Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Fake Film

I'm more than a wee bit interested in the soon-to-be-released Richard Gere movie, The Hoax, which is the story of Clifford Irving and his infamous bogus Howard Hughes autobiography. Just before he went to prison for the crime, Irving wrote a book which purported to be the true account of his crime. Since his crime was passing off a fake book as legit, a lot of people were skeptical that the "true account" was true. If you read it, it sure felt honest...self-serving in many ways perhaps, but honest. Other sources suggested Irving's confession wasn't much more accurate than his phony book. As an outside observer weighing it all, I tended to think Irving was probably closer to candid than his detractors wanted to admit...which isn't to say he didn't spin at every possible opportunity to minimize his less admirable actions.

I read almost everything I could find about Irving and Hughes, individually and collectively, and for a time tried to convince a couple of motion picture producers to option the Irving confession book and pay me to adapt it into a screenplay. Before the film Melvin and Howard came out, all I heard was "Hughes is dead...no one's interested in him." After that movie came out and did rather well, what I heard was, "Melvin and Howard exhausted the market for a film about Hughes." As we all know, once someone puts out a successful film, no one in Hollywood would ever think of making something in the same vein.

Advance reports on the Gere movie (like this one) make it sound like great liberties have been taken with the truth. If that's so, I'm curious as to why...because the true story — or at least the version Irving told in his tell-all — struck me as eminently filmable without embellishment or alteration. Just looking at the plot points that are beyond dispute, you have a pretty fascinating tale that's all the more compelling because you sit there realizing, "This actually happened! And this and this!" Over on Irving's website, he's posted this statement which basically says he hasn't seen the film but already doubts its accuracy. People may suspect this dispute is all a way to gin up interest in the film but I doubt it. For one thing, I think this is the kind of story that's only of interest if you believe it hasn't been exaggerated or faked in any way. It would be like knowing a TV magic show contained camera trickery.

This might be a good spot to stop and embed the trailer for the movie. It's three minutes...

You can find out a little more about it at the website for the film. Also, elsewhere on Clifford Irving's site, you can download and read for free, a few chapters from the bogus Autobiography of Howard Hughes. You can also download on the honor system (on your honor to send him money) a copy of the whole book.

Irving notes that the hardcover edition of The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, which came out in 1999, is now rare and sells through some dealers for $160. I bought it when it first came out for about a tenth of that and frankly didn't find it as interesting as his account of how he and co-conspirator Richard Suskind flim-flammed the publisher with it. I also found myself wondering how so many people had believed it was real...but then again, I knew it was a fraud before I read it. I'd like to think I wouldn't have been fooled but of course, that's easy to say.

The "confession" book was originally called What Really Happened and was later reissued (with a few deletions) as The Hoax. It's now out again in a new paperback edition with a photo cover of Richard Gere from the movie. You can order it from Amazon here. I don't guarantee its veracity but it's a pretty easy, engrossing read. I hope the movie's that enjoyable.

• Posted at 9:46 PM · LINK

Casting Call

Need a job? You might be able to get one here if you're blue enough.

• Posted at 7:47 PM · LINK

me (and Earl) on the radio

This is to remind you once more that tomorrow, my pal Earl Kress and I will be back on Stu's Show, the keystone program on Shokus Internet Radio, which is part of the vast Live365 network. We'll be blabbing about TV animation for two hours, beginning at 4 PM Pacific Time. The show is live and you can call in and ask questions or you can call in and answer host Stuart Shostak's trivia questions. Or you can just listen to us yak.

But now here's the big announcement! We'll have a special, surprise guest on the program. Who is it? Earl and I are keeping it a secret and not just from you. We haven't even told Stu yet who it is...and we won't until after we're on the air. He loves game shows. We're going to make him guess who it is.

Our surprise guest, who'll be joining us via phone for a little while, is a great cartoon voice performer. Way back in the late fifties and on into the early sixties, this person did voices on a number of classic cartoon shows that you've probably heard. In fact, one of my all-time favorite cartoon characters was voiced by this person. What's more, this is a voice performer who to my knowledge has never been interviewed about those days in any public forum, so this will be a "first."

You can listen to the show tomorrow afternoon by going to this website and selecting an audio browser. (Note: If you log in just before the show starts at 4PM Pacific, there's a slight chance that you'll get bumped off when the show starts. If that happens, just log right back in and it shouldn't happen again. There's some sort of glitch in the Live365 software that occasionally does that when a station switches from pre-recorded programming to live.)

Hope you'll tune in. If you love old TV cartoons, you'll very much enjoy "meeting" our surprise guest star.

• Posted at 4:38 PM · LINK

Marathon Man

This Thursday evening — and again, early next Monday morning — Turner Classic Movies is running They Shoot Horses, Don't They? This was the 1969 feature directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin and Gig Young in a downer tale about old time marathon dances. Depressing? No more than watching small, helpless animals die. But the film was oddly entertaining in its way.

