Blind Item

Some say it's only a matter of time before an actress blows the whistle on this middle-aged moviemaker. When casting his last project, the silver-tongued, not unattractive manipulator went so fast from flirtation to outrageous passes to outright lewd behavior it left a couple of performers' heads spinning. The guy's tendency to unzip and demand all sorts of hanky-panky has become so talked about around town that many hot young performers are refusing to work on his movies because they're afraid they'll be branded as desperate and easy. – Movieline

In Nashville, when I was a teenager, there weren’t many places you could buy comics. There were a couple of drugstores in Donelson with comics racks, and that was about it. In Downtown Nashville, the pickings were even thinner, with the only comics sales venue within walking distance of the Downtown YMCA being the bus station.

I was told not to go to the bus station, my mother having heard a lurid tale or two. That’s a little funny in retrospect, knowing what I now know about the reputation of YMCA hotels as homosexual assignation spots. For the record, no one ever approached me at the bus station, and in all the years I was at the “Y” I received a total of one single proposition, when I was somewhere around 16-17. I politely declined, the fellow not being the type I’m attracted to, that type being, well, female.

Drugstores also carried the Hollywood gossip magazines, mostly tame things by today’s standards. I must have glanced through some of them from time to time, because I remember two stories that caught my eye. The first was cover billed as about “Jim Nabors’ Secret Heartache,” and the second concerned, “The Pain in Raymond Burr’s Past.” In the first case, the article divulged that Nabors had asthma, and the second noted that Raymond Burr had struggled with a weight problem when he was young. They were bait-and-switch articles, in other words, promising something scandalous, but delivering only yawns.

Much later, I learned that both Burr and Nabors were closeted homosexuals throughout their careers (Burr also married and apparently had a relationship with Natalie Wood, so we’ll leave the veil covering the full nature of his sexuality). So the bait-and-switch was also a wink-wink, nudge-nudge for anyone in the know.

I’m uncertain as to whether or not the magazine in question was the notorious Confidential Magazine, in which case the stories may have been blackmail threats as well, although that sort of thing was mostly early on in the magazine’s history, before they got sued to hell and gone by almost everybody. I mean, they lost a libel action to Liberace. How sloppy do you have to be, to call Liberace a homosexual, get sued, and lose?

The bait-and-switch articles only work if you have a cover for the lurid title as the bait, then the tepid story inside for the switch. If you only have a column to work with, or something too small for a full article, or if you really, really want the salaciousness but don’t want to get sued, you go with the blind item.

This TV superstar is young, pretty and living high on the hog, but she doesn't want to live alone. So she moved a platonic male friend into her fancy digs. He seems like a nice guy, but little does she know what he does when she's away working! First he gets himself high as a kite on drugs. Then, since he has a fetish for call girls, he calls sex magazine ads for the kinkiest gals he can find. He loves pain and pays extra for the girls to bring big sex toys. Where he gets the $300 and up to pay for these sessions is a mystery! Worst of all, the guy gets so drugged up he doesn't realize the call girls are getting into his famous roommate's private things and helping themselves. –Star

The blind item may not have been invented by Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, and Hedda Hopper but they elevated it to an art form. It’s perfect, really. Totally libel-proof, since there are no names attached, and there need not be a grain of truth in it, just a touch of “truthiness,” scandalous behavior amongst the rich and famous.

But the blind item works best as a shroud for truth. I’ve slid into memoir quite a few times in these essays, and I’ve given some indication of my dancing around with the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll crowd from time to time ‘way back when (Really, I’ve given all that up. Would I lie?). In fact, there was a time when S&D&R&R had a few other things often appended to it in the common culture, like science fiction or comics, both mainstream and underground (underground comix, boy, there’s a term from the past). I like hanging out with writers, artists, and good looking women and if cheap thrills were to be had, well, in Woody Allen’s immortal line, “It’s all I could afford.”

But discretion, yes, good point, that. People have told me things and short of waterboarding, I think it ill-advised to tell tales out of school. But some of the things were just so cool, and well, by knowing them that makes me cool, right?

And there’s the rub, because as soon as you start thinking that way, the cool just evaporates and leaves behind something rather tacky. Winchell, Parsons, and Hopper, like today’s gossip mongers may be feared, or fascinating, or even monstrous, but they’ll never, ever, be cool, at least not in my dictionary.

So I’ll just do my little dance in the dead of a moonless night, maybe whisper a few things to Amy, or to a close friend, and leave the rest as fiction fodder. That’s actually all they ever are, because even the truest blind item is still fiction, and not very good fiction at that. It fails to convey the true shape of reality that the best fiction can convey.

