Los Angeles Times Festival of Books - Day 1

Book Festival Facts

What: One of the largest and most prestigious book festivals in the country, the FREE event spans two days and features author panels, writing workshops, food, music and dance.

When: Saturday, April 24, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, April 25, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: UCLA campus, Westwood

Who Will Be There: Each year the Festival attracts more than 130,000 people of all ages from across Southern California and other parts of the country. Among them are book lovers, authors, artists, celebrities, chefs and entertainers.

Why: It's a free and fun-filled community gathering featuring more than 100 author panels, workshops, cooking demonstrations, poetry readings, musical performances and storytelling sessions. There will also be nearly 300 exhibitor booths representing booksellers, publishers, literacy and cultural organizations.

Information: www.latimes.com/festivalofbooks


Intro

Ah yes, my favorite weekend of the year. Literally. No joke, this is the weekend I live for. More than anything else about L.A.--the awesome weather, the incredibly vibrant cultural scene, the chance to see the minds behind my favorite movies--the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is the number one reason I still live here. Sure, even if I didn't live here, I could always fly in for the weekend. So I reckon it would be more accurate to say the Book Fest is the numero uno reason I didn't move back east right after finishing SC. At this point, though? After twelve years here? I'm pretty much entrenched.

Like I've done the past couple years, I'll devote two blog posts to the Fest, one per day. This one will cover today, Saturday, and I'll do Sunday's post tomorrow night.

Today was certainly action packed. After attending panels on Hollywood and science, I got to see Carol Burnett in a one-on-one interview, followed by Alicia Silverstone on the outdoor cooking stage. Now if you look back at that previous sentence and say to yourself that you never thought you'd see all of those words in the same sentence, you'd hardly be alone.

So anyways, like I always do, I'll give you the lowdown panel by panel. For each one, you've got the panel title, the venue and time, the names and mini bios for each panelist, followed by my notes on what they discussed. The bios are taken verbatim from the Book Fest program.

Let the Fest(ivities) begin!



Hollywood: Life in the Biz
Humanities A51 - 10:30 a.m.

Alex Ben Block - Block is an internationally known entertainment industry journalist, author, broadcaster and show business historian. He is currently an editor-at-large for the Hollywood Reporter. Block is the author of George Lucas's Blockbusting.

Darnell M. Hunt - Hunt is a professor of sociology and the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. His research interests include race, media and cultural studies. Hunt is the author of Representing Los Angeles and his latest, Black Los Angeles.

Tom Kemper - Kemper is a visiting lecturer at USC and a teacher at the Crossroads School of Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica. He is the author of Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents.

Moderator: Anne Thompson - Thompson covers film industry news. She tracks Hollywood, Indiewood, awards season and film festivals for Variety's daily blog.


Notes

Since I'm such a movie buff, it's pretty much a guarantee I'll attend a Hollywood panel at the Book Fest. They have at least two or three every year. Now you might think I already know my fair share of movie trivia and therefore wouldn't get anything out of yet another movie panel. Uh-uh. Not remotely. That's another awesome thing about the Book Fest. Sure, the panels can be bucketed very generally (e.g. Movies, Science, Fiction, Memoir), but within each bucket are innumerable mini buckets (e.g. Memoirs of Addiction, Earth Sciences, Science Fiction, Second Novels, etc.).

So it is here. Although I should say "Life in the Biz" is a fairly large mini bucket and could contain all kinds of stuff. And sure enough, this one does. The three authors here represent quite a cross-spectrum of expertise and points of view about Hollywood.

Let's start with Darnell Hunt, a bald fortyish African American decked out in a crisp suit with a very polished, professional demeanor. He taught at SC before he joined UCLA's Department of Sociology in 2002. When he first got here and checked out the Ralph Bunche Center, he was struck by how little was documented about black history in Los Angeles. Blacks have been out here quite a while, which many people don't realize. I myself wasn't aware until I attended this other Book Fest panel a couple years ago where a woman historian mentioned race riots in L.A. during the Civil War.

I wish I could've recorded Darnell because he gave a fascinating history of L.A.'s Baldwin Hills neighborhood. If you watch the BET (Black Entertainment) channel, you may be familiar with Baldwin Hills. They have a reality show that takes place there. Dubbed the black Beverly Hills, Baldwin Hills is a neighborhood of mostly wealthy black families located practically square in the center of Los Angeles, with Culver City to the immediate west, the Mid Wilshire area just to the north, Inglewood to the south, and more of central L.A. to the east. One thing I didn't know, although I suppose I should've, is that Baldwin Hills is named after Lucky Baldwin. I've definitely heard of him, but I didn't put this two and two together because Elias "Lucky" Baldwin is more of a name to conjure way out east in the San Gabriel Valley, where you've got cities and towns like Pasadena, Monrovia, Arcadia and what have you. I used to work in Pasadena, Old Town specifically. One of the bars in Old Town Pas is called Lucky Baldwin's. And then a few miles further east in Arcadia lies the Santa Anita racetrack. I've been there a whole bunch of times. One of the big races there every season is the Baldwin Stakes. So yeah, out there Lucky Baldwin's a legend. Why, you ask? Well, he bought a shitload of land there back in the 1800s. He's from the Midwest originally, and he made his fortune in mining. They called him "Lucky" because he didn't really know much about mining, so the vast wealth he eventually accumulated was considered a fluke by some. Anyway, he eventually settled in the San Gabriel Valley in present-day Arcadia. Yes, he got into horse racing, and yes, he opened the original Santa Anita Park, although it eventually closed and didn't reopen until the 1930s thanks to a local dentist named Charles "Doc" Strub. Another big annual race at Santa Anita is called the Strub Stakes.

What Lucky Baldwin's connection is to the Baldwin Hills neighborhood, so distant from Arcadia, I'm not sure. I suppose he could've bought land there. Darnell told us Baldwin Hills didn't start out as a black neighborhood. I forget the exact hows and whys, but it was a very slow process over several decades whereby well-to-do blacks moved in. Slowly but surely it became the little enclave of African American aristocracy it is today. Not many whites live there now. Darnell says whites generally don't want to live in a neighborhood like that. Whether black people are rich or not, whites just aren't comfortable being the minority in a black neighborhood. It pains me to say it (not about myself, I live in Van Nuys, after all), but he's probably right. As for the Baldwin Hills reality show, he's not a fan. He said it isn't reality because it doesn't give you the whole picture. Then again, that applies to most so-called reality shows.

When asked what black-themed entertainment he does enjoy, he was generally down about the whole topic. He said it's hard to choose because he feels so much of black TV and movies today don't really live up to the black experience in America. He absolutely loves The Wire (as do I), but to him that's an exception that proves the rule. As is Treme, he said, the new show by The Wire folks. He used to like Spike Lee but says Spike started getting mediocre in the mid nineties or so. Since then, he's been in a decline "to say the least," Darnell said with a smile. Interesting, huh? But he does have a point. Spike did some pretty provocative stuff once upon a time. Nowadays his stuff is very middle of the road. Although he did do that Katrina documentary for HBO, which was well received. Of course these days you can't talk about black entertainment without mentioning Tyler Perry. Darnell said he likes Tyler Perry's stuff but wishes he'd step out of his comfort zone. One thing I didn't know until today was that Tyler Perry makes all his movies in Atlanta, where he lives, and uses local non-union crew, which has sparked quite the controversy in Hollywood. Tyler's taken a lot of flack for that. But hey, union crew cost a fortune. Judging by his movies, he always seems to be producing under a self-sufficient operation, utterly separated from Hollywood. Maybe if studios were willing to bankroll him more consistently, he'd be willing to use union crew since it wouldn't be money out of his pocket.

