Things I learned from Vanity Fair's 2005 Hollywood Issue.
I received the wrist-snappingly heavy March 2005 issue (No. 535) of Vanity Fair in the mail on Saturday, 12 February, and have only finished picking through it three or four days ago. This is the annual Hollywood Issue, which features a fold-out cover of the actors and actresses whom VF's editors deem to be the latest "hot properties;" this year the cover features entirely actresses, such as a vampiric-looking Cate Blanchett, Uma Thurman, Kate Winslett, Scarlett Johansson, Ziyi Zhang, and Rosario Dawson.
As usual with Vanity Fair's plus-sized issues, though, the preponderance of the increased mass is due to the increased number of advertisements, rather than an amplitude of journalistic riches, or even good dish. Nonetheless, while this year's Hollywoodie wasn't as chock full o' fun as in some prior years, it still contained tidbits that I didn't know.
Christopher Hitchens: "Ohio's Odd Numbers," pps. 214-18; 3 pgs.
When even the "pro-war liberal," anti-conspiracy theory pundit Christopher Hitchens admits that there was something mighty peculiar going on with the voting and vote tallying in Ohio in last November's presidential election, notice should probably be taken:
"Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many 'vote hops' [i.e., recording a vote for Candidate "A" as being a vote for Candidate "B"] the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.
"...there is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was often said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be 'a conspiracy so immense' as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to have been part of the plan....
"I had the chance to spend some quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be 'in on it.' This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. 'Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were "in control" and no comparison studies,' she explained. 'The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded.' In these circumstances, she continued, it's possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of the votes."
-- p. 218
James Wolcott: "From Fear to Eternity," pps. 220-28; 4 pgs.
This month Wolcott discusses the 1964 movie The Americanization of Emily, directed by Arthur Hiller (Torbruk, The Out-of-Towners, Love Story, Silver Streak, Making Love), written by Paddy Chayesfky (Marty, Network, Altered States), and starring James Garner, Julie Andrews, James Coburn and Melvyn Douglas; he makes a strong case for this movie being once again made available on video, preferably on DVD:
"Perhaps the most subversively dovish statement ever crafted in Hollywood barely dallies a moment on the battlefield and doesn't withdraw into shell-shocked silence -- it loves hearing itself talk too much. It's a true rarity, a cheerful tract....
"Where [Billy Wilder's] Stalag 17 now seems too chuffed with its cocky iconoclasm, a smug complacency that corrodes many of Wilder's comedies as the years go by, The Americanization of Emily seems more adult and daring today than when it was released... The country around it has changed, its people too. America has become a more brutally sentimental superpower since then, more enthralled with the idea of war as a crucible of national and individual character-building. From talk radio to the Fox News Channel to the neo-imperialist bellicosities of historians Victor Davis Hanson, Robert Kaplan, and Max Boot, we've never had so many white men peering through Patton's field binoculars to reconfigure a stronger America. Such armchair centurions drip scorn on those wobblers and weaklings who believe the better part of valor is to heed the call of battle, then run like hell the other way.
"The hero of The Americanization of Emily is one such yellowbelly."
-- p. 220 & 222
Wolcott also provides one of Chayefsky's broadsides that James Garner's character, Lt. Cmmdr Charlie Madison, delivers when Julie Andrews' Emily makes a snide remark about "Yanks," but I'll refrain from quoting it; don't want to spoil everything in the article.
Michael Wolff: "Twilight of the News," pps. 236-39; 3 pgs.
Michael Wolff writes this month about the retirement of the Big Three television network news anchors Dan Rather of CBS (whose retirement is imminent) and Tom Brokaw of NBC (whose retirement is a fait accompli), and the likely further diminution of their news departments since the networks' corporate parents see them less as a public service than as a cost center. Wolff remarks that Tim Russert, host of NBC's Sunday morning Washington, D.C. news programme Meet the Press and renowned whiteboard-carrying commentator during the presidential elections, "rose in NBC's Washington bureau in part because he was a good conduit of information between the G.E. top brass [General Electric owns NBC] and Washington politicos" (p. 238). Commenting on the fallout from "Rathergate" -- the scandal of CBS's Sixty Minutes news programme running with forged documents to accuse George W. Bush of receiving preferential treatment during his National Guard service -- Wolff writes:
"Of the three networks, CBS's news division has always been the most dug in. Church and state -- although the church has lost much of its funding -- still exists as a real line at CBS. You don't trifle with the mullahs there -- the pros in the newsroom on West 57th Street [in New York City], watching Rather in shirt-sleeves circle his chair before broadcast-time. That's still some sight. It's a weighty, classy, well-dressed, intelligent world converging there. Then again, it's a clueless one, too -- these people have no idea they're over with.
