Review: Inside Inside

For reasons that are meaningful only to me, I don't do new year's resolutions. I did plan to do two things (at one time) here in the new year that I haven't done before: read a Thomas Merton book, and blog about a book I'm reading.

I got sidetracked at the library, though, by a hefty volume on the New Arrivals rack: Inside Inside, by James Lipton.


James Lipton is the founder and former director of the Actor's Studio Drama School, and host of Bravo's Inside the Actor's Studio. I haven't had access to the Bravo network in several years, but when I did, Inside was one of my favorite shows.

This book is more about Lipton than about Inside, but in a sense Lipton is Inside, so that didn't bother me as much as it obviously bothered the reviewers at Amazon.com. But he's done much more than just his work with Actor's Studio. He wrote a novel and a literary work that has been in print for forty years, wrote two Broadway musicals, produced twelve Bob Hope specials and a Jimmy Carter inaugural concert, is a pilot and competitive horseman, was awarded a lifetime Emmy and France's Chevalier de l'ordre de Arts et des Lettres, was a pimp in a Parisian bordello (well, sort of; the nuance of the translation may have been lost on my sorry monolingual butt), and has the overwhelming admiration and respect of the arts and entertainment community. Except from maybe Barry Manilow and/or Bob Kerrey (read the book for that Inside inside joke).

The book clocks in at 492 pages and there isn't a lot of white space, let me tell you. Mr. Lipton doesn't interview actors from behind a stack of 500 blue notecards just because he has a cardboard fetish. He may have, for all I know, though he didn't feel it necessary to mention in the book. He did mentioned a bunch of other stuff, though, like how he almost crashed a plane in Alaska, got thrown off a horse, had a [Warning: NSFW] print of his naked wife published by George Plimpton in The Paris Review [I warned you], and listened to Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan exchange raunchy anecdotes in the Lincoln Bedroom after taping a dialog for one of the Hope specials, resulting in Secret Service confiscation and erasure of an 18 minute portion of the tape. Not the first time that's happened in the White House, huh? Come to think of it, it probably wasn't the first time raunchy anecdotes were exchanged in the Lincoln Bedroom either. Or the last.

But I digress. By now you must know that I am untrained in the art of the book review, so I take no shame in saying that this was a swell book. And in the spirit of Inside the Actor's Studio, I shall end with the infamous Bernard Pivot Questionnaire:

What is your favorite word? Papa
What is your least favorite word? Irregardless
What turns you on? The smell of roasting pork
What turns you off? Wastefulness
What sound or noise do you love? Sleet landing on fallen leaves
What sound or noise do you hate? A ringing telephone
What is your favorite curse word? Crap
What profession would you like to attempt? Professional book reviewer
What profession would you not like to attempt? Donald Trump's hairstylist
Finally, if heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Son, what had you so keyed up? Well, forget it, you have the rest of eternity to unwind.


Bravo, Mr. Lipton...