JOEY'S PAGE

This is a young adult named Alex Fischetti who I met through Charles Grodin.  Alex enjoys doing celebrity interviews.
Ernest Borgnine Interview - see below
Jonathan Winters Interview

Me and Ernie: A conversation with Ernest Borgnine
By Alex Fischetti

A lifelong dream came true for me at last.  After 4 years of hard work and effort I finally managed to score an interview with legendary Hollywood actor: Ernest Borgnine, or as everyone including me calls him: Ernie.  Ernest Borgnine has one big career as an actor with roles in such classic movies such as "From Here to Eternity=E 2, "Marty", "Bad day at Black rock", "The Dirty Dozen", "The Wild Bunch" and "The Poseidon Adventure".  I had the time of my life talking to him and he had a lot of important things to say.

The first thing I talked to Ernie about was how he's still working at age 91 which is incredible.  Ernie's most recent project was in the TV western "Aces N Eights" which premiered not too long ago on Cable television.  Not only did Ernie act in the movie, he also rides a horse.  Considering that he was in his 90s, everyone ran to see him get on the horse but Ernie, being the age he was at, insisted that he use a ladder to get on the horse.  So they got the ladder and went on the horse.  Hey, that's how John Wayne did it!

Now aside from "Aces N Eights", another movie Ernie is doing is an independent project called "Another Harvest Moon" with Piper Laurie, Anne Meara, and Doris Roberts from Everybody Loves Raymond.  The movie is still in production.  Ernie also has two new other movies in production "The Lion of Judah" and another new western called "Death keeps coming".

Ernie still wants to work though.  Recently in the news Ernie said that he's almost up to 200 movies and he hopes that the Hallmark channel, the network which made "A Grandpa for Christmas" for which Ernie received a Golden Globe nomination at age 90, would come up with some projects for him to do so he can get up to 200 movies. However he doesn't want 200 to be the last number of movies for him, he told me that he hopes to work to he's 113 which I pray happens because we need an actor like him in cinema.

Next I moved on to talking about all the classic movies he did.  The film we most talked about was From Here to Eternity in which he played Fatso Judson the guy who killed Frank Sinatra's character Maggio.  Ernie told me that after the movie came out he became known as "the guy who killed Frank Sinatra."  He told me a story of how when he was driving down Ventura boulevard the year the movie came out, he had this Pizza he wanted to take home and eat and he got stopped by a policeman.  When the policeman looked at his face he said to his partner: "Hey guess what, I caught the guy who killed Frank Sinatra."  But hey, I guess that's what happens when you play bad guys onscreen.  However off-screen Ernie and Frank were great pals all the way till the end when Frank saw Ernie a mouth before he passed away.  He told Ernie that "If a songwriter were to write a song that he used to sing back in the day, they'd make a million dollars."  Sadly that's not the way it is these days.  These days it's all this Hip Hop mumbo jumbo which both me and Ernie find crude, disturbing and so surreal that we both agreed that it felt like Sodom and Gomorra had come upon the music industry, it's the same thing with movies.  Ernie told me that today in movies there's more sex and violence than ever before and that it equals money when it's on-screen.  He said that if a head is blown off and a bare chest is shown, it's a hit but when it's not it=E 2s a flop.  It's a sad example of how The Golden era of Hollywood is gone and that it's slow to come back.

Besides talking about from here to Eternity, other movies we discussed were Bad day at Black Rock in which Ernie told me that he had a ball working with Spencer Tracy.  Marty which he said is his favorite film and a movie he beat his own co star in Bad day at Black Rock Spencer Tracy for the best actor Academy Award.  The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch, two movies which showed how violent the world can be and how violence is used in both movies to prove that point and The Poseidon Adventure a movie that Ernie called a family themed disaster filmed which showed how interesting a staircase looked underwater.  Also he mentioned Emperor of the North was his second favorite movie because he never played such a bad man in his life.

Now aside from motion pictures, we also talked about his TV career mostly McHale's Navy where he told me the story of how he signed on to do the show when a boy scout could recognize other famous TV actors and not him.  From TV we moved on to actors where I brought up a=2 0subject Ernie was shocked to hear.  According to IMDB (The International movie database) it's been said that Ernie and Mickey Rooney have been feuding and that they hate each other according to quotes they said about each other.  Ernie denied it right away and said that whoever started the rumor should shut up and=2 0should get spanked.  He felt it wasn't fair to him or to Mickey that it was brought up and I feel the same way.  It's a testament to how gossip tries to ruin relationships and tries to make you believe things that aren't so.

The last thing we talked about to wrap up our memorable conversation was his upcoming autobiography: "Ernie".  The book is now available in book stores near you and Ernie is doing a book tour around the country to promote it.  However "Ernie" wasn't the original title of the book.  The original title of the book was "I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire -- I Just Want To Keep My Nuts Warm".  It was a title Ernie got when he was a chestnut vendor more than 50 years ago before he became an actor.  However the publishing company told him that people might question the title so it was changed to "Ernie".

So that was it.  I had a fantastic time and I'm sure Ernie did too.  I hope to meet Ernie someday while he's doing his book tour and also make a movie with him because I write scripts from time to time because to top off this article, there's no one like Ernie!  He's one in a million!

Alex Fischetti