Changing gears completely now, let's talk about Tom Kemper and his book on Hollywood talent agents, Hidden Talent. The book focuses mainly on the thirties and forties. As with Darnell, I learned a lot of fascinating stuff from Tom. For one thing, the legendary producer David O. Selznick (you've seen some of his movies even if you've never heard of him) had a brother named Myron Selznick, who was the top talent agent of his day. Among his clients was Vivien Leigh, and among the parts he got for her was Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. In fact, the way she landed the part was kind of weird and fluky. As you can imagine, the role of Scarlett O'Hara was in very high demand. Competition was fierce. The studio even put on a nationwide "Search for Scarlett O'Hara" and spent untold gobs of money sending casting agents across the country looking for the perfect Scarlett. Interesting that they would do that considering producer David O. Selznick was having a hard time getting money for shooting it. Now get this: By the time he started shooting it, he still didn't have anyone to play Scarlett. So he started shooting the scenes that didn't have her character in the hopes that they'd get their Scarlett eventually, and eventually they did. David was literally in the middle of shooting the Atlanta-on-fire scene, with literally all the Technicolor cameras Hollywood had at the time, all seven of them or something, when his brother Myron came up to him with Vivien Leigh and said something like, "Hey Dave, meet your Scarlett O'Hara."

Weird, huh? But it does sort of illustrate Tom's point: Talent agents are necessary. Not only are they necessary for actors, but producers need them too. In fact, Tom takes it further and says talent agents are really in business to serve the producers more than their own clients. If not for talent agents, how would producers find the talent to make their films? How would talent get to the set? Both of those questions are perfectly illustrated in the Vivien Leigh anecdote. Actors are flaky, Tom said. They couldn't survive without their agents. Another actor he gave us the skinny on was Laurence Olivier. I've seen a few movies with Olivier at this point, maybe more than a few, but until today, I had no idea he liked wearing prosthetic noses. Most of the time the effect on his countenance was subtle, hence my never having noticed it, but apparently he really needed a fake nose to get into character. As Tom put it, Olivier "never found a character until he put the nose on." I tell ya. Actors.

Myron Selznick's only true rival in the agenting world was this guy named Charles Feldman. He was a bit of a pioneer himself. You have to remember that when motion pictures really got going as a business in the twenties and thirties, actors and directors would sign contracts binding them to a particular studio. They could only do movies for that one studio and no others. Charles Feldman played a big part in blowing all that up with these so-called "overlapping nonexclusive" contracts. Sure enough, actors and directors loved that kind of flexibility, hence Chuck's client list became a veritable who's who of Tinseltown: Howard Hawks, John Wayne, George Stevens, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, you name it. Chuck was also a producer. It was thanks to him Orson Welles was able to get the otherwise shoestring-budgeted Macbeth off the ground. Chuck also produced The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Seven Year Itch, and a whole bunch more.

One thing about these Hollywood panels is that you'll invariably have folks in the audience who are aspiring actors, directors, and, don't you know, screenwriters (like, say, me!). When the floor was opened to questions, this one guy asked Tom how beginning actors and screenwriters should go about finding an agent to champion them. This sort of revealed the weakness of Tom's scholarship in that, while he's schooled himself backwards and forwards in the early days of Hollywood, he doesn't really have his thumb anywhere near the pulse of today's life in the biz. Tom even acknowledged that by prefacing his answer with how his focus was strictly the 1930s and '40s, and even then only on the major talent agencies. And when it comes to major talent agencies, you don't go finding them, they find you. Agents who work at places like Creative Artists Agency are not only agents, they're talent scouts. They're looking for folks who already have representation and already have at least some kind of career going, and show promise for greater things. That answer, of course, is incredibly unhelpful to folks like me, not to speak of the guy who asked the question. You could all but feel his discouragement as he retook his seat.

Now let's talk about the third writer on the panel, Alex Ben Block, THE perfect name for a guy with this much girth. A middle-aged grizzly bear of a fella, Alex is sort of Tom's mirror image, in terms of scholarship, not physical size. Whereas Tom knows all the big names of the thirties and forties, Alex knows all the big names today. You can tell he's been around the Hollywood block more than a few times. As a veteran writer for the Hollywood Reporter, he knows the business inside and out. This would include things like film distribution. To get Alex started on that subject, and because he wrote that George Lucas book, moderator Anne Thompson read some distribution stats from her notepad about all six Star Wars films. The first one opened in thirty-two theaters (really? that's so hard to fathom), The Empire Strikes Back opened in three hundred, Return of the Jedi in about a thousand. And the prequels? The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones each opened in more than two thousand theaters. Revenge of the Sith opened in a whopping thirty-six hundred. Amazing, huh? From thirty-two to thirty-six hundred. This made Alex remember when James Cameron phoned him personally to give him shit for putting Star Wars above Titanic in one of his articles.

Alex had a lot of interesting stuff to say about movie distribution and all the drama that can come out of it, drama you and I would never think about. For starters, he went all the way back to 1915's Birth of a Nation. A lot of people think, and I have to admit to being one of them, that folks had no problem with a movie like that at the time, that our mentality about race was so neolithic compared to today. Not so, said Alex. Birth of a Nation caused the kind of outcry you would expect when viewed through a more modern lens. Black folks and white folks were rioting in the streets outside movie theaters in New York City. And no, the white folks were not categorically pro Birth of a Nation. Many of them sided with the blacks in protesting the film's release. "They knew it was wrong then like we do now," Alex said.

He also talked about the 1941 flick Sergeant York. Have you seen that one? It's based on the true story of this guy from Tennessee named Alvin York. He was a sergeant in the U.S. Army during the First World War and had balls of titanium and the luck of Lucky Baldwin. The main thing he's noted for is leading this attack on a German machine gun entrenchment, a maneuver that guaranteed a quick death for the aggressors ninety-nine percent of the time. The battle ended with something like three dozen German machine guns captured (machine guns were a big deal way back then, don't forget, practically brand new) and well over a hundred Germans taken prisoner. The ironic thing here is that Alvin York himself was a mess. He was a red-faced alcoholic whose day wasn't complete without getting into a fight or two. And he was totally against going to war. Remember that by the time the U.S. entered the First World War, it had already been raging for three years at the cost of literally millions of lives from each participating country. France especially was getting clobbered since quite a bit of the war was waged within her borders. So Alvin, like a lot of Americans, was scared shitless of having anything to do with that. He filed a petition labeling himself a "conscientious objector." That went nowhere. Soon enough he was shipped over with the rest of the doughboys. As you can see, he was light-years from what most people think of when they think of a war hero, right? Exactly! He was just the kind of complicated, reluctant hero type Hollywood loves making movies about. Good ol' Alvin made things even easier by keeping a diary during his war days. The screenwriters basically just drew from that in crafting their script.

