The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 70 to 61
His parents and grandparents were from Williamsburg, but Alan was raised in Eastern Parkway, the area today we call Crown Heights. “I used to go to a pickle store,” he once said on CNN. “They had holes in them. My father finally said, you know why they have holes in them? Because rats were eating them. That was the last time I went to the pickle store.” His parents escaped these pickle-eating rats by moving the family to Los Angeles when Alan was 11, and from there he went on to pursue a career in the arts, eventually becoming an awesome actor, who we remember best for later career work like Edward Scissorhands, Glengarry Glen Ross, and even Little Miss Sunshine, blech. But we’ll always remember him most fondly for his feature directorial debut, 1971’s madcap and surreal Little Murders.