"But without Rather it's a clean slate (the fact that nobody ever planned for his succession is a reflection of the news division's isolation -- nobody at CBS News was even discussing corporate synergy and long-term strategy). [CBS chairman Les] Moonves, the most successful television news executive of the day, with a famous golden gut, can do almost anything now. He can fire whomever -- and not just the producers who took the immediate fall. Demand obeisance of whom he pleases. That's the point of the CBS internal investigation with its big report -- not just to assign blame, and do the mea culpa, but to give the network executives a pass into the news division. A moral mandate to take over."
-- pps. 238-39
Wolff goes on to observe:
"If, along with a news division, you also own one of the world's largest companies, much of your management of the news is naturally going to be about not having it cause grief for the rest of your enterprise. Balancing our news obligations against our corporate responsibilities ...although no one will ever actually discuss how that balance is achieved -- and how the weight shifts with what political winds.
"And yet it is not so secret.
"What relationship could Time Warner-owned CNN's tepid election coverage have had to the fact that the S.E.C. [Security and Exchange Commission]s was considering penalties against the company over its accounting at AOL [America On-Line]? And what relationship did the modest settlement -- completed just after the election -- have to the tepid election coverage? Well...?
"And what about that bizarre endorsement of the president by Viacom's [Viacom owns CBS] chairman Sumner Redstone -- lifelong Democrat, major party contributor -- after the Rather imbroglio? What kind of horse head turned up in his bed?"
-- p. 239
Judy Bachrach: "Moore's War," pps. 240-56; 7 pgs.
This was an interesting and informative article about Michael Moore (who shares Shakespeare's birthday, believe it or nuts; p. 256); Bachrach definitely doesn't swallow every line he shoots. Among the interesting bits in this article: "Mel Gibson's Icon Productions had originally agreed to finance Fahrenheit 9/11, then Mel bowed out" (p. 255); the New York filmmaker with whom Moore apprenticed, Kevin Rafferty, is "Barbara Bush's nephew (and therefore George W. Bush's first cousin!)" (p. 248); and for his movie The Big One, Moore "produces a copy of a cancelled check sent to right-to-life Republican candidate Pat Buchanan from a fictitious group called 'Abortionists for Buchanan.' (Bob Dole got a check from the 'Satan-Worshippers for Dole Club.') (ibid)
The article wraps up with Moore's response to Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ; Bachrach also reveals the following anecdote:
"...when Time magazine was considering putting Moore and Gibson on the cover of its Person of the Year issue...Gibson refused to sit down with Moore for the three hours of talk necessary to allow them to be in the running. As it turned out, George W. made the cover."
-- p. 256
Duff McDonald: "Poker's Wild," pps. 280-94; 6 pgs.
This article about the celebrity craze for poker further convinced me that I have absolutely no interest -- and no business -- in playing cards, particularly in playing poker, and most particularly in playing poker for any stakes higher than the coupons that I randomly clip from the Sunday newspaper. And I don't really want to see Rounders again, either. I've got a hot video on how to make a cool million in real estate without really trying that I can watch again if I ever get the niggling feeling that my financial straits simply aren't dire enough, by golly.
Evgenia Peretz: "The Garden of Kabbalah," pps. 296-310; 7 pgs.
This is less about Kabbalah and more about the "Kabbalah" of The Red String Book that's supposedly making various nasty Hollywood personages into kinder, gentler people -- except for Madonna, who's apparently trying to wrest total control of the Kabbalah Centre franchise from the Berg family. I daresay that you could learn as much about the Kabbalah by reading the John Warner/Steve Gerber-scripted Bloodstone stories in Marvel Comics' Marvel Presents #1 & 2 and Rampaging Hulk #1-8 -- there's a third-string sorcerer named "Kaballa" who pops up in it -- as you could from reading "the book that everybody's wearing." This article was particularly annoying and superficial, though most of that's probably not the fault of the writer (although I do wonder about her referring to Lindsay Lohan as a "blonde shiksa babe" [p. 298]; maybe she was the week that Ms. Peretz wrote this sentence...). The thing that most surprised me in this article? Madonna's showing more cleavage (p. 296) than the inestimable Lindsay Lohan (p. 310). C'mon, Ell! Ya gotta represent!
Peter Biskind: "Midnight Revolution," pps. 312-28; 10 pgs.
This is an interesting article about the making of the movie Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, and a movie that couldn't be made in Hollywood today, despite what such conservative commentators as Michael Medved might think of that city's morals.
