Bio Hazard: Blogtown, PDX, Portland Mercury

A Golden Moment: How I Saved One Invasive Animal From Another

Nathan Gilles — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 13:59:20 -0800

First came the sound: the loud thumping of a soft body plummeting into hard glass. Then the sight: colorful plumage knocked silly by the cunning entrancement of the ersatz sky, that perfect illusion afforded by a window reflecting the sunlight in just the right way. “Holy Shit!” I yelled to myself.

I’d just seen a bird hit my neighbors’ window. And hard! So hard in fact it appeared that—as if by an occult hand—the chicken-sized animal had been plucked from the heavens and tossed around like some vivid marble. But I’ll give whatever capricious god played with this animal his or her due, because what a bird it was. It’s feathers were a kaleidoscope of pigments that ended in an elongated red tail. It looked like no fowl I had ever seen. And as I marveled at the discombobulated ornithological wonder from my bedroom window this past Sunday, I had to ask myself, “What-in-the-fucking-hell-kinda-funky-ass critter is this?” As of yesterday afternoon, I got my answer.

My mystery bird was a golden pheasant, an ~~invasive~~ "exotic" species native to China, and probably somebody’s exotic pet. (This is not to be confused with the much less dapper common pheasant, also a Chinese native, but now super-abundant in America, especially the plains states—hell it’s even South Dakota’s state bird). Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland, broke the news in an email.

And as beautiful as it is, it might also be illegal. And if that's the case, Oregon probably would have wanted me to let it die.

UPDATE: 5:30 PM Bob Sallinger just informed me the animal is legal to possess in the state of Oregon, with the right paperwork.

Here's his full response to my inquiry.

As far as I know, golden pheasants are legal to possess in Oregon and are not becoming prolific in the environment. They are listed as controlled which means there are some rules governing their possession. However people are allowed to keep them in captivity. If one were brought to Audubon or another rehab facility, we would transfer or refer it to either somebody who is qualified to have them or to domestic animal shelter that could adopt it to an appropriate home. We would not be required to euthanize it. The terminology gets confusing...but there is a difference between an exotic species and an invasive species.

The one place that legality might come into question would be if it was deliberately abandoned into the wild. It would not be legal to just dump a bird like this into the environment if it was not longer wanted..

An invasive species is classified as any non-native animal or plant that, once introduced to an environment, causes economic or ecological harm. And as I reported back in August, if you show up at an animal rehabilitation center with an injured invasive in your arms, the center by law has to either turn you away, or euthanize the animal.

Rehab centers can’t legally treat injured invasives, and if they do, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife finds out, they could lose their license. And how the animals are killed can get a little gruesome.

The problem is the whole invasive classification system is a little prejudiced. Some invasives get a free ride on the whole euthanasia thing—regardless of the damage they may cause to the environment—because they are "useful" to humans. This “useful” category includes, livestock, introduced non-native crops for agriculture, and house pets. Here enters the irony.

I wasn’t the only one that heard the colorful creature smash into the window; so had a neighborhood cat.

Cats are one of these privileged, "useful" invasives that, no matter how many songbirds they murder, we let off scot-free. Having heard the pheasant’s body slamming into the window, the cat ran toward it. And here comes the rest of my story.

When it got to the now shocked bird, it stopped and looked. It was obviously puzzled by the bird’s sheer magnitude. But the cat—which looked just like the Clintons' old cat, “Socks”—looked like it was going to pounce, so I, ever the nurturing moron, ran outside to scare predator away from prey. When I got there, I said something like, “Fuck you, Socks!” I had successfully saved ~~one invasive species~~ an exotic species from being ripped to shreds by an invasive species. Minutes later, the bird, now out of shock, got up and ran away. ~~Of course, I didn’t know at the time the pheasant was invasive.~~

~~Now that I do, I’m feeling more than a little conflicted. But who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and both the cat and the bird will be hit by a car, and the natural order will be restored.~~

Lastly, to my neighbors’ neighbors, who I accosted in the early morning with rumors of a preternaturally colorful rooster running about, just ignore me. I was obviously confused and in a state of shock myself.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The City Had Someone Look Inside Your Food Scrap Carts

Denis C. Theriault — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:14:12 -0800

This Wednesday, Portland City Council is due to hear a report examining at how well the city's year-plus—and pointlessly and irrationally controversial—food-scrap composting experiment has fared. It's about what you'd expect from a document mostly meant to give city commissioners and city planners a chance to wax poetically about trash: A lot less of it is heading to landfills—a lot more food scraps are winding up in yard waste bins.

But the best part? To test out, roughly, how many Portlanders were going along with the compost program, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability commissioned a "field study" wherein intrepid and curious workers actually had to peek inside the garbage cans outside a random sample of 1,000 Portland homes.

"Based a positive identification of food scraps," nine in 10 green garbage cans contained kitchen slop—meaning, if you count homes where no one put out a green cart at all, close to 78 percent of residents participated overall.

Of course, no matter how good the numbers look, a disturbingly vocal and cranky minority of us won't ever be swayed and won't ever come around to the idea that biweekly pickup of regular garbage just isn't a real inconvenience. I say that even after having had, for a while, two kids crapping and pissing into disposable plastic diapers, which makes me one of the hordes of supposedly aggrieved Portlanders critics love to invoke.

Mayor-elect Charlie Hales has mentioned his willingness to find a way to restart some kind of weekly option for people who really want it. I'm just not sure who those people are.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Single Use Disposables: Convenience or Conundrum

Marjorie Skinner — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:44:00 -0700

Jen LaMastra is the indisputable star (unless you care to dispute me) of Glean, a group show of art made solely with materials scavenged from the city dump, currently on view at Disjecta. She has a couturier's knack for looking at a material—be it pages of a dictionary, window blinds, or tires—and determining what would be the most painstaking possible way of using it. The result is wearable sculpture that defies predictability as often as it does the act of sitting (one of her submissions for Glean involves a bustle made, in part, of bed springs). If you don't get up to the old Paul Bunyan to often, though, there's another, downtown chance to see LaMastra's latest. "Single Use Disposables: Convenience or Conundrum" is now on view in the Galleria windows at SW 9th & Morrison, and on view through October.

I can't resist fantasizing about what LaMastra could do with traditional dressmaking materials, but she remains focused on raising awareness of the waste society generates, and this installation—fourth in a series—specifically deals in plastic bags, coffee cups, and plastic beverage bottles, materials specifically intended to be used once and thrown away. Here's a video of her fashioning coffee cops into an intricate bodice, but let it be a teaser for the finished installation and, better yet, a motive to make the trek out North to Glean, which features some of her most impressive work to date.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Please Stop Eating Each Other. No Really, Stop It.

