Stardate 06202003
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Jodie Foster, at the Directors Coffee Chat at the Los Angeles Film Festival last weekend said, “Some actors will steal other people’s psyche to get ahead.”
I’m back in Hollywood and I have a fabulous idea. Someone, some big-name magazine that wants to get seriously hip, needs to set me up in the Chateau Marmont for three months so I can write about the Hollywood scene. I call it The Sunset Diaries. It will be a history-making journalistic venture. While hashing out the concept with a long-time Topanga Canyon resident, she said, “The rooms are filled with formica-covered furniture. You should write about the faded glory of The Chateau.”
Are there homeless megastars and is rock and roll debauchery still a staple of The Sunset Strip or is it over-run with fashion victims, Angeleno Guidos and the girls who preen for them? Guys with rented Benzs and girls with fake tans mimicking the careless attitude represented tongue-in-cheek by some of the upscale hipster fashion rags. It’s like they think it’s 1975 and they are at the Playboy Mansion. There’s a line of cocaine at every bar stool and everyone knows you are a star, baby. “You don’t have to be a star baby, to be in my world.” They come in droves on the weekend clogging up West Sunset Boulevard, turning it into a congested artery, heart attacks nightly.
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The real party has moved on. The slebs got better things to do. There are far more efficient ways to get your picture in the paper, to get talked about by the gossip columnists, to show up in the pages of a tabloid.
So much for my history-making idea. But the myth of the Sunset Strip and the Chateau Marmont is a good conceptual anchor for a series about Hollywood. Just like evoking the Playboy Mansion in the `70s brings back a sensibility that everyone knows is fun to pretend at, but nobody would want to go back there. Or Studio 54 in its heyday. Andy Warhol, where did you go?
I may as well be talking about New York in the 1930s. So what’s going to satisfy my journalistic aspirations?
Christopher Hitchens is already occupied with VANITY FAIR and I don’t have time to go back to university, get a PhD, get an important book published and THEN attempt to appeal to Graydon Carter (editor of VANITY FAIR). My life doesn’t read horrific enough to go the J.T. Leroy route and have the memoirs of my days as a teenage prostitute get published. Although, J.T. Leroy is a fabulous writer, content notwithstanding. He has a short piece in this month’s BLACK BOOK magazine set in the seedy underbelly of my former home, San Francisco. An underbelly I know well, in that I’ve seen enough of it but managed to find a way to not have to live it to survive.
Since I more or less grew up in the streets without actually having to, a lot of people I knew couldn’t, at the end of a week or two of wandering around from place to place, end up back home, exhausted, ten pounds lighter, brush off the parental concern, take a disco nap, reapply eyeliner and head back “out there.”
I got into a lot of trouble for bringing my strays home.
Marginal Deflections
J.T. Leroy interviewed Darren Stein for the Summer issue of FILM MAKER magazine. Stein’s film, PUT THE CAMERA ON ME is crawling its way through the festival circuit. It sold out at Tribeca, is playing at CineVegas right now and will be at the Los Angeles Outfest. Stein’s film is a collection of clips from films he made while he was growing up in the San Fernando Valley with commentary from his family and his stable of his neighborhood friends he used as actors about what it meant to grow up through film making. Not only does the movie highlight his early interest in gore, horror and darker storylines, it also inadvertently captures Darren’s burgeoning queerness and subsequent development into an out adult.
“I always thought Darren might be gay,” said his mother. “He was really flamboyant.” I met Darren at a recent OUTFEST launch party (Outfest is the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian film festival that I’m sure you’ll hear more about next month.) He looked at my name badge and said, “Oh, hey! I know you, I read your column. You are friends with my friend Angela Brown!” Indeed I am. Angela is the lead singer of the shamefully overlooked alt-rock band THE CUTTERS.
All night he kept introducing me as “this really great film journalist with an underground following.” Which is probably true and I don’t know it because I’m too busy just doing what I do to catch up with where it’s all gotten.
Mechanical Self-Reproduction In the Age of Art
I’ve been spending time with marketing writers to figure out a way to take the truth of my life and turn it into a beautiful lie. This is the latest version of my bio.