Alex's point in bringing up Sergeant York was to show how hard it can be to make a movie about something begging to be told. Alvin York was totally against his war experience being put on the screen. He was approached by Hollywood almost as soon as the war was over, but it wasn't until 1941 when the movie came out. We're talking over twenty years, kids. And the only reason Alvin relented was he needed money to build a church or something, Alex said. The drama didn't end there, though. Howard Hawks, who signed on to direct, was also one of the producers. Apparently there was a lot of in-fighting between him and fellow producer Jesse Lasky. The fact that Hawks got credit for the film before Lasky caused all kinds of controversy, since it was Lasky, not Hawks, who'd been hounding Alvin York for a solid twenty years. Lasky alone deserves credit for that movie getting made, but somehow Hawks got the glory. See what I mean? That's Alex's point. Making a movie is more complicated than most people realize, and frankly, from all he's saying, it seems mainly due to ego.

That whole thing with Hawks and Lasky makes me think of Tom's thing about agents. Directors and producers have agents just like actors do. So I wonder if it wasn't Hawks so much as his agent who beat out Lasky for top credit. If I'd been Lasky, I'm sure I'd've given my agent the third degree for not getting me credit first. Agents play a huge role in the hows and wherefores of stuff like that.

Just as Tom talked about Gone with the Wind, so did Alex, only from a distribution standpoint. That is to say, Gone with the Wind didn't do so hot when it was originally released. It came out just as World War II broke out in Europe. The war started on September 1, 1939 (also the day my father was born) when the Nazis marched into Poland. At that point, the principal photography was pretty much done, so it's not like the studio could suspend the production. They had this big huge premiere in Atlanta in December '39, followed by the nationwide release in January 1940. Suffice it to say people had enough worries, not just the war in Europe, but the Great Depression at home. Bad time to release a huge expensive movie like that. Indeed, Alex said both World Wars made it impossible for studios to distribute movies outside the U.S. That's another thing many folks don't realize: Often the best chance American studios have of turning a profit on a film is foreign distribution. Take that away, you'd be surprised how many otherwise very successful movies would get stuck in the red. So it was with Gone with the Wind. It look a long, long time before that behemoth made any money. You could tell Alex is a big numbers guy when it comes to movie distribution. He said the bottom line is, you need the widest spread distribution you can, although it's still no guarantee. The number of theaters showing your movie doesn't necessarily put "tushies in the seats," he said.

The final and most fascinating anecdote Alex shared with us had to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." It was originally published in Colliers in May 1922, and later that year was included in Fitzgerald's collection Jazz Age Stories. In 1944 the Fitzgerald estate (F. Scott himself passed on in '40) sold the movie rights to Warner Brothers. Eventually the rights went to the ruthless mogul Ray Stark, the "power behind the throne" at Columbia Pictures. If you've never heard of Ray Stark, that's probably a good thing. Certainly you wouldn't want to know him, or be on the wrong side of a pitch meeting with him. He was notorious for being a cold-blooded bastard who did anything and played any dirty trick necessary to make the deal. You know that movie Funny Girl? Ray based that character on his mom-in-law, although apparently a lot of it's made up as well. Depends who you ask. Anyway, this guy Ray Stark, in typical Ray Stark fashion, held onto the rights to "Button" for literally decades, even though he never made any overture at making it. Producer Kathleen Kennedy, from Spielberg's company Amblin Entertainment, was able to get the rights from Stark in the eighties. How she did, no one knows. Stark was around seventy at that point, maybe he was getting soft. He didn't stop working, though. You know that movie Steel Magnolias from the late eighties? He did that. Yep. Dude didn't die until 2004 at the age of eighty-eight. Kathleen Kennedy, meanwhile, held onto "Button" for twenty years with nothing to show for it. It took a real maverick director like David Fincher to make something happen. And so the movie finally came out around Christmas 2008. I always visit Mom in North Carolina during the holidays. We saw it when it came out. I think I liked it better than she did, but then again I'm an easy audience. Eric Roth, who wrote the script, deserves a lot of credit for expanding so much on what was a fairly simple bedtime story. Alex was like, "Whatever you think of the movie, the fact that it got made at all is a real achievement."

Amen.



Science and Humanity: From the Past to the Future
Fowler Auditorium - Noon

Brian Fagan - Fagan is an internationally known archaeology writer and a former Guggenheim Fellow. His many books include The Little Ice Age, The Great Warming and his latest, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans.

Michael Shermer - Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University. He has appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report and Dateline. Shermer is the author of numerous books, including The Mind of the Market.

Richard Wrangham - Wrangham is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and curator of primate behavioral biology at the Peabody Museum. He is the coauthor of Demonic Males and author of Catching Fire, a 2009 Book Prize finalist in Science & Technology.

Moderator: M.G. Lord - Lord is an author, critic and cartoonist. She wrote Forever Barbie and Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science. Her new book, The Accidental Feminist, will be published in September.


Notes

This was a first. No sooner did I grab an aisle seat than this gregarious, gray-bearded, red-faced guy, who'd been strolling the aisles with his hands in his pockets, say hello and shake my hand. At first I thought he was just an attendee killing time. Nope. This was Brian Fagan, one of the writers on the panel. His specialty is the prehistoric era, and he's quite well known in that arena. I guess he's not used to the popularity, though. While he and I shot the shit before the panel started, he looked around and took in the packed house and admitted to being nervous. Come on now. Wouldn't you think a guy like this, a well-known writer and a Guggenheim fellow to boot, is used to talking in front of crowds at this point? I guess it could be how some people take acting classes to get themselves used to public speaking, but no matter how many times they perform, the whole thing remains antithetical to their nature. Anyway, cool that Brian would hang out with me before the panel, even if he was just doing it to exorcise the jitters.

Now why, you might wonder, would I attend a panel on science writing if I'm not familiar with international scientific superstars like Brian Fagan? Well, exactly. One of the things I try to do at each Book Fest is seek out a panel or two or three that covers an area of writing I know little about. It's all about branching out, right? Stepping out of your comfort zone to learn new things? This doesn't mean I have any intention of becoming a science writer. Not by any means of the stretch. What I'm saying is, I like to hear from smart and talented writers of all stripes. It makes the Book Fest weekend more intellectually fulfilling.

I suck at science. Always have. I say this now in case you wonder why my notes for this panel aren't as extensive and detailed as my notes for the Hollywood panel. It's not that I didn't enjoy this panel and find it enlightening, it's just that some of the enlightenment went over my head. It didn't help that the panel, like the Hollywood one, had such a sweeping title. Honestly, could you find a more all-inclusive title than Science and Humanity: From the Past to the Future? As you'll see, this panel's discussions were all over the map.