Things I learned from Biskind's article:
As usual with Vanity Fair's plus-sized issues, though, the preponderance of the increased mass is due to the increased number of advertisements, rather than an amplitude of journalistic riches, or even good dish. Nonetheless, while this year's Hollywoodie wasn't as chock full o' fun as in some prior years, it still contained tidbits that I didn't know.
Christopher Hitchens: "Ohio's Odd Numbers," pps. 214-18; 3 pgs.
When even the "pro-war liberal," anti-conspiracy theory pundit Christopher Hitchens admits that there was something mighty peculiar going on with the voting and vote tallying in Ohio in last November's presidential election, notice should probably be taken:
"Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many 'vote hops' [i.e., recording a vote for Candidate "A" as being a vote for Candidate "B"] the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.
"...there is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was often said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be 'a conspiracy so immense' as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to have been part of the plan....
"I had the chance to spend some quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be 'in on it.' This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. 'Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were "in control" and no comparison studies,' she explained. 'The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded.' In these circumstances, she continued, it's possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of the votes."
-- p. 218
James Wolcott: "From Fear to Eternity," pps. 220-28; 4 pgs.
This month Wolcott discusses the 1964 movie The Americanization of Emily, directed by Arthur Hiller (Torbruk, The Out-of-Towners, Love Story, Silver Streak, Making Love), written by Paddy Chayesfky (Marty, Network, Altered States), and starring James Garner, Julie Andrews, James Coburn and Melvyn Douglas; he makes a strong case for this movie being once again made available on video, preferably on DVD:
"Perhaps the most subversively dovish statement ever crafted in Hollywood barely dallies a moment on the battlefield and doesn't withdraw into shell-shocked silence -- it loves hearing itself talk too much. It's a true rarity, a cheerful tract....
"Where [Billy Wilder's] Stalag 17 now seems too chuffed with its cocky iconoclasm, a smug complacency that corrodes many of Wilder's comedies as the years go by, The Americanization of Emily seems more adult and daring today than when it was released... The country around it has changed, its people too. America has become a more brutally sentimental superpower since then, more enthralled with the idea of war as a crucible of national and individual character-building. From talk radio to the Fox News Channel to the neo-imperialist bellicosities of historians Victor Davis Hanson, Robert Kaplan, and Max Boot, we've never had so many white men peering through Patton's field binoculars to reconfigure a stronger America. Such armchair centurions drip scorn on those wobblers and weaklings who believe the better part of valor is to heed the call of battle, then run like hell the other way.
"The hero of The Americanization of Emily is one such yellowbelly."
-- p. 220 & 222
Wolcott also provides one of Chayefsky's broadsides that James Garner's character, Lt. Cmmdr Charlie Madison, delivers when Julie Andrews' Emily makes a snide remark about "Yanks," but I'll refrain from quoting it; don't want to spoil everything in the article.
Michael Wolff: "Twilight of the News," pps. 236-39; 3 pgs.
Michael Wolff writes this month about the retirement of the Big Three television network news anchors Dan Rather of CBS (whose retirement is imminent) and Tom Brokaw of NBC (whose retirement is a fait accompli), and the likely further diminution of their news departments since the networks' corporate parents see them less as a public service than as a cost center. Wolff remarks that Tim Russert, host of NBC's Sunday morning Washington, D.C. news programme Meet the Press and renowned whiteboard-carrying commentator during the presidential elections, "rose in NBC's Washington bureau in part because he was a good conduit of information between the G.E. top brass [General Electric owns NBC] and Washington politicos" (p. 238). Commenting on the fallout from "Rathergate" -- the scandal of CBS's Sixty Minutes news programme running with forged documents to accuse George W. Bush of receiving preferential treatment during his National Guard service -- Wolff writes:
"Of the three networks, CBS's news division has always been the most dug in. Church and state -- although the church has lost much of its funding -- still exists as a real line at CBS. You don't trifle with the mullahs there -- the pros in the newsroom on West 57th Street [in New York City], watching Rather in shirt-sleeves circle his chair before broadcast-time. That's still some sight. It's a weighty, classy, well-dressed, intelligent world converging there. Then again, it's a clueless one, too -- these people have no idea they're over with.
"But without Rather it's a clean slate (the fact that nobody ever planned for his succession is a reflection of the news division's isolation -- nobody at CBS News was even discussing corporate synergy and long-term strategy). [CBS chairman Les] Moonves, the most successful television news executive of the day, with a famous golden gut, can do almost anything now. He can fire whomever -- and not just the producers who took the immediate fall. Demand obeisance of whom he pleases. That's the point of the CBS internal investigation with its big report -- not just to assign blame, and do the mea culpa, but to give the network executives a pass into the news division. A moral mandate to take over."