Marjorie Skinner — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:14:00 -0700

It's true, the internet is eating its own tail. But in the interest of your being able to keep up with the water-cooler talk, here comes the latest horrifying act of cannibalism, this time from Sweden.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Fucked-Up People, Fucked-Up Show

D.K. Holm — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:29:00 -0700

Fucked-up people make for a fucked-up show. That's the implication Saturday Night Live comic Darrell Hammond makes in his new memoir.

SNL comics have burst like humorless spiders from putrid nests into numerous movies, TV shows, stand up tours, and plays, and there have been many memoirs by and bios of these comedians, but no book has addressed the real question that plagues the show: Why isn't SNL funny? Hammond's autobiography, God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m Fucked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem (Harper) finally provides an indirect answer, especially if his life is held up against books about John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Michael O’Donoghue, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, and the oral history of the show itself.

In their terrific book about screenwriting, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit, Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon discuss booze and creativity (they’re for them). Booze relaxes you and stimulates new ideas and perspectives; it also drowns trouble when your script goes into turnaround yet again. Hammond took booze to extremes, however, along with cocaine and self-cutting, somehow managing to maintain a healthy work ethic while keeping himself blotto and/or blacking out and ending up in Mafia bars at two in the morning.

Hammond was born in Florida and wanted to be a baseball player. In a rare happy moment, the adult Hammond goes to a media event featuring aging Cleveland pitcher Bob Feller. ("I one-hopped one off the wall in left field,” Hammond writes. “Feller said, ‘You got a nice swing, son.’") Otherwise, Hammond is tormented by an emotionally withdrawn, alcoholic ex-soldier dad and a disappointed, sadistic mother, most of whose bizarre practices on his baby body Hammond repressed for many years. He discovered baseball and beer as a youth, with the second interest derailing the first.

Meanwhile, he showed a knack for mimicry and pursued a career in radio, eventually focusing on impressions. Stand up eventually took him to Manhattan and finally to an audition for SNL in 1995, where he remained on the show until 2009, after which he went rogue, appearing in plays and TV shows such as Damages. Hammond says that he was on drugs throughout his SNL career, either cocaine or various medications for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Despite these impediments, he had the longest run of any Not Ready for Prime Time Player.

Details from God, If You’re Not Up There include:

• Hammond's mother would do things like hit him in the stomach with a hammer and stick his fingers in electrical outlets. She once slammed a car door on his hand.

• While working on a Bahamas cruise line, Hammond drank 16 rums in a row and ended up in jail for purchasing cocaine. His dad had to come down and bribe him out.

• Hammond had a whole cutting system: razor blade, gauze pads, strips of precut surgical, Good News disposable razors ("the plastic top was easy to break off"). "Over the years," he writes, "I accumulated dozens of scars, narrow and neat, or raw and jagged, like angry ladders across my arms, legs, and chest."

Hammond's book is breezy about horrible things—it sounds dictated rather than written—but it tells an interesting story of crisis and redemption. It only really falters when it comes to other performers. Hammond doesn't "tell" on anybody, and is perhaps too starstruck, even when the person isn't a star but a mediocre TV talking head. ("I was totally impressed by Tim Russert." WTF?)

Except for, really, the last few weeks, SNL remains achingly unfunny. The humor has little depth or wit, relies on recurring characters, is terribly out of date (the show continually parodies game shows from the '70s), and the writers and actors simply don't know how to end a sketch. But ultimately, that isn't Hammond's fault. He worked hard and remains a brilliant mimic. At least, that's the impression he leaves.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Pee Wee's Less-Than-Playful House

D.K. Holm — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 12:44:00 -0800

We all know someone who looks like Pee-wee. The undersized suit, the close-cropped hair boasting a Tintin-like comma-lick at the crown. The recessively phallic tiny bow tie. The faint sense of make-up, the flushed cheeks, the pouting mouth. Yet also like Pee-wee, there is the raging man hidden within the child who comes out on occasion to scorn, to knife you with words, to bask in hedonistic selfishness. Pee-wee was a kid's show performer for the age: the comedian as borderline personality type.

Paul Reuben's rise as Pee-wee was meteoric. The character grew from a skit for the Los Angeles-based comedy group the Groundlings, then turned into a recurring live show. After a cameo in Cheech & Chong's Next Movie, Reubens starred in an HBO special, based on the Groundlings event, and then Pee-wee's Big Adventure, a film that married the talents of Reubens and another newcomer, Tim Burton. The Pee-wee Herman persona reached its zenith in 1986 with the debut of Pee-wee's Playhouse, a faux children's program aired Saturday mornings on CBS. But Reubens reached a personal nadir in July 1991, in the South Trail Cinema, an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Florida, when around 10 pm a patrolling cop—as the police report chronicles it—"did observe the Def's penis exposed. The Def did begin to masterbate [sic] his exposed penis with his left hand. At approx 2035 hrs, the Def did again expose his penis and masterbate [sic] again." Three other men were also arrested. The film showing was Nurse Nancy.

At which point Pee-wee Herman became a national joke, the subject of Jay Leno monologues. Reubens had another brush with the law in 2002 when he was scooped up in the Jeffrey Jones child pornography scandal thanks to an extensive collection of gay erotica, supposedly mostly men's physique magazines bought in bulk. Since then, Reubens has repaired his career and may do yet another Pee-wee Herman movie.

Caseen Gaines is one of thousands of Pee-wee's Playhouse fanatics, but he has turned the obsession into a helpful guide to the series, Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon (EGW Press). A fan since childhood, Mr. Gaines watched the show "religiously, often screaming the secret word at the top of my lungs whenever it flashed on the screen and jumping up and down in my footed pajamas." Though the second half of the book is an episode guide—that outdated phenomenon of '80s publishing—the first half gives a detailed history of the program and interesting information about Reubens's life and the influences on the show and the Pee-wee Herman character:

• The most shocking parts of the book concern Reubens's treatment of past associates. First up was Dawna Kaufmann, who produced the first Pee-wee Herman Show. She was introduced to Reubens by fellow-Groundling Cassandra Petersen, who later went on to become Elvira. Viewed as a mastermind behind the show, she was unceremoniously cast aside when Reubens and his character took off. Kaufmann never sued Reubens as others did, and he went on to claim that the show was always his idea, conceived on a plane flight to New York.

• Next was Phil Hartman, a key early writer and performer. Says one observer, "There was a lot of jealousy between Paul and Phil… They were close friends, but Paul never really went out of his way to help Phil in his career." Reubens viewed Hartman's ascension to Saturday Night Live as "disloyalty." Said one observer, "Paul actually was angry about this, rather than happy for Phil's success … He was really nasty to Phil and felt the reason he got the job was because Paul [had originally] brought him there as a writer. They didn’t speak for years."

