Not not Marty but this: From the A.V. Club…

Jackie Gleason : “You’re in the Picture” by werquin

The A.V. Club’s 2001 interview with KRS-One. 

[Picture via Up North Trips]

The A.V. Club interviews Mr. Wunnerfulness himself–Prince Paul:

AVC: “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’” (from 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead for De La Soul)

PP: I remember the big deal about that was having Russell Simmons come in and do the vocal intro at the beginning of the song. Russell was my manager as a producer for a hot second, and he was also a manager for Stetsasonic. And I remember just how hard it was to even get him in a meeting. But after De La Soul did so well, it just took a phone call for him to come down to the studio. He was so eager and everybody wanted to be down so much, it just showed me the power of what a hit record can do for you. That, to me, was the shining moment of that song. It was fun making it. It was uptempo and everything else, and there are a lot of layers and samples. Once again, Pos had the main loop for the song, and it was just us kind of building around that loop, but it was like, “Wow, we got Russell on here.”

AVC: Was it your idea to have Russell on?

PP: I don’t remember whose idea it was, to be honest. I think it came from the guys. Who it came from, I don’t know, but I just remember that he was real happy to be there. I was like, “Wow,” because it was hard enough to get the guy in a meeting but he was on time and ready to record. So that was kind of nice.

Sam Adams has a wonderful interview with Bob Balaban over at the A.V. Club.

I like this part:

AVC: Speaking of great directors, your role in Close Encounters was as translator to the scientist played by François Truffaut, and the sense from your diaries is that you played a similar role offscreen.

BB: It was so much fun. You can only imagine [having] one of your favorite directors be absolutely dependent on you for eight months of shooting. I could speak fairly good French, and he really didn’t like to speak English. He would bring me scripts, I would translate them, and we would have discussions afterward. He didn’t like reading the scripts in English, so I would read them and describe to him what it was, and what was going on. It was great. Truffaut was great with kids, also. At one point—I’m sure I’ve said this in my book, and three or four thousand times already—Truffaut said for him there were literally two things that interested him in all of his movies. That was it. He said life was short—how prescient he was, because he died eight years later. But he said, “I’m never going to have enough time to make all of the movies I want. So I can only make movies about men and women and their relationships, and children and their relationships. That’s it, that’s all that interests me.” That’s everything in the world, but it also rules out a huge amount of things. It mostly rules out anything mechanical. At one point, he was asked to direct Bobby Deerfield, I think. He said, “Too much ‘vroom vroom.’” What he really meant was it wasn’t about men and women falling in love, or children.

Fascinating. To have such a firm grasp on what you want to make movies about and then to do just that.