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April 6, 2001

(Transcript from television promo & interview)

"Steven Weber hits a home run in his first attempt at writing with Club Land, the touching Showtime movie of a father who devotes his life to business and the son who risks everything to start a new life.

ET - Could you talk about how this came about?

SW - I just started writing something, and eventually it evolved into this. I wrote a script loosely based on my father and grandfather, who were agents, Borscht Belt and nightclub agents, in the '40s, '50s and '60s, and wrote a script, and it was in a fairly decent form. And MURRAY SCHISGAL , who's a great playwright-screenwriter, read it and liked it. He helped me push it in certain directions that the script was lacking, and Showtime liked it, and that's how it evolved.

ET - How long ago did you write this?

SW - About two years ago. It took two years to write it, essentially.

ET - And did you pull this cast together?

SW - They all owed me favors. (laughs) No! Actually, it was Showtime and it was Saul Rubinek and it was Punch Productions, which helped, but it all just happened. I knew Brad Garrett a little bit. We worked together on an old show and kind of stayed in touch here and there. Originally when I saw these characters, I only saw people who looked like the characters that I described, do you know what I mean? So that the original character of Willie that Alan Alda plays is based on my grandfather, who was a slight, wiry, bald guy. Well, Alan was interested in playing it. I immediately thought, well, he's not a slight, wiry, bald guy, you know, and it was the same with the character of Lou Montana.

At the last minute, truthfully, it was Brad, who plays Lou, who came in and saved things. And not only saved it, but there could have been nobody else who would have done it. Seriously, he's unbelievable. It's a role that, if you know Brad's work, will kind of stun you because it's not like his work on "(Everybody Loves) Raymond." It's a very introspective, kind of dark characterization. It could not have been better. And the scenes with Brad and Alan work like I never dreamt they would. That was part of the process about writing. I had never done this before, so I had no clue if it would succeed or fail. And I'm kind of a fatalist and I figured, all right, well, as long as I've written it, now it's being done, how great. But I had no idea that the actors would bring such life to it. It was amazing."

September 19, 1992

by Janice Arkatov

Steven Weber is changing.

Sure, he's still the same easygoing, lovable quipster Brian Hackett on NBC's "Wings" (making its season premiere Thursday). But last summer, movie audiences also saw a darker side of Weber, as Bridget Fonda's philandering fiance in the hit thriller "Single White Female." And come November, Weber gets really dark, playing real-life California serial killer Jon Dunkle in the CBS-TV movie "In the Company of Darkness."

"I read as much as I could stomach," Weber says of Dunkle's court transcripts. "It was just too disturbing. You try to ascribe motivation (to a character) and end up wearing that suit home a little bit." The segue into seamier roles, he says, is not as much by design as necessity. "I'm not at a point in my career where I have the luxury to choose," admits the New York native. "If someone's interested in me, I'm interested. These parts just happen to be a little darker."

Weber, 31, whose TV credits include "As the World Turns" and playing J.F.K. in "The Kennedys of Massachusetts," is the offspring of a nightclub singer and a manager of borscht-belt comedians. "But they weren't stage parents," stresses the actor, who appeared in "Made in Bangkok" at the Mark Taper Forum in 1988. "I got bitten by the acting bug in the third grade--we were doing Sendak's 'Where the Wild Things Are.' I was a minor character, but I got on stage and ad-libbed shamelessly, abusively."