I saw it twice when it first came out, both times at the Picwood Theater in West Los Angeles. The first viewing was with a bunch of guys I knew, one of whom I discovered that afternoon had a dread fear of the cinema device known as the Flash Forward. He believed that films should be structured in a linear, chronological manner with one event after another. He could occasionally tolerate a flashback because, after all, in real life we sometimes talk about things that occurred in the past. But we do not have a clear glimpse of the future and this fellow hated it when a movie did.

They Shoot Horses contains a couple of Flash Forwards. When the first one came on the screen, we all felt our friend freeze and shudder. Softly, we could all hear him mutter, "Oh, dear God...no. Not Flash Forwards!" The second time, he rocked in his seat as if slammed in the face and after that, he sat there whimpering until the next one. When the third Flash Forward occurred, that was all he could take. He jumped to his feet and screamed out, "No, no! Not Flash Forwards! NOT FLASH FORWARDS!!!" And he began squeezing past everyone's feet, trying to get to the aisle with the same urgency as if the theater was ablaze. Everyone told him to shut the hell up but there was no stopping the guy. In fact, he couldn't understand how the rest of us were sitting there so peacefully, pretending to be enjoying a movie that contained the unspeakable horror of Flash Forwards.

When he reached the aisle, he sprinted up and out of the theater. Being true friends, we decided to just forget about him and enjoy the film, which we did. After it was over, we found him sitting in the lobby with half a box of Milk Duds, still shivering and murmuring to himself, "Flash Forwards...brrr..."

A few days later, walking in Westwood, I ran into a young lady I'd known casually in high school and lusted after from afar. This was early 1970, as I recall...seven months or so after we'd both graduated and gone our separate ways. We got to talking and as I attempted to angle the conversation around to the topic of perhaps dating, she noticed a bus go by with an ad on it for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Unknowingly making my job easy, she said, "You know, I really want to see that movie. Have you seen it?" I said no — not the biggest lie a male ever told a female, but a lie nonetheless. When I suggested we view it together the following Saturday evening, she agreed and even offered to drive since I didn't. (I started to ask her, "You aren't bothered by Flash Forwards, are you?" but didn't just in case she was and that would cause her to cancel.)

As dates went it was among the worst of my life, starting with the moment she picked me up and I asked her how she was feeling. She began a non-stop monologue about how she hated her mother, loathed her father, wanted to see her brothers and sisters all killed in a fiery car crash, thought her boss at work should be in prison, was deep in debt, hadn't slept in weeks, thought all men were evil and was experiencing menstrual problems that were agonizing to her and everyone around her. This went on all the way to dinner, throughout the meal and up until the moment the movie began. The graphic descriptions of her cramps and bleeding were expertly timed to coincide with the arrival of our entrees at the restaurant. I didn't eat a lot.

Finally, we made it to the Picwood and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The people exiting from the previous showing looked depressed because, well, the film just had that effect on the normal person. Having listened to Sunshine Sally for the previous hour and a half, I was thoroughly dejected on the way in and I recall thinking, "Boy, I'm really going to be cheery by the time this is over." But an odd thing happened when the movie started. My lady friend loved it. The cynicism and pessimism didn't bother her one bit...and neither did the Flash Forwards. She just sat there, enjoying the hell out of the movie. The more miserable the people were on the screen, the more she liked it. In the first scene where one of the main characters dies (I won't tell you which one in case you haven't seen it), she had a big grin on her face and she emitted a small but audible cheer. The worse things got for the people on the screen, the more she liked it.

I was so amazed at my date's reaction that I hardly watched the film at all. At the end, she was happier than when she'd gone in and I had to ask her why. The answer was along the lines of, "It cheers me up to see people whose lives are so much worse off than mine." She told me that sometimes, she liked to page through the newspaper, savoring all the stories about people who'd died in horrible accidents. I guess I can understand that...but not really. This was not exactly schadenfreude. It was some sort of even more perverse enjoyment of the misery of others.

After that, she drove me home, parking a few doors away so, I guess, we could engage in a bit of physical contact without the chance that my parents would look out the window and see us. I think that's what she had in mind but for the only time in my adolescent life, I wasn't interested in any of that. I didn't know if she'd have a bad time if she liked it or a good time if she didn't. Matter of fact, I felt like I needed to end that date a.s.a.p. and did. There was no second date.

I haven't seen They Shoot Horses, Don't They? since then. I've set my TiVo and I'm going to watch it in the next week or so, but first I'm going to try to get myself in the same frame of mind as that lady. She obviously enjoyed it a lot more than I did. You will too if you watch it from her point of view. Especially if you don't mind Flash Forwards.

• Posted at 3:14 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This is the finale from the revival of A Chorus Line currently playing on Broadway.

It seems like a pretty good performance of the number but I dunno...I'm planning my next New York trip at the moment and deciding what I want to see. Somehow, A Chorus Line ain't making my list. I liked the show the first time I saw it...and the second time and the third time. Around the fifth, it started to feel like a parody of itself...and of course, the movie version ruined it further. So I can't summon up the interest just now, though I will admit this is a pretty snazzy version of the closing song...

• Posted at 1:18 AM · LINK