Author: rb809rb

Sharon Stone is done smoking weed.

Her journey to cut ties with cannabis began when she was put on several medications after she suffered a near-fatal stroke in 2001.

“I got off one of my medications that I was on for my stroke last September, and they said I couldn’t go off of it,” Stone tells me. “They said, ‘You can’t go off of it. You can never go off of it.’ I’m like, ‘I’m going off it,’ and it was like going off of fucking heroin. I was sick as a frigging dog for four and a half months. I just thought, ‘I want my life back.’ I had gotten off the majority of the drugs over the years that they had put me on. But I was like, ‘I want a drug-free life.’”

She continues, “Once I got off that, I decided I’m going to quit smoking pot. And because I think they put so much stuff in it now — they really do — when I stopped smoking pot, I also got sick. It’s not like you’re pulling it out of the ground anymore. It’s not like when we were kids. I got pretty sick for a month. I went to my neurologist, and he said, ‘Sharon, I’ve had people dying in the emergency room from marijuana.’”

Stone is sitting poolside at her Beverly Hills estate on a Monday afternoon. Just minutes before, I watched her paint on a large canvas in a guest house she’s turned into an art studio. At the same time, photographer Tyler Chick is shooting her for digital magazine Nineteen92. The day is also being chronicled by a group of young people from Social Network Studios, a social media management and branding company founded by her eldest son, Roan, that runs Stone’s social media.

“I had four or five million followers [on Instagram], but not that much engagement,” Stone says. Roan overhauled her feed. “Now, I have millions in engagement.”

But that also meant Roan had to modify who she was following. “People wrote me nasty letters. Why am I not following them anymore?” Stone says. “People got outraged that they were not being followed anymore, as if like this was a real relationship. As if I had a personal relationship with someone I was following on Instagram, someone I had never met.”

While Stone’s painting career has taken off over the last few years, the art form isn’t new to her. The Pennsylvania native studied fine arts in college before she dropped out to pursue a modeling career. “I went to New York with 50 bucks and a suitcase,” she says.

The creative spark was reignited during the COVID lockdown. What began as a few canvases and some paints in her bedroom turned into a sometimes around-the-clock obsession. Before she knew it, Stone transformed her bedroom into a makeshift art studio. “I moved all the furniture out of my bedroom. Before very long, I gave away my bedroom furniture and gotten a small bed,” Stone recalls. “I was living in like this French artist loft with this bed in front of the fireplace. I had this beautiful bedroom, but I put nails in the wall like I wasn’t living in this gorgeous house. I just put nails in this beautiful wall. Started buying bigger canvases. Brought a big table up there. Threw sheets on the floor. Months went by, months and months.”

Her sons – Roan and his brothers, Laird and Quinn – became worried and intervened. “They come in and they say to me, ‘Mom, we just think that you should wear a bra.’” Stone says. “I’m like, ‘This is the same conversation my dad had with me in the 70s.’ Didn’t work then. Not going to work now. Thanks for your concern. Have a lovely day.”

They were able to persuade Stone to move her painting to the guest house. “I’m selling my work in galleries all around the world now,” she says.

She also returned to modeling in June by walking a runway for the first time in 33 years as the closing model of the Vetements menswear show in Paris. “I really liked meeting the designer [Guram Gvasalia] because he’s very talented, and I think very clever, and he’s doing something which is to me quite punk,” Stone says. “And you know, I was actually around for punk, so I like punk a lot. I truly identify with punk.”

She also couldn’t help but think of her early days modeling in Europe. “When I was 19, I had a 38-year-old boyfriend who was a designer, a silk designer, and I knew all of the designers because of him,” Stone recalls. “We traveled all over the world together. We dated on and off for 30 years. We’re still best friends.”

Was marriage ever considered? “He would have married me, but I did not want to live in Europe,” Stone explains. “I knew I was going to be an actress. I knew what my destiny was. I really knew when I was little that this is what was going to happen to me. It wasn’t just all about the acting. I knew that I was going to be super famous, and that I had many things I was meant to do. I just knew it.”

In the last year or so, Stone’s time in front of the camera includes appearances in “Euphoria,” the action comedy “Nobody 2” and the indie dramedy “In Memoriam.”

Stone hopes a Broadway debut is in her future. She tells me she tried to secure the rights for a stage production of “All About Eve.” “I could be a good Margo Channing,” she says of the role of the aging Broadway star originated by Bette Davis in the 1950 film. “I mean, in my sleep. Let’s go. Come on. When she goes, ‘I hate men.’”

Stone says she’s been offered Broadway roles, but nothing ever felt right. She also revealed to me that she recently pitched an idea to her agent. “I was like, ‘Can we get ‘Mame’ and reset it in the punk era?” she says. “I could work at a department store in New York and get a biracial kid and be Mame in the punk era. The kid could have a mohawk. I would have bleached blonde Blondie hair. I could get Debbie Harry to do the music and Billy Idol.”

