ken starr, fernando's birthday, leonardo di caprio, and the psycho remake.
In case you haven't heard, in all likelihood, the following quote:
"Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts. Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's 'right to know'."-- Kenneth Starr, 1987, `Sixty Minutes' interview with Dianne Sawyer.
is NOT true; it never happened; it is urban legend. (No one can find the quote in transcripts of 60 Minutes, which are evidently posted to Lexis-Nexus, and a spokesperson for CBS says they can't find proof of it anywhere.
We would all like it to be true. It apparently isn't.
Please stop forwarding it. Thank you.
Last night, Fernando and Nancy and Darin and I went to Ruth's Chris Steak House in Beverly Hills to celebrate Fernando's birthday. Nothing much exciting happened--I realize it's been quite some time since I've seen a celebrity, dammit--but we had a very good time and some damn fine food. The restaurant was kind of weird, because all of the tables are half-moon shaped booths.
I had a dessert named Chocolate Sin that I thought deserved the accompaniment of "Fly Me To The Moon." Darin took a taste of it and said, "It's isn't the chocolate, it's the espresso." Very strong coffee mixture. Eat too much of this, don't sleep for days.
Pooks--whom I did not inform immediately that I was not, after all, dying; bronchitis is such a comedown after a tuberculosis scare--suggests that I keep mentally busy while recuperating:
By the way -- have you picked out young men? How young? From movies or television? This could be an interesting fantasy, and don't forget having Kevin Kline sitting at your side, reading you the phone book (start with pizzas-that-deliver) and Anthony Hopkins murmuring sweet wickedness in your ear ....
I mean, you still have some time to kill while you're mending.
So I've mentioned the whole phone book reading thing in regards to Kevin Kline, have I?
I don't know who the young men are, but I know one of them won't be Leonardo Di Caprio. For one thing, LDC does nothing for me--Camille Paglia said he looks like a 12-year-old girl and for once I agree with the right-winger: he does. I prefer men; I'm just weird that way, I guess.
Also, LDC fired me last night.
Last night I had a dream in which Leonardo Di Caprio is going to host the Oscars and I'm on the team writing his monologue. So we're going over everything that happened, cinema-wise, in the past year, in order to see what there is to make fun of, and someone mentions Titanic.
I launch into a rather lengthy rant, worthy of any film criticism program, as to why Leonardo Di Caprio was not important to the success of that movie: any of the crop of young men in Hollywood would have done just as well. I remember I mentioned Ethan Hawke, but I also came out with a whