Moviefone News Moviefone Copyright 2011, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. Moviefone Good old fashioned elbow grease. <![CDATA[Life Begins Before Conception? You Zygote to Be Kidding]]>
Let's start with the most obvious questions relating to "personhood."

How will anyone know when a zygote has been created, thus establishing its legal residence, when neither it nor its parents can pin the moment down? If we're going to change the definition of the life cycle from birth-to-death to conception-to-death, accuracy is essential.

OBGYNs will tell you that nine months is merely an average gestation period for humans and that counting back 275 days, adjusting for leap year, is not a reliable way to establish the instant of conception. And memory is even worse. Did the gametes meet after that candlelight dinner and the warm toddies, or was it the night the creators -- and, of course God -- stayed home and watched porno?

This legislation is going to make birth leave a lot of wiggle room, both in the womb and in the courthouse. I don't know how a zygote will go about finding a lawyer, but if it were to learn that it's becoming a zygote was the result of an inconvenient accident, and its post-birth accidental status caused it emotional distress, won't it be able to sue the makers of the contraceptive foam that had failed its mom?

Will a zygote that is the result of rape or incest and comes to regret his life as the son or daughter of a monster be able to sue the government for banning the procedure that his mother, in a more enlightened era, might have sought? The GOP will be reinvigorated in its pursuit of tort reform.

One thing we can for sure: Donald Trump will be right in saying that Barack Obama's birth certificate is meaningless. Where were his parents when the sperm hit the egg?

As for birth certificates in general, they may still be valid in bars, but otherwise they'll be like bar mitzvahs, anniversaries and the first paragraphs of obituaries, merely markers along a continuum of life from conception to brain death (and the GOP may get around to redefining that, too). So, schedule your kids' conception day parties accordingly.

By now, you can see the necessity of pinning down the moment when two gametes come together to form a U.S. citizen. And with the anti-science movement gaining moment along with the personhood movement, there will be no federal funding of research into home pregnancy testing, which at the moment cannot narrow the event down to less than a few days. That won't begin to dampen the voices of critics who say that if God wanted us to know the exact moment of conception, he would have affixed a bell to a woman's womb. (That would get cowboys out of the bunkhouse faster than a call for supper.)

It may be that in vitro fertilization is the only way to know exactly when conception takes place. Doctors take good notes. But most couples, given their choice, would prefer old-fashioned rutting to visits to cold hospital labs, even, I suspect, most Republicans.

Of course, people in gay marriages who want children would still have to make those visits to the labs, which they would probably be glad to do if the GOP that wants to grant complete citizenship to zygotes would extend the same rights to them.

As for the costs of this amendment, they will be staggering. With people being approximately nine months older than we think we are, we should be able to apply for Medicare when we are 64-1/3 years old. We'll get the same jump on Social Security, and pensions for government workers -- military, police, firemen, members of Congress -- would be advanced nine months, less for preemies.

There is some risk in the GOP plan. The voting age would have to be moved up nine months, as well, and given the predilection among young people to vote for the other party, it could cost Republican candidates at the ballot box.

If reasonable heads were to prevail in Tampa (insert guffaw here), the GOP might realize that they would have a better chance of passing an amendment that states their actual purpose -- the criminalization of all abortions -- than one that makes germinated eggs more important than even their mothers' lives.

But for now, every little zygote is their political football.]]> Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:57:15 EDT 1830167 <![CDATA[Memory Lane]]> After an unforgiving diagnosis, a Thanksgiving dinner reunites two old friends and the Hollywood actress who first brought them together.

By JACK MATHEWS


I cannot forget the look on my wife's face when I told her that the actress Diane Lane and her 7-year-old daughter Eleanor would be joining us for the following day's Thanksgiving dinner in 2001. The look wasn't what you'd think: not "Oh, my god, a movie star will see my dinnerware!" -- though that may have crossed her mind. No, it was simple panic. She'd bought a turkey for four and now we were six; my wife and I, our son Darren, Diane and Eleanor, and Diane's father, Burt.

Burt Lane was one of my closest friends and I'd invited him to have Thanksgiving with us a week or so earlier. When he learned that Diane and Eleanor would be flying in from Los Angeles, I said "Bring them along." I assured my wife that we could stretch that bird six ways, and we did.

The memory of that day brackets a friendship that began 22 years earlier in Durango, Mexico, where Diane, then 14, was playing one of the title roles in the Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches. Burt was there to keep "Little Britches" out of trouble. I was there to do interviews for my paper, the Detroit Free Press. A week later -- and with apologies to Diane and her more established co-stars Burt Lancaster and Rod Steiger -- I came away thinking that Burt Lane was the most interesting person on the shoot.

Burt was a big man, a robust, larger-than-life character with a smile that could light candles and a laugh that rattled the walls. He was also very intelligent, highly curious and full of surprises. I knew very little about him or Diane when I got to Durango. Though she'd been doing plays since she was 6 years old, her first movie, A Little Romance, had just opened in the U.S. to very good reviews. I may have been the first to tell Diane that her Little Romance co-star, Sir Laurence Olivier, had compared her to a young Grace Kelly.

Okay, but check Burt's accomplishments. As an acting coach in the 1950s, he prepped both Bobby Darin and boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson for their dramatic film debuts. He'd also operated an actors workshop in New York -- which he called home for his adult life after growing up in the South and a stint in the Army in Germany -- with partner John Cassavetes. Burt complained that Cassavetes spent less time teaching than he did taking students out of class to shoot them in improvised street scenes that were later used in "Shadows," a no-budget, no-plot indie film that launched Cassavetes' directing career.