Another idea brewing is a gender swap adaptation of “La Cage Aux Folles,” the Tony-winning musical about a gay couple operating a drag club who try to go back into the closet for just one night when the son of one of the men brings his conservative future in-laws to dinner. “’La Cage’ with two lesbians,” Stone says. “I play the lipstick lesbian and you find a big butch lesbian who has to fem it up.”

But then she adds laughing, “I tell people these ideas and they just look at me and are like, ‘What the fuck are you taking?’”

But as we now know, Stone is hardly taking anything these days. In fact, she says, “This has been a period for me in this last year of really reclaiming my life.”

Peter Lassally, the dean of late night producers who worked with Johnny Carson on the “Tonight Show,” David Letterman on “Late Show” and Craig Ferguson on “The Late Late Show,” has died. He was 93.

Lassally was long dubbed the “host whisperer” for helping steer some of the biggest franchises of all time in late night. He worked with Carson until that host retired in 1992; after that, he joined forces with Letterman, who had hoped to take the “Tonight” mantle but was famously passed over for the gig. That’s when Lassally, joining Letterman’s Worldwide Pants shingle, was instrumental in helping Letterman decide to leave NBC and create an entirely new “Late Show” franchise at CBS.

Under Letterman’s deal with CBS, Worldwide Pants also programmed the 12:37 a.m. slot with “The Late Late Show” — which Lassally executive produced in its first incarnation with Tom Snyder. When it later went to Craig Kilborn, Lassally semi-retired, but when Craig Ferguson took over in 2005, Lassally served as the show’s executive producer.

“Peter had two loves in his life that lasted more than a half-century, the first with his lovely wife, Alice, and the second with the world of talk television,” said Michael Naidus, who worked with Lassally on Ferguson’s “Late Late Show” as showrunner. “Each of those love affairs was a two-way street.  Quite literally, hundreds of millions of people owe their late-night smiles and laughs to this beautiful soul, whose gift for finding extraordinary talent and honing it is unmatched and unrivaled. 

“And all the while, Peter took such joy from the moments he helped create, that his grin was as ubiquitous as his daily sliced apple,” he added. “Whatever little I gave to the format is because he was kind and patient enough to teach it to me. It’s traditional to say ‘he will be missed’ in these circumstances, but the truth is Peter was and is irreplaceable.”

Lassally retired in 2015, as Ferguson departed “The Late Late Show,” overseeing guest hosts before James Corden took over.

In a 2015 Variety profile, then-CBS Entertainment chairman Nina Tassler referred to Lassally as “the strong, silent type,” with an unerring ability to “diagnose problems with surgical precision” and a nurturing attitude that elicited the best from the big personalities with whom he’s dealt, as well as with the show’s staffs. “He’s kind of ego-less,” Tassler noted. “There’s a comfort he derives from not wanting or needing to be in the spotlight.”

An NBC spokesperson shared, “When Johnny Carson and David Letterman needed counsel and an honest opinion, they immediately went to Peter Lassally, the professor of late night. His relationship to each of these giants was immeasurable and both of them would undoubtedly say his contribution to their success was so impactful that it would be difficult to put in words. A quiet man whose influence and stature spoke volumes, Peter’s brilliance was in shaping what we watch, how we watch and why late night was, and remains, vitally significant.”

Lassally was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1932 to a Jewish family that later had to flee to the Netherlands with the rise of Nazi Germany. While there, Lassally’s sister went to school with Anne Frank, and he, his mother and sister were imprisoned in the Westerbork transit camp and later in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. After surviving the Holocaust, Lassally and his family moved to New York in 1947.

Lassally was a part of TV from the very beginning, joining the NBC page program at age 19 and serving as a Radio City Music Hall usher alongside his pal Regis Philbin. He worked in radio, then moved to Arthur Godfrey’s popular program.

He joined “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in the 1970s, rising to executive producer until Carson’s retirement. From there, he moved to “Late Night with David Letterman,” and then helped establish “Late Show” with Letterman. (That franchise, which later continued under Stephen Colbert, recently wrapped following CBS’ surprise cancellation.)

Lassally’s final act in late night was identifying comedian Craig Ferguson (then known mostly for his role on “Drew Carey”) and transforming him into a talk show host — which ultimately, as Ferguson grew into the role, became a critically acclaimed, unique late night outpost.

Lassally won two Emmy awards over the years, while discovering and nurturing multiple generations of talent.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Alice Lassally, and is survived by his daughter, Andrea Gibbin (Chris Gibbin); his son, 3 Arts’ Tom Lassally (Romi Lassally); and his four grandchildren, Walker Gibbin, Eloise Gibbin, Annabel Lassally, and Owen Lassally.