That's why I'm glad they got M.G. Lord to moderate it. She teaches at USC's graduate creative writing program, the same program where I studied about ten years ago. No, I didn't have any classes with her. Actually, I'm not sure she was there. Too bad, too. M.G. Lord is absolutely hilarious. On paper she's very impressive, right? Almost intimidating. Don't be fooled by that. She's this petite lil' thing with blonde mushroom-style hair and the cutest little voice. Absolutely adorable. And did I mention she was funny? Whoever organized this panel should be applauded for installing good ol' M.G. as the moderator, keeping all these lofty brains from getting too lofty, ya know?

When it was time to begin, the packed house (Brian was right to be nervous, every seat was taken) showed no signs of being aware we were, in fact, at the top of the hour. M.G., in a very nice, cute way, got everyone to stop jibber-jabbering by saying (square into her mic) how amazing it was that all these people had come out on a beautiful spring afternoon to hear a bunch of writers drone on about such a narrow topic like humanity. Brilliant, for this not only got everyone's attention, it also started off what could've been a self-serious panel on a perfect note of levity.

Ironic Brian Fagan should've been so nervous before the panel because he was by far the best speaker. And not just speaker, an awesome storyteller as well. His English accent assumes this type of cadence that is just perfect for a narrator. It was very relaxing. I would almost label it soporific. Among the stories he told, true stories, I should add, was his experience living with subsistence farmers in Africa for seven years. "Very sobering," he said. That came later, though. At the start of the panel, he told this great anecdote about a family of Cro-Magnons living on one side of this huge valley. One day, they spot the face of a Neanderthal on the opposite side of the valley. What happened next? Not much, Brian said. They each went back to their respective homes. Neanderthals were around a long time, a good hundred thousand years or so, before the Cro-Magnons showed up. The Cro-Magnons, by the way, were the first early humans. Neanderthals weren't entirely human. You may have heard that before, right? Neanderthals were a sort of subset, or a branching off from the main evolutionary path that led to humans. No one's entirely sure what happened to them. Some say the Cro-Magnons wiped them out, but even more people think that's baloney, that in fact the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals co-existed peacefully. I'm leaning toward the latter because the Neanderthals were around for at least another ten thousand years after the Cro-Magnons showed up. You can't co-exist with someone on the other side of the valley, so to speak, for so long if you don't get along with them. Just imagine it, though. Imagine sharing the planet with this other sorta human race that was technically a different kind of hominid race...

Brian said the Cro-Magnon gene is still alive and well in Northern Europe today. "I'm Cro-Magnon," he said. This got some laughs, but he was serious. Indeed, even the Neanderthal gene isn't completely gone. Something like three percent of humans today have Neanderthal genes in their DNA. Wild, huh? Literally! One thing Brian mentioned sporadically throughout the panel was cave art. He's a big fan of the stuff the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons drew on cave walls. Like Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, prehistoric cave art provides scholars a window on what kinds of people our distant ancestors were. Plus, on a more primal level, it's just really awesome to look at something someone drew so incredibly long ago, and someone who wasn't entirely Homo sapiens to boot.

One last thing Brian said, which he waited to say until the very end of the hour, was one word: Water. It's a finite resource. What will we do when it runs out? Now you might wonder how it could be finite when our planet is seventy-five percent water. Well, a lot of that is salt water. So the trick is to have a desalination process, right? To convert salt water to fresh? They're obviously hard at work on that, but I think the technology's still in a nascent stage. At any rate, Brian wanted us to go home thinking about our most precious resource.

For all his scholarship and ability to convey complex ideas in a very warm, Hans Christian Andersen-type way, Brian Fagan is all too Homo sapiens. No, I don't mean because he gets butterflies. I mean the way I heard him whining about teaching at UC Santa Barbara. He's not teaching there now, which was partly his point. He resigned because he couldn't stand it. Outside after the panel, while I was standing in line waiting for him to sign the copy of Cro-Magnon I'd just bought, he was complaining incessantly to fellow panelist Michael Shermer, who was sitting next to him at the signing table. The one thing that bugged Brian to no end about UCSB was the bureaucracy. He said UCSB was chockfull of "girly-crats talking about excellence." This made Shermer--and me and everyone else--crack up. Girly-crats, that's great.

Since I just mentioned Michael Shermer, I suppose I should talk about him next and what he said during the panel. That's just it, though. I remember next to nothing about what this brainiac said. He had as much time to talk as the others, but this guy was determined to sound smart, so he lost me. The only thing I remember was that he got some media attention getting into a public spat with Deepak Chopra. Deepak, if for some strange reason you haven't heard of him, advocates a lot of health-related practices that are more spiritual and less scientific. That makes him a prime target for a natural skeptic like Michael Shermer. Remember, dude founded a magazine called Skeptic. So there ya go. If you've got an idea in your head what kind of person it would take to create a publication called Skeptic, you're probably pretty close to the kind of person Shermer is, or the way he came across to me anyway. Don't get me wrong, though, he's not a grouch. In fact, he's hilarious, a sort of Dana Scully crossed with Adam Sandler. It makes perfect sense that he's been on shows like The Colbert Report and Penn & Teller's Bullshit!. I'm curious as hell what he attacked Deepak about.

Now Richard Wrangham, I remember a bit about this kat. Like Brian Fagan, his specialty is the prehistoric era, but more from a biological standpoint, and this includes food. This guy knows quite a bit about what Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals snacked on. Indeed, he seemed to know quite a bit about dieting in general. To show you how tiny our planet is, Richard mentioned this book by Claude Lévi-Strauss called The Raw and the Cooked. Why does that make our world tiny, you ask? Because I just heard about this Claude Lévi-Strauss fellow at an Opera League seminar back in January. The seminar was about Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle, which LA Opera is in the middle of staging as we speak. If you go back to my January blog posts, you'll see a post about the seminar. It was action packed, three speakers, and they covered tons of material, about Götterdämmerung as well as German artist Achim Freyer, the genius directing our version of the Ring. Anyway, I don't remember which lecture it was, but in one of them they talked about Claude Lévi-Strauss. Considered the father of anthropology and having only just passed away last fall at the age of a century, among the innumerable things Claude did during his career was travel to South America and hang out with the natives. In other native cultures on other continents, he noticed a lot of inbreeding, but in certain South American indigenous tribes he didn't notice any inbreeding at all. When he asked some of the fellas why they didn't get hitched to a sister or a cousin, they were like, "Are you kidding?! Then how are we supposed to get a brother-in-law?!" In other words, their reason for not inbreeding wasn't because it's disgusting and abhorrent, the problem was that marrying a relative wasn't conducive to forming alliances with other families. That was the A number 1 reason these particular indigenous peoples ever got married: Not for love, but for strategy. Now you might ask what in tarnation any of that has to do with the Ring Cycle? Well, the guy giving the lecture was trying to make a point about arranged marriages of 19th century Europe. Civilized Europe and the jungles of Brazil are worlds apart, yet they have the whole arranged marriage thing in common. And since 19th century Europe's the world Wagner lived in, that's why we see relationships in the Ring dealt with in a cold, strategic way, with nothing to do with love, especially the way the bad guys in Götterdämmerung scheme about Brünnhilde and Siegfried.