-- pps. 238-39
Wolff goes on to observe:
"If, along with a news division, you also own one of the world's largest companies, much of your management of the news is naturally going to be about not having it cause grief for the rest of your enterprise. Balancing our news obligations against our corporate responsibilities ...although no one will ever actually discuss how that balance is achieved -- and how the weight shifts with what political winds.
"And yet it is not so secret.
"What relationship could Time Warner-owned CNN's tepid election coverage have had to the fact that the S.E.C. [Security and Exchange Commission]s was considering penalties against the company over its accounting at AOL [America On-Line]? And what relationship did the modest settlement -- completed just after the election -- have to the tepid election coverage? Well...?
"And what about that bizarre endorsement of the president by Viacom's [Viacom owns CBS] chairman Sumner Redstone -- lifelong Democrat, major party contributor -- after the Rather imbroglio? What kind of horse head turned up in his bed?"
-- p. 239
Judy Bachrach: "Moore's War," pps. 240-56; 7 pgs.
This was an interesting and informative article about Michael Moore (who shares Shakespeare's birthday, believe it or nuts; p. 256); Bachrach definitely doesn't swallow every line he shoots. Among the interesting bits in this article: "Mel Gibson's Icon Productions had originally agreed to finance Fahrenheit 9/11, then Mel bowed out" (p. 255); the New York filmmaker with whom Moore apprenticed, Kevin Rafferty, is "Barbara Bush's nephew (and therefore George W. Bush's first cousin!)" (p. 248); and for his movie The Big One, Moore "produces a copy of a cancelled check sent to right-to-life Republican candidate Pat Buchanan from a fictitious group called 'Abortionists for Buchanan.' (Bob Dole got a check from the 'Satan-Worshippers for Dole Club.') (ibid)
The article wraps up with Moore's response to Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ; Bachrach also reveals the following anecdote:
"...when Time magazine was considering putting Moore and Gibson on the cover of its Person of the Year issue...Gibson refused to sit down with Moore for the three hours of talk necessary to allow them to be in the running. As it turned out, George W. made the cover."
-- p. 256
Duff McDonald: "Poker's Wild," pps. 280-94; 6 pgs.
This article about the celebrity craze for poker further convinced me that I have absolutely no interest -- and no business -- in playing cards, particularly in playing poker, and most particularly in playing poker for any stakes higher than the coupons that I randomly clip from the Sunday newspaper. And I don't really want to see Rounders again, either. I've got a hot video on how to make a cool million in real estate without really trying that I can watch again if I ever get the niggling feeling that my financial straits simply aren't dire enough, by golly.
Evgenia Peretz: "The Garden of Kabbalah," pps. 296-310; 7 pgs.
This is less about Kabbalah and more about the "Kabbalah" of The Red String Book that's supposedly making various nasty Hollywood personages into kinder, gentler people -- except for Madonna, who's apparently trying to wrest total control of the Kabbalah Centre franchise from the Berg family. I daresay that you could learn as much about the Kabbalah by reading the John Warner/Steve Gerber-scripted Bloodstone stories in Marvel Comics' Marvel Presents #1 & 2 and Rampaging Hulk #1-8 -- there's a third-string sorcerer named "Kaballa" who pops up in it -- as you could from reading "the book that everybody's wearing." This article was particularly annoying and superficial, though most of that's probably not the fault of the writer (although I do wonder about her referring to Lindsay Lohan as a "blonde shiksa babe" [p. 298]; maybe she was the week that Ms. Peretz wrote this sentence...). The thing that most surprised me in this article? Madonna's showing more cleavage (p. 296) than the inestimable Lindsay Lohan (p. 310). C'mon, Ell! Ya gotta represent!
Peter Biskind: "Midnight Revolution," pps. 312-28; 10 pgs.
This is an interesting article about the making of the movie Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, and a movie that couldn't be made in Hollywood today, despite what such conservative commentators as Michael Medved might think of that city's morals.
Things I learned from Biskind's article:
- The screenwriter, Waldo Salt, is the father of former actress, current screenwriter for Nip/Tuck, Jennifer Salt, who starred in the 1972 made-for-TV movie Gargoyles, along with Cornel Wilde and Bernie Casey (Stan Winston designed the gargoyle costumes); p. 314.
- "According to [director John Schlesinger’s lover and assistant Michael] Childers, 'Elvis Presley's person from MGM said, "If you'd clean up this script, get rid of some of the smut, it could be a vee-hicle for Elvis!"'" (p. 318) Yes, that's right: Elvis was being pushed for the part of the naïve, inept hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight). Shudder.
