Thursday, September 16, 1999
The University Daily Kansan
Section B · Page 9
Entertainment
Drew Carey goes home to film new episode
The Associated Press
CLEVELAND — Comedian Drew Carey punches his hand into the air near the goal line of Cleveland Browns Stadium as thousands of fans chant his name.
A dream episode on Carey's top-rated ABC sitcom, *The Drew Carey Show?*
No, it's Carey taking a break from filming to acknowledge the thousands of Clevelanders who came decked out in orange and brown to play Brown fans for the show's Sept. 29 episode on the team's return to the National Football League.
The big guy with the crew cut and glasses is getting a welcome from his hometown not unlike the one the city gave its beloved Brown's after a three-season absence from the NFL.
Carey is overwhelmed by the response.
"Thank you. God bless you." he said.
But a moment later, Carey was poking fun at the crowd, drawing a large laugh
that echoed through the 72,000-seat stadium.
"Hey, good luck looking for your face on TV," he told those who waited in line for hours to be part of the crowd on the show. More than 10,000 fans streamed through the stadium.
"The out-of-pocket expenses are substantial but worth it," said Lou Fusaro, one of the show's producers. "This is a great town to work in when Drew Carey is here."
Carey was clearly having fun during the recent four-day shoot in Cleveland. He went bowling — a favorite pastime — and watched the Browns win at home for the first time since the old team moved to Baltimore.
"Awesome, man, awesome," Carey said of the Browns' 35-24 preseason win against Chicago.
high Carey's show takes place and the cast only has been on loc
tion once before. The musical opening of the show was shot three years ago at several well-known spots, including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Jacobs Field, home of the Cleveland Indians.
The show decided to move off the sound stage and into the real world when the writers suggested an episode on the return of the Brown's. Most of the 22-minute episode, the second in the show's fifth season, is shot at the Brown's stadium.
The show has Carey's character and friends trying to get tickets. When that fails, they sneak into the stadium. (Not very likely, but hey, it's TV.)
Once inside, Drew sees his girlfriend Sharon (Jenica Bergere) making out with another man on the stadium's gigantic TV screen. He flips out and takes off across the football field during the game.
And to make matters worse, Drew finds out that his cross-dressing brother Steve
(John Carroll Lynch) to marry his hated co-worker, Mimi (Kathy Kinney).
"It's like doing 'Drew Carey: The Movie'," Miller joked while cooling off in a stadium bar between scenes. "It's fun."
Everybody wants a piece of Carey, an autograph, a handshake, a picture. Tim Conley, 44, who went to high school with Carey and described him as a geek, brought his yearbook to be signed.
"I feel guilty that I'm not going to be able to talk to these people." Carey said while looking at the long line of extras playing Brown fans who camped out for tickets.
"I really only takes 30 seconds. There's what, 1,000 extras today? That's 500 minutes and that's like 16 hours. It would take me 16 hours, which I can't do."
Carey said he realized how popular he has become every time he returns home to his Old Brooklyn neighborhood where he owns his childhood house.
"The theory was to come back and relax here, but I really can't relax when I come back to Cleveland anymore," Carey said while puffing on a cigarette and drinking a soda. "I'm not a regular guy anymore. I miss that. I really do. Those days are over."
Forbes magazine ranked him as the 24th highest-paid entertainer last year with an income of $45.5 million.
On the show, Carey portrays a hardworking manager in a Cleveland department store who never seems to get a break. During shooting, Carey cracks as many jokes as Mimi has layers of mascara.
Most of the featured extras are from Cleveland. In one scene, Carey gives high-fives to the mother and sister of the show's writer Terry Mulroy, also a Cleveland native.
Costner bloody but unbowed by criticism, box office bombs
"I pulled some strings," Mulroy says with a sheepish grin.
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — It's lunchtime in Manhattan, and Kevin Costner is on the menu.
