Posted on November 17, 2011 at 09:45 PM | Permalink
A few years ago, Rolling Stone kindly published a piece of mine about the funniest "studio notes" actors, writers, directors, and comedians have received from Hollywood producers and network execs. It was intended to be an oral history about receiving chortle-worthy criticism, a way to use these "notes" to tell some of comedy's best secret stories, and I hope we accomplished that goal, to some degree. (Note: the headline was not my first choice, but I am a team player, and I had a lot of fun working on the piece and eventual pride seeing it in RS.)
It was a dream assignment: I interviewed a score of hilarious celebs, producers and directors--from Mel Brooks and Garry Shandling to younger talents like David Wain ("Wet Hot American Summer"), Paul Scheer ("The League"), and Nick Stoller ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "The Five Year Engagement").
Everyone cracked me up, and the piece generated serious interest from one of the world's biggest book publishers. So I took some of the quotes from my many funny interviews that Rolling Stone had not picked for inclusion (page-space is limited at magazines), and my agent and I went out with a book proposal about how this could be a hilarious narrative project, especially given my access to so many people in the entertainment industry. Eventually, and ironically, the senior publishing exec didn't think the book would make money (I still disagree), and the project, which could now be a brilliant multimedia thing with video, great for iPads, was tabled.*
Alas, one of the many funny things Rolling Stone could not include--sadly rendering my collection of interview subjects 100% male--was my unforgettable, if short, interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who stars tonight in HBO's new series "Veep." I share this gem with you now. Word, for word, and I have this on tape, this is what one of the funniest actresses in comedy told me, on the record. Addendum: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a lovely, generous woman, with guts of steel, and I don't doubt she will continue to be a hit with audiences everywhere -- and to reiterate, I would not have posted this if she had not given me the quote on the record.
FUNNIEST STUDIO NOTE: JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS

"I have only one story that comes to mind, and I leave out names because that's a better idea.
But when I was very young and had just started on “SNL”--I believe I was 20--I did a sketch in which I played John DeLorean's wife...
In that sketch, my hair was blown out straight -- because her hair is straight.
So, we did the show, and the following day, I was called into one of our producers' offices (as a side note, I should say that I have naturally curly hair), and he said to me, “Julia, I got a call from a bunch of NBC executives after last night’s show, and they said that after seeing your hair straight, they all wanna fuck you.”
This was apparently his way of trying to entice me into straightening my hair for the rest of season.
Needless to say: I was young and naïve, but I was so shocked that anyone would say anything like that, I just burst out laughing in a hysterical way. I didn't know what else to do.
Years later, when "Seinfeld" was becoming somewhat of a hit, I ran into the same producer at NBC again.
And he said to me, “Hey, Julia, I see they're letting you do your hair the way you want now."
That's apparently all he took away from my “Seinfeld” contribution.
The irony of it was that not only did I make my hair curly on "Seinfeld," which may have been a huge mistake now that I think about it, but I enhanced the curl and made it HUGE!
I wonder if that hair wasn't some kind of reaction.
I was saying: 'Not only is this hair going to be curly, it's going to be crazy curly. Take that, motherfucker!!'"
--as told to Adam Baer
*Tabled in this case means I stopped pursuing it. I'm open to pursuing it again, though, especially with a new class of today's funniest people.
Posted on April 22, 2012 at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Technorati Tags: Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Seinfeld, SNL, Veep
Today I have a piece in The Atlantic in which I persuade the Academy Awards to create a "Best Soundtrack" category that would honor the artistic work of insightful music supervisors, who should be given the same awards as art directors and other creative film staffers. There wasn't much room to get into a large discussion of the best soundtracks ever created much less those of 2011. But as I wrote, the "art is in the curating of the mix," and in that spirit, I offer you up the one-song but internally eclectic soundtrack to my life. OK, seriously: that song and this one.
UPDATE: A reader commented on the piece with an intelligent response. The comment and my reply are below.
