From the Onion A.V. Club's Random Roles interview with Kevin Corrigan comes the best news I'm likely to hear all day:
AVC: On the Big Fan DVD, you explain your own “big fan” experience with Robert De Niro. What was that like?
KC: We were at the Boston Film Festival, and it was just me and Rob doing the Q&A. Patton couldn’t be there. When he is there, I say very little, because I just want to hear Patton talk, you know? When he does a Q&A, it’s like watching him do a stand-up gig. But this time it was different, because it was me and Rob and someone asked if either of us had had a “big fan” experience, and I pulled out the story about meeting Robert De Niro that I’d told a hundred times, but I had never shared it with a group that large. And it was fitting. It fit the occasion. I told it and it went over nicely.
What goes unmentioned is that the rhythm of his delivery of the story [below] out-Walkens Walken in cadence and odd emphasis. I was there, and it was magical.
KC: I went to see this play at the Public Theater in 1986. De Niro hadn’t done a play since 1970, or something like that. So it was a big deal. The show sold out. I caught it twice. I saw it once in previews and then once again after it opened. I actually used to draw and paint and was pursuing that… I picked acting, finally. And I could still draw, pretty well, back then. And I really wanted to meet De Niro. And I thought the way I’d get to meet him was if I drew a picture of him. I got the usher to help me get backstage, and that’s pretty much how it happened. This usher took the picture backstage and he said he would see if he could get permission for me to come back. He liked the picture. That’s what it was. I don’t think he was interested in helping me out, but I had some friends with me, and they were like, “Show him the picture!” ’Cause he was trying to blow us off. And then I showed him the picture and he liked it a lot. So he agreed to help me. And he did. He came back, after about 10 minutes. He reappeared and said, “You can come backstage, but your friends gotta wait here.” So I went backstage, and that’s how I met him.
I was lost back there. I didn’t know anybody. There’s no reason why I would have. I was 17. I’d never met a celebrity or seen one in person. There were a bunch of them back there. I was studying acting at the time in a young people’s program. I was really starstruck. I mean really starstruck. I didn’t know how to process the experience at all. I got very, very nervous and tongue-tied. I should have just walked away. That’s what I would do now, but at the time, I was so determined to get backstage. It was just that my ability to deal with getting backstage didn’t match my determination. I was able to get in there, but I couldn’t handle being there. Meeting him was something I was not prepared for. Back then, he wasn’t doing any interviews and he still had this mystique, you know? No one really knew anything about him. So I tried to have a conversation with him. It didn’t really go well. I asked him a question that came out really inarticulate and it wasn’t the kinda thing he wanted to deal with, anyway, after coming offstage. I think his character tries to commit suicide with a gun. He didn’t want to make small talk. I think I asked him a weird question. I was trying to get in his head and I don’t think he liked that. He declined to answer my question. And that was it. It was very awkward.
AVC: The picture you made for him was De Niro and Marlon Brando.
KC: I put them together because they work together in people’s imagination. At the time, he was considered to be the heir to the greatness of Marlon Brando. But he had won an Oscar for playing the same character Brando had played. He was like Son Of Brando.
