By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
PASADENA, Calif. -- Professional nose-tweaker Michael Moore is a man with a mission: to inform, irritate and stimulate the American TV-viewing public.
The creator of "TV Nation," Moore met with TV writers at the Summer Press Tour here to promote the late-summer run of his show on the Fox network, which played a year ago on NBC.
"This is satire," Moore explained. "It's not a stunt, it's satire, and the purpose of it is to expose a system that somehow has drifted away from the bulk of the American people. People don't care about politics anymore and they don't vote and in some cases for good reason."
Very often, as I'm digitizing my past, I come across pieces that I completely forgot about. This interview with Ed O'Neill, who right now is so great on "Modern Family," is one of them. I interviewed him at a Fox Network party one evening around the pool of the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. He were there to meet with the press, and now that my memory has been bumped, I recall talking with him and Michael Moore that night. This is ironic for me, because I just watched an immensely entertaining interview with O'Neill on "Kevin Pollak's Chat Show."
By Donald Porter
Standard-Examiner staff
PASADENA, Calif. -- A couple of years back, Ed O'Neill was cut out of a movie because a test audience laughed when he was on screen. It was a drama, you see -- a war film -- and he was playing a character who wasn't supposed to be laughed at.
Actors can be typecast, and O'Neill, after playing Al Bundy for eight years on "Married ... with Children," knows all about it. He's so identifiable as Al Bundy that, in the case of the aforementioned movie, "Flight of the Intruder," it meant his work was left on the cutting room floor.
O'Neill, however, is sanguine about his being Al Bundy.