Still, if I were to mention the phrase “The Greater Bay Area Co-Prosperity Sphere,” there are a few people who would still get a chuckle or give a little snort or remembrance. The possibilities seemed endless once, but it turned out they were merely combinatorial.

A funny thing happened when the glam, famous young wife of the equally glam, famous guy struggling to control his well-concealed drug habit, started turning up at New York self-help meetings. Her intentions were all pure and good, of course, as she was trying to support her hunky hubby in his withdrawal from cocaine and other nasty vices. But insiders on both coasts are abuzz at how close she has become to a fellow attendee of that same self-help group, the sexy executive husband of a well-known, substance-addicted Manhattan A-list socialite. Sure, it all started out innocently, with just two lost, sad souls trying to help each other through some harrowing times. But now their two-person extracurricular support group has flared into a two-person extracurricular support grope. – Hollywood Life

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile, deep in the heart of the Ural Mountains, the secret Great Communist Conspiracy powers up their iinsidious Tesla Coil to send another burst of Dark Chaos at the heart of the One Nation Under God. The conspirators had already achieved their first purpose, of lulling the Western Powers into believing that Communism was dead, by pretending to relinquish control over the vast Soviet Empire. But the wiley Commies were never interested in mere empire; they required world domination. So they banked their fires in Mother Russia, and intensified their efforts to put across the Greatest Hoax of All: the Global Warming Conspiracy.

Now their plans were accelerating. Dark Prince Gore, having failed to acquire the job of President of the U.S. (only the heroic efforts of the Godly men--and woman--of the Supreme Court had managed to thwart that scheme!), forged a new alliance with Soros, that Elder of Zion, first to create a propaganda masterpiece of a movie, and then, through their Swedish dupes to steal a Nobel Prize.

Now the Tesla Coil was turned to the task of igniting fires on the West Coast of the United States. Significantly, the surreptitious heat ray was aimed at parts of the State of California that understood that the Communist Conspiracy was not dead, that its goal was to wreck the U.S. economy by a combination of air quality regulations and socialized medicine, because once those were under its insidious control, the Nation itself would soon fall....

Like a Dog in the Manger

Nobody knows anything. –William Goldman

Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar.
You’re gonna go far, fly high,
You’re never gonna die,
You’re gonna make it if you try;
They’re gonna love you.
Well I’ve always had a deep respect, and I mean that most sincerely.
--Pink Floyd

William Randolph Hearst was a man of extraordinary power and influence. Some credit him with launching the Spanish American War. His newspapers set styles, boosted political candidates, and ruined careers.

Marion Davies was one of the standout comediennes of the early Silent Era. She began as a “Follies” girl, then graduated to films and became substantially popular. Then she met William Randolph Hearst, fell in love (or some reasonable simulation thereof), and became his mistress. Over the next several years, the Hearst newspapers did everything in their power to boost Davies’ career.

The attempt was close to disastrous. Despite amassing a sizable body of work, her career has generally been overshadowed by her relationship with Hearst. Worse, Hearst liked putting her in costume dramas, whereas her main talent was for light comedy.

Of course, Davies was already a woman of accomplishment before Hearst took a shot at elevating her still further. There are innumerable other actors, singers, models, musicians, comedians, writers, etc., who have been hyped as The Next Big Thing, only to slide quickly into obscurity.

John Gilbert was also major star of the Silent Era, rivaling Valentino and sharing the screen with Garbo. His career came to a screeching halt with the introduction of sound. One legend holds that Louis B. Mayer, with whom Gilbert was often at odds, ordered his sound technicians to use a high-pass filter on Gilbert’s voice to make it high pitched and squeaky (his natural voice was tenor). Current conventional wisdom in the critical community is that it was merely ludicrous scripts that did in Gilbert’s career. Either way, Gilbert became an Object Lesson.

I made you and I can break you just as easily. –The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The entertainment industry has two important characteristics, mass production and personalized appeal. Printing was close to the first example of mass production (I’ll allow grain milling as old #1). The economies of scale can produce gigantic jackpots. H. G. Wells once said, "I went to bed one night a fairly well-to-do man and woke up the next morning wealthy beyond dreams of avarice." Similar things have happened to other writers, actors, singers, athletes. And these success stories are each individual, idiosyncratic. They don’t happen to large groups of people, any more than an entire town can hit the lottery.

The connections between the performer and the audience are personal, magical. They are inherently hard to predict, because there are too many factors involved.

"Weird Al" Yankovic has said that his movie UHF had one of the most successful test screenings in its studio’s (Orion Pictures) history. Unfortunately, it came out at the same time as Lethal Weapon 2, Batman, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Oops.

But Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything,” quote only applied to the upside of the market. Every motion picture studio knows how to bury a film. Every publisher can insure poor sales of a book. Every record label has lawyers available to tie up anyone who has signed with them in endless litigation if they wish to Make a Point.

