Knifethrust of Thought

“Authentic” celebrity is never the product only of the efforts of the person who is celebrated.  The actor commanding $10 million a picture is able to do so because in his second appearance in a film the screenplay was written by a genius, the director was a wizard, the producer kept his eye on the ball, the studio cut a hell of a distribution deal, or his co-star was a $15 million a picture celebrity whose notoriety (always a career booster) led to a record-breaking opening weekend.   Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of never-will-be’s  strive and sacrifice, “prepare” themselves and writhe with desire and hope until their intestines cycle into spin/dry, yet never get a call-back.  The predicament is too humanly destructive for a glib or frivolous comment about being in the right place at the right time (however apt that may be).  It’s just the way things are.  It’s the luck of the draw.  The only consolation the multitude of disappointed might savor is the knowledge that after that first big success, the celebrity in question gets his choice of five or six of all the good parts on offer at the moment and, more often than not, either exercises terrible judgment or never again receives a smidgen of the good fortune he enjoyed his second time out.  Bye, bye, happiness.  Still, there is a difference in being a 45-year-old car salesman who never delivered a line on screen, and a no-longer-employable leading man with fifty million dollars in the bank and a Gulfstream jet.  That is an irony that calls for sarcasm, but I am sorry—I just can’t seem to find it in me.

Oxymoron: new movie

Hollywood celebrities who “make statements on politics” resemble fart-cushions.

Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation.  The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun.  A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce.  Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine.  The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.”  Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming.  Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles.  Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess.  Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet.  Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values.  Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town.  And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.

A lawyer and a Hollywood talent agent had a child.  The little tyke grew up to be a congressman.

Overheard at the Intersection of Hollywood and Vine: A woman is using the payphone. I don’t have his pants. Why would I be walking around Hollywood holding Peter’s pants in my hands? Jesus…. So I’m the bad guy?…. The last time I saw the goldfish it was in the refrigerator door-rack.…. Hey this grungy-looking weirdo is staring at me. He’s checking out my tits. Wait a minute…. Okay, he’s gone. Are you saying I didn’t pick her up from school yesterday? Fuck that. Who’s got her?…. Oh shit. Look, can you go down and get her out for me? You can act like you’re me…. I would act like I was you, if you…. What’s the big deal, Breanne? Don’t you give a shit about my daughter?….

Sylvester Stallone completed a sentence without destroying it one day and everybody stood up and clapped.

Mickey Rourke has never failed to blow an opportunity completely out of the water.

Melanie Griffith was asked how she cooked pancakes and she said, “You mean those bready flat things you pour the sweet thick stuff on that gets on your hands?”

Asked to share the secrets of acting, Tom Cruise clinched his jaw muscles and whipped out a Dennis Quaid grin.

Woody Harrelson, complimented on his performance in Natural Born Killers, retorted, “Kiss my fucking ass.”

Madonna, having persuaded 587 million women to believe that their potential will never be fulfilled as long as they remain tied to one man, decided that was a load of crap.

When asked, “Do you know your lines?” Billy Crystal said, “Whadda ya mean do I know my lines?  I wrote my lines, schmuck.  Now I’m getting ready to direct my lines. I’m the producer of this cockamamie picture, for Christ’s sake.  What kind of frigging thing is that, do I know my lines? You know what I think, schlump?  I think you couldn’t tell a Nathan’s hotdog from Stage Deli pastrami on rye.  I think you couldn’t tell me what borough Yankee Stadium is in.  I think you’d take the Holland Tunnel to go to Staten Island.  Do I know my lines?  Get outta here!”

When Rob Reiner finished reading the screenplay, he hired his father to explain it to him.

Keanu Reeves accepted an invitation to conduct a master class for the Julliard School of Acting in New York City, but he couldn’t locate it—the city, I mean.

Gwyneth Paltrow turned down a movie directed by Sean Penn because she would have had to stop winsomely smiling for one of the scenes.

If pretentious sentiments were nylon filaments, Sean Penn would have strangled himself ten years ago.

The latest tally shows that Richard Gere has asked 5,642 people the question that is always on his mind: “I know I’m rich, but why don’t they take me seriously?”

William Goldman said it best: The first thing you have to grasp about Hollywood is that nobody there has the slightest idea what he’s doing.

Everybody trying to make it in Hollywood belongs to a little losers’ circle of five or six people who call each other every day to reiterate that they are all going to stick together forever and that the first one to hit big is going to bring the others along with him or her.  You can tell when one of the group does score big, for when you call her up to congratulate her the message on her answering machine says: “Listen up, losers.  I’m moving with a new crowd now.  Eat shit, fuck off, drop dead, and you don’t know me anymore.”