Thom Fowler spent hours in the Donnel Library Center in Manhattan watching fragments of obscure films and newsreels before heading to the MOMA to watch the people looking at the art. Bored of that, he would walk down to the Christopher Street pier and watch the men cruise each other. He has been writing and telling stories for as long as he can remember and after living in a desperate, wine-soaked haze that carried him from the legendary coffee houses of North Beach in San Francisco where he communed with the ghosts of the proto-bohemians to tiny European villages in search of a perspective on America, he finally understood “it all” and set out to blindly follow his passion wherever it took him. He is currently living in Malibu, California and writing about Hollywood for MoviePoopShoot.com. He is lauded by his peers and ignored by editors.
Middle Class Wage Slave
That’s one version of the story anyway, and the one I think is most interesting at this moment. A literary agent told me that you can’t sell a first novel unless you are already famous. So why write one? Jonathan Franzen, author of THE CORRECTIONS practically killed the novel in an essay where he asked the question, “If people don’t read, why write?”
Private Life As Public Story
Jennifer Aniston said on The Tonight Show that the producers of IT’S GOOD TO BE on E!, a show about how very wealthy celebrities supposedly spend their money, made up things about her and Brad Pitt. She said it was “infuriating.” And then she copped to being a weirdo.
And while I’m in Hollywood meeting all these fabulously creative people to talk about their movies, I keep thinking, “Maybe I should write a movie.” Maybe I should just dig up a few people I’d really like to work with and then write a story AROUND that in the typical ass-backwards way of getting a film made. Mike White, who wrote THE GOOD GIRL starring Jennifer Aniston, told me that “you just have to work it.”
Was it worth it? Let me work it.
After being at Promax and listening to people talk about everything on television in terms of demographics, ratings, and dollars and cents instead of how most viewers experience television as entertainment, I just can’t watch a program without counting the number of commercial minutes, wondering if they are hitting their target of 18-35 year old women, and trying to figure out what the ads I’m watching are saying about who the programmers think I am. If TV execs had their way they would have you watch TV 12 hours a day, especially their channel or network. But you are a tough sell. You have better things to do. So you only watch TV for 8 hours a day. Way to stick it right back to the man!
I Watch TV Because It’s My Job
When NIRVANA came along and changed the geography of pop music, I was too caught up reading 19th century English novels to care. And as a totally plugged in 20-year-old, I managed to step outside of the zeitgeist where I’ve been in a cultural Bermuda Triangle ever since.
I was so far beyond the edge at that point that I didn’t need NIRVANA to point the way. I think there is something pure about living in a bubble world of your own making. Of discovering what interests you and making that your focus. It also inoculates you from merely accepting what’s offered as your only option. It gives you a mental machete to hack a road through the jungle of raw experience. Build your city and live in it. Or build your inner-city and graffiti in it.
I spent a lot of time with the drama club kids in high school. They liked that I didn’t actually go to high school, I just showed up every day for the requisite six hours, had a laugh and then disappeared into the horizon. We took comfort in our irrelevancy to the high school gestalt. We were the aliens, deftly avoiding the giant shopping mall celebration of conformity and homogenization. And after I walked through a little door called LSD, the world became a Technicolor side-show and the four walls of my high school literally melted away.
I used to get the best acid from this homeless couple who lived out of their car in Berkeley. That acid was epic. I also got some pretty bad acid once and I accidentally gave too much of it to a friend who was already psychologically unstable. She freaked out. A neighbor called the cops. They had to use a cattle prod to subdue her and took her to a hospital where they pumped her full of Thorazine. I lived in fear for months, waiting to be jumped by her friends in an act of filial vengeance. I felt like Winston in 1984, waiting for the bullet to the head that never came.
It’s amazing how we survive the lives we create for ourselves.
I’ve been trying to get Robert Redford for an interview for OFF THE RADAR to talk about his interest in environmental protection issues. Sheila Laffey who produced a documentary called THE LAST STAND: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BALLONA WETLANDS, hosted by Ed Asner. She tipped me off that Redford has offices in Santa Monica. We got to talking about climate change and she told me that Kevin Bacon was hosting a day-long event kicking off an environmental awareness program called Climate Star. Sheila and I both agreed that we were probably past the point of no return so the best we can do is minimize our impact.
Climate change is a story of accretion. There is no one single dramatic moment to report on as news. Every day is another day of rising global temperatures and melting ice-caps. Fossil fuel consumption is the single largest contributor to the greenhouse effect. Toyota has begun advertising their cars as “fuel efficient,” a selling point we haven’t seen since the gas crunch of the 1970s.