• Shirley Stoler as Mrs. Steve was "a concession that Reubens was forced to make" and she was a "deeply polarizing presence on the set." One colleague called her "the laziest actress I've ever worked with," adding that, "if she was ever placed near furniture or a window ledge, she would try to sit down. She was always whining and had a really low, negative energy."

Being a celebration of Pee-wee Herman and his club, Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse is lavish in its attention to the special effects, toys, and sets that serve as background and co-stars, and is skimpy on the sex scandal. Still, the book does capture a bubble in the pop culture zeitgeist—even if we all now know that there is a devil in Mr. Herman.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

R. Kelly's Love Letter Cruise

Chris Cantino — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:20:00 -0800

All aboard!

That's right, it's the R. Kelly cruise. From the McRib-lovin' mind that brought you "Bump n' Grind," Trapped in the Closet, and urinating on underage girls, Carnival is proud to present the Love Letter Cruise, embarking next October for a five day excursion through the Bahamas. If we needed any furthur proof that Kelly is the voice of our generation, this is it.

It isn't cheap (tickets start at $1500), but the cruise features a wealth of entertainment, including a fashion show and modeling contest, mock game show, waterslide fun, and even a wellness seminar! Sounds like a great time to be had by all—let's just hope they chlorinate the fuck out of that pool (because of, you know... the pee).

End Hits: Ridin' that Soula Coaster.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Deux

Marjorie Skinner — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:44:00 -0800

Another detail about next weekend's Open for Business sale at the Cleaners (which I also previewed last week). Like so many things that happen in this city, the idea for the event was born as a byproduct of its organizers just hanging out. Alison Hawley, who first came onto the scene as one of the forces behind the bygone Frank James shop (along with prevalent stylist Victoria Mesenbrink), is launching her home-goods project, Nice Work, at the event, and Heather Sielaff is the woman behind cult fragrance line OLO.

So it wasn't long before the two also started kidding about collaborating on a room spray, and that quickly e-/de-volved into a bathroom specific spray that addressed Hawley's semi-OCD obsession with Pine-Sol. Originally they were going to call it "Number Two," but the product that did eventually become a reality (and will also make its limited edition appearance at OFB) got dialed back to the Frenchified "Deux." I had the opportunity to preview the scent over the weekend, which is indeed a fresh and very pine-y, cedar scent, elements that Sielaff points out "happens to be a great neutralizer." I ordinarily think of bathroom sprays as an unnecessary way of dumping more chemicals into your air intake, but this is a far cry from the aerosol cans lined up at Freddy's. It's one of those rare gift items that walks the line between thoughtful and jackass, which is just necessary for certain gift recipients. Like, say, the brother who proudly tricked you into checking out his most impressive contributions to the family toilet back in the day, for instance. Ahem.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: DON'T PISS OFF PAULINE KAEL.

D.K. Holm — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:59:00 -0800

From her perch at the prestigious New Yorker magazine, Pauline Kael ruled movie reviewing for 20 years. She was a "love it or hate it" kind of reviewer, over-praising favored films and directors while disparaging those she viewed as nothing less than crimes against humanity. Top Gun, for example, was "a recruiting poster that isn't concerned with recruiting but with being a poster." She was also a "love her or hate her" writer, dividing readers and other critics along various doctrinal lines. Kael retired in 1991 and died 10 years later, but her disciples continue to have a stranglehold on what is left of national film writing.

Despite her fame or reputation, little was known about Pauline Kael the person. Now, former Oregonian Brian Kellow has been rectified that situation with a new biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (Viking). Mr. Kellow throws a great deal of light on the famous critic's heretofore mysterious ways. Some highlights:

• Kael was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, but was raised in San Francisco and became a coffee house bohemian, philosophy student, aspiring playwright, and something of a fag hag.

• Her main relationships were with the poet Robert Duncan (gay); critic Robert Horan (gay); the poet Weldon Kees; experimental filmmaker James Broughton (bisexual), with whom she had a daughter, Gina; and Ed Landberg, operator of an arthouse theater which Kael more or less took over and turned into a platform for her early reviews, in the form of program notes.

• In the early 1940s, Kael and Horan trekked to Manhattan, where they attempted to break into the arts. On their first day there, however, Horan was picked up by a couple outside Saks, who turned out to be the composers Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti. Horan moved in with them that night, leaving Kael to fend for herself. She fled back to 'Frisco four years later.

• The impecunious Kael married Landberg, which allowed Kael to get necessary heart surgery for her daughter. The marriage lasted a year, or until Landberg discovered that "I couldn't stand that woman."

• Kael started at the New Yorker in 1967. There, she liked to torment the straight-laced editor, William Shawn, whom everyone else deferred to as "Mr. Shawn." Shawn cultivated the magazine's image, while Kael attempted to insert randy, salacious, and suggestive allusions into her copy along with her dismissive appraisals. When Shawn told her that Terrence Malick, the subject of her negative review on Badlands, was like a son to him, she told her boss, "Tough shit, Bill."

• For several years, Kael alternated at the New Yorker with author and screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt. The British writer had a problem with facts, booze, and plagiarism, and once arrived so late for a press screening that it started without her. When the movie was over, the other reviewers found her drunk at the back of the theater, blocking the door.

• Kael herself was a heavy drinker, with cigarettes frequently dangling from the corner of her mouth at half-mast. She favored Wild Turkey, which she often carried in a hip flask.

• Though Kael appears to have been "through with men" after her second foray to New York, she cultivated many close male friendships. Among them were Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott and roué filmmaker James Toback. Both were, for a time, her constant companions at critics' screenings, a status that she didn't disclose when reviewing Toback's directorial debut, Fingers. Kael was also (undisclosed) pals with Sam Peckinpah, Stephen Frears, and Robert Altman, whose Nashville she reviewed before the film was finished. In print, she would also turn on these directors' films if they disappointed her.

• Kael may have had a toxic effect on many. At a social gathering in 1970, Kael so berated director David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia) that he didn't make another movie for 14 years. Kael served on a Cannes film festival jury with Roberto Rossellini (Rome, Open City) in 1977, and so exasperated the esteemed director that some attributed his death a few months later to the stress she caused him.

• Kael's most famous essay is a long consideration of Citizen Kane. Kellow reveals that Kael based the essay on the exhaustive research of a UCLA adjunct named Howard Suder, which Kael "bought" for a small fee and with the promise that the work would appear in a jointly written book under both their names. He was surprised to see the material pop up in a two-part New Yorker article in 1971, where some of the revelations offended interview subjects whom Suder had spent years cultivating. Suder felt he couldn't complain because the chair of the UCLA film department was an old friend of Kael's.

