Bill Murray’s big secret

Bill Murray is now in his mid-fifties, but he is more in demand than ever, says Scott Raab in Esquire. His last film, Lost in Translation - in which he has an unconsummated love affair with Scarlett Johansson - has been hailed as an instant classic. Everywhere he goes, people beg him to reveal what he whispered to Johansson in their parting scene. Murray’s lips are sealed. "But I’ll tell ya a good story about it," he says. "I’m gettin’ on the ferry at Martha’s Vineyard, and some guy yells out, ‘Bill, what’d ya say to her?’ Everyone hears him ask, and I pause for a second with my mouth open. And as I start to speak, the foghorn sounds, and I just" - he moves his lips silently - "acted it out like I was saying something sincere. The crowd laughed so hard. It was great. I couldn’t have bought that moment.

(The Week, November 2004)

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Hugh Grant's hard life

I'm sure Hugh Grant is right that being a film star isn't as much fun as one might imagine. Jeremy Paxman, who has a small, walk-on role in the new Bridget Jones movie, found his time on the set very frustrating and tedious. His appearance comes in shot 42A, a slow, tracking shot in which he's required to emerge from behind a Coke machine and say, while passing Daniel Cleaver (played by Grant): "Ah, Daniel. I thought the Madrid piece was outstanding. Full of insight. Really original."

You'd think shooting this wouldn't take long - it's hardly "Hamlet's soliloquy", as Paxman said in The Sunday Times - but to get it right he had to spend four hours on a wet November morning in a glass and concrete office block on the North Circular. Not until after 20 takes was the director finally satisfied.

In one of the endless "Iongeurs", Grant confessed he found the whole business of making romantic comedies "too demeaning" and "too stressful". What an odd reaction, thought Paxman. "Too stressful? Repeating the same line until the cows come home? It's more stressful... waiting for some automated halfwit at Barclays Bank to tell you why your cheque has bounced."

After his experience, Paxman was thankful to get back to live TV. This is not an option open to Grant. But perhaps, instead of complaining how awful film-making is - as he did, again, at the Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason premiere last week - he should try his hand at live theatre instead. It might not make him as much money, but at least he'd have more fun

(Jolyon Connell, The Week, November 2004)

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Pornographer who exploited women with "zeal and gusto" (!)

The film-maker Russ Meyer, who has died aged 82, was "considered part visionary, part dirty old man", said Ronald Bergan in The Guardian. Some critics have described him as an auteur; Meyer proclaimed himself a first-class pornographer. But however you define his films - skinflicks, soft porn, sexploitation - there is one word that could sum them all up: "Breasts." Fixated on the female cleavage, Meyer celebrated it at every opportunity in films such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), about a trio of go-go dancers who kill men for fun, and Up! (1976), featuring "Margot the Magnificent Superchick".

Born in 1922, Meyer grew up in Oakland, California. When he was 12, his mother, a nurse, pawned her engagement ring in order to buy him an 8mm camera. He began his career as a combat photographer in France during the war. Afterwards he turned his hand to "cheesecake photos", and produced some of the first Playboy centrefolds.

Meyer's first film was The Immoral Mr Teas (1959), about a delivery man who can see through women's clothes. A breakthrough movie (previous nudie films had been dressed up as documentaries); it cost $24,000 to make, and earned Meyer $lm. Mr Teas - which now resides in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - was a pioneer of "permissive films", said The Daily Telegraph, and inspired countless imitations. Meyer himself, however, soon realised that nudity alone wasn't enough. "So from Lorna on, I have concentrated on melodrama, violence and sex." He made several black and white films set in the Deep South, featuring "deranged hillbillies and over-sexed babydolls" - he described this as his "Steinbeck period" - before producing his most successful work, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970); Alexander Walker described it as "a film whose total, idiotic, monstrous badness raises it to the pitch of near-irresistible entertainment".

Meyer, who was married three times and lived with a series of strippers, models and actresses, freely admitted that he exploited women "with zeal and gusto". Yet he attracted surprisingly little feminist ire. "The women in my films are always super-vixens," he explained, "the men are always wimps. The feminists love that."

(The Week, October 2004)

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