| Billy
Crystal,
over the last two decades has
enjoyed many a screen triumph. He broke
through as a TV soap-star. On film, he's
been involved in several mainstream
super-hits. And, as seven-time host of
the Oscars, he's regularly performed to
an audience of over a billion, causing
many to consider him - slick, confident,
and wholly unflustered - to be the
ultimate professional, perhaps even the
face of corporate entertainment.
Now, as one of
the very few comedians who managed to
become movie stars, Billy could do his
own thing. He created and produced his
own series, Sessions, an intelligent
comedy about a fellow in therapy. He got
involved in several baseball-based
projects, and he wrote his own scripts -
for City Slickers 2, the romantic comedy
Forget Paris, and for Mr. Saturday
Night, also starring as an old comic who
doesn't know when to quit (the tag-line
was the excellent "It's lonely at the
middle").
The mid-Nineties
brought several projects with
Robin Williams.
They both appeared briefly in
Kenneth Branagh's
Hamlet, then co-starred in Father's Day,
both as ex-lovers of Nastassja Kinski
and both convinced that her runaway son
is theirs. To promote the movie, the
pair appeared on Friends, Crystal as a
gynecologist who's slept with friend
Williams' wife. Then came Woody Allen's
Deconstructing Harry. Allen was a friend
of Crystal's from back in the Seventies.
The pair had played basketball together
and once defeated a much taller pair, an
event Allen still talks about. Crystal
recalls Allen once telling him on court
"Don't guard me too close. I tend to get
nauseous".
And the hits kept coming. Analyze This,
where Crystal played the therapist of
mobster
Robert De Niro,
was a big hit. And, on the other side of
the camera, he was nominated, as
director, for 61*, the program receiving
12 nominations in all. Crystal just
can't get enough of the Yankees, in 1999
paying $239,000 for a glove made by
Rawlings for Mickey Mantle in 1960.
Making a neat circle, in 2000 Crystal
hosted another roast for Muhammad Ali,
this time in Louisville, Kentucky. And
he hit big yet again, along with Julia
Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones in rom
com America's Sweethearts. Here,
Zeta-Jones and
John Cusack
play a film-star couple who've secretly
broken up, just as their new movie is
about to be released. Billy is their
publicist, desperately trying to keep
the truth from the press. The film had
the third best rom com opening in
history, behind Runaway Bride and What
Women Want.
Where the impossibly young-looking
Billy Crystal
will go next is anyone's guess. The
desire for an audience that he showed
when tap-dancing beside Jelly Roll
Morton will probably see him host the
Oscars again and again - the nation
demands it, really. He will write more
scripts - he's too smart not to. And he
will continue to make films about his
first love, baseball. A 24-hour
documentary charting the history of his
beloved Yankees is not out of the
question. |