• The most bizarre aspect of Kael's life is her smothering relationship with her daughter Gina, which sounds like something out of a Tennessee Williams play: Kael press-ganged Gina, even as a girl, into the roles of chauffeur, amanuensis, typist, and other duties, while discouraging her interests in dancing and later painting. Gina broke free long enough to marry, but the union was brief, and she returned to slavery under her mother's lash until Kael's death in 2001.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Sign 'o the Times

Alex Zielinski — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:29:09 -0700

Considering popping a squat downtown? Think again:

I'm used to the "No sleeping/sitting here" signs, but this one definitely cuts to the chase.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Blame Nicholas Ray for Emo

D.K. Holm — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:07:33 -0700

Nicholas Ray invented the teenager. Oh, sure, the biological entity spanning ages 11 through 19 technically existed before the director made Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, but before then, this creature was mocked in homespun Hollywood fare, which rendered them as little more than gum-chewing layabouts with crushes on movie stars. It took Ray to codify the signs of modern teendom: car culture, groupthink, awful parents, inarticulate alienation, sex, high school as a social Darwinist battleground, leather jackets, hair fixations, and even the "gay teen" (you're welcome, Glee). Emo culture would not exist without Ray's spadework.

This weekend, Ray's 1950 noir In a Lonely Place screens at the Fifth Avenue Cinema (showtimes are here), which means now's as good a time as any to delve into his fascinating life. In Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director (It Books), Patrick McGilligan traces Ray's Zelig-like life: He was a Wisconsin teen roué; a disciple of architect Frank Lloyd Wright; a member of the Group Theater; a collaborator with music folklorist Alan Lomax; a student under the likes of Elia Kazan; a director of Humphrey Bogart (In a Lonely Place), Robert Mitchum (The Lusty Men), and Joan Crawford (Johnny Guitar); a cult-famous person thanks to the writings of the future French New Wave directors in Cahiers du Cinema; and, finally, in New York, a teacher to Jim Jarmusch, among others.

Ray's most famous film remains Rebel Without a Cause. An examination of juvenile delinquency, Rebel made stars of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, introduced to the screen Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams, and featured future TV presences Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo), William Hopper (Perry Mason), and Edward Platt (Get Smart). Rebel's famous for its exotic cliff-side "chickie run," its knife fight outside the Griffith Observatory, and Dean's red windbreaker (found in a kids clothing shop in downtown Los Angeles).

Per McGilligan, Ray was highly attractive to both women and men, and availed himself of both, beginning with a school drama professor. Among the highlights is Ray stumbling upon his then-wife Gloria Graham in bed with Ray's teenaged son from his first marriage (in a tradition that Woody Allen would later follow, Graham married the kid). But it's fun to concentrate on the making of Rebel as "synecdoche" of Hollywood's typical sex roundelay.

• Natalie Wood lobbied hard for the role of Judy, the good-bad girl, seeking to break out of her kid identity thanks to films such as Miracle on 34th Street. Sixteen at the time, her efforts led to an affair with the then 43-year-old Ray.

• Dennis Hopper also knocked Wood, seeing her alternatively with Ray (Ray encouraged the relationship, in part so that he could play around with other boys and girls). Ray also encouraged a romance between Wood and Nick Adams (later a soulful TV star who ended up committing suicide).

• Rebel made James Dean a cult figure, but in one of the earliest intimate conversations with the director he confessed to having crabs.

• Like a proto-Larry Clark (Kids), Ray surrounded himself with teens eager to get cast, hosting all-night "be-bop" parties in his bungalow in the now-famous Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi later died.

• Ray immersed himself in a gang called the Athenians, led by a former child actor. Ray went along with them to "rumbles," smoked pot, and eventually lured several of the lads into the bedroom.

• Ray's boyfriend at the time was British writer Gavin Lambert. Lambert revealed that Ray preferred fucking Wood in the afternoon, as his nights were booked with other conquests, among them a "clingy" Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, and Jayne Mansfield.

• Other fun facts: Rebel as we know it would have been much different if Ray had got his way and shot it in black and white. Or if it were known by its original title, The Blind Run. The filmmakers were quite conscious of making Mineo's character gay. Later, the actor was proud of playing the "first gay teenager in films."

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Ashley Judd Wants to Give You a Condom

D.K. Holm — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:29:00 -0700

No one matches me in my admiration for Ashley Judd. From her lead role debut in Ruby in Paradise to her superb turn in Heat, to her dignity-stripping appearance in Bug, Judd has proven herself to be an intense and versatile actress, evincing the rare ability to show believable rage on screen. Her fans have stuck with her from powerful performances in thrillers such as Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy through thankless "wife" roles in things like A Time to Kill, to utter nonsense such as Eye of the Beholder and Twisted. She is now happily married to an international racecar driver and lives in Tennessee, and her movie career unwinds at a steady film-a-year pace, while she travels to the world's hot spots offering succor to kids via Population Services International, an organization that essentially distributes condoms to stem the spread of AIDS.

Now she has written a book. I wish she hadn't.

The Judds are well represented in the publishing industry: Mom has self-help, cookbooks, and a delusional memoir; Wynonna has an autobiography; there are books about the Judd clan and Ashley. Now Ashley gets into the act with All That Is Bitter and Sweet: A Memoir (Ballantine), in which she talks about her troubled childhood and depression, but mostly about her work with the PSI, which her memoir really exists to support. Still, there are small bits of subtle show biz gossip to glean:

• Though Southern by trade and inclination, Ashley was actually born in California. Her parents are Michael and Diana Ciminella, but they divorced in 1972, and Diana soon became Naomi Judd. Michael is not the father of her older sister Christina (AKA Wynonna), however—Mom got pregnant from another kid in high school in Kentucky, and married unloved suitor Michael for security. Both sides of her parents' families are rife with such soap opera events as gambling, murder, fatal illnesses, and incest.

• One of mom's live-in boyfriends was an aspiring actor with a criminal record, a heroin addict who used to "knock us girls around." He was later jailed on a parole violation.

• Ashley was molested by a small town businessman who "offered me a quarter for the pinball machine at the pizza place if I'd sit on his lap," and then Frenched her.

• When she was 16, she played around with her mom's gun, contemplating suicide.

• Before getting famous, Naomi talked herself and Wynonna onto Merle Haggard's tour bus as groupies.

• As an aspiring model for two months in Japan, Ashley was molested by her boss, raped by a "creepy Frenchman," and pressured unsuccessfully by a male model to give him a blowjob.

• The Judds' manager is a guy named Ken Stilts. "Daddy Ken, as we all called him, was a condescending, hard drinking patriarchal figure who always had to be right." He publically humiliated Wynonna for getting a tattoo.