The hardest part of living in Los Angeles is coming to terms with how much driving you have to do. For an ecologically sensitive guy like me, I am acutely aware of how much gas I use every week. 10 gallons. And that’s if I just stick to my normal city routine. If I take a side trip to the mountains or get antsy and go to Mexico or Palm Springs, the amount goes up. So I try to balance it all out and give myself a cap. I try to stay inside my fuel budget. I know that there is not as much gasoline in existence as I can afford to buy. I also know that my individual efforts to use less gas has a long-term, cumulative effect. It is a very hard balance. I have decided that only an asshole would drive a Hummer.
It’s cool to have fun and listen to Christina Aguilera and watch TV and talk about soap opera stars as if all that stuff matters, but there are larger issues that we need to stay focused on so we can continue to be preoccupied with the floating world of pop stars.
Sheila Laffey and I also talked about how we live through story. I like writing about pop culture because that is where the critical mass of our shared stories is. She said that even babies use story. When they want more, the say, “all gone.” That is their story they are using to express their needs. I tell her that I’m more interested in story and our relationship to story than I am about the medium of film. My primary fascination is with story and communication. Film is just a convenient vehicle for me to indulge that fascination.
Christina Aguilera
Glen Ballard (the multi-platinum producer largely responsible for helping Alanis Morissette become who she is today, musically speaking) told me that Christina Aguilera is trying very hard to change her public image from her first album. He says she is trying to take more control over her image. Coincidentally, I met a guy a few days later who is friends with Christina Aguilera’s hair and make-up guy and he told me the exact same thing. I guess Christina’s super-sexy trashy image is, if not her own doing, the direction she wants to go in.
Christina Aguilera has been taking a lot of flak from people for her DIRTY video but a fellow writer friend of mine, Dave White, likes her trashy, slutty image. I agree. I don’t think she can get dirty enough. And that BEAUTIFUL song has been stuck in my head. I imagine that it is by now some kind of anthem for teenage girls and their gay male best friends.
I’m trying to work Christina Aguilera into every conversation I have. At some point I find a reason to say, “What do you think about Christina Aquilera?” I’m wondering if there is a point where you hit Christina Aguilera overload?
Oh yeah, Justin Timberlake is also on tour with her.
Speaking of Aliens
I saw Angelyne in her pink Corvette on the Pacific Coast Highway. It was late at night, and we were the only cars on the road. I starting writing a story in my head about how we got in a massive car accident and when they brought all our body parts to the hospital to be put back together, they got all mixed up. Instead of everyone being horrified after the bandages came off, we all had a good laugh.
Angelyne is in a documentary about Nina Hagen called NINA HAGEN, PUNK + GLORY, if you want to hear what Angelyne sounds like. Nina Hagen has been playing a lot of shows recently. She was at the Key Club last weekend and the weekend before she was at the Bodhi Tree metaphysical bookstore in West Hollywood singing Hindu devotional songs.
George Lucas was the oldest person in attendance at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards. And they kept cutting away to him for reaction shots. He was evidently highly amused at the proceedings. Yoda won an award. The musical number with TATU and that army of “hit me, baby” Britney clones in their underwear jumping around looked torturous. I heard they stripped the soles off the dancers shoes and sent 100 volts through a metal floor and said they wouldn’t get paid unless they lasted five minutes. The two girls no longer do their gimmicky end-of-song kiss and they played down the whole faux-lesbianism. Instead, 30 pairs of girls slipped each other the tongue at the end of the number. Yeah, that’s way more subtle.
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I was aghast at 50 CENT’s dancers toting uzis and aiming at human shooting range targets. It communicated the bigoted racial stigma of the “dangerous black man.” Which is really what 50 CENT is being sold as, right alongside guns and the supposed ultra-violent inner-city gang life represented by those looking to cash in on the current popularity of hip-hop and “urban” entertainment.
I get confused. When marketing folks used the word “urban” they mean “inner city black/Hispanic culture” but I always read it as “not provincial” or “cosmopolitan”. “Urban” entertainment should be called “occulture” since much of the reality if inner-city life is hidden through a careful concentration of violent imagery, symbolism and gang machismo packaged as entertainment.
