Alec Baldwin just burned a lot of his bridges -- and roads, and footpaths -- with his former colleagues at MSNBC.
And that's just for starters.
In an essay published in New York Magazine that went online Sunday, the actor rants about a range of people in show business and the media who did him wrong, before concluding that he’s saying “goodbye to public life.”
Baldwin spends the majority of his 5,000-word essay complaining about having been labeled a homophobe after a string of confrontations with journalists and paparazzi, while doing a lot of labeling himself.
MSNBC head Phil Griffin and host Rachel Maddow take the brunt of Baldwin’s berating, but he also goes after TMZ’s Harvey Levin and recently elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The former “30 Rock” star also bashes the paparazzi, Shia LaBeouf, the Huffington Post, Broadway director Dan Sullivan, Capital One Bank and Fox News.
He charges that head of MSNBC, Griffin, is a man who “couldn’t give a flying f--k about content,” and he calls Maddow “a phony” and “the ultimate wonk/dweeb,” and he speculates that she may have conspired with Griffin to end his contract with the network.
If all that wasn’t enough to likely destroy any future relationship between Baldwin and MSNBC, he also trashes the content on the network.
“If MSNBC went off the air tomorrow, what difference would it make?” Baldwin muses.
Baldwin had a short-lived talk show on the cable news channel in 2013.
The actor also takes a stab at TMZ honcho Levin, who he calls a “cretinous barnacle on the press.”
“Levin has so little regard for the truth, which is odd, knowing he was once a legal correspondent for the CBS affiliate in L.A.,” the actor rants.
The New York City mayor also seems to be on Baldwin’s bad side. He speculates that de Blasio stopped aligning himself with the star after Levin published a video in which Baldwin appeared to say a homophobic slur—a claim the actor repeatedly denies in the essay.
“Bill de Blasio, who apparently gets his news from TMZ, too, distanced himself from me,” he recalls.
Baldwin had meltdown after public meltdown in 2013, and repeatedly offended gay rights groups—though he maintains that he is in no way homophobic. At one point, he was accused of using a racial slur against a New York Post photographers, and he admits he tweeted vulgar digs at a Daily Mail reporter as well.
Baldwin explains that he thinks maybe he has fallen victim to an internal struggle Warren Beatty once described to him.
“When this whole thing happened, Warren Beatty, who is mystifyingly intelligent and wise, said to me: ‘Your problem is a very basic one, and it’s very common to actors. And that’s when we step in front of a camera, we feel the need to make it into a moment. This instinct, even unconsciously, is to make the exchange in front of the camera a dramatic one.’ Perhaps I fell for that.”
He blames the invention of camera phones, explaining that these days everyone wants to snap his picture.
Despite his long list of perceived vindictive haters, Baldwin does try to take some personal responsibility.
“If I offended anyone along the way, I do apologize,” he writes.
Baldwin then promises he’s done making his personal drama public.
“It’s good-bye to public life in the way that you try to communicate with an audience playfully like we’re friends, beyond the work you are actually paid for,” he wrote.
Not surprisingly, the actor leaves the door open for him to change his mind.
“… admittedly, this is how I feel in February of 2014.”
MSNBC and TMZ did not immediately return FOX411’s request for comment.
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