Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

This week Alec talks with Judd Apatow, whose films include ‘The 40 Year Old Virgin,’ ‘Knocked Up,’ and ‘Funny People;’ all of which feature emotionally immature men forced to grow up after confronting, respectively -- sex, responsibility and death. Of all Apatow’s movies, his most recent, “This is 40”, which opened the weekend before Christmas, may be his most personal and stars his wife, Leslie Mann, and their two daughters.

Apatow talks with Alec about working with some of his heroes, like Albert Brooks: “obviously I’m terrified ‘cause I’m working with someone who’s clearly more talented than me.” For Apatow, each movie he makes is “a letter to myself telling me something that I need to know about how to live my life."

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This week Alec sits down with Jamie and Alex Bernstein, to hear about growing up with the maestro, Leonard Bernstein.Bernstein had three children: Jamie, Alexander and Nina.And while they knew him in the tux and tails, they also knew him as the dad who loved games – he was a killer at anagrams – and always up for tennis or squash or skiing or touch football.

Jamie and Alexander talk to Alec about listening to music – Jamie says she learned “more about music by listening to The Beatles with my dad than I think I did any other way” – and how their father's relationship to fame evolved during his lifetime.Alex remembers his dad saying, “I’m so sick of Leonard Bernstein. I’ve had it with him."

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This week Alec talks with Lewis Lapham, who's been refining his prose for over 50 years. Lapham says he still has to write “three or four or five, sometimes eight drafts of something,” but takes pleasure in “getting it right.”Today, he’s at the helm ofLapham’s Quarterly. He was atHarper’sfor many years – and he started out atThe San Francisco Examinerbefore stints atThe Saturday Evening PostandLife.

To talk with Lewis Lapham, you’re struck with the sensation that you’ve stumbled onto the set of a 1940’s film noir movie.He wears pressed suits and pocket squares -- and his stories evoke another era. He tells Alec about being a rookie reporter atThe Examinerand what it was like to go on a meditation retreat with the Beatles in India.

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This week onHere’s The Thing, Alec talks with writer Paula Pell – who has been making people laugh atSaturday Night Livefor the last 17 years.Pell landed her dream job as a writer atSNLafter working at a Florida theme park. Her agent told her that Lorne Michaels wanted to meet her – “it is not an audition, but he wants to fly you up and talk to you.” Pell wasn’t sure what she was headed up for, but she got a job writing for the show.

Because of her longevity on the show, Pell calls herself “Nanny SNL,” but she’s the first to admit, “if you have a good night there you feel like you’re 20 again.”Today, Pell also spends time writing for movies -- she’s an executive producer on the upcoming "This is 40."

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This week Alec talks with Andrew McCarthy – about making movies, directing, and what it’s like to reinvent oneself as a travel writer.Most people know McCarthy for his roles in "St. Elmo’s Fire" and "Pretty in Pink" – as a member of the “Brat Pack" -- but those movies were only one stop on Andrew McCarthy’s journey.

Almost 20 years ago, McCarthy discovered that traveling the world was the perfect antidote to the fame and exposure that came with his acting career.He has spent much of the last decade writing about his experiences in distant and exotic lands.McCarthy talks with Baldwin about his new book, calledThe Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down.

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This week on Here’s The Thing, Alec talks with two men who have spent much of their lives living and working in Africa.Photographer Peter Beard first set foot on the continent in 1955. Richard Ruggiero, of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, began his Peace Corps stint in 1981 in the northern Central African Republic.

“We are enemies of nature,” says Beard, whose photographs have documented the destruction of wildlife in Africa, including the plight of the African Elephant, the very topic of Ruggiero’s doctoral dissertation.Ruggiero continues to work in Africa today and says the situation with elephant poaching right now is a “nightmare.”That says, says Ruggiero, “People are the problem, but they are also the solution.”

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This week on Here’s The Thing, Alec talks with David Brooks on stage at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in Manhattan as part of the Public Forum series.David Brooks has been aNew York Timesop-ed columnist since 2003.He is known as a Conservative voice -- he was a senior editor atThe Weekly Standard-- but former Obama advisor David Axelrod described him as a “true public thinker.”

Join Baldwin and Brooks on stage at Joe's Pub for a wide-ranging conversation: Brooks tells Baldwin about writing a humor column in college; about William F. Buckley’s “capacity for friendship” and about his evolution of opinion toward the Iraq war. They debate fracking -- Brooks says, "I am where President Obama is. So I'm a good Democrat on this issue." Brooks wonders about the possibility of Hillary Clinton in 2016; and he explains to Baldwin his basic feeling about college education: "Every course you take in college should be about who to marry."

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This week, Alec talks with Pulitzer-prize winner George Will, whose passion for politics began early: he remembers Truman’s election when he was seven years old.

George Will is a political conservative, but he’s not afraid to direct criticism to the right. Will analyzes the current election for Alec – this isn’t a “slam-dunk for either side,” he says, and offers some historical perspective on the current animosity in political life. “We've been through really violent times,” says Will, “and we're in one of those periods now. And it will burn over.” With over 40 years in political journalism, George Will is a voice worth listening to.

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This week, Alec talks with Fred Armisen. Armisen has been a punk rock drummer, currently he’s a cast member onSaturday Night Liveand is also the co-creator and co-star of IFC’sPortlandia. Armisen has always been ambitious; when he was a drummer, he recalls, he always "wanted much more."

Long ago, Armisen played drums with the Blue Man Group in Chicago and he tells Alec he learned a lot: about "simplicity," "reinvention" and "that audiences want to be entertained." Armisen admits that he’s always working; whenSNLis on hiatus, he’s producingPortlandia.But he still dreams about what might come next: "I want to invent a type of entertainment that is really blurry between comedy and something else. That doesn’t have a name yet...another level of fooling people as opposed to just doing a character. Something a little bigger than that."

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This week, Alec talks with Zarin Mehta who retired as president and executive director of the New York Philharmonic at the end of this past season. Mehta, an accountant by trade, grew up in 1940’s Bombay before it became the booming city of Mumbai. In Mehta’s memory, Bombay was more like a colonial fishing village.

Mehta talks with Alec about his father, who founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, his brother Zubin, and the realities of running a major arts organization in New York.As Mehta states, “Look, in the United States one does not look to the state for support of the arts.”Alec also talks with Carmen Mehta, Zarin Mehta's wife, and she offers her own insights into Mehta’s success.

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