Staten Island Stalker, Screech Edition

Seen on Staten Island — Dustin “Screech” Diamond:

From 5 a.m. until after sunset last night, 100-plus ABC crew members descended on the Hilton Garden Inn, Bloomfield, and a nearby office building to film parts of episode 4 of the Knights of Prosperity.

The show, due to premiere Oct. 17, mixes sitcom fare with celebrity voyeurism by following a pack of goofy characters as they plot to rob the home of Mick Jagger.

The plum-lipped, wire-thin rock icon, around whom the show has been built, makes an appearance as himself in the first episode, the production company divulged yesterday.

Otherwise, the TV people on scene at the Hilton Garden Inn yesterday guarded the set with passion equal to that of a Betty Crocker Bake-off contestant protecting a secret recipe.

They couldn’t quite hide Dustin Diamond, however. The actor, who played the uber-nerd Screech in the early-1990s sitcom Saved by the Bell, has a cameo, although a spokeswoman for the production company was characteristically mum.

He’s a little heavier and has a little more facial hair — other than that, he’s Screech, said hotel owner Richard Nicotra.

It’s amazing how much time and effort is spent on seven minutes of airtime, marveled Nicotra, as he watched the crew line up for a buffet lunch during a break in the 14-hour-plus day. We’re friendly to them. We enjoy doing this. It’s certainly good business.

With some Hollywood set-designer magic, the hotel can be transformed into Anywhere, USA, and it receives frequent visits from scouts looking for locations to shoot.

Knights of Prosperity, starring Donal Logue and a band of other actors who have yet to become household names, joins the ranks of such shows as Law and Order and The Sopranos in using the hotel as a set.

What does Donal Logue have to do to become a household name on the Island? Screech-struck ingrates . . .

Don’t You Know Where I Am?

New Yorkers are known for playing it cool in the face of celebrity, not caring that they just passed, say, George Hamilton while walking on the Upper East Side except that secretly they really do care — much more than you know:

As the stars swarm among us, you have to wonder: Are we now destined to become just another L.A., where fawning nobodies hound celebrities, who then escape behind gates and smoked glass? Are Soho penthouses the new Hollywood Hills, where the super-famous retreat to gaze on the milling serfs below, chuckling like feudal lords? Well, no. Heath Ledger’s house hasn’t been thronged by chanting mobs, even though everyone and his dog knows where it is. And now comes the news that Ledger’s bought a $2.3 million modernist box shrouded by trees in Los Angeles, which means there’s even less chance of spotting him on Smith Street. (Not that you care.) Even Gawker Stalker is presented partly tongue-in-cheek, a guilty pleasure that’s heavy on the guilt, its meticulous missives a halfhearted joke about how silly it is to obsess over the whereabouts of Ryan Adams. As for the rest of us, did we ever truly not care? I mean, wouldn’t you have been just as psyched to see Patti Smith in the East Village in the seventies as you are to see Jay-Z today? Or way more so, for that matter?

“I don’t think L.A. and New York are as different as some people make them out to be,” says Michael Imperioli, an oft-sighted Tribeca fixture. “I think it’s more about how people approach you and how they behave — that determines your reaction much more than any difference between L.A. versus New York.” In other words, it’s not that we in New York don’t care but that we know enough to pretend that we don’t care. Which, in essence, is almost as good. You know the drill: Ignore the star as she walks toward you, then start texting all your friends the moment she’s passed you by.

See also: New York Magazine’s Star Map.

Woody Allen Shirking His Civic Duty

Manhattan County Court Clerk Norman Goodman has the most celebrity sightings of anyone I know:

As county clerk, clerk of the State Supreme Court and commissioner of jurors for Manhattan, Mr. Goodman is responsible for every jury trial in every Manhattan state court, whether civil or criminal. He supervises about 180 employees who do everything from filing cases to collecting the $210 fee for the index number needed to start a civil action.

But his true talent is for sniffing out malingering jurors and prodding and cajoling Manhattan’s many prima donnas, from Hollywood stars to titans of Wall Street, to do their civic duty.