The bulk of Bitter is Judd's Angelina Jolie-esque globe-trotting public service work, and festooned with quotes from Kahlil Gibran and Gandhi and her thoughts on Christianity, yoga, and depression. There are also many trivial passages: She spends two or three pages on a lost cat named Percy. Ms Judd's memoir is, perhaps, a reminder that it;s usually best to "know" your favorite stars only through the screen.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Lowe Down

D.K. Holm — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:59:00 -0700

For the past three years, the off-Broadway production Celebrity Autobiography has staged live readings and reenactments of celebrity memoirs. Passages from books by Suzanne Somers, Tommy Lee, Loni Anderson, and the Jonas Brothers are read by the likes of Craig Bierko, Rachel Dratch, Sharon Gless, and others; the point of the show, apparently, is to surprise audiences with the reality that celebrities really put all this shit into print.

It is unlikely that Rob Lowe's life story will fit into this template. Stories I Only Tell My Friends (Henry Holt and Co.) is an account so dull as to make drying paint yawn. Celebrity watchers might enjoy its cameos of the famous people Lowe has run into from time to time, from Cary Grant to Sting, and aspiring actors will glean lessons from his account of a typical Hollywood career. But Lowe's career is mostly interesting for its scandals, lightly treated here.

High points of Lowe's life include his big break in The Outsiders, fame as a brat packer, dating Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, and the success of The West Wing. Low points include dancing with Snow White at the 1989 Oscars, boning an underage girl during a Democratic convention, creating the first of the celebrity sex tapes, and litigation with family nannies. His ex-girlfriend's account is dishier: In her autobiography, Melissa Gilbert wrote about revenge fucking John Cusack after finding Lowe in the sack with Nastasia Kinski. Later he dumped her for Princess Stéphanie, but they got back together, with Lowe finally dumping her permanently when she became pregnant (she later miscarried). Lowe doesn't go into equal detail.

Insights include:

• Lowe pére was equally handsome and something of a ladies man, thus showing the tree not that far from the fallen apple.

• In Dayton as a 11-year-old, Lowe crashed Liza Minnelli's hotel room and talked to her for an hour. No, Lowe isn't gay.

• Lowe had his first French kiss at the age of 10 backstage at a school production of The Wizard of Oz.

• Lowe enjoyed his first fuck at Paradise Cove, Malibu, with an older girl, his little step-brother's 16-year-old babysitter.

• Because of his closeness to the Sheen family privately and professionally, he has inside scoops on Apocalypse Now, including learning about "Francis replacing Harvey Keitel supposedly because the actor bitched about not having a trail." Coppola seems trailer obsessed. On the set of The Outsiders, he blew up within Lowe's hearing over a trailer situation.

• Roman Polanski gave him advice on how to get laid in Paris.

• Lowe was almost collateral damage in a hit on Stéphanie's bodyguard.

• In the '80s, the actor used MTV music videos and CNN as an eHarmony catalog, which led to a date with Fawn Hall. Nevertheless, his life of drinking, drugs, and chicks makes him feel "empty."

• Lowe was on a flight that was a dry run for the 9/11 attacks.

The longest passages of Stories I Only Tell My Friends deal with The Outsiders and The West Wing. The anecdotes are occasionally interesting from a sociological or business angle, but there's a sense that Lowe isn't being as forthcoming as he could be, perhaps to protect his image for his family. Probably only a rebel like a rock star can be frank about what it's like to be famous and have access to drugs and sex; movie stars are too image conscious.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: The Way He Was?

D.K. Holm — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:59:00 -0700

Can Robert Redford really be this boring? He's a world-famous sex symbol who was in numerous hits before going on to invent the Sundance Film Festival. Also, being a handsome guy from the febrile '70s and '80s, he must have had to fend off the world's top dishes, right? But from the evidence presented in Robert Redford: The Biography (Knopf), Mr. Redford is stolid, dull, ordinary, and pedestrianly committed to political causes—in other words, just like the movies he’s directed.

Redford more or less collaborated with the book's author, Michael Feeney Callan, and the text has the feel of a long interview spiced with occasional detours to facts, figures, and filmographies. Thus, it doesn't ask the hard questions, such as: Why does Redford take so long to decide on what movies to make, thus hanging up his collaborators? When he does finally choose to join a project, why are they almost inevitably mediocre? Why is he such a difficult and elusive manager of Sundance? And is his "conquest" list as long as Warren Beatty's?

Still, if you squeeze this stone of a book hard enough, some meager droplets of blood emerge for the gossip hound. The nuggets just usually tend to be about other people:

• In the stage production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, Redford was angry most of the time ("He was pissed a lot in those days,” says the play's director, Mike Nichols), while the production was slightly disrupted by the drama surrounding costar Elizabeth Ashley, who had stolen George Peppard, her co-star from The Carpetbaggers, from his wife of 10 years.

• Knowing Nichols, Redford pressured the director to give him the part of Benjamin in The Graduate. Over a snooker game in Nichols’ Hollywood rental, Redford tried to convince him that he understood Benjamin. But eventually both agreed that Redford would be unbelievable in a role that cast him as a guy who can't get girls.

• Early in his film career, around the time of the movie version of Barefoot, Redford had anger, booze, and pill problems. He bought a ski paraphernalia store in Provo that failed. On movie sets, he tried to prove that he wasn't an uptight, straight-laced guy by dressing up as a cowboy, replete with a Stetson. Around this time, Redford supposedly had an affair with costar Natalie Wood, though the book is reticent on the subject.

• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might have been quite a different movie. Writer William Goldman wanted Paul Newman, but Steve McQueen also wanted to buy the script for himself. Later, 20th Century Fox wanted to cast Warren Beatty as Sundance, while Newman wanted to cast… Jack Lemmon. Fortunately, Lemmon hated horses.

• In Paris, having dinner during a break from shooting A Bridge Too Far, Redford was surrounded by rough crowds and paparazzi, and was told by security people that he was the subject of a kidnapping threat. In the book, Redford attributes the plot to the "Nixonites."

In the end, the most interesting aspects of the book regard the history of Sundance—though this take on the festival is "cleaned up" and pro-Redford, unlike the one in Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures.

Callan is a practiced biographer, having previously written of the lives of Sean Connery and Julie Christie. But on the evidence of this volume, he sees his role as a branch of the promotion business. Take Callan's look at Redford's early film The Chase, from 1966. With a cast including Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Janice Rule, and Angie Dickinson, and also with a tempestuous director (Arthur Penn) and a stubborn producer (Sam Spiegel), you'd think there’d be a wealth of gossip and dish, as the bios of the film’s other cast members have suggested. (For fuck's sake, the film starred Marlon Brando! The randiest actor in the history of film!) But no: In Robert Redford: The Biography, the section on The Chase is a plodding rundown on how the actors all became great friends, loved working with each other, and became political activists. Please! Save that crap for the DVD-extra market.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Ice Tease

D.K. Holm — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:44:00 -0700

We domesticate our bad boys. Like moony schoolgirls crushing on the class rebel, we are drawn to rambunctious evil, like Stefano DiMera on Days of Our Lives or Tony Soprano, because we think we can tame them.