- Dustin Hoffman, as Ratso Rizzo, nearly got run over by a taxi in that famous scene where he and Voight's Joe Buck are tooling down NYC's mean streets; Hoffman managed to stay in character when he upbraided the cabbie ("I'm walkin' heah!"); p. 326.
- Roger Ebert, film critic extraordinaire, panned Midnight Cowboy, calling it "'an offensively trendy, gimmick-ridden, tarted-up, vulgar exercise in fashionable cinema,'" (p. 328), totally missing the boat and betraying his normal affinity for the tawdry and vulgar. One hopes that his future autobiography won't reveal that he thought that he was writing a fun and funky update of Little Women when he co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
- Budd Schulberg was in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the forerunner of the CIA, during World War II, and "trained in its school for undercover agents;" pg. 445.
- Marlon Brando's nickname was "Buddy;" p. 447.
- Frank Sinatra was originally signed for the role of Terry Malloy (Brando's character) in On the Waterfront; this helped make the set of the movie version of Guys and Dolls, where Sinatra and Brando played rival gamblers, extra tense (p. 447).
- The movie was based on an eponymous 1944 clinical study by Dr. Robert M. Lindner, whose subject was "a disturbed, incarcerated youth, whose violent past was revealed under hypnosis" (p. 434); early choices to play this character were Marlon Brando and future director Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Prince of the City, Q&A).
- Other oddball choices to play Dean's character of Jim Stark included Robert Wagner and Tab Hunter; "what were they thinking??" choices to play Natalie Wood's character Judy included Debbie Reynolds and Jayne Mansfield (p. 435). Oh, sure, I get those two confused all the time....
- Nicholas Ray apparently had quite the taste for jailbait: he slept with Natalie Wood ten days after her first screen test (she was 16 years old at the time).
- Nicholas Ray was also bisexual; Kashner cites Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest for his speculation that "Ray had an affair with [Sal] Mineo as well as Wood, 'while the sallow Dean skulked in and out;'" p. 435.
- A real gang-banger, Frank Mazzola, was hired as an actor and technical consultant on Rebel; he led a gang called the Athenians (p. 436).
- Dennis Hopper, who played Goon, was shocked at how super-skank Natalie Wood jumped from Ray's bed into his; he was PO'ed at how Natalie's mother Maria Gurdin squawked to the studio about Hopper but not about Ray: Ms. Gurdin, by all accounts the classic stage mother, apparently thought that the best way to advance her daughter's career was to pimp her to prominent men like directors and producers and such, not to teenaged nothings like Hopper (p. 438). There is some evidence that Dean's mother in the movie, played by Ann Doran, was modeled on Ms. Gurdin (ibid).
- Sal Mineo, who played Plato in Rebel (and Dr. Milo in Escape From the Planet of the Apes), opined that "he had portrayed the first gay teenager on film. There are little clues: the photograph of Alan Ladd taped to his locker door, his longing looks at Jim Stark, his disguised declaration of love in the abandoned mansion. Ray was aware of Dean's bisexuality and encouraged the actor to use it in certain scenes. Dean instructed Mineo, 'Look at me the way I look at Natalie,' for their intimate scene in the Getty mansion." (p. 440)
- Nicholas Ray became addicted to crystal meth in the early 1960s; Kashner reports that "the amphetamine was prescribed as a cure for alcoholism!" (p. 440)
- Ray was in the student uprisings in Paris in 1968 (the same ones almost depicted in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers) -- the ones that so rattled French president Charles DeGaulle that he stepped down shortly after quelling them, not wanting to push his luck (p. 440).
Budd Schulberg: "The King Who Would Be Man," pps. 420-25, 444-49; the article itself has 9 pgs., excluding the photo-only pages
The author of the classic 1941 Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? and the screenwriter for the 1954 apologia for director Elia Kazan's serving as a friendly witness to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) wrote this memorial of Marlon Brando, his longtime friend. Things I learned from this piece:
Sam Kashner: "Dangerous Talents," pps. 428-41; the article text is 7½ pages long, excluding the photos-only pages
This one's about the making of Rebel Without a Cause, and focuses as much on that movie's director, Nicholas Ray, as it does its star, James Dean. Tidbits from this piece:
There are some other articles -- a piece about Stanley Kubrick's early start as a Weegee-wannabe, a piece about an elite anti-prep school for Hollywood movers and shakers, and an installment of Dominick Dunne's diary of crime among the rich and (in)famous -- but they're either unremarkable (in the first instance) or as yet unread by me (in the latter two instances).
Stick a fork in me; I'm done.