More compelling to me were the sacrifices Burt had made to help Diane establish herself as an actress. He gave up his coaching career and became a New York City taxi driver. He said it was the best way he knew to arrange his work schedule around hers. He did that until she was cast in A Little Romance, which took them both to Europe for several weeks.

Burt had a great confidence, which was rarely shaken. I asked him in Durango how he intended to guide his daughter through the alternative moral universe she was entering and he said he had it under control, that he had given her all the tools she needed to survive the rough-and-tumble of Hollywood. He was convincing, but wrong. A few months after our Durango encounters, Burt called me in Detroit to say that he and Diane had had a fight and that she had run away. She showed up days later in Los Angeles with then-teen heartthrob Christopher Atkins and eventually ended up living with her mother in Atlanta, which launched a long and ugly custody fight.

All adolescents make mistakes, but Diane's were often fodder for magazine pieces and, as an adult, she attributed some of those mistakes "to having too much independence too young." I'm sure she's right. In Durango, Burt had boasted to me of giving her a free hand in her decisions, both personal and professional, and I had a first-hand look at that independence.

Over a lunch in 1983, when Diane was in Burbank shooting Streets of Fire and Burt was there functioning as her business manager, he talked me out of writing a novel that I'd just described for him and instead suggested I tell the story in a screenplay. The story sprung up from a California murder I covered as a cub reporter, and Burt thought one of the main characters was perfect for Diane. He noted that, if he had an original screenplay in hand, he might be able to piggyback it onto another movie in which uber-producer Peter Guber wanted to cast her.

Fast-forward a week and, with clearance from my editors, I'm holed up in a motel in Ojai, California, an artists' haven about 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles, finishing a 110-page script titled Dangerous Obsession. Fast-forward another week and I'm signing a contract for a one-year option while Burt writes me a six-figure check: Count 'em: $1,000.00. Fast-forward a couple more weeks and I'm sitting in a plush office on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank listening to Burt and Guber discuss whether the role opposite Diane's character in Dangerous Obsession would be a better fit for Warren Beatty or Robert Redford.

Hey, guys, your call.

Fast-forward another few days and Guber has stopped taking Burt's calls. Diane decided not to take the title role Guber had offered her in The Legend of Billy Jean and he was holding Burt responsible.

A Friendship Told By Map






Crowning Achievement



Life went on. I became a movie columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Burt began teaching a humanities class at New York's New School, and Diane kept getting better and better. I saw her on TV during the 1989 Emmy Awards show. She'd been nominated for Best Actress for her role as a frontier prostitute in Lonesove Dove. Burt was sitting next to her, her date for the evening, wearing that incandescent smile.

When I moved to New York in 1991 to be the movie critic for Newsday, Burt and I began getting together frequently for screenings and meals afterward. We morphed into the characters from My Dinner with Andre, discussing and/or arguing every issue one of us thought to bring up. Burt was a proponent of the Socratic Method, a process where you debate a point until its truth is revealed or, in our case, I had to catch a train back to Mahopac.

Burt said that he'd use argument as a technique in coaching actors. By drawing them into a verbal fight, he got them to hear how they sounded when they weren't acting. Though I didn't pose the question to her, I imagine that Socrates was both a blessing and a curse in Diane's childhood.

When I met Burt for drinks one night shortly after the dark day of 9/11, I didn't expect the usual fireworks. The whole city was subdued. Nor did I expect what he was about to say -- that he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer and been given three to six months to live.

"No!" I blurted out.

He reached over and patted the back of my hand, and said, "It's okay, really. I'm okay with this."

And he was. After he shared his prognosis with me, we spent nearly every day together, talking for hours and hours. Though his large frame was soon stooped over a walker on our outings to screenings, he never complained and never lost either his intellectual energy or his positive attitude.

About 10 days before he died, I helped the former taxi driver into a cab and took him to a private screening that Diane had arranged of her latest movie, Unfaithful. You didn't have to be a critic or an acting coach to recognize the brilliance of her performance. When the movie ended, we sat quietly for a few seconds before he turned toward me, tears glistening on his cheeks, and said "What do you think?"

"I think it's the crowning achievement of your career," I said.

He laughed, and later that day, he repeated what I'd said to Diane on the telephone. Months later, after she'd been nominated for an Oscar for Unfaithful, I heard her tell TV interviewers that her dad had been able to see the movie before he died and that he'd told her it was the crowning achievement of her career. Same thing, I think.

I spent many happy hours with Burt in those last months, but that Thanksgiving day stands out. I'd invited him because I was afraid he'd be alone on one of the last holidays of his life. That Diane had decided to join him -- and reunited the Durango three -- turned a good day into perfection.

Jack Mathews, now retired and living on the Oregon coast, spent the last 30 years of his journalism career working a movie reporter, critic and columnist for the Detroit Free Press, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the New York Daily News. He was co-host of Cinema, a nationally syndicated television show that featured interviews with contemporary stars and filmmakers and is the author of The Battle of Brazil, an account of director Terry Gilliam's winning fight with Universal Pictures over the final release version of his Oscar-nominated 1985 film Brazil.



Video: Little Britches and Cattle Annie





A lengthy clip from the film, filmed in Durango, where Jack and Burt first met.


Want to read about other great Thanksgiving events? Check out more TurkeyQuest.


TurkeyQuest Special: Read "Shrinking The Holiday," Jonathan Katz's (star of Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist) dysfunctional holiday memories. ]]> Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:42:36 EDT 1067995