Indeed, in his new memoir, Ice-T comments on the "attracted-to-bad-boys" phenomenon: "I'm going to tell it to you straight—I don’t give a fuck. Little white girls are intrigued by little black boys. You ain't never going to shake that."

In Ice: A Memory of Gangster Life and Redemption — From South Central to Hollywood (One World/Ballantine), Ice T—born Tracy Marrow—recounts his life from comfortable New Jersey suburb to comfortable showbiz life via South Central, an army tour, and hiphop. Since the mid-'70s, Ice-T had been making poems called "Crip Rhymes," and he traces hiphop back to Iceberg Slim, pimp culture, Muhammad Ali, James Brown, and the blues. "To me it was street-level journalism, real-life observations told in poetry."

Meanwhile, Ice-T was leading an "international crime spree" of jewelry stores, using planning skills learned in the army—but hiphop soon supplanted robbery, which led to record deals, which in turn led to a part in New Jack City, and then a 10-year run on Law and Order: SVU and a reality TV show, Ice Loves Coco ("He's a doctor!"), with a side foray into rock controversy with 1992's track "Cop Killer," which, like so much at the time did, infuriated Tipper Gore.

Much of Ice-T's crime are long past their drive-by date, making his book a mini-guide to robbery:

• "Rule one of any lick [heist]: You never rob in your own car."

• "The getaway is actually more important than anything that happens during the robbery itself."

• "You never carry any kind of identification so you can always give the cops an alias."

• As a crook, Ice-T had a sense of consumer brand names worthy of John O'Hara: "We only stole top-line jewelry, we drank Dom Pérignon, wore Louis Vuitton long before any cats in the hood had even heard of it. We knew about brands like Gucci and Fendi and stores like Neiman Marcus."

• Though there are few intimate confessions in the book, Ice does offer some insight into sex: "I always felt girls liked to flirt with you in order not to give you the pussy; they just liked to see men get weak. It wasn't sexual attraction; it was a mind-control thing."

• In 1976, Ice-T impregnated his first girlfriend. "I was so inexperienced with sex, I was literally ignorant. I didn't understand birth control. To be honest, this wasn't my thousandth nut—I was still green, and hadn't had a lot of sex. Nobody I knew had condoms; we thought you had to go to a doctor's office to get condoms." Later while in the army, "We found out really quick that you couldn't get any pussy if you were in the military. When you go off post, most of the girls in Hawaii, and especially the tourists, were warned not to fuck with the GIs." Now, Ice concludes, "Monogamy is the bomb. Having one steady relationship—yes, being in love—that’s what turns me on."

• Of his early rapping career, Ice-T admits, "My style was still really raw. But since everybody else was terrible, I was considered all right." He concludes that a "rapper is nothing more than a glorified cheerleader. You’re always reppin’ something."

Never a drug user, and a thief who hated stealing, Ice-T was ripe for domestication, which happened when he met his wife/manager. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "Politicians, ugly buildings, and rappers all get respectable if they last long enough."

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Raging Bull

D.K. Holm — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 09:57:00 -0700

Welcome to Bio Hazard, a monthly Blogtown column by local film writer D. K. Holm that delves into the best (and worst) in Hollywood-centric biographies. This month: Conversations with Scorsese, critic Richard Schickel's book of interviews with Ol' Eyebrows. —Erik

Does Martin Scorsese ever weary of telling his life story? While doing press for each new film, he submits to a round of interrogations, many of which have been gathered into an anthology, Martin Scorsese: Interviews. And there's a full-volume interview, too—Scorsese on Scorsese—that has gone through periodic updates. Now comes Conversations with Scorsese (Knopf), a book in the tradition of Hitchcock/Truffaut and Cameron Crowe's Conversations with Wilder—a late-in-life summing up.

Conducted by Richard Schickel, the Luddite reviewer for Time, Conversations with Scorsese is built around softball questions pitched by a person who deems himself a friend (he continually calls his subject "Marty") and a peer (Schickel has directed movie history documentaries). For a balanced assessment of Scorsese's career, look elsewhere (like Roger Ebert's recent Ebert on Scorsese), and for gossipy details, consult Vincent LoBrutto's Martin Scorsese: A Biography. Still, in Conversations with Scorsese, one learns from the horse's mouth that:

• Scorsese showed Francis Ford Coppola a print of Mean Streets. The next day, Coppola hired Robert De Niro for The Godfather Part II.

• Scorsese's uncle got into trouble with mobsters and money, and Scorsese's father had to bail him out on a regular basis—even lending his brother $200 dollars on his deathbed. The uncle died under a year later. Their relationship formed the basis for Mean Streets.

• Martin knew gangsters in his youth, including a neighborhood fixture, a killer who was "like an uncle" to Scorsese, and who died in 1968.

• Scorsese flirted with joining the priesthood, that being the only alternative to a life of crime for youths in that milieu. But he was thrown out of the seminary and ended up going to NYU.

• Citizen Kane, The Third Man, and Cassavetes' Shadows made Scorsese want to become a director.

• Scorsese was fired from all the first features he was hired to work on, including Woodstock and The Honeymoon Killers.

• There are three vague periods of collapse in Scorsese's life. The first occurred when he left Manhattan for Los Angeles to edit Medicine Ball Caravan, abandoned his first wife and child in the process. Though the book never nails down specifics, the second occurs around the time of 1977's New York, New York, when Scorsese was having an affair with Liza Minnelli and did a lot of drugs with members of the Band. Scorsese ended up in the hospital and nearly died from complications due to his asthmatic condition. He doesn't go into much detail about the third crisis, but it may have been the reception to The Last Temptation of Christ.

• Though Scorsese's personal projects can be uneven (Mean Streets, New York, New York, Temptation, Gangs of New York), he had to be talked into doing some of his better works, such as Raging Bull, King of Comedy, and Cape Fear.

• We have Scorsese to thank for The Darjeeling Limited. Scorsese showed Jean Renoir's India-set masterpiece The River to Wes Anderson, who then ran off and made his film.

Conversations with Scorsese is well-illustrated, at least, with rare photographs and personal sketches, and you can really hear Scorsese’s fast-paced voice as he discusses movies he loves—which makes the reader wonder why this is a print book and not an audiobook. And this reader wishes Schickel were less deferential: As with his previous books on specific filmmakers, Schickel once again declines to be a bull in the cinematic china shop.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Drunk Tank

D.K. Holm — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:28:00 -0800

Bibulous British actors have long been a cliché of the trade, and new biography of history’s most crapulous quartet is probably the most thorough drunk tank log of actorial excess ever.