Knots of journalists mill about, waiting their turn to take a bite out of the star. His boyish charm can no longer satile this post Waterworld, post-Postman crowd.
Costner, once a sacred cow, has become steak tartar.
"If you believe in yourself, you just have to walk forward. You're going to suffer the slings and arrows," he says, wearily. "I just have to go forward."
Tucking his legs up onto a sofa, Costner exhales deeply. He is dressed sportily: white pants, pristine white sneakers and a white polo shirt under a sleeveless V-neck sweater.
"I'm mixed up about some things in my life," he continues. "But I ain't mixed up about how to approach my work. I'm just not."
Maybe that rubs people wrong — the certainty with which I come to something — because they're not certain about anything."
This is a recurring theme for Costner, a filmmaker with an impossibly taut moral compass and a black-and-white view when it comes to the art of movies.
"Kevin has great integrity as a man," says actress Kelly Preston. "He's got strong convictions. He's like a good ol' boy — he's got very American down-home values."
Those values — plus, of course, his sun-kissed looks — helped catapult Costner into the oxygen-deprived heights of the Hollywood elite during the late 1980s.
His string of hits — "No Way Out," "The Untouchables," "Bull Durham," "Field of Dreams" — were so well-received that Costner was likened to Gary Cooper, a postmodern throwback to the stoic, struggling hero. By 1990, he could do what he wanted. And he did.
Costner devoted the next 18 months — and sank all his cash — into his directorial debut: a three-hour Western with subtitles in Lakota Sioux. People thought he'd gone nuts.
"The movie was really beaten up before it ever came out," he says. "Nobody ever wants to write about it in that way, but I remember reading just awful things about what I was maybe doing out in South Dakota."
He was quietly brewing up a blockbuster: Dances With Wolves earned 12 Academy Award nominations and won seven Oscars, including best picture and best direction awards.
what you want because there's a lot of noise out there to keep you from doing what it is you want to do."
More movies followed with Costner as star, including Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK and The Bodyguard. Costner was the third highest-paid entertainer in 1991-92 with a net worth of $71 million, according to Forbes magazine.
"It didn't change me at all."
Costner says. "You have to pursue
when, in 1995,
he rolled out
his $175 million
epic,
Waterworld,
amid ballooning
budgets,
the breakup of Costner's marriage
and rumors of bitter fights on
the set.
The noise became overpowering
And that was even before the critics weighed in.
The New York Times decried it
Coster: wades through movie hits and misses in the wake of his latest film.
as the most wasteful feat of one-upmanship in Hollywood history. The Associated Press called it uninspired and ordinary. The *Wall Street*
Journal dubbed it "Fishar," after "Ishtar," another expensive clunker.
"I came out of Waterworld, and I didn't know if I was going to make it emotionally, given everything that was going on. And I thought, 'Well, are you going to be a baby, you baby?' he recalls.
"I said, 'Don't be a baby. You can cry all you want to think that people have invaded your privacy, but you've created some situations in your life and you need to deal with them. You need to go to work,' he says.
Armyan Bernstein, a longtime Costner friend and a producer of the actor's latest film, For Love of the Game, considers the backlash unfair.
"I think he is sort of misunderstood. I think so many events in his life have painted him with the wrong color," Bernstein says. "I think that people assume when you're a movie star and you get divorced, then that's your fault."
And if you have a run-in with a director on a movie you're making, then that's your fault, too."
After Waterworld, Costner stroked back with Tin Cup—a devilishly fun parable about a bullheaded golf pro—only to squander his credibility with the post-apocalyptic The Postman, dubbed by many "Dances With Postcards." USA Today didn't think it was worth the price of a first-class stamp.
"You know, movies have been marked through time as being dismissed and then finding their way back into a psyche. Whether that movie does or not is not important. I'm comfortable with what happened." Costner says.
"I have faith in the movies, and I have faith in my own choices about what I do," he says. "The measure of movies is how well they do at the box office or how well critics receive a film — and I think those are false gods."
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