| What's the one thing from your childhood that your mom threw away that haunts you to this day? |
| Ben Stiller has one, a souvenir from what today would be called a riot but back in the 1970s registered as perfectly normal behavior. |
| I'm Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope newsletter and the guy still holding out hope that those baseball cards are going to turn up in a box someday. |
| In this week's newsletter, let's look at what our Envelope cover star Ben Stiller misses. |
Cover story: Ben Stiller has no time to waste |
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| (Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times) |
| For this week's cover story, Stiller and I talked a lot about his love for the New York Knicks, a passion kindled early and one that became an "addiction" this year as the team tried to win its first NBA championship since 1973. His dad, Jerry Stiller, took him to lot of games as a kid. Two of Jerry's friends, Stanley Asofsky and Carnegie Deli co-owner Fred Klein, had season tickets, and they knew all the players and refs and would introduce them to Ben. |
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| Jerry also took his son to baseball games, both the Yankees and the Mets. The Yankees were Ben's favorite — though his commitment to them was nowhere near his love for the Knicks — and when they won the American League championship series in 1978, Stiller ran out onto the field with his friend Jonathan Harris, as one did in New York. (Or, really, anywhere else ... but especially New York.) He even scooped up a chunk of the right-field turf and took it home with him on the D train. |
| "I had it in my room for two years," Stiller says. |
| "And then," I guessed, "your mom threw it away." |
| "My mom threw it away," Stiller affirms. To be fair to Anne Meara, the sod was old and crumbling and probably had bugs in it. And yet ... |
| "It was a prized possession," Stiller says. "I had it on a piece of tinfoil on a shelf. Maybe if I had been really lucky and had picked up a base, my mom wouldn't have made me get rid of that." |
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| Stiller told me he wouldn't be directing any episodes of "Severance's" upcoming third season to free him up to make a feature film, a World War II survival story about a downed airman in occupied France who becomes involved with the French Resistance. Stiller has spent most of this year helping prep the third season and wants to be clear that the show is "a real priority." But after a long break, he's ready to return to feature filmmaking. |
| "Severance" star Adam Scott understands, though he finds it hard to imagine the set without Stiller. Scott remembers exactly what he told Stiller when they were shooting the jaw-dropping, mood-shifting Season 2 finale. |
| "I was just like, 'Dude, this is our 'Temple of Doom,'" Scott told me, referencing the second "Indiana Jones" movie. "And I was in absolute paradise the entire time, not just because 'Temple of Doom' is my favorite movie, but because we were getting to do it all. There's the marching band. There's a fight scene. There's the running in the hall. We had the big scene where Mark talks to Outie." |
| "And when we finished it, we were all so tired," Scott continues. "But I could see how happy Ben was. It was such a showcase for him." |
| And now, he'll be returning to making movies — the one thing as a kid he always wanted to do. |
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| Well, that and snag third base at Yankee Stadium. |
Read more coverage of 'Severance' |
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