People

By Lev Grossman Sunday, July 27, 2003
    • Paging Dr. Remoray
    In Hollywood, all good things must come to an end — and then get spun off into something that's almost as good, but not quite. After Friends finishes its 10th and final season next year, NBC will launch a sitcom starring Joey Tribbiani, the lazy, lovable lunk played by MATT LEBLANC. (What, Gunther wasn't available?) The new show will premiere in the fall of 2004 in that same old comfy Friends time slot, Thursdays at 8 p.m. E.T. Joey won't be going on his own: the three executive producers who created Friends will be there for him too. The title of the show? Joey. This must be after they rejected How You Doin'? and Joey Loves Chandler.

    She Completes Him
    When most people look at VERNE TROYER, they see Mini-Me, the tiny evil clone from the Austin Powers films. When GENEVIEVE GALLEN looks at him, she sees 32 smoldering inches of future husband. At 6 ft. 2 in., Gallen might seem an unlikely match for Troyer, 34, but he and the yoga instructor, 29, have been dating for a year and will marry in November. (As Austin Powers might say, the mechanics of it are just mind boggling.) If anyone's looking for a wedding present, we suggest a stepladder.


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    Q & a with Johnny Cash
    You have 11 Grammys. Do you still care about stuff like this?

    I gotta tell ya — and it's not all humility — I get very excited about it.

    "Hurt" is a cover of a song by techno-goth rockers Nine Inch Nails. Not the most obvious choice for the Man in Black.

    I think it's probably the best antidrug song I ever heard.

    How did you turn a song like Hurt into a Johnny Cash song?

    I would just get down and do it until I felt like I was doing it with feeling, like it was my song. I probably sang the song 100 times before I went in and recorded it.

    You and Elvis are the only people in both the Rock and the Country Hall of Fame. Do you think of yourself as more one than the other?

    I can't put myself in a box. That would be death. I couldn't do that at all. I don't believe in the categories in the first place. I'm really trying to prove that there aren't categories that you have to stay in music, that you can branch out, you can touch others out there that have not been listening to you, if you keep trying.

    Do you ever watch MTV?

    Occasionally.

    But they don't really play your kind of music much.

    Yeah, it's not really my cup of tea.

    There's a whole legendary Johnny Cash mystique out there. Do you think you're a lot different from that person?

    Well, I haven't tried to analyze that, what people think of me. They probably see me differently from how I see myself, yeah. Sure. I see myself as very human, very fragile.

    So what are you working on now?

    When my wife died I booked myself into the studio just to work, to occupy myself so I would be doing something, and I found that that's the thing I really wanted to do, to be in the studio. That's what I been doing. That's what I'm gonna be doing for a while.

    Splits Ville
    LIZA MINNELLI AND DAVID GEST

    The wedding favors were satin candy boxes bearing the words "Liza and David 4 Ever." Those satin candy boxes lied! The marriage of LIZA MINNELLI and DAVID GEST is over. The two were wed in March of last year in a ceremony of Bruckheimeresque splendor — there were 1,100 guests, including Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor — but the couple always looked as if they were trying too hard to convince us, and maybe each other. Was it all just a publicity stunt? We may never know. Their marriage may have been a sham, but at least their divorce will be real.