I'm Wesley Morris, and this is Cannonball.

Today, we're going to play a little game.

Does Timothy Shalame go above the fold?

I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about movie stars.

Movie stars.

They're basically actors who we and our wallets have fallen in love with.

I have fallen in love with my fair share, but I also love to study them because they can tell us a lot about who we think we are and how maybe we'd like to be.

And ever since we started this show, I've wanted to talk to my friend Bill Simmons about this idea of who the movie star is, what it takes to make one, whether we even still have them. It's something he

and I have been talking about pretty much for as long as we've known each other. And not infrequently,

Robert Redford would be invoked as the definition of a movie star. Everybody's mom, including

mine, loved this man. She paid good money to see him act, but I have no doubt that

she'd have paid with a piece of her heart, too. Which is kind of how you know he was a star.

He could make a married woman feel real single. And then last month, Robert Redford died.

So Bill and I were like, I think now is the time.

Let's finally have another round of this conversation.

But the Redford edition,

Bill, welcome to Cannonball.

It's great to be here.

We've known each other for almost 15 years,

and I think we have talked about the concept of movie stardom more than any other topic. And Redford's the perfect got

to do this, because we don't have Redford's anymore. They just don't exist. But we'll come

back to that. I want to start by asking some condolence questions. First of all, how's your

...