Like this (occasional) column, Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed (Thomas Dunne Books) is an anthology of dissipation. (It's out now in hardcover, but comes out next month in paperback.) Robert Sellers, who has written books about Sting and Tom Cruise, tracks these tanked thespians from childhood on, decade by decade, each chapter rotating among the four in title order. Richard Burton (née Jenkins) was a Welsh rugby aficionado mentored by teacher Philip Burton, whose last name he took and who outlived him; Richard Harris came from a large, well-off family, and was violent and unschoolable; Peter O'Toole, born in Ireland, was raised in Leeds among what he called the "criminal class" (three of his childhood friends were eventually hanged for murder); and Oliver Reed, born in London privilege, grew up a bully whose favorite world was pub culture. Gay or at least bisexuality rumors always clung to Burton (after all, he was married to Elizabeth Taylor—twice), but Sellers doesn't address that possibility. On the other hand, numerous other actors and their boozing enter the main four's obits, and the reader reads corked cameos of Trevor Howard, Peter Finch, and George C. Scott, whose love for Ava Gardner didn't prevent him from trying to slug her — and this on the set of The Bible.

Like a Wikipedia article, the reader can dip in anywhere, likely to learn that:

• Burton could down two pints of beer in 10 seconds, some kind of dipsomaniacal record. While making The VIPs, Burton knocked off a gallon of cognac a day; on The Klansman, two quarts of whiskey a day. He didn't remember making that film.

• While at Oxford, Burton made an impression in Measure for Measure, but after the performance got so plastered he passed out and had to sneak back into school, whereupon he slipped on a rail fence, driving a spike up his rectum. Burton was given to relieving his bladder onstage into his costumes.

• O'Toole's youthful lisp and stammer was cured when a Swedish rugby player kicked him in the head, causing O'Toole to bite off half his tongue (it was sewn back on).

• Reed was so prone to pub brawls that all the knuckles in his hands were broken at one time or another. In the late 1960s, his film career was in such utter ruin that he took to driving a cab.

• In 1979, Reed made The Brood for David Cronenberg. His costar was Samantha Egger, with whom he had played doctor when they were five years old.

• Richard Harris had a tendency to loathe his costars, among them Marlon Brando, whom he thought was a poof, Charleton Heston, a stiff prig whose drinks he wanted to spike with LDS, and Julie Andrews, for whom he experienced "the greatest hate I ever had for any human being."

And there are many, many more stories about the far-gone four, along and those who fell under their soaked spell. Hellraisers is like a text-based version of Antabuse. Emerging from this book with a contact hangover, one can’t think of liquor the same way—or be able to see these actors’ films outside the red-rimmed eyes of their boozing.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Lara Croft, Womb Raider.

D.K. Holm — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:28:00 -0800

Welcome to Bio Hazard, a ~~monthly~~ uh, semi-regular Blogtown column by local film writer D. K. Holm that delves into the best (and worst) in Hollywood biographies. This month: Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography. —Erik

Does the public truly like Angelina Jolie?

Sure, the actress won an Oscar, has been heralded as sexy in magazine polls, and—at the opposite end of the value spectrum—is a staple of grocery store tabloids. But does anyone ever say, "Let’s watch Tomb Raider again tonight"? Does the public really wonder who she's wearing on the red carpet? Have they memorized her tattoos, or the birth order of her children?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the public doesn't embrace Jolie as an icon—but the publishing industry does, so now St. Martin's Press has issued Andrew Morton's biography of the 35-year old actress, Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography.

Born into Hollywood royalty as the daughter of actor Jon Voight and his then-wife, Marcheline Bertrand (herself the offspring of a wealthy, snobbish Midwestern family with showbiz ambitions on its maternal side), Jolie had a seemingly typical L.A. upbringing: divorced and feuding parents, a close younger brother in her shadow, a phase as a street Goth, a brief modeling career, and a trip to stardom so speedy it must have been fueled by Satan. As an adult, Jolie seems to have modeled her career after Elizabeth Taylor (numerous husbands swiped from other women), Madonna (multiple reinventions, and a taste for baby collecting), and her own father's political commitment to social amelioration (Voight began as an activist, before falling into the clutches of an oddball family of hustlers and becoming a right-wing proselytizer).

Morton, biographer of Princess Di and Tom Cruise, has not only combed the tabloids and magazines but has also interviewed friends and colleagues and a couple of shrinks who are happy to armchair analyze (her Mia Farrow-style child collecting, apparently, stems from abandonment issues). But as is typical of bios of living celebs, the earlier years are fuller than the present because few peers want to cross a powerful competitor.

Most of the tabloid tales are here: Jolie's heroin use (she preferred to smoke it), her bisexuality, her vicious feuds with dad, her marriages to Jonny Lee Miller, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brad Pitt, her knives and blood fixations, her goodwill tours, her flings with the likes of Mick Jagger, Timothy Hutton, Nicholas Cage, Ralph Fiennes, Russell Crowe, and Ethan Hawke, and the gradual reshaping of her various images. There are other tidbits along the way:

• Voight's kid brother penned the Troggs tune, "Wild Thing" (page 16).

• Jolie had so much trouble breaking into the business on her own that her father secretly had to pave the way with discreet telephone calls, which Morton says Jolie still doesn’t know about (page 101).

• During one of her many emotional low points, Jolie conferred with an assassin whom she planned to pay on an installment plan to kill her (page 133 - 134).

• Jolie's mother had a life-long crush on Mick Jagger. When the rock star took an interest in Angelina, mom actively promoted it, though Angelina wasn't particularly interested in Jagger. Marcheline became a telephone confident of Jagger's, whom she hoped her daughter would marry (page 132). Jolie, meanwhile, had a lifelong crush on Johnny Depp (page 163).

• Morton claims that Thornton trolled for girls on Jolie's behalf (page 191).

• Lover Jenny Shimizu introduced Jolie to Manhattan's S&M club scene (page 108). Later, Jolie took Mick Jagger to an S&M club, where they were publicly whipped (page 164). "S&M focuses you on survival," she says. On the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, her trailer was festooned with S&M gear (page 245). Her bodyguard was tasked with picking up bondage gear for the Pitts (page 190).

• One observer theorizes that Jolie is an exhibitionist who likes that her sexuality discomfits people (page 127).

• Jolie hates to be hugged and "disdains" those who cry (page 74). She never forgives, and she never forgets (page 22).

As a public figure, Jolie lives with endless tabloid gossip and books such as Morton's, but the outside observer wonders if celebrities, especially "edgy" stars such as Jolie, secretly like the publicity, even conspiring with paparazzi sneak attackers, as Morton suggests she does. Jolie and Pitt's various kids' first photos are sold to fan magazines for millions of dollars. From Goth girl to womb raider is quite a leap, but there seems to be a lot of opportunism and little joy in Jolie World.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll.

