Sold my house in LA, packed myself up and moved to New York, not knowing anybody. Friends are very hard to make after a certain age.
When 'Real People' aired in 1979, we did OK in Los Angeles and New York. What kept that show from being canceled were the ratings from the middle of the country, and that's what kept us in the top five. I learned then from co-hosting that it was important to focus on the country between Los Angeles and New York.
I started out in New York, and New York has a way of countering a Southern accent, naturally; when I moved to Los Angeles for a job, and I just stayed, the dialect out here doesn't really counter, and my Southern started coming back.
In June 2002, I had just finished 'Laurel Canyon' and decided to move back to Los Angeles after nearly a decade in New York. Post-9/11 New York felt different.
I'm always looking for ways to connect myself with American people and that American feeling. I'm trying to pick up on the feeling of places, like the Los Angeles feeling or the New York feeling... Los Angeles is much better for me that way.