Latest news with #SteveGuttenberg
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lifetime's new true-crime title Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story debuts tonight
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. 'When I was reading it, I'm like, 'This cannot be real. Like, this is not real, right?'" actress Jana Kramer told ABC News about the script for Lifetime's latest true crime thriller, Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story, which premieres on the cable network tonight, June 7 at 8pm Eastern Time. And it is, shockingly, a very true story, about a Kansas City's teen whose whole world comes crashing down when she learns that her uncle is actually a serial killer responsible for the murders of multiple women in the area, including her biological mother. Per the movie's official synopsis: "Heather Robinson (Rachel Stubington) grew up in a loving family in Illinois and, by the time she was a teen, had long known that she had been adopted as an infant by her parents. But in 2000, the then-15-year-old's world was shattered when she learned that the man she knew as her uncle, John Robinson (Steve Guttenberg), was actually a serial killer accused of murdering multiple women in the Kansas City area, including her biological mother. After her uncle's arrest, Heather learns the shocking truth about her birth mother's disappearance." Along with Rachel Stubington as Heather and Steve Guttenberg as Uncle John, the cast of Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story includes Jana Kramer, Ross Crain, Deja Dee, Jackie Sanders, Rose Decker, Sarah Hudson, Lily Talevski, Robyne Parrish and Molly Miller. Guttenberg, known for his roles in classic comedies like Police Academy and Three Men and a Baby, spoke to Remind magazine about going against-type to play a violent killer in the new Lifetime drama. 'It's such a great opportunity to be able to go outside your wheelhouse,' he said. 'And I think that's the classic nature of acting — people want to see you pop up through different holes. They want to see you surprise them.' 'To me, it was a story about destruction and what one man can do, [how] one man can change so many lives [through his actions],' the actor added. To tune into the premiere of Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story tonight at 8pm, you're going to need access to the Lifetime network. Those with cable packages can watch on their local Lifetime channel, but even if you don't have traditional cable, cord-cutters can also tune in online via a live TV streaming service that carries Lifetime, such as Frndly TV, Fubo, Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV and Philo TV. And if you miss the television broadcast tonight, don't fret: Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story will also be available to stream on beginning tomorrow, Sunday, June 8. Check out the official trailer for Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story before tuning into the true crime flick tonight on Lifetime.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'80s icon reveals bizarre moment he and Caitlyn Jenner were told to 'stuff their shorts with socks' for film
One of the biggest stars of the 1980s is looking back on a bizarre moment he and Caitlyn Jenner shared on set. Steve Guttenberg — who rose to stardom with roles in hits including Diner (1982), Police Academy (1984), Cocoon (1985) and Three Men And A Baby (1987) — recalled how he and Jenner, 75, got an unusual request when they were filming the 1980 film Can't Stop The Music. The 66-year-old actor said he and the Olympic decathlete — who was making her film debut — were asked to 'stuff' their shorts with socks in order to give them more prominent bulges, according to Page Six. 'I did wear really skimpy shorts,' he explained to the publication earlier this week. Guttenberg said that it was a request from Allan Carr, who co-wrote and produced the film, that he and Jenner 'stuff our shorts with socks to make it look a little bigger.' 'We didn't need it by the way. I mean I told Alan, "No need for a sock!"' Guttenberg recalled joking. Despite the attempt to make Guttenberg and Jenner appear more virile, Can't Stop The Music ended up being a box office flop and a critical bomb. The disco musical was a biography charting the rise of The Village People — though it was fictional — and featured Guttenberg as a very loose stand-in for the group's co-creator, the French songwriter and record producer Jacques Morali. Jenner, who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, played a lawyer who confusingly found himself swept up in the creation of the Village People, leading him to quit his job after his firm refuses to represent the burgeoning disco group. Carr, the same person who allegedly convinced Guttenberg and Jenner to stuff their shorts on set, saw the film as a star-making vehicle for the Olympic gold medalist, and in 1979 he told the New York Times that Can't Stop The Music would make Jenner 'the Robert Redford of the '80s.' But following the critical and commercial failure of the cult camp film, Jenner's acting work was confined to television appearances, and she didn't appear again in a feature film until 2011's critically reviled comedy Jack And Jill, which starred Adam Sandler, Katie Holmes and Al Pacino. Guttenberg, who also spoke about his career heights to Page Six, warned that actors need to be wary of developing too much of an ego, 'because it's a very fragile business and you cannot believe what you see.' 