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Adam Baer
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Update #2: The other strategy they could employ is two music categories: Best Music Direction (like art direction, which would include soundtrack), and Best Original Music. --Adam Baer
Posted on February 23, 2012 at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Technorati Tags: academy awards, adam baer, best soundtrack, music supervisor, oscars, the atlantic
Today I posted "content" in an attempt to use Facebook Timeline in a humorous, narrative way; I was kidding a little, but I thought it could be fun to really use the software to create a comedic, serialized micro-narrative made of short status updates. The post was commented on by a couple of friends, and then removed by someone other than me. I then discussed this in another status update with those same friends. That was then promptly removed by someone other than me. I then reposted the content twice, and now I do not see any of this on my page. If Facebook would like people to care about its IPO -- and that's a foregone conclusion, they do, because billions of dollars are concerned, but let's talk about regular people -- they should not delete writers' attempts to use their tools to create and engage with an audience, in jest or more serious ways. The aforementioned content (copied below) is far from genius and merely average, but I posted it here, which is less "buggy" a virtual "place" and likely watched by fewer programmers who police and react to user content. Perhaps this was all just FB software problems...but if so, who can trust FB with content you do not backup elsewhere. I mean, what if this stuff was actually good?
Here is the attempt at humor I posted, related to the ABC Show Revenge. Do you find it inappropriate?
"When I was 10, a high-school senior in my Monte Cristo-like neighborhood was hired to hang out with and shoot hoops with me before my parents returned home from work. One day, the kind young man suggested I find someone to buy me a tape of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” So, I did, and the next time he appeared, he “borrowed” it, never to return or answer our many calls again. Now, as a rational adult, I plan to use Facebook Timeline, narratively, to track down this man for a final confrontation. Would any of you care to follow this meaningful adventure? I shall call it “My Facebook ‘Revenge’ / Season One: Born to Run.”
I shall move slowly, follow clues, keep my emotions at bay, and friend anyone close to this man and his especially heinous crime, crossing each one off my list one by one. It will be sweet to one day recover this low quality recording, if it still exists, uncompressed and possibly warped. But the ultimate prize will be hearing this man sing under duress the lyrics: “The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive / Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide.”
AFTERNOON UPDATE: Facebook was briefly down this morning, and I wouldn't want to think they'd target one person, so it's quite possible that's what happened. Still, the "dangerous" keywords used in my posts could have triggered a moderator or bot to remove them at different times (people observed their staggered removal individually), and the critique and untraditional use of Timeline the day after FB's IPO announcement is definitely something they might try to quash.
The important issue remains: Can we trust FB to hold our original life-content as Timeline promises? I'd use a few backups, and make sure you already own the rights to anything you publish anywhere.
Posted on February 02, 2012 at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Technorati Tags: born to run, bruce springsteen, count of monte cristo, facebook, ipo, revenge, social media, timeline, writers, writing
My recent Harper's essay, "Speak Malady," in which I rock, roast, and melt at medical tourism meccas Boston, M.A., and Rochester, M.N. [PDF link]
Posted on May 24, 2011 at 05:21 PM | Permalink
Technorati Tags: adam baer, cancer, cedars-sinai, chondroid chordoma, chordoma, endoscopic endonasal, harper's magazine, hodgkin's disease, mayo clinic, mukherjee, proton beam radiation, the emperor of all maladies, ucla
This weekend, The Financial Times Magazine runs a hopefully informative and humorous personal essay [PDF] about my mysterious health travails and experience with LA's medical marijuana world at an crucial point in the battle to legalize cannabis in California. It's also online in web-friendly html page-format here, @ FT.com.
Naturally, I thought long and hard about what kinds of supplementary material I could offer on my blog. But we sadly only present words and stuff we can roll and/or bake into Web code Glass Shallot. In that spirit, then let me offer a small chunk of text my editors and I had to cut at the last minute for page-space. It concerns the first dispensary I visited in Hollywood, one of the shops LA will close, where the system -- and the product -- actually worked very well. (Text below)
"More concerned with convenience than finding a boutique shop that sold Valrohna chocolate cupcakes, I first visited Druggie Christmas Tree Girl’s dispensary: a dank space above a seedy Hollywood motel, manned by a hulking Middle Eastern guy with a shaved head, wearing an elegantly dizzying Ed Hardy T-shirt. He screamed my name the way some thug had screamed at Jason Statham in an action movie I once reviewed. Naturally, I trusted him.