Now let's get back to Richard Wrangham. Again, his thing was food, and the reason he brought up Claude Lévi-Strauss was because of a book Claude wrote called The Raw and the Cooked (Le Cru et le cuit). Published in 1964 and released in English in 1969, The Raw and the Cooked was the first part in a four-part work called Mythologiques. Wrangham talked quite a bit about raw food, how it can compromise our reproductive systems, and how cooking separates us from the primates. However, studies have shown that primates, like humans, have a natural preference for cooked food because it's softer and easier to chew and digest. One interesting anecdote he shared was about beans falling from a tree. At first, the chimps who lived nearby didn't give those beans the time of day. But then a brush fire swept through the area, leaving the beans well done. Sure enough, the chimps ate 'em all up.

And that's pretty much all I remember about this science panel and the massive brains who peopled it. Sad, huh? Because I know they said a lot of interesting stuff that I've failed to capture here. As I said earlier when talking about Brian Fagan, I headed to the signing area afterward. In addition to buying a copy of Cro-Magnon, I also scooped up one of M.G. Lord's books, Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science. Interesting that I'd see her here after having just read about her a couple weeks ago in the alumni magazine I get from USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. Released only twice a year, the spring/summer 2010 issue was all about the writers who teach at USC, including M.G. Among other things, it talked about Astro Turf, a memoir she wrote about growing up with her dad, a rocket scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab who had a personality "as distant as the stars," and whose worldview, which included a less-than-flattering take on women and their role in society, compelled Lord to "flee in terror" for college the moment she had her high school diploma. I guess the book is a family dramedy of sorts. Lord has a terrific sense of humor, although you wouldn't know it from that SC magazine article. They made her and her material come across as so serious, which is why I was caught off-guard by her contagious humor at the panel today. I had no plans to buy her stuff, but I was so taken with her bright personality, I couldn't help buying one of her books just so I'd have an excuse to introduce myself. I wish I knew a way to get to know her. In all my life as a writer, I've never had a mentor. Something tells me M.G. and I would click brilliantly in the mentor-mentee relationship.








Carol Burnett in Conversation with Mary McNamara
Ackerman Ballroom - 2:30 p.m.

Carol Burnett - Cool!

Mary McNamara - McNamara has worked for the Los Angeles Times for 19 years, writing extensively about the inner workings of Hollywood. She's the author of Oscar Season, and her second novel, The Starlet, is due out in June.


Notes

How awesome is this, huh? I don't really need to say it, do I? Okay I will: Carol Burnett! See, that's what I love about the Book Fest. Only a Book Fest in Los Angeles could attract heavy duty names like Carol friggin' Burnett, a living legend if ever there was one. They always park the biggies in Ackerman Ballroom too. This is definitely the Book Fest's main celeb venue. Ackerman is humungous, almost a football field long, and the ceiling's a good two or three stories high. I'm here almost every year. Last year my obligatory pilgrimage to Ackerman was to see this same gal Mary McNamara interview Michael J. Fox about his second memoir. At one of the Book Fests not long before that, I came here to see Madeline Albright.

Carol's a great talker, one of the best interviews I've ever seen. I mean, if you've seen her show, you pretty much have a good grasp of her personality already. She told us all kinds of stories about her personal and professional background, going all the way back to Hollywood Blvd. Carol was born in April 1933. In fact, her birthday's two days from now. She grew up all of one block from Hollywood Blvd. in a one-bedroom apartment with her grandmother. Her parents were alcoholics who were in no shape to raise kids. Now you might think that Carol, growing up in the epicenter of the entertainment biz, might've caught the performing bug early. And you'd be right. As far back as she can remember, she wanted to be an actress. Here's the thing, though. The movie business was still young back then. If you wanted to act, the stage was your best bet, and New York, then as now, was the theater capital. So after graduating from Hollywood High in 1950, Carol packed up, kissed Grandma good-bye, and hauled it to the Big Apple to give acting a try. Like most actors (and writers), Carol dreamt big but had very low expectations of herself. For a while it seemed those expectations would be met. The poor thing couldn't get arrested. But then in 1959, when she was twenty-six, Carol auditioned for Once Upon a Mattress, a musical comedy adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's The Princess and the Pea. Talking about it today, Carol said she'd've been thrilled just being part of the chorus. Remember, she'd been at this brutal business for almost ten years and had gotten all of nowhere. If her expectations were low when she moved to New York, imagine after a fruitless decade. In yet another example of persistence paying off, though, and how a little bit of luck never hurt anyone, Carol not only got a plum role, she got THE plum role. They cast her as the main character, Princess Winnifred. Oh, and did I mention this was a Broadway production? Later during the Q&A, this one older guy in the audience said he saw Carol in that original production. He was in junior high at the time, and his class took a Broadway field trip. He loved the play so much, and was so inspired by Carol in particular, that he credits her for the long and successful career in theater he's now had. He's in his sixties now, and he said he's produced something like three hundred plays in the L.A. area. And it's all thanks to Carol. Wow, huh? What an amazing story.

Carol's days as a starving actress were over. Once Upon a Mattress ran on Broadway for over a year, from the spring of '59 to late summer of '60. That led to her being cast on The Garry Moore Show. No, I hadn't heard of it either, but apparently The Garry Moore Show was a big hit in its day. To be a part of it was any aspiring comedian's dream, a lot like Saturday Night Live, I guess. Or maybe how SNL used to be. The Garry Moore Show launched a lot of careers: Carol as well as Don Knotts, Jonathan Winters, Don Adams, and a whole bunch more. Carol scored a real coup getting cast on that show. It gave her four or five years of steady paychecks. The Garry Moore Show, by the way, is where Candid Camera came from. Garry Moore started it as a recurring skit on his show before it spun off. I didn't know that until today. Pretty awesome.

Carol's next gig after this was The Lucy Show. Yes, as in Lucille Ball. Having divorced Desi in 1960 after twenty years of marriage, Lucy was on her own. She was still in the biz, but her work wasn't catching fire the way it used to. By the time she did The Lucy Show, she was in her fifties, and there was no question she'd passed her prime. In The Lucy Show, she plays a woman named, yes, Lucy. And she has a friend named Vivian, played by Vivian Vance (Ethel from the original I Love Lucy). The Lucy character is a widow, and Vivian's divorced. The premise is that they live together with their kids while trying to make ends meet. Carol Burnett wasn't a regular. She played a recurring character on a handful of episodes as a woman named, yes, Carol. So Carol Burnett didn't work with her much, but she worked with her enough to have an opinion about it today. First of all, Lucille Ball was a task master, but Carol doesn't hold that against her. "Lucy was tough because she had to be," she said, the implication being if she wasn't, show biz would've eaten her up. But one thing Carol criticized Lucy for was having taken Desi's writing for granted. She said Lucy never appreciated Desi's writing until he was gone.

The Lucy Show lasted all of one season, 1966-67, which leads us too, yes, The Carol Burnett Show. It premiered on September 11, 1967. Carol told us all kinds of anecdotes about this show, as you'd probably expect. It's too bad my father and stepmother weren't here to see this, my stepmother especially. She's got to be the biggest Carol Burnett fan I've ever met. Every time I go back to Jersey to visit, usually at Thanksgiving, at some point they'll break out their VHS tapes of episodes they recorded back in the nineties when they were rerun on one of the local stations. If you're a fan of the show or know even a little about it, you'll probably want to know about Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. Actually, there's no need to say too much about them. They were as awesome to work with as you'd expect, Carol said. She really lit up talking about them. The only specific little nugget she shared about Harvey and Tim was how they were always trying to outdo each other. They kept up this sort of friendly competition to such an extent that, in the end, you were sure to see them at the top of their game every single episode.

One recurring theme in Carol's recollections was Bob Mackie, the costume designer, who was all of twenty-seven when the show started. She made no bones about it: Bob Mackie was her savior. One time they did a sketch (Carol prefers "sketch" instead of "skit") with a funny take on Jack the Ripper. Vincent Price was the celebrity guest that week, and he was playing Jack. Carol was supposed to play his London whore victim. During rehearsals, she was having a tough time getting into character. How does an American from twentieth century Hollywood relate to a nineteenth century London prostitute? Bob Mackie's solution: Put black stuff on one of Carol's teeth, so that from the audience it would appear she had a chipped tooth. Perfect! Carol said that was just the thing to make it work. She also talked about a skit--sorry, sketch--riffing Gone with the Wind. A whole bunch of people cheered when she mentioned this sketch. I guess it was that memorable. In fact, you know what? I seem to remember seeing a Gone with the Wind-esque sketch on one of my stepmom's VHS tapes. Harvey Korman played the Rhett Butler character, I think. I think. Don't quote me on that. Anyway, we should all thank Bob Mackie for that one as well.

Maggie Smith, of all people, guest-starred on a few episodes throughout the show's run. Amazing, huh? I wonder if this was before or after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Probably after, right? That's when it would've been a bigger deal to have her on the show. Just last year I saw Hot Millions on the big screen, a late sixties movie Maggie Smith did with Peter Ustinov. This was just before Jean Brodie. She was adorable. Carol said the most memorable sketch they did together was a riff on bullying. She didn't specify who bullied whom, though. I'm guessing Carol was the aggressor, and Maggie Smith was the sweet little victim. I can see that.

They made some discoveries on the show. Bernadette Peters is one example. Carol's really proud of how they helped her career. She was like nineteen or something when she showed up and did about ten or so episodes during the show's run. The best discovery they made, though, would have to be Vicki Lawrence. Carol talked at length about that. It is an amazing story, I have to admit, and I'd never heard it til today. So apparently Vicki Lawrence landed on The Carol Burnett Show simply because she resembled Carol Burnett. She's originally from Inglewood, which is yet one more thing I never would've guessed. For you non-L.A. folk, Inglewood's this little community right outside L.A., down near the beach and right next to LAX. The Hollywood Park racetrack's there. And besides that, there's very little reason you'd want to go there. Not exactly paradise, if you know what I'm sayin'. Anyway, when she was in high school, Vicki was part of a singing group called The Young Americans. In fact, they made a documentary about the group, and it actually scored the Oscar for Best Documentary. One critic did a write-up and mentioned offhand how Vicki Lawrence bore a certain resemblance to Carol Burnett. Vicki read that and sent the clipping to Carol herself. Mind you, Vicki was only a high school senior at this point. But get this: Carol called her! No, I don't mean one of Carol's reps called Vicki. Carol picked up the phone and called Vicki and asked if they could meet. Just to reinforce how luck always plays a part in the big break, in case the journalist's remark wasn't enough of an indication, Carol just happened to be scouting the talent pool for someone to play her kid sister on The Carol Burnett Show, which was still in the early planning stages at that point. Vicki invited Carol to attend the Miss Fireball Contest, a beauty contest put on by the Inglewood Fire Department. So they met. And the rest, as they say, is history. Vicki was cast to play the kid sister and stayed on the show for its full eleven-year run. She didn't miss a beat after that. Still only twenty-nine when the show ended, ol' Vick scored recurring roles on Laverne & Shirley and The Love Boat before scoring a major coup with Mama's Family. That carried her for another seven years, 1983-90. Not a bad career for someone voted Most Likely to Succeed by Morningside High School in Inglewood.

Funny personal story about Mama's Family. When I first discovered it, in the mid or late eighties or thereabouts, I actually thought that was Carol Burnett playing Mama. In the credits I saw it was someone named Vicki Lawrence, whom I'd never heard of. What's funnier, even though she was only in her thirties when she did the show, I actually thought she was as old as the Mama character was supposed to be. Hey, I was like ten years old or whatever. Gimme a break. I saw the gray wig and heard the way she talked, and I bought it. It's just funny that I thought she looked like Carol Burnett, having no idea until today that her big break was due solely to the fact that she looks like Carol Burnett.

During the Q&A toward the end, this one guy from the audience told Carol that he'd attended one of the tapings of her show, and he'd asked her a question then as well. Oh yeah, that's another thing about The Carol Burnett Show: Carol did Q&As with her audience. Anyway, when this guy attended a taping, he asked Carol if she would consider posing for Playboy. Today he wanted to know if Carol remembered that. At first it seemed like she didn't. But then as the guy was reminding her, she was like, "Field and Stream!" Her original answer had been something like: "No, not Playboy, but maybe I'd pose for Field and Stream." Amazing she'd remember that.

Someone else asked if Fresno would ever come out on DVD. Carol had no idea. It didn't do well at the time and since then has basically vanished into oblivion. I've never seen Fresno, but the concept sounds great. It's basically a spoof on Dallas. Instead of two families feuding over oil, it was about two families feuding over Fresno's raisin industry. It had a heck of a cast: Carol Burnett, Dabney Coleman, Teri Garr, Charles Grodin, Jeffrey Jones, Tom Poston.... Oh yeah, and Bob Mackie doing the costumes.

One question from Mary McNamara had to do with Carol's lawsuit against National Enquire. Apparently they ran a piece saying Carol was at a D.C. restaurant going around from table to table pouring wine for everyone when, upon arriving at a table where Henry Kissinger was grabbing a bite, she poured wine all over him. What really happened was, well, nothing. Carol and friends were having supper at a restaurant in our nation's capital. Henry Kissinger and his pals were having supper there at the same time. And that's it. Nothing happened. Carol ended up winning the lawsuit on a very interesting technicality. At some point before all of this happened, the National Enquire sought and was granted the status of "magazine" instead of "newspaper." Apparently being a magazine is a bigger deal and/or lets them charge people more. Here's the rub, though: Since magazines only come out at most once a week, they have more time to check the facts, unlike newspapers, which come out every single day. During the trial, it came to light that someone from this so-called magazine was at the restaurant the same night as Carol and Henry and wrote a note to his boss asking, "What can we do with this?" Apparently the boss forgot to throw out the note because it was presented as evidence.

The interview wasn't all hilarity, though. This one woman from the audience, in her fifties, I'd say, came up to the mic to talk to Carol about losing a child. This woman's daughter died two years ago at the age of twenty-six. Carol Burnett, if you don't know, lost a daughter herself. Her name was Carrie Hamilton. When she was in high school in the late seventies, living with her mom and producer dad Joe Hamilton in Beverly Hills, Carrie got into some hardcore dope. She eventually got out of it, though, with help from friends and family, and established a pretty decent career as an actress. What I know her best from personally is a season six episode of The X-Files (my favorite show ever), where she's the girlfriend of this bank robber who relives the same day over and over. Good stuff. Carrie was a writer too (she was her mother's daughter, after all). She and Mom took Mom's 1986 memoir, One More Time, and adapted it into a play called Hollywood Arms. Carrie never lived to see it produced. She died of cancer in the lungs and brain shortly after New Year's 2002.

Depressing as hell, huh? Especially after Carrie worked so hard to beat down her demons and establish a career. Now that it's been eight years since Carrie died, the woman in the audience wanted to know if there's a way to get over it. Carol thought for a moment (you could tell she was trying not to let her emotions get the better of her) and very gracefully said, "You don't get over it, but you learn how to cope." Carol also talked about how sometimes she sees signs of her daughter. One time she was really hoping L.A. would get some rain....and then it started raining cats and dogs almost right away. The woman at the mic kept saying "Yes, yes" while Carol related that and other similar anecdotes. Anyway, the whole thing almost made me cry. I just lost a brother last summer, who was the same age as Carrie Hamilton, and had to watch my father bury his son, something I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy.

On a brighter note, I was thrilled to hear Carol say she's a huge fan of the show Damages with Glenn Close and Rose Byrne. I love that show! You watch it? If not, please do. The third brilliant season just ended. For the first three seasons it was on F/X, but starting next year, it'll be on one of those DIRECTV-only channels in the 100-200 range. Anyway, it's great, and I was tickled to hear how much Carol likes it. "That show is so interesting!" she enthused more than once. Indeed, she's really hoping the casting folks knock on her door someday. She'd love to play a villain the way Martin Short so brilliantly did in season three and the way Ted Danson's done all three seasons.

And that's a wrap, folks. This was definitely one of my favorite Book Fest events ever. Carol's great. You'd never guess she's turning seventy-seven in two days, although that didn't stop this one guy in the audience from giving her a present. Actually, he gave the present to the volunteers, who passed it along to Carol. I guess the one and only thing I wish she'd gone into is her seemingly tumultuous experience with men. She's been married three times now, but she didn't say a single thing about that. Well, perhaps the fact that she's had three marriages is the reason she doesn't want to talk about it. No matter, this was fun.


Alicia Silverstone Interviewed by Mary MacVean
Cooking Stage - 3:30 p.m.

Alicia Silverstone - Clueless! :)

Mary MacVean - MacVean is a senior feature writer at the Los Angeles Times who has focused on food in culture and history, and on issues of food justice, policy, organic farming and local food. She also has been a reporter and editor in New York and in Moscow. She lives with her husband, Times reporter Mitchell Landsberg, and their two teenage sons in Los Angeles.


Notes

From Carol Burnett to Alicia Silverstone. Don't worry, I didn't get whiplash. Although I did have to book it (pun intended) from the Ackerman Ballroom to the western end of the Book Fest universe (yes, the Fest consumes a huge enough portion of UCLA campus that I feel justified calling it a universe, not to speak of the fact that "universe" and "university" are almost the same word). The Carol Burnett event ended at 3:30 p.m., and the Alicia Silverstone thing was due to start at 3:30 p.m. Having been a regular here for ten years now--no, eleven!--I know how anal the volunteers are about starting on the dot since there's usually an event scheduled right after. That's the rub about dealing with celebrities, though. Not even the Book Fest volunteers' trademark anal retention is any match for Hollywood celebu-fickleness.

Sure enough, when I finally reached the outdoor Cooking Stage, sweaty and out of breath, no one was on the stage yet. Quite a crowd had gathered, though. Folks of all ages and both genders had converged on the Cooking Stage to hear how Alicia stayed so cute. With no sign of Clueless and no indication anything was about to happen, I hopped over to the adjacent outdoor food court to grab a bottle of water for my parched, and by this point in the day well-tanned, self. The area directly in front of the stage was completely mobbed, and the crowd stretched back quite a bit, so any hope of a straight-on view of Alicia and Mary was out. That can suck since, when you've got two folks on a stage like this, sitting in those tall director's chairs, they're facing each other at forty-five-degree angles. If you're watching from the side, one of them's going to be turned away from you. This makes the outdoor stage events different from the indoor panels and indoor one-on-ones like the Carol Burnett thing, where the participants are all sitting at a table facing the audience. And so, water in hand, with no hope of getting into the center of the crowd, I squeezed into the throng of people on the left side facing the stage, hoping Alicia would pick the chair facing me.

And she did! Alicia came out to much applause and whistling, looking just as adorable as you'd expect. You've seen Clueless, right? If not, please do. It's a modern-day spin on Emma set in Beverly Hills. Of course, that came out fifteen years ago, so you might think Alicia couldn't possibly be as cute today as she was then. You'd be wrong. She was nineteen then, she's thirty-three now (thirty-four in October) and not one iota less cute for it. Yes, I know when her birthday is, it's early October. She was born the same year as me, 1976, only two months later. Does my knowing that scare you? Don't be scared! Hey, I'm an Alicia fan, what can I say? And the fact is, whatever you think of her, Clueless is in fact a very clever film. It's one of the most creative and clever adaptations of a book I've ever seen. But don't take my word for it. The critics liked it too. Unfortunately, with Brittany Murphy's recent passing, it's also taken on a note of poignancy, since that film launched Brittany's career.

This is now the fourth time I've seen Alicia in the flesh (this isn't helping the "I'm not a stalker" argument, is it?), although I should note this is the first time I've seen her as herself. The other three times were at the Geffen Playhouse, just a few blocks from UCLA in Westwood Village. Most recently, she was in this play called Time Stands Still. It had its world premiere at the Geffen last year before going on to Broadway. Before that, Alicia starred in a pair of David Mamet revivals: Boston Marriage in 2006, followed by Speed-the-Plow the year after that. So if you're wondering why you haven't seen her in movies lately, that's why. Yeah, I agree a lot of her film work since Clueless leaves much to be desired. I have a feeling she knows that, too. Actors have no control over the quality of scripts sent their way. What's a girl to do? Hit the boards!

Alicia wasn't here to talk about her acting career, though. She talked about a food book she published last fall, The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet. It is, in a nutshell, a book about how awesome it is to be a vegan. No, it's not a preachy book. I'm saying that not because I've read it (I haven't), but because Alicia reiterated several times during the interview that she judges no one and she's not trying to tell people how to live. Instead, our pal Alicia wants to share her experiences being a vegan so that non-vegans like myself can see that it's not so bad after all. Not only does being a vegan mean we still get to eat lots of awesome food, it means you'll feel much better, have better skin (I can vouch for that, seeing Alicia and her skin today), and have a higher energy level. Better yet, you're also helping the environment. So there ya go, veganism is a win-win all around. That's all she's trying to get at with The Kind Diet. And yes, the title has that double meaning: Veganism means being kind to yourself while being kind to Mother Earth. No, The Kind Diet is not about dieting per se, as in losing weight. If your weight is your only concern, this book is not for you. Besides, the market's already glutted (no pun intended) with books about shedding pounds.

I should probably state right now that I have no plans to become a vegan. I'm not saying I never will be, but that's only because I never say never. And I don't mean to suggest Alicia's case wasn't compelling. It totally was. Actually, I shouldn't say compelling. That's too aggressive a word for someone of her radiant personality. I'd say she was disarming. If you've seen Clueless, you know what I mean. She makes no effort at all to be sweet and disarming. She just is. One of my favorite things about listening to her, speaking of disarming, was how scatterbrained she could be. Several times during the interview, she'd be in the middle of a sentence and then go, "Oh my God!", and change topics. Adorable!

Alicia gave us some backstory on how she became a macro vegan. I'm not exactly sure when she converted, but by the time she did The Graduate on Broadway in 2002, she'd at least gone vegan, if not macro. Her Graduate costar Jason "American Pie" Biggs would deliberately eat meat in front of her to get under her skin. It never worked. Alicia's not the kind of gal to let shit like that get to her. Awesome sense of humor. While I don't know when she went macro, I know who gets the credit: Gwyneth Paltrow. Alicia said Gwyneth was the first person she ever heard of subscribing to the macro lifestyle. That's where you not only have a vegan diet, you live a vegan life. In other words, you never wear leather (that's cow), you use solar panels on your roof, those low-energy bulbs in your lamps, the whole bit. Mind you, Alicia was already a vegan when she read about the macro lifestyle. At first, she made fun of it. It was unfathomable to her that someone could live like that. Then she met Gwyneth. I don't know if the latter meant to convert our girl here, but whatever the case, Alicia said today, "As it turns out, Gwyneth was right."

Alicia talked about the book for a bit. It's divided up into three sections. The further in you get, the more hardcore the vegan lifestyle becomes. The first section is called Flirts. This is the section for folks like me, those of us who are tepid at the prospect of changing our diets so radically. As a Flirt, you're not doing anything radical. You're dipping your toe into the vegan pool. Instead of cutting out meat altogether, you reduce your carnivorous intake and substitute some of that meat for non-meat stuff, plants and what have you. Alicia couldn't say enough how even those small Flirtatious changes make a big difference.

The next section is Vegan. This is where Alicia was when she made fun of Gwyneth, who gave as good as she got. The first time they met, Gwyneth already knew Alicia was reluctant about going macro, so she took playful jabs at Alicia for being a vegan without being macro. How can you pretend to care for animals, in other words, and still wear that hot leather coat? Nonetheless, if you're not ready for macro, but you're over being a Flirt, you can graduate to Vegan. You cut out any and all animal food. This includes milk, cheese, butter, ice cream (!), everything that comes from an animal. Yes, this is where things get radical. Or "life altering," as Alicia put it. As I said above, I just can't wrap my head around embracing a lifestyle like this, but that didn't detract at all from Alicia's cuteness as she went on about how the Vegan level means you can enjoy all those yummy meat substitutes and those wonderful yummy grains and fruits and veggies. I tell ya, had this interview gone on a little longer, this sweet gal just may have had a fighting chance at converting me.

And finally we have the third and most hardcore section of The Kind Diet: Superhero. This is the so-called macrobiotic lifestyle, the all-consuming (no pun intended) veganism. As a Superhero, you're not just a vegan in how you eat, you're a vegan in how you live. "True enlightenment," as Alicia said. The bottom line of the Superhero macrobiotic program is that you gotta love grains. Brown rice is one of the most popular manifestations of the grain theory. It's all about the grains. You've also got veggies, of course. You can eat beans. But you don't eat anything that's processed or refined. Going even further, macrobiotics also decrees that you chew your food very, very well. Yes, you can eat seafood, just not very much of it. Alicia was so cute. She was like, "Yes, I splurge. You can splurge on the Kind Diet! If I see a shrimp walking down the street and I really want it, well..." She also said she enjoys a glass of wine most nights, but if she has more than a glass, "I'm having a wild and crazy time," she said.

Except for ice cream, just about any kind of dessert is fair game. Alicia couldn't stop gushing about the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes she likes to make now and again. She told us an anecdote about working with Laura Linney on Broadway. I mentioned above that one of the times I saw Alicia at the Geffen was in a play called Time Stands Still. It's about this couple on the outs after having been Iraq War photographers for several years, and how their respective scars (some physical, but mostly mental) have made living with each other a bit of a challenge, to the point that the guy's already seeing this other gal, a cute young thing named Mandy. Alicia played Mandy at the Geffen and stuck with the role in the move to Broadway. Anna Gunn, who played the lead at the Geffen, was replaced with Laura Linney. Too bad, because Anna Gunn was quite good. But Laura Linney is Laura Linney, right? So anyway, during the Time Stands Still Broadway run, Alicia would prepare her signature chocolate peanut butter cupcakes for everyone, and apparently Laura Linney was her biggest fan. She'd even have them for breakfast and would stop Alicia in the hallway to gush about them.

Although Alicia didn't delve into it, she did mention a past drug habit. She said that once she was on the healthy food kick, "I stopped taking the drugs." Huh? What drugs? She didn't specify, nor did Mary seem interested. Also, speaking of drugs, since Clueless is one of the movies she's famous for, I wish she'd talked about Brittany Murphy. That movie was Brittany's big break, and seeing's how she just died from a dietary disorder and apparently developed a dependence on several prescription drugs, mentioning her wouldn't have been out of order.

Thekindlife.com is the site Alicia set up for The Kind Diet. There's all kinds of stuff there. If you're a female, check out the makeup selection. Yes, it's vegan/animal-friendly/eco-compatible makeup. She's got makeup kits called ecotools that she gives away in contests. You've got a shop, a recipe section, stuff about how to conserve water, the works. Alicia keeps it well updated and posts her own articles, each of which comes with a feedback and discussion module. Good stuff. She's a woman of the people.

To finish off, Alicia wanted to recap that The Kind Diet is not about weight control or shedding pounds. If you're overweight, this will address that, but only secondarily. It's really about feeling better. She says she feels much better today than she did fifteen years ago making Clueless. Being macrobiotic means you're getting the gunk out. She talked about de-gunking herself, something that happens organically when you subscribe to her regimen. And by being kind to yourself, you're being kind to Earth. She made no bones about being a picky eater, a self-described food snob. She created her own menu for her thirtieth birthday back in October 2006. In fact, Mary had a copy of the menu and read it to us. Too bad I can't remember it, it sounded spectacular. And it was all macrobiotic. Alicia also wanted to reiterate that she doesn't mean to sound preachy. So cute how she was sensitive to sounding preachy. I didn't feel like she was. One good point she made was that you may already be close to her kind of diet and not even know it. "Try it for a day," she said.

That concludes the first day of the 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I'm wiped out. I'm going to hit the sack early so I can get to UCLA at a decent time tomorrow and park in my usual spot in garage 6. Yes, after so many years, I pretty much park among the same set of spots in an outdoor part of garage 6 on the second level. So with that, I'm signing out. Day 2 promises to be just as full (and fulfilling).