'You're very important today, and tomorrow nobody knows who you are,' he said. He said he had tried to be 'level-headed' about the hot-and-cold nature of Hollywood, where success is reward but failure can lead actors to quickly be dumped. Guttenberg's most recent project is the Lifetime movie Kidnapped By A Killer, in which he plays John Edward Robinson, who is the first serial killer reported to have used the internet to connect him with his victims. Robinson, who admitted to committing multiple murders, is currently serving multiple life sentences from a trial in Missouri and is on death row after being convicted of three murders in Kansas. Guttenberg said he put in 'a ton of research' to play the convicted killer. 'I thought it was an incredible opportunity, because to play a serial killer, most actors, you get one chance in your whole life to play a serial killer and this is a good one,' he said. He added that he was confined to a makeup chair for an hour and a half every day of shooting to achieve Robinson's distinctive look, and he was even forced to put on weight to look more like the convicted killer. 'It was great,' the Three Men And A Baby star joked. '[I ate] ice cream, pasta, that part was really fun.' Guttenberg gained renewed attention earlier this year when he helped his neighbors evacuate Los Angeles' Pacific Palisades neighborhood when deadly fires swept through the city in January. His own $5 million Palisades home was ultimately spared, but it suffered 'terrible smoke damage.' 'Everything needs to be replaced,' he said, and the job will likely take a full year. In the meantime, Guttenberg has been living across the country in New York while his West Coast home is repaired. The temporary move overlapped with the end of the Cocoon star's marriage, as he filed to divorce his wife-of-six-years Emily Smith in April. They had been together since at least 2014 and tied the knot in 2019. Guttenberg was previously married to the model Denise Bixler from 1988 until their 1991 separation. They divorced the following year.
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Weirdo Talk Show That Has Suddenly Found Its Way
Last week, John Mulaney hosted his weekly talk show blindfolded, because, well, why not? Covering his eyes enabled him to make a joke about what he has in common with the pope: 'We're both from Chicago and we both willfully blind ourselves to the absurdities of our job.' Yet the stunt had less to do with opportunities for punchlines than with short-circuiting the rhythms of the talk show. Putting a host in such a predicament scrambles the script. Mulaney occasionally wandered away from the camera, leaving us, his viewers, abandoned and slightly worried for him. What's remarkable is that if you were to rank the most bizarre aspects of that hour of 'Everybody's Live With John Mulaney' (every Wednesday on Netflix), blindfolding the host might not make the Top 10. Consider the competition: Mulaney's sidekick, Richard Kind, told a story about taking a nap on a toilet during a date. An actor playing Yakub, a bulbous-headed ancient scientist who the Nation of Islam believes invented white people, came onstage to sing a show tune. That was followed by an actress who did an impression of Jean Smart — that is, if she weren't smart. (The character's name was, naturally, Jean Dumb.) Steve Guttenberg appeared and underneath his name onscreen, it read: 'Defund the Police Academy.' Then there was the subplot of a daredevil robot named Saymo who broke up with his girlfriend in front of a crowd on a studio lot, then tried to roll off a ramp and fly over a car. He failed and crashed to bits. With a lab-experiment aesthetic, 'Everybody's Live' is the most ambitious, most anything-goes television talk show in many years. Whether it works is more of an evolving question. The season began with a firm idea of what was wrong with other talk shows: actors promoting projects, overly planned chat, generic topicality, formulaic structure. Critics like me have long complained about these elements, and Mulaney, bless him, just did away with them. But figuring out the show you want to do is harder than knowing the one you don't. 'Everybody's Live' is less original than it appears (even the blindfold had been done before). Trying to escape topicality, Pete Holmes's short-lived talk show organized monologues around not the news but broad subjects like marriage or family. Mulaney did something similar, centering every episode on quirkier themes like 'Can major surgery be fun?' Nearly everything has been done before, of course, but Mulaney tends to steal from the best. (Like 'Late Night With David Letterman,' he did a Christmas special far from the holiday season.) Mulaney's opening monologues have been a consistent highlight, mixing behind-the-scenes stories, like a failed attempt to book Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, with polished stand-up bits, like an irreverent case against the F.B.I. But some of his fever-dream stunts (recasting 'Seinfeld' with members of Phish) are easier to admire than laugh at. The phone calls from viewers he fields in a recurring segment have often been awkward. And the panel chat can be aimless. How did they pull off a boring chat with Conan O'Brien, Tina Fey and Mulaney? That's the risk you take when you do away with more prepared conversation. Mulaney asked Fey if she collected anything, learned she didn't and hit a dead end. 