Maury Z. Levy

Archive for January, 2011|Monthly archive page

The Last Steve Carlton Story


By Maury Z. Levy










Jimmy Stewart: The Interview

In Video Review on January 23, 2011 at 10:02 am


He is silver now, but no less golden. At 78, James Maitland Stewart looks back fondly on a career of some 80 feature movies. He’s played cowboys and con­gressmen, baseball players and bandleaders, ranchers and runamucks. And through it all, this Princeton graduate who stumbled into Hollywood by way of summer stock has had a special air of innocence and elegance that has made him, without a doubt, America’s favorite actor.

His craft, most often seen on the late show in recent years, is now being preserved for the ages on home video. MCA, which released the long-awaited Hitchcock series a while back, just came out with five more Stewart classics: The Glenn Miller Story, The Rare Breed, Bend of the River, Winchester ’73 and Thunder Bay.

As Stewart relaxed in a comfortable armchair in his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by almost as many awards as memories, editor Maury Z. Levy talked with him about his life and loves, his tapes and times.

LEVY: You, quite obviously, have a VCR in your home. Do you use it a lot for taping?

STEWART: Well, um, actually, no. You see, so many of the old movies I’m interested in are on so damn late at  night, and I just can’t keep awake anymore. But taping them from television—I just don’t find that a good thing to do. Especially, you know, if it’s a picture that I’m in. I just find the quality so gull-darn awful. The movie’s scratchy, the sound is bad. That’s why I think this new idea of prerecorded home video is so great. They go and do the taping and the cassette work at the studio, and they do it directly from the film master. I’ve seen some of the stuff and it’s absolutely crystal clear, and the sound is great.

LEVY: And that’s why you’ve let them release so many of your films on home video.

STEWART: Yes, well, that’s right. They just make the whole thing so, well, so attractive. Also, you don’t have to wait until two in the morning to see it. You can just invite people in whenever you want. Throw a little party, you know, and still get to bed at a respectable hour.

LEVY: But will this mean the end of movie theaters?

STEWART: I’ll tell you something there. For some of them, it might not be such a bad idea. Now I’m talking about those little 300-seat houses with the bad projection and the bad sound. I think it’s very disturbing what they let these things get down to. But I do hear that some folks are building bigger and better picture houses. I know there are several being built right here in Los Angeles. And, in other places around this great country, they’re reopening some grand old houses that have been closed for a long time. The owners were smart enough not to have them torn down, because they just had a feeling that the movie audience that used to be would come back.

LEVY: And will they?

STEWART: I think so. I think we might see a nice mix. People will watch the videocassettes one or maybe two nights a Read the rest of this entry »

The Sex Chapter

In Gym Psych: The Insider's Guide to Health Clubs on January 23, 2011 at 9:56 am

[From the book Gym Psych: the Insider’s Guide to Health Clubs, by Maury Z. Levy and Jay Shafran (Fawcett Columbine, 1986)]

They used to call it the broad jump. In 1968, at the Olympics in Mexico City, U.S. jumper Bob Beamon shattered the existing world record with a leap of twenty-nine feet two and one-half inches. Some seventeen years later, the rest of the world is still trying to come close. What was Beamon’s secret? How did he prepare himself the night before the big jump? With sex. Beamon had intercourse the night before. Hell, he screwed his brains out. He was very cool about the whole thing. Afterward, he admitted the sex, and his only comment was, “What do I do now?” Oh, a cigarette usually does the trick, Bob.

There’s always been some mystery, if not confusion, about sex and sports. Different athletes handled it in different ways. Muhammad Ali always stayed celibate for six weeks before a fight. Did it help? Ali thought so. And it’s hard to argue with his record. But for those of you, men and women alike, who are more concerned fighting the battle of the bulge than the heavyweight champ­ionship, there are some things you should know about sex and athletics.

Sex isn’t all that taxing. Intercourse, even at its most passionate, burns up about 250 calories an hour. And unless you’re going for a world record in the sack, it’s unlikely that you’ll lose more than twenty-five calories, since the average lovemaking session lasts about five minutes. (Did you ever wonder who times these things? And where do they hide?)

To put those twenty-five calories into a gym perspec­tive, you’ll burn off about twice that in your preworkout warm-up and stretch. For those of you not yet in the gym, it takes about twenty-five calories to walk up a flight of stairs. So if your bedroom is on the second floor, you’re burning just as much energy going as you are coming. So to speak.

Some athletes fear that sex will ruin their con­centration. Actually, just the opposite might be true. Sex, like exercise, is a good way of venting stress—of losing a lot of pent-up negative energy.

You have to know something about how the body works to understand this. The adrenaline flow, the heightened blood pressure—the same biological process that gets you pumped up for sports—also gets you pumped up for sex.

This is where the brain comes in. The brain plays traffic cop. Once the juices start to flow, the brain sends them to the areas involved in the specific activity. And since the body can only concentrate fully on one stimulus at a time, you’re unlikely to see a man get an erection doing a bench press.

This bodily flow of one-way traffic also explains why after what seems like an exhausting workout, most people still have lots of energy for sex. In fact, while getting those juices flowing without draining the vital organs, the workout now becomes a very interesting and very effective form of foreplay. And there is data, dating back to Kinsey, that shows the sex drive and sexual frequency of an athlete exceeds those of the general population.

Lately, there’s been some speculation about internal stimuli. You might have picked up on this if you watched the Olympic marathon. Some of the runners interviewed talked about a mysterious “natural high” that comes over them at a certain point in the race. Some said it was like a cocaine high—you just sort of float along, aware of things outside your body, but Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Mitchell: A Nose for News, a Face for Radio


By Maury Z. Levy














Jessica Savitch: ‘Please Don’t Send Me Panties!’



By Maury Z. Levy













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