D.K. Holm — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:55:00 -0700

Welcome to Bio Hazard, a monthly Blogtown column by local film writer D. K. Holm that delves into the best (and worst) in Hollywood-centric biographies. This month: Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr.Take it away, D. K. —Erik

Given the current economic climate, we need to live our lives vicariously. No one has any money to spend, no one seems to be having sex (these are two linked enterprises), and people are desperate for parties and decadence. But—for the time being, anyway—we must get our fix of Higher Fun from TMZ.com and and E!, though some additional help comes from writer Robert Hofler’s biography of agent-promoter-producer Allan Carr, Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (Da Capo Press).

Carr, once upon a time, was Allan Solomon of Chicago—until one day he became a theater producer, then Ann-Margret's manager, then promoter of Tommy and Saturday Night Fever before shepherding Grease from stage to screen. The nadirs of his career were the Village People movie Can't Stop the Music (please try), and the notorious 61st Oscar ceremony in which Carr paired Snow White with Rob Lowe to sing "Proud Mary." He died of liver cancer in 1999, age 62.

Carr was a short, pug-like human being and plastic-surgery recipient who resembled, in both appearance and ambition, Truman Capote, Carr's unofficial mentor in party giving. He was prone to monstrous weight gains (up to 300 pounds) and favored elaborate body-disguising caftans. Carr had an eating disorder—a refrigerator was his bed stand—that resulted in gastric bypasses. He also wired his jaws shut from time to time, though that hardly prevented him from squeezing liver or chocolate cake past his dental hardware. Aside from promoting the careers of various clients, Carr was the architect of a series of lavish parties, whose ephemeral fabulousness are his legacy.

Mr. Hofler—who also wrote The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, a bio of talent agent Henry Willson that is rife with gossip about '50s Hollywood—knows what the reader wants. We learn that:

• Carr had a fetish for watching young men wrestle on mattresses in his living room (page 3).

• Rudolf Nureyev pulled a train on 25 guys in Carr's guest house during one men-only extravaganza (page 14).

• Carr became a friend of porn star Harry Reems and almost gave him a small part in Grease (pages 66 — 67).

• Carr paid special attention to John Travolta's jeans during Grease, conducting 20-minute private consultations on the subject in his limo (page 71).

• Carr staged late night private orgies where he facilitated encounters between elites such as Merv Griffin and available young men, which Carr secretly videotaped (page 85).

• Carr demanded that his personal assistants inspect his toilet and formulate an opinion on his kidney stones (page 145)

• Gene Barry, one of the stars of the stage musical version of La Cage Aux Folles, was terrified that he would contract AIDS by appearing in the play (page 175). Meanwhile, the show's chorus boys were passed around like candy among the film's producers (page 176).

The Carr estate where so much semen flowed is now in the hands of director Brett Ratner, whose partying reputation with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton brings the Carr legacy and Hollywood hedonism into the 21st Century. Meanwhile, civilization collapses all around us mere mortals, watching wide-eyed from the outside.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bio Hazard: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

D.K. Holm — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:55:00 -0700

Welcome to Bio Hazard, a monthly Blogtown column by local film writer D. K. Holm that delves into the best (and worst) in Hollywood-centric biographies. First up: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, a tome about how Warren Beatty has boned just about every woman on the planet. Take it away, D. K. —Erik

Warren Beatty has probably fucked your wife. According to Peter Biskind's new biography, Beatty has bedded 12, 775 women, "a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-by blowjobs, casual groupings, stolen kisses, and so on." It's possible—even likely—that your wife is there among that brobdingnagian statistic. Go ahead, ask her when you get home.

Biskind's book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon and Schuster), is the fourth biography of the actor, producer, and Oscar winner. Already the author of histories covering Hollywood filmmaking in the '70s and the '90s, Biskind is unlike other biographers in his complete boredom with psychology, which is perhaps to his credit. He’s largely uninterested in Beatty's motivations; he barely mentions Beatty's childhood in Virginia, where he was merely little Henry Beaty. Biskin is, however, quite interested in gossip, and offers up many facts, or rather "facts," among which are:

• Jane Fonda was usually proficient at oral sex because apparently she could briefly dislocate her jaw (page 15-16)

• Beatty believes that "every woman is a lesbian at heart" (page 161)

• Old women are Beatty's "biggest fetish" (page 138)

• This hip Hollywood lothario's favorite movie is Dr. Zhivago (page 122)

• Beatty has received a writing credit many times, but has never actually put fingers to keyboard (passim)

• An affair with Jacqueline Onassis ended abruptly because she learned that Beatty was bragging about it (page 258)

• Madonna never had an orgasm with Beatty, and was interested in him because she thought he might be bisexual (page 409)

• Tarantino wanted Beatty for Kill Bill, but Beatty eventually withdrew because he thought he would be blamed for the movie's budget overages (page 551)

This is all very edifying information that enriches our understanding of society and civilization, but Mr. Biskin's book also raises some larger themes.

One issue is how limited the actor/director biography genre has become. These sort of books tend to be as repetitious and cyclical as Mr. Beatty's alleged love life. It usually goes like this: Once a filmmaker completes a film, an idea for a new movie comes to the filmmaker, and he beds various women while pondering it, and eventually starts the new project, and the film is shot, edited, and released to a spectrum of opinion, whereupon the subject beds someone new, and embarks on a new film, and the cycle begins again for another 30 pages. Worse, the stars, directors, and craftsmen who are the usual subjects of the modern Hollywood bio haven't really done all that much in their lives. They haven't fought in wars or revolutions, boxed, chopped trees, spied; they haven't discovered a new technology, or composed a lasting poem. They made a movie. This requires some skill, of course, but everyone knows that the core objective of these biographies is gossip concerning other people who also haven't really done anything. The book isn't really an analysis of the subject, but about whom he or she knew and/or blew.

Aside from gossipmongers, the only readers who might find such a book appealing are budding Hollywood aspirants seeking moviemaking insight, which Biskind provides in small measure. Which brings us to the second issue that Star, as a cultural artifact, raises: The sloppiness of Hollywood as a creative institution. Because movies cost millions of dollars to manufacture, you'd think that executives and filmmakers would begin each project with a completed script, competent collaborators who share the vision, and a realistic production schedule. Instead, with film after film, from Shampoo to Reds, Beatty and his colleagues procrastinate for years, sell the concept to confused executives who don't know what they’re getting into, begin filming before a script is finalized, bicker with each other nearly to the point of murder, and then battle each other throughout post-production over technical issues, credit, and money. The participants must find this contentious method of filmmaking secretly fun, but the reader, embarking on yet another chapter on a film (Ishtar, Town and Country) made in chaos, does not.

Beatty is indeed a figure of some historical importance, if only for being the father of the '70s "movie brat" era with his production of Bonnie and Clyde. But Mr. Biskind rates Beatty higher than history will. Beatty's cinematic output solely as an actor was decidedly slim and uneven. The rest was just fucking around.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]