'Everybody's Live' is still always interesting because of its taste and ambition and mad chutzpah. But a guilty thought occurred to me watching the first few episodes: What if someone went to great lengths to make exactly the kind of talk show that I want to see — and I didn't like it? Is that on me? Truly adventurous talk shows take time to find their voice. And if you gave up on this program early on, you've missed out, because 'Everybody's Live' has evolved, gotten tighter, funnier, more meta. Mulaney has downplayed the viewer calls (which could be cut altogether without much loss). And he has done more work strategizing for interviews, like one in which he and Andy Samberg read fan-fiction written about them online. The bookings have become savvier, mixing relaxed stars with a chaos agent like the comic Robby Hoffman, who has the critical quality of appearing more at ease the more uncomfortable everyone else becomes. In an episode spoofing fictionalized movies inspired by real people, Mulaney said everyone on the show was based on a real person. When an elderly man in the audience loudly complained that Samberg was playing him ('I'd never sit like that!'), the actor responded: 'He's just mad that as part of my research, I slept with his wife multiple times.' Mulaney has also cultivated his own Lonely Island-like secret weapons, with hilarious videos by the writers Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh that skewer pandering anti-Trump political comedy and obsessive behind-the-scenes documentaries with pitch-perfect precision. In late-night talk-show writers rooms, the true comedy purists have long pleaded for evergreen rather than topical jokes, but riffing off the news pays off. 'Everybody's Live' has smartly embraced it more, parodying the '60 Minutes' interview with Bill Belichick by having a woman interrupt Kind throughout one episode, creating a sidekick to the sidekick. The show's core identity is that it takes big comedic swings that might go over people's heads, greenlighting ideas that other mainstream shows would reject. But as the season has progressed, the volume of jokes has increased. What started as loose and rambling now feels as punchy as a '30 Rock' episode. Recently there's been considerable anxiety over the future of the late-night talk show in the streaming era. Everyone from Donald Trump to Jimmy Kimmel has said it is dying. I am more of an optimist, but there's so much disruption in entertainment right now that anyone would be foolish to confidently predict that in five years, late night will look like it does now. But we tend to focus too much on these business questions when discussing the health of this venerable art form. And this breeds caution. It's worth remembering that the winner of the late-night war during the height of the genre's popularity was Jay Leno, a solid joke-merchant who has faded into obscurity. David Letterman lost, but that had little impact on his beloved reputation. No artistic genre deserves to be around forever, but late-night talk shows should stay alive if they can continue to feature risk-taking artists doing funny work. Sometimes, that will mean safe jokes about the news, but the entertainment landscape is far more crowded than when the only laughs to be found on television around midnight were on 'The Tonight Show.' Now there's more of a premium on novelty and the unexpected. There is a rich tradition of that kind of late-night work going back to Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen. Mulaney is making a high-profile case for that legacy, with the help of some of the biggest stars in popular culture. Whether their efforts will reach a big enough audience to get renewed is an open question. But an upcoming stunt has commercial promise. About a month ago, Mulaney announced that on the final episode this season (May 28), he would fight three 14-year-old boys. Not since Hunter S. Thompson wrote about getting beaten up by a bunch of bikers to close out his book 'Hell's Angels' has an artist promised a more pugilistic finale. Is this whole thing a trick to get your attention? If so, it's a good one, because I have spent a fair amount of time considering ways that the host could possibly avoid taking a beating. It's not easy to dream up a winning strategy for a delicate-looking 42-year-old comic that doesn't include weapons or rigging the rules. Mulaney appears confident about his chances. Of course, he always does. He takes part in all these stupendously stupid and absurd things, not with an ironic wink like Letterman or a sense of childlike silliness like O'Brien, but with an alien sureness, as if he were born to tell jokes blindfolded and get pummeled by teenagers for our entertainment. Until recently, he was the wholesome, very nice young man of stand-up comedy. Then divorce and rehab shifted his image, and his special about it catapulted him to a new position: the most acclaimed stand-up of the moment. That he is now spending his cultural capital on this weirdo show is something that deserves attention, credit and, I hope, another season.
