Davis Movie Quotes

Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want.

In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star

The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone’s concern and like vampires they suck our life’s blood.

Old Bette Davis movies are all she watches now. There’s one where Bette Davis’s character goes blind, and as the credits rolled my mother said, ‘Must be what they mean when they talk about Bette Davis eyes.

But at the time I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was...

Good things happen to those who dress well.

Visit Arcata, I really do recommend it. Play the nearly impossible to find original Pac Man at the cafe, explore the HSU campus, see a two-dollar movie, buy a tofu dog from the vendor in Town Square, sleep on the rooftops, and if they ask you what time it is, there's only one correct answer--'4:20'!

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.

I was asked to write something for the movie Hero, starring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis. Tommy had agreed I would submit a song for the film, to be sung by Gloria Estefan, who was on Epic Records (Sony, Tommy’s label, was the parent company). I knew that Luther Vandross was also writing a song for the soundtrack, so I would be in great company.

I daydream - and get paid for it. I recall a scene from An Officer and a Gentleman. At the end of the movie Richard Gere, dressed in his naval whites, goes into a factory, picks up Debra Winger, and carries her out of that depressing place with all of those dirty machines. I wish that would happen to me. Of course the whole time I'd be worried that the guy was trying to guess my weight or something. I realize how truly pathetic I am. Some guy in a uniform drags his woman out of the workplace to stick her in a house to cook and possibly even clip coupons, and I am staring to buy into it, into the anti-female propaganda disguised as romance. As soon as he picks her up, things have to head south from there, because at some point, he has to put her down.

Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. It's like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind.

Star Wars is the American religion," Davis said at one point, and Mychal said, "I think religion is the American religion," and even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.

Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?

Yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sister how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars--she was all of them, and she was so much more that just just her that I still didn't know.

Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance – a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75

Now Creighton, he's a different kind of man, altogether." "We'll only be here a short while, Gram. Don't go wild with your imaginings." "One never knows. Did I tell you I love his aura?" Paisley rolled her eyes. "Last night while we watched old cowboy movies, he watched you. Couldn't you feel his heated gaze? He looked at you like you were the last drumstick in the box and he was a starving man.

She brought the tea into the living room on a lacquered tray. The pot and cups were Japanese with unglazed rims. She poured. "Thanks," I said. "Well?" "Huh?" "Your family," she reminded. I sipped the tea. "This is really good. Really delicious." She raised her eyebrows. "That's what I thought. You're a good listener, Davy, and you can change the subject on a dime. You've hardly talked about yourself at all." "I talk... too much." "You talk about books, you talk about plays, you talk about movies, you talk about places, you talk about food, you talk about current events. You don't talk about yourself." I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I hadn't really thought about it. Sure, I didn't talk  about the jumping, but the rest? "Well, there's not much to say. Not like those stories of growing up with four brothers." She smiled. "It's not going to work. If you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. But I'm not going to be distracted again, nor fooled into talking about those idiots again." She poured more tea into my cup. I frowned. "Do I really do that?" "What? Not talk about yourself? Yes." "No, try and distract you." She stared at me. "You are fucking amazing. I've never seen someone so good at changing the subject." "I don't do it on purpose." She laughed. 

For my speaking gigs, the title of my presentation is always the same: 'The journey of a hero'. I learned from writer Joseph Campbell, that a hero is someone born into a world where they don’t fit in. They are then summoned on a call to an adventure that they are reluctant to take. What is the adventure? A revolutionary transformation of self. The final goal is to find the elixir. The magic potion that is the answer to unlocking HER. Then she comes "home" to this ordinary life transformed and shares her story of survival with others... My journey was like a war movie, where at the end, the hero has been bruised and bloodied, traumatized from witnessing untold amounts of death and destruction, and so damaged that she cannot go back to being the same woman who went to war. She may have even seen her death but was somehow resurrected. But to go on THAT journey, I had to be armed with the courage of a lioness... Individuals on the journey eventually find themselves experiencing a baptism by fire. It's that moment when they are just about to lose their lives, and they, miraculously, courageously find the answer that gives their life meaning. And that meaning saves them. In the words of Joseph Campbell, in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", "The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth, or the dreamer in a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposites, his own unsuccessful self, either by swallowing it or being swallowed. I still see my younger self so clearly from that fateful day in my therapist's office. She stands up, in tears, on a mound of snow. Pissed off, she shouts, "Bitch!!! I'm not going to be swallowed!