He has been honing those skills for 37 years, since May 3, 1969, when he was appointed to his job by the appellate division. He is now 82, which makes him four years younger than Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, the other well-known gray eminence in the Manhattan court system. Mr. Goodman is fairly tall, with a full head of white hair, a courtly manner and a wardrobe of conservative suits. He is cautious to a fault, the consummate clerk.

Manhattan jury pools are rich in celebrities, and Mr. Goodman can summon a deputy, Vincent Homenick, to provide a comprehensive list of those who have been called: Kevin Bacon, Roberta Flack, Henry Kissinger, Walt Frazier, Harvey Keitel, and so on, scores of them.

Naomi Campbell, the supermodel, responded to a jury summons by saying that she was willing to serve, but had a past assault conviction and, in any event, was a British citizen. (Records show she pleaded guilty to assault in Canada, but her record was expunged. She is due in Manhattan court on June 27 as a defendant, accused of throwing a cellphone at her maid.)

Celebrities are usually dismissed without being chosen, because lawyers fear they will have too much influence over other jurors. Still, Mr. Goodman asks them to return for juror appreciation day to talk to schoolchildren about the beauty of the jury system, and sometimes throw in a performance. Once he lined up Wynton Marsalis and Joel Grey on the same day. “I could have sold tickets to that,” he said, beaming.

Mr. Goodman, a strong believer in equal treatment, insisted that [Woody] Allen show up, bad memories and all. Mr. Allen arrived wearing what Mr. Goodman describes as “army fatigues and a Fidel Castro cap,” surrounded by his lawyer, his agent and a bodyguard. Mr. Goodman escorted him to the jury room, where Mr. Allen insisted on standing, rather than sitting like everybody else. The rest of the jurors gawked at him.

“We eventually offered him the opportunity to get out of there,” Mr. Goodman said. “Frankly, we were glad to get rid of him.”

Then again, it seems everyone wants to get out of serving on a jury:

Hemorrhoids are a perennial excuse, and one evidence-minded man mailed back a used box of Anusol as proof.

A Murray Hill woman wrote that regretfully, her husband could not serve because he had jumped off the Queen Elizabeth 2 and drowned. The Health Department later confirmed his death.

Another woman sent in a photograph of her battered face, with a note saying, “Thank you for understanding my chaotic situation.”

One man wrote a five-page treatise in medieval-looking script, explaining that his spiritual beliefs prevented him from sitting in judgment on the guilt or innocence of a fellow human being. He ultimately agreed to be part of the jury pool in a civil trial, where he would only have to determine liability; he was not chosen.

Russell Crowe On Steroids

God help anyone who has a story about them that includes this telling detail:

It was not the first time Ms. Campbell had been accused of injuring an employee with a telephone.

The Strongest Jawbone

Al Sharpton is on a diet:

For the longest time, the only part of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s body that got any exercise was his mouth. “I had the strongest jawbone,” Mr. Sharpton said without even a hint of a smile. Instead, his right hand mimicked someone’s lips flapping up and down.

Mr. Sharpton’s jawbone is still getting a heavy workout these days, whether in politics, entertainment or on his cellphone. But finally, at 50, so is the rest of his body.

“I am her art piece,” Mr. Sharpton said with typical modesty as he introduced his private trainer, Liz Ross, at his $300-a-month gym (not including the private trainer), Reebok Sports Club/NY, on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan one recent morning.

Ms. Ross has, in fact, helped carve out a trimmer Al Sharpton.

In the first six months of his weight loss regimen, Mr. Sharpton lost 15 pounds, 5 inches off his waist and 6 percent of his body fat. A couple of months later, he’s down a total of about 30 pounds and headed toward his goal of weighing 200 pounds, which might be considered svelte for a guy who once tipped the scales at more than 300 pounds.

The “Sharpton Plan” is simple:

Set realistic goals. Exercise three times a week at the gym. Skip breakfast. Salad for lunch (maybe some chicken, too). Salad for dinner (maybe some fish).

And to keep those hunger pains away – cookies. Boxes of cookies. He prefers Aunt Gussie’s chocolate chip and almond. To be fair, the cookies are sugar free and made with organic wheat. But his trainer, Ms. Ross, clearly isn’t pleased. “They’re not carrot sticks, Al,” she said.