Friday, March 29, 2024

Tina Fey: Alec Baldwin Told “30 Rock” to “F” Themselves

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Alec Baldwin’s on the cover of Vanity Fair this month and it’s a doozy. Anger-enhanced Alec doesn’t come off very well. One day after his wedding, his already harshly damaged image gets worse. Todd Purdum wrote the story and these are the extracts:

Baldwin’s friend and 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey describes what she’s dubbed his “Irish Negotiating Technique,” which, as she sees it, usually boils down to his saying, “They offered me more money and I told them to go fuck themselves.”

Lorne Michaels, a longtime friend and one of the producers of 30 Rock, puts it this way: “Most people find a way to get to do the thing that is better for them. He doesn’t.”

Baldwin, who recently got into an altercation with a Daily News photographer, is the first to admit he’s had a volatile past, acknowledging that he often “gave the Heisman” to people in Hollywood, sometimes “unreasonably” and “childishly.” When Purdum asks Baldwin where he thinks his anger comes from, the actor launches into a long description of the perversity of the industry he works in: “You know, Hollywood does draw some very strange characters, and then the power of Hollywood and what they can do with it becomes like a blood sport to them.”

Then he returned to the frustrations and injustices of his child-custody case. He outlined vivid fantasies of the gruesome ways in which he might have murdered his wife’s lawyer (“with a baseball bat”) or Harvey Levin, the TMZ producer who posted the embarrassing voice mail Baldwin left for his daughter: “I wanted to stick a knife in him and gut him and kill him and I wanted him to die breathing his last breath looking into my eyes..”

PS: You may think Baldwin’s anger is a new thing. But in 1990, he told writer Ryan Murph–yes, Ryan Murphy who now produces “Glee,” etc– for an article I commissioned, that Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg was “the eighth dwarf.” Baldwin was angry at Disney about the way he and Kim Basinger had been treated, he thought, on the movie “The Marrying Man.” Twenty two years later, not much has changed.

Roger Friedman
Roger Friedmanhttps://www.showbiz411.com
Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News, where he created the Fox411 column. His movie reviews are carried by Rotten Tomatoes, and he is a member of both the movie and TV branches of the Critics Choice Awards. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications over the years including New York Magazine, where he wrote the Intelligencer column in the mid 90s and covered the OJ Simpson trial, and Fox News (when it wasn't so crazy) where he covered Michael Jackson. He is also the writer and co-producer of "Only the Strong Survive," a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals, directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.
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