Islamophobia” as a weapon of jihad The charge of “Islamophobia” is routinely used to shift attention away from jihad terrorists. After a rise in jihadist militancy and the arrest of eight people in Switzerland on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, some Muslims in Switzerland were in no mood to clean house: “As far as we’re concerned,” said Nadia Karmous, leader of a Muslim women’s group in Switzerland, “there is no rise in Islamism, but rather an increase in Islamophobia.”5 This pattern has recurred in recent years all over the world as “Islamophobia” has passed into the larger lexicon and become a self-perpetuating industry. In Western countries, “Islamophobia” has taken a place beside “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia.” The absurdity of all this was well illustrated by a recent incident in Britain: While a crew was filming the harassment of a Muslim for a movie about “Islamophobia,” two passing Brits, who didn’t realize the cameras were rolling, stopped to defend the person being assaulted. Yet neither the filmmakers nor the reporters covering these events seemed to realize that this was evidence that the British were not as violent and xenophobic as the film they were creating suggested.6 Historian Victor Davis Hanson has ably explained the dangerous shift of focus that “Islamophobia” entails: There really isn’t a phenomenon like “Islamophobia”—at least no more than there was a “Germanophobia” in hating Hitler or “Russophobia” in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the “security profiling” of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves—here in the U.S., in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel—to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile “allies” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.7

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!” I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened. We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks. I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back. “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?” …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo… “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know. “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.” …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip… “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy. “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—” Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street. “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished. “What?” “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.” “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…” What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied. It would have to do. …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd… I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.

When I was a kid I adored Katharine Hepburn, especially when she played Jo, the ballsy sister in Little Women. All the kids in school started calling me “Jo.” I also loved Barbara Stanwyck, Ann Sheridan, Bette Davis, Claire Trevor—I didn’t know them but after seeing them in so many movies, I felt like I knew them. They weren’t feminists, they were just strong women, and I always admired anyone who had some guts. All those sweet, quiet, polite, ladylike little things just bored me to death. Back then there were so many wonderful women’s stories being filmed, and so many strong actresses. But by the time I started doing movies they were mostly making men’s stories. It has always saddened me that I never got to work with directors like George Cukor and William Wyler, directors who could really pull such marvelous performances from actresses." - Jane Russell

A point often ignored in cinema history studies of [Bette] Davis,” wrote Jim Parish and Don Stanke years later of Housewife, “is that Ann Dvorak, who plays the film’s title role, was established as a strong dramatic actress long before Bette, and it was she who set the standard for battling with the studio for better roles. In her quiet performance as Nan Wilson Reynolds, it is Miss Dvorak and not the already mannered Bette, who woos the audience’s attention and affection. It is Dvorak who provides the proper artistic control for the feature…” The big difference between the two actresses was maturity. Bette, in these early movies, was very rough around the gills; she became polished, but always tended to slip into campy tirades. Dvorak was a natural; she was intense, but always in control, even in highly emotional situations.

Can’t you tell I’m broken?” she demanded. “I can’t stand anyone touching me!” “You handled me touching you until I pushed you too far.” “Freaking out because someone you’re enjoying kissing tries to get closer to you is not normal.” “It wasn’t normal that I was turned into a vampire because a female vamp became obsessed with my best friend,” David replied. “When Liam didn’t follow after her, she decided to turn his friends in the hopes she would get him to fall in line with her. That’s about as far from normal as it gets. I didn’t have a clue about the paranormal being real when my transformation occurred. Vampires were for horror movies, not reality. Life’s not normal. Shit happens. We all work through it.” “Is that so, Dr. Phil?” The frustrating man smiled at her. “That’s so,” David replied.

ROBERT DAVI They tried to get me in Die Hard 2 with [director] Renny Harlin. Joel would say, “C’mon, put ’im in there.” Then they’d go, “But how do we bring him back? He’s clearly dead.” Joel said, “It’s a movie!” I didn’t push it.

Somehow, another week had been swallowed whole, gone in a blur of takeout and old movies, interminable nights immersed in other people’s happy endings.

Among other things, these are, in fact, movies about men who fall madly in love with middle-aged women—their peers—but get rejected by them. Those women (who are played by a cadre of amazing actresses including Diane Keaton, Farrow, and Judy Davis) are prickly, funny, demanding, messy, controlling, complicated, and intellectually accomplished figures. They’re generally portrayed as preferable to younger women, but harder to hold on to.

That's what I get for reading. I'm sticking to action movies with oily shirtless dudes and WWE from now on. Nothing good ever comes from literature.

You’ve probably had this experience: It’s late at night and you start browsing Netflix, looking for something to watch. You scroll through different titles, you watch a couple of trailers, you even read a few reviews—but you just can’t commit to watching any given movie. Suddenly it’s been thirty minutes and you’re still stuck in Infinite Browsing Mode, so you just give up. You’re too tired to watch anything now, so you cut your losses and fall asleep.

Give me a BLACK AND WHITE MOVIE Where you know what's what. The good guys get love, The bad guys get shot, The rich girl's cold, The poor girl's not.

says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis. If you were to screen the movie Cool Hand Luke for an audience of chimps—something he has not done—they would have no trouble determining who prevails in the prison boxing scene: the hulking boss, Dragline, beats Luke until the title character can barely stand. But the next scene would leave the chimps scratching their heads. Luke, the loser, has become the new leader of the prisoners. A human moviegoer could attempt to explain. Because Luke kept getting up out of the dirt, even when he was beat, he won the other prisoners’ respect. But the chimps would just not get it. “That’s a complexity of humans,” Faris says: it was not until after the human-chimpanzee split that Homo sapiens developed a newer, uniquely human path to power. Scholars call it “prestige.

Do you fancy catching a movie at the Sturbridge Theater tonight? That new Robert Pattinson movie is showing,” I ask her, the phone cradled against my chest. “Definitely sign me up for that!” Ari replies, chuckling as I mock scowl. Her easy laugh warms my soul. “We’re in,” I tell Gil, arranging to meet him and his date in the diner later. “So, who is it this time?” Ari asks, resting her chin in her hands. “Anyone we know?” Considering I can count the girls on one hand who have enjoyed more than one date with Gil, I doubt it’ll be someone familiar. “I didn’t ask; guess we’ll find out soon enough.” “Five bucks says it’s a blonde,” Ari quips. “That’s one bet I’m not taking,” I admit, twirling a lock of her hair around my finger. “Gil’s penchant for blondes is world-renowned.

One of the band’s all-time-favorite movies was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, starring Bette Davis. In the movie, Bette wears disgusting caked makeup smeared on her face and underneath her eyes, with deep, dark, black eyeliner. She looks horrific and creepy because she put on traditional makeup thickly and badly. Another movie we watched over and over was Barbarella. One character, the Great Tyrant, was played by the gorgeous European actress Anita Pallenberg. She dressed in black leather with a black eye patch and had switchblades coming out of her. Alice Cooper’s look evolved from a composite of those female movie characters, with a little bit of Emma Peel from The Avengers added for good measure. Not

Time travel ain’t no Michael J. Fox movie. You mess with timelines, you might end up with butterfly effects that’ll make Chernobyl look like a spilled Slurpee.

Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. The cool kids of the 1960s invited the old man who had been cool before they knew cool was cool to join them in a musical romp that nobody took particularly seriously. Crosby enjoys himself. He has nothing at stake, since he’s not the star who has to carry the film. He’s very casual, and appears to be ad-libbing all his lines in the old Road tradition with a touch of W. C. Fields’s colorful vocabulary thrown in: “You gentlemen find my raiment repulsive?” he asks Sinatra and Martin when they object to his character’s lack of chic flash in clothing. Crosby plays a clever con man who disguises himself as square, and his outfits reflect a conservative vibe in the eyes of the cats who are looking him over. The inquiry leads into a number, “Style,” in which Sinatra and Martin put Crosby behind closet doors for a series of humorous outfit changes, to try to spruce him up. Crosby comes out in a plaid suit with knickers and then in yellow pants and an orange-striped shirt. Martin and Sinatra keep on singing—and hoping—while Crosby models a fez. He finally emerges with a straw hat, a cane, and a boutonniere in his tuxedo lapel, looking like a dude. In his own low-key way, taking his spot in the center, right between the other two, Crosby joins in the song and begins to take musical charge. Sinatra is clearly digging Crosby, the older man he always wanted to emulate.*17 Both Sinatra and Martin are perfectly willing to let Crosby be the focus. He’s earned it. He’s the original that the other two wanted to become. He was there when Sinatra and Martin were still kids. He’s Bing Crosby! The three men begin to do a kind of old man’s strut, singing and dancing perfectly together (“…his hat got a little more shiny…”). The audience is looking at the three dominant male singers of the era from 1940 to 1977. They’re having fun, showing everyone exactly not only what makes a pro, not only what makes a star, but what makes a legend. Three great talents, singing and dancing about style, which they’ve all clearly got plenty of: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin in Robin and the 7 Hoods

Late at night I think that if I could write a list of the things I like, I could somehow write my way out of the mess I'm in. I don't know how this works or even how it occurs to me that it might work. How the fuck could it work? Write a list. It's a bizarre thought. But what would I write? I like reading. I like movies, especially in the early hours, when the rest of the city is sleeping. I like the American football on TV, strange and beautiful sport from another planet. I like Candy, Candy's warmth, Candy's pussy, Candy's eyes, breasts, sense of humor, attitude, legs, voice, laugh... I like a lot of things about Candy. I like sex. The list I'm trying to write should not include the statement I like heroin, because that won't help.

In one of the first wide shots of Gimli, Legolas and Aragorn tracking the Uruks, all three actors are running injured. Viggo had broken his toes doing a previous scene, Orlando Bloom had a cracked rib from falling off a horse and the scale double of John Rhys-Davies had a knee problem.