If Christina Aguilera was marketed with the same concept, we’d all be talking about how many times she’s gotten laid, as if that’s what lends credibility to her sexy, trashy image. “Damn, that ho been had 30 ways since Sunday just this morning. Nobody is DIRTIER than her! She got sheet creds!”
Toby Young, author of the tell-all book HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE is in Los Angeles to promote the release of the paperback. The book is about his experience as a celebrity journalist working for VANITY FAIR in New York. He wrote a one-man stage show based on the book that ran in London and he wants to bring it to New York Off-Broadway and/or make a movie. So he’s been showing the videotape of the play, which is hilarious and engaging and he has pegged the likes of Paul Bettany and Steven Coogan to play himself. At one point, Jack Black’s name came up since Toby had asked us all to help him brainstorm. “No, he’s got to be English,” said Young.
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When I got to the screening at the William Morris Agency, the small group of Young’s friends and associates were huddled around candy dishes off to one side of the room. I took a seat and listened to the hum of the conversation rise and fall and I watched the dance of their body language. They looked like an amoeba of expensive clothes and self-importance and their emotive gestures belied their dull chatter. It was precisely the kind of J. Alfred Prufrock moment that Young would write about.
I hung around after the screening to watch the glow fade and three well-presented young women were talking about a party one of their friends gave. “She was totally inviting C-listers. She asked Lisa Kudrow to come. She’s not even stylish. She’s like a 45-year-old mom. She’s SO REDBOOK.” The same young woman also talked about some guy she met whose name I didn’t catch. “He was the sweetest, nicest, richest guy.”
VANITY FAIR, indeed. I’ve never read any of the issues that Dorothy Parker worked on. A part of me is afraid the myth is going to be more interesting than the reality. But I may be surprised. TO THE LIBRARY!
You Are Who You Say You Are
The Los Angeles Film Festival wraps tomorrow. I didn’t get my press application in on time so I’ve been posing as another writer who lent me his press badge for a few days. The head honcho press wrangler came right up to me and introduced herself and looked down at my badge. And then someone who does know me came up just then. It was exactly what I hoped wouldn’t happen. Luckily, my friend read the alias off the badge and I was allowed to proceed unhindered throughout the rest of the fest.
The film to watch out for is BOMB THE SYSTEM. The film stars and was exec-produced by Marco Webber who played Scooby in Todd Solondz’s STORYTELLING. It doesn’t have a distributor yet but I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets snatched up soon. Hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons just started a company to acquire and distribute hip-hop movies from unknown first-time directors with a financing deal from Lions Gate. They are looking at the straight-to-video though and BOMB THE SYSTEM should get a national, if limited, theatrical release. It seems like a Lion’s Gate, Strand Releasing, Cowboy Pictures, IFC kind of film. No news yet on who is likely to snatch it up.
The film, by first-time feature director, Adam Bhala Lough is about a fictional famous underground graffiti artist in New York City who is on the run not only from a dirty cop on the vandal squad but also from making a choice between art school and street art. The film was edited by the Jay Rabinowitz who also cut 8 MILE and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. The editing effects and jump cuts are music video like and the film not only explains the deeper aspects of graffiti art culture as a subversive, street-driven form of communication, like a public/private conversation. It also tells an emotionally powerful story. “We had all kinds of real New York taggers helping us out with the film and doing the art for us. The whole tagger community was into what we were doing.”
Insight and Innuendo
In other movie news. THE HARD WORD, starring Rachel Griffiths and Guy Pearce (MEMENTO) opens. Pearce plans on starring in a movie written by Australian alt-rock god NICK CAVE called THE PROPOSITION.
Pearce, a long time fan of Cave, jumped at the role when Cave asked him to do it. “Nick rang me up just out of the blue.” Cave, Pearce are currently looking for other actors to fill out the cast and filming is set to begin anywhere between September and March.
And the homo-erotic SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS also opens with Brad Pitt as the voice of Sinbad. My review explains it all.
And the quote of the week comes from Ludivine Sagnier, co-star of François Ozon’s new film, THE SWIMMING POOL. Her take on the classic “does art imitate life or does life imitate art”, which is the intellectual’s equivalent of “which came first, the chicken or the egg.” – “As an actor, you think you are fitting the reality of yourself into the fiction of the character. It is the fiction of the story that feeds the reality of the character. That is the magical transformation that makes [acting] art. I let the character take me into the film rather than me taking the character into the film.”
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