So it is that the gatekeepers take their tolls. Toll taking is not facilitating a journey; it’s ability to extract payment comes from the ability to deny the journey.

I’m using the entertainment industry here because it’s an egregious example of an industry where dog-in-the-manger tactics are rampant. The other obvious example of it is politics, where the jackpots are even bigger, and the faces uglier. The tactics are pretty much the same though; straight out of the Protection Racket. It’s SOP to hang somebody up, just to show that you can do it. If you do it often enough, then you become important, and that’s were the money is made. Because all it takes is a little piece of a jackpot to change your life forever.

Everyone who calls wants to know one thing.
They want me to say yes to them and make their movie.
If I say yes, they think that come New Year's...it will be just them and Jack Nicholson on the slopes of Aspen.
That's what they think.
--The Player, screenplay by Michael Tolkin based on his novel.

A Few Brief Observations Concerning Black Snake Moan

To immediately undercut my own essay title, let me first say that much of this is going to be observations about commentaries I’ve read about this movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci, two actors who could probably sell any story, no matter how implausible or preposterous. So we begin with the acknowledgement that the old Hollywood Magic is in overdrive here, and I find nothing wrong with that.

Second, let me stipulate that, as with all of the estimable Jon Swift’s Amazon.com book reviews, I Have Not Actually Seen This Movie. This, in fact, is one of the ongoing arguments that have erupted on multiple comment threads seemingly everywhere. One must See the Movie to have a valid opinion, at least so say a goodly many people, people who, I imagine, have nevertheless formed opinions about foreign countries they have never lived in (or even visited), wars they have not fought in, drugs they have never taken, sexual practices they have only imagined, and celebrities they have only read about.

And let me be very clear about this, I have upon occasion judged books by their covers, bands by the names of their songs, people by their appearance, and movies by their reviews, advertising, and interviews in Entertainment Weekly. Call me shallow. Or possibly concede that popular culture is a grand interconnected archipelago of information, with islands that are often observable from other islands, without the need to set foot on their shores to count the number of trees thereon.

But enough: here is the basic plot of BSM, known to anyone who has watched television or read the entertainment section of a newspaper within the past two weeks.

Ricci plays Rae, a girl who was sexually abused by her father, and whose boyfriend has just left for the National Guard. She’s sexually compulsive (aka a “nymphomaniac”), gets gang raped then beaten to unconsciousness, after which she is found by Lazarus (Jackson), and taken to his house where he chains her to a radiator for many days, during which the transference bond that forms between them cures her of her compulsions.

I just slipped the “transference” thing in; usually it’s called “tough love” or some such drivel.

Okay first interesting thing about the comments I’ve seen so far. They’re all about the chains, the radiator, and the interracial aspect. For some reason, these rank higher than the gang-raped-and-left-for dead part. Why is that?

One possibility is that we’ve seen that so many times in modern cinema that it’s become unremarkable. Another is that if follows the course of “normal” morality; get high, screw a lot of guys, well, hey, you’ve got to expect a certain amount of brutal beatings along the way. Goes with the territory.

I think I’m going to go with the interracial bondage explanation, though. Black man, white woman in chains. That’s certainly what they’re selling in the print ads, which say “Everything is Hotter Down South.” Gotta go duck huntin’ where the ducks are.

Okay, just a speculation mind you, but what do you think would happen in “real life” to a sex-and-drug compulsive young woman who had been gang-raped and beaten, then found by an ordinary kind citizen who called 911 and she’d been taken to a local hospital? One good chance is that she’d have been treated, then released, then found again a few days later in similar condition (or dead, but that ends the story prematurely). After a time or two of this, she’d have been involuntarily committed as “a danger to herself or others” (the latter as a possible vector for STDs—this does happen). If she became "intractable," she’d then be, at the very least, tied to her bed at night, and probably given some fairly powerful medication to make her more “tractable.”

Or possibly, at some point she’d commit some petty crime and be just jailed.

If she were really, really lucky, she might be given medication for bi-polar mood disorder (part of the “lucky” thing is that this would be a correct diagnosis; it’s at least a plausible one), and there would be some brilliant therapist who accidentally came to be working for a county hospital for a while, who could effect the transference cure on her long enough to turn her life around.

I know, this is only slightly less implausible than the movie scenario. She wouldn’t look as good as Christina Ricci in any case.

My point here is that Jackson’s character is actually doing what movie characters do all the time: acting as a vigilante and taking the law into his own hands, except here he’s being a sort of “vigilante therapist.” It works because in Hollywood Magic, vigilantism always works, provided the hero’s heart is pure and intentions are good. After all, what are a few chains and a thong between friends?