It's said that Richard Harding Davis was dispatched by William Randolph Hearst to cover the Johnstown flood. Here was his lead: "God stood on a mountaintop here and looked at what his waters had wrought." Hearst cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God.

To those readers who have told me they still prefer the books, I have agreed. So do I. Yet the TV series and the movie are a delight. Phryne remains Phryne. Essie Davis IS Phryne: magnificent in her sublime self-assurance. But my novels and these stories are firmly set in the world of Book Phryne, and this will continue to be the case.

have always been skeptical of love triangles in books and movies, struggling to understand how someone could love another man when they’re already so much in love with someone. However, I know now I was naïve to believe it doesn’t exist. Now I’ve had cause to seriously think about the subject, it makes perfect sense. I love my mom and my dad. I love both my besties. When I have children, I imagine I will love them all with the fullness of my heart. So, it stands to reason I can love two men at the same time. I just never looked at it like that before.

For my speaking gigs, the title of my presentation is always the same: 'The journey of a hero'. I learned from writer Joseph Campbell, that a hero is someone born into a world where they don’t fit in. They are then summoned on a call to an adventure that they are reluctant to take. What is the adventure? A revolutionary transformation of self. The final goal is to find the elixir. The magic potion that is the answer to unlocking HER. Then she comes "home" to this ordinary life transformed and shares her story of survival with others... My journey was like a war movie, where at the end, the hero has been bruised and bloodied, traumatized from witnessing untold amounts of death and destruction, and so damaged that she cannot go back to being the same woman who went to war. She may have even seen her death but was somehow resurrected. But to go on THAT journey, I had to be armed with the courage of a lioness.

Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody himself provided such a linkage to his heroic predecessors in 1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone, Crockett, Carson-and one of his own autobiographies: Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats, by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W.F. Cody), a Full and Complete History of the Renowned Pioneer Quartette, Boone, Crockett, Carson and Buffalo Bill. In this context, Cody was often called "the last of the great scouts." Some are also aware that he was an enormously popular showman, creator and star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a spectacular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been estimated that more than a billion words were written by or about William Frederick Cody during his own lifetime, and biographies of him have appeared at irregular intervals ever since. A search of "Buffalo Bill Cody" on amazon.com reveals twenty-seven items. Most of these, however, are children's books, and it is likely that many of them play up the more melodramatic and questionable aspects of his life story; a notable exception is Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's Buffalo Bill, which is solidly based on fact. Cody has also shown up in movies and television shows, though not in recent years, for whatever else he was, he was never cool or cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance. Buffalo Bill is important to me as the symbol of the growth of our nation, for his life spanned the settlement of the Great Plains, the Indian Wars, the Gold Rush, the Pony Express, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the enduring romance of the American frontier-especially the Great Plains. Consider what he witnessed in his lifetime: the invention of the telephone, the transatlantic cable, the automobile, the airplane, and the introduction of modem warfare, with great armies massed against each other, with tanks, armored cars, flame-throwers, and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians. Nor, though it is not usually considered

Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner who was portrayed in the movie Chariots of Fire, famously said, "I feel like God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast! And when I run I feel His pleasure." I started thinking that my ability to hike was a gift and a divine responsibility. The farther I walked, the weaker I felt, the more I relied on my faith, and the more I felt God's presence.

I remember certain group gatherings that are hard to get up and leave from. I remember alligators and quicksand in jungle movies. (Pretty scary.) I remember opening jars that nobody else could open. I remember making home-made ice cream. I remember that I liked store-bought ice cream better. I remember hospital supply story windows. I remember stories of what hot dogs are made of. I remember Davy Crockett hats. And Davy Crockett just about everything else.

One chapter turns into five, and while I've always had a hard time slogging through my textbooks, it's like the pages just fly by. It's like I'm watching a movie in my head, and despite the fact that this bitch keeps making supremely stupid decisions that make me wonder if it's her first time outside of the house, I can't bring myself to stop.

Acting is a collaborative art form. The actor needs the director, writer, makeup artist, hairstylist, cinematographer, and finally the audience. You can’t act in your bedroom. Most people don’t understand what it is we do. That’s not being condescending, it’s true. Even other actors don’t get it. So they watch a movie and if they like it or don’t, they really don’t have the aesthetic to articulate why. Therefore, everything becomes the actors’ fault. If the role was smaller than they anticipated or not fully written, it becomes the actors’ fault. If the direction wasn’t good in a scene, it becomes the actors’ fault. There’s no real cognitive approach to directing the work of an artistic piece. If you are that character actor out there getting the leftovers, it’s very hard to compete with the actor who’s getting the filet mignon of roles. It just is. Once again, it’s a profession that is a tangled web of artists getting jobs based on bankability, clout, and not ability. There’s no rhyme or reason.