Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker. Now with a link that works

Responding to concerns that a play he wrote might not be appropriate for an Oregon high school production, Steve offers to pay for a community production and let people decide for themselves. What a great letter.
http://www.lagrandeobserver.com/Opinion/Guest-Columns/Of-arts-and-sciences

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

No link

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

http://www.lagrandeobserver.com/Opinion/Guest-Columns/Of-arts-and-sciences

It's OK, Dan just goofed up posting it.

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

great letter, great offer, but I doubt the community will take him up on it.

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

That's awesome.

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

hey, maybe we can get Steve Martin to buy some newspapers.

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

I love Steve Martin, and has as much respect for his talents as I do just about anyone.

Think about how diverse of an artist he is for a second. He started his career in show business as a teenage magician who was good enough at magic that he actually performed it for a living. He managed to land a spot on the Smothers Brothers writing staff and eventually won an Emmy. He decided he really wanted to focus on performing, specifically stand-up, and then he became, arguably, the best stand-up comedian ever. He co-wrote The Jerk and starred in it, a movie generally regarded as one of the 100 funniest movies ever made. He moved fairly effortlessly between dumb comedies to romantic comedies to serious comedies, he writes very dry and very funny pieces for The New Yorker, he authors two novellas which are sad and funny and beautiful in very subtle ways, both of which receive pretty good critical reviews, he writes a memoir about stand-up comedy that is universally praised, and he's also written plays that are both commercially and critically successful.

Throw on top of that the fact that he plays the banjo well enough that he actually released an album of original recordings that went to No. 1 on the bluegrass chart.

I'm not sure we'll ever see another artist like him.

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

Kapow!!!

I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as “people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.” With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle. T

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

OTOH, that line about intepreting Hamlet as being "a play about a castle" is pretty damned barbed.

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

I've seen Picasso at the Lapin Agile and I can tell you that the show is no less or more sexually suggestive than Anything Goes which I saw again last night and which has been performed by countless high school drama groups throughout the decades. There is a large amount of drinking, references to cocaine, racial stereotyping and homosexual double entendres in Anything Goes - moreso than anything in Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

It would be interesting to compare what shows the school board had no issue with in the past to Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

 

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

Great letter from a great guy. I met Steve in 1990 in the buildup to Desert Storm when he visited our ship with his lovely and talented wife Victoria Tennet (sp?). He was gracious, funny (even off the cuff) and very appreciative of us.

I really do like his approach. Not arrogant, although some lines certainly could have gone that way.