“What iz dis?” the guy asked, taking my letter through a little hole in the wall that separated the real store from the waiting room.
“It’s my doctor’s recommendation," I said.
“I never see something like dis, yo.”
“Well,” I said, “It’s real.”
“I see dat, dude. But I still gotta call.”
Yes, this sketchy drug-dealer type was calling a nationally lauded physician because of me.
He left the window, I heard some mumbling. He reappeared minutes later.
“You in,” he said. “He OK it.”
“You spoke with my actual doctor, not some nurse or assistant?” I asked.
“Totally,” he said. “Now whaddayou want?”
I walked into a tiny, smoky space through a cage-protected door, and he showed me some 10 canisters of fragrant weed. I asked for something to alleviate pain – nerve pain, if that meant anything?
“Bubba Skunk,” he said. “That’s you shit.”
“That’s my shit,” I concurred, handing over $50 for a pill bottle filled with buds.
“How much should I use?” I asked.
“Howev much you want, homeslice.”
Then I left, and as I waved my new drugs around the seedy eastern side of Hollywood Boulevard, as a man in a doo-rag drove by me on a miniature bicycle powered by a tiny motor, my wife grabbed the bag and told me to hide it.
“But it’s legal,” I said.
“But this isn’t Brentwood!"
Posted on April 16, 2010 at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Technorati Tags: 4/20, 420, adam baer, bubba skunk, buds, california, cannabis, dispensary, edibles, farmacy, financial times, ft weekend magazine, hash, indica, james franco, los angeles, marijuana, medical marijuana, pot, prop 215, sativa, strain, tax cannabis, weed, weeds

I struggle, like all artists, and nowhere is this more evident than in the rough-and-tumble assignments I completed last fall for publication in a variety of December magazines: a short Details magazine profile of Zoë Saldana (above) and a Hemispheres feature on chef Jose Andres. Sometimes I must also dig ditches.
Posted on November 25, 2009 at 08:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: actress, avatar, bazaar, chef, james cameron, jose andres, motion capture, neytiri, pandora, sls hotel, tapas, zoe saldana
Recently, GQ posted a little one-question Q&A that I conducted with the co-creators of Fox's new "The Cleveland Show," premiering September 27. Below, is a piece about attending a table-read at the show's offices last spring, followed by a longer transcript of our conversation.
Grab a folding chair in the front row; avoid clumsy boom-mic gaffers; sit close to the guest stars; caffeinate. These are but a few actions you will enjoy if you’re one of the animators, production staff, agents, TV execs, writers, and miscellaneous VIPs invited to a table-read for The Cleveland Show, Fox’s "Family Guy" spinoff (premiering September 27) centered around Peter Griffin’s lovable African American neighbor. On the day that I drop by, last spring, in the Wilshire Boulevard offices, the scene is business as usual. Nearly. Superagent Ari Emanuel, the brother of the new White House Chief of Staff, is observing (he represents the show’s co-creator, Simpsons writing-staff alum Rich Appel). Actress Taraji P. Henson has a guest spot, fresh off her Oscar nomination for “Benjamin Button.” In the house, wearing a sharp white shirt, as well is spiky haired executive producer and "Family Guy" mastermind Seth MacFarlane, the highest paid and most identifiable comedy writer in the world--see a new slew of Hulu TV ads in which aliens unfurl from his stomach. Then there’s the day's most notable guest-star: Kanye West—quiet and composed, decked out in black, neon-yellow hightops, and his trademark oversized Wayfarers. (Sadly, Arianna Huffington, who plays a talking bear, is absent.) “The Cleveland Show,” if this is the first you're hearing of it because you don't live and breathe in America, is an attempt to recast the "Family Guy's" gentle deli owner as the patriarch of a new family in Rhode Island, where he lives with his gullible son, Cleveland, Jr., his new wife Roberta, and her ghettoriffic son, Rallo. But did you know America’s most heavily anticipated new African American sitcom’s really the brainchild of Mike Henry, a pale, 44-year-old white guy with easy smile from Richmond, V.A.? As the source of Cleveland’s laconic whine and the gritty growls of Rallo, Henry seems as if he could just be some soccer dad from the burbs—and it’s a pretty surreal thing to watch, as he vacillates with epic smoothness between urban voice-archetypes as if somewhere inside him is a class clown from the South Side of Chicago. From the confines of his office, he says no one’s really ripped into him for doing black-voice—but that's just got to be a testament to how well he pulls it off. “Here Cleveland’s not just the Black Friend, but a much fuller, well-rounded character than he ever was," Henry adds. Appel, a former Harvard-educated lawyer who literally runs the read by announcing the script’s action as fast and naturally as a New York City auctioneer, sharpens the point: “There's a tradition in animated shows, and it’s a virtue that people often aspire to: colorblind casting. You have grown women playing Bart Simpson and Bobby Hill, and Hank Azaria as Apu. We have Kevin Michael Richardson, who is African American,and while he plays Cleveland, Jr., he also plays one of our most redneck, potentially racist [white] characters.” An admitted “Family Guy” fan, Kanye is—surprise!—playing a character based on himself: a freestylin’ ladies man who competes for a chick with roley-poley Cleveland Jr. through a rap battle at a Jewish neighbor’s house. Picking up a Menorah, he spits: “This voodoo shit’s got nine candles/Your fat ass got nine loooove handles.” Kanye reads OK, if a little slowly, on the fly, but it's not half as magnetic as hearing him perform his own stuff—or, for that matter, posturing for attention on the VMAs. Voiced smoothly with spot-on syncopation by actor Kevin Michael Richardson, Cleveland, Jr.'s retort wins: “Your flow is fated ‘n’ dated, deflated ‘n’ constipated. If I had to rate it? Hate it. Translated—you ate it… Hey cheeseball, you been grated. Chewed up, swallowed, defecated…On the DVD this won’t be pixilated.” Yep, this thing's written by the Family Guy crew. And, expectedly, the in-crowd eats it up with cheers and measured guffahs. By the end, everyone’s congratulating each other, posing for snaps, and milling out to the hallway where a giant Cleveland cut-out stands in front of a large table of craft-service goodies. What I can’t forget, however, as Ari Emanuel offers Our Rap Icon a high-five handshake—power connection!—is how Hollywood rarely contrasts with its meta-depictions on shows like “Entourage.” To wit, the way Appel introduced the day’s Rhymin' Guest Star star an hour earlier: “The man who will appear two weeks from Saturday at my son’s Bar Mitzvah, I hope… Kanye West!” * * * As with any reported piece, there's often at least one Q&A behind it. For the true Cleveland fan, here's a three-way phoner I did with the show's co-creators after attending the Kanye Table Read...
Continue reading "Cleveland Show Calling: The Kanye West Table Read" »
Posted on September 26, 2009 at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Technorati Tags: Ari Emanuel, Cleveland Brown, Cleveland Show, Family Guy, Fox, Kanye West, Kevin Michael Richardson, Mike Henry, Rich Appel, Seth McFarlane

It was Labor Day. We needed a break. I hated the bullshit word "Staycation," but we had to remain in our city. I turned to Priceline. Madness ensued.
[via The Faster Times]
Posted on September 10, 2009 at 09:38 AM | Permalink
Upon moving back to Manhattan after my collegiate and early professional sentence to Baltimore, I wrote an essay about finding specific movie sites close to my new apartment, and how it was far easier to lose oneself in a film's faux-reality than to engage in a new adult life, especially in post 9/11 Manhattan. Well, one of those essays will reappear soon in the new anthology "Lost and Found: Stories from New York," edited by writer Thomas Beller, an influential colleague, founder of MrBellersNeighborhood.com, and editor of the literary journal Open City. Pre-order the book and you'll get more than just my post-adolescent ramblings: other contributors include Philip Lopate, Jonathan Ames, and Alicia Erian.
Posted on July 04, 2009 at 04:48 AM | Permalink
Believe it or not, r'tards, but there was a moment when only discerning--or inebriated--fans of very smart absurdist comedy knew about Zach Galifianakis. OK, that's not completely true, because the genius, free-thinking improvisation master did act in plenty of crap movies as well as appear on channels like VH-1 for much of the 1990s. But these days, with the success of "The Hangover," to say nothing of out-of-touch newspaper articles that say he just had his "big break" a few years ago with the film "The Comedians of Comedy," it's hard to get an authentic, semi-historical sense for why one of the most intelligent minds in comedy today has actually stolen "The Hangover," a very funny broad-seeming but not unsophisticated movie that looks like it could have easily been a vehicle for someone else. Well, a few years ago, just before "The Comedians of Comedy" hit the theaters--actually, in the afternoon before the movie would premiere on Hollywood Boulevard--Zach invited me over to his Venice, C.A. house to do a little interview for Radar (not today's Radar but the version that was edited and written by smart Spy Magazine-style wits before it went under once and for all). Anyway, the piece is no longer online, but I have the uncut version right here. If you loved "The Hangover," and if you know anything about Noam Chomsky, beards, and Malcom Jamal Warner, you may enjoy this little trip down memory lane. If anything, I can report that it was probably one of my best interview experiences with someone who makes entertainment. Zach's way more than a comedian: he's a thinker, an extremely unpredictable performer, and probably most important, a good guy happy to open his door to a stranger one day in 2005 just hours before he'd have to get all gussied up for a big Hollywood event that would force him to do the unthinkable--get on the freeway. [RADAR Interview PDF]
Posted on June 29, 2009 at 04:22 AM | Permalink

In May’s Men’s Journal, I have a one-pager
about Big Sur in the wake of last year’s wildfires. In the piece, I
write about an awesome collection of yurts overlooking the Pacific ocean called Treebones. My wife and I hung out in Big Sur for this piece in November ‘08, on the weekend that Santa Barbara's Montecito area lit up like a roman candle, and
on which there were crazy winds that shook us, and a fair amount of our camping
friends in Ojai and beyond, all night long. Why Lina and I continually end up in oceanfront
mountains during wildfires and windstorms is beyond me. That said, we’d been to
Treebones before, and we’ll return. There’s nothing like it, and it’s only perhaps
too rustic for the Woody Allen wannabe who can’t hold down his lunch west of the Mississippi. But
if you want a little supplement to the MJ piece, I thought that I’d post some of a long and bewitchingly cool interview with Treebones’s unusually decent founder, John Handy, a recently
indoctrinated volunteer fireman and green-building pioneer who used to work as
a toy executive down in super-serious LA, eventually decided to leave the so-called grid, and now owns a Big White Tanker and
lives in Henry Miller’s woods, where it’s nice and natural, and no one wants to
stick you with dirty needles for your change from the Korean fried chicken
place. Here, if you haven't opened the PDF yet is the Q&A. For more about traveling to Big Sur, here's the MJ piece, which is also available on their Web site. --AB
Posted on April 16, 2009 at 07:59 AM | Permalink
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If you actually think you can beat Shallot's only gefilte fish winner, feel free to send in your recipes now, regardless of how you feel about that tired subject called Organized Religion (boo! yay!). Bonus: Best gefilte-related story wins you a publication and a surprise award to be discussed in public on this here Interweb portal.
Posted on March 31, 2009 at 02:25 PM | Permalink
We must now look this hot and put-together whenever we leave our Laurel Canyon homes.
Posted on March 23, 2009 at 03:32 PM | Permalink
Posted on March 14, 2009 at 03:56 PM | Permalink
Forgive me, Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer (and Bernie Madoff), I was just taught the keyword magic used by top S.E.O. experts to improve my pageviews and already steep income from blog ads, and I'm experimenting with the Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer and Daily Show and CNBC news to see if the Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer and Daily Show and CNBC news will give me more than the usual three readers today, a day when everyone is talking about Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer and the Daily Show and CNBC. And, oh, the Recession. And Economy. And GM. And some guys called Obama, Madoff, Michael Jackson, and China.
Posted on March 13, 2009 at 09:46 AM | Permalink
Occasionally (alright, frequently), the Shallot gets a press release that's just too much fun not to share. Who needs entertaining journalism when a company does the work for you?
Today's featured release:
Posted on March 10, 2009 at 10:08 AM | Permalink

[Shallot's Unopened Press CD of the Week is a newly recurring feature in which the Boss finally unwraps one of the discs that had been sent to him for review and shares the cover art, which always, obviously, Says It All.]
Posted on March 09, 2009 at 08:43 PM | Permalink