IF YOU'RE TALKING TO ME, YOUR CAREER MUST BE IN TROUBLEIn December 1992, I sent out polite, neatly typed letters to seventy-five actors and actresses requesting interviews for a book I was writing about the movies. Some of the letters were a bit hazy about the book's theme, but most of them did contain at least a passing mention of my interest in discussing the fleeting nature of fame, a subject with which many of them were quite familiar. The people I wrote to included the rich and famous (Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Daryl Hannah, Goldie Hawn), the previously rich andfamous (Ursula Andress, Bo Derek, Isaac Hayes, Margot Kidder, Liza Minnelli, John Travolta), thepreviously reasonably well known and/or probably stillfairly rich (George Hamilton, Judd Nelson, Eric Rob-erts), plus a bunch of people like Pam Grier, HelenSlater, and Vincent Spano. Only two of the seventy-five responded; Liza Minnelli's and Raul Julia's pub-licists wrote back to say no. The stars' and ex-stars' lack of interest in thisproject did not catch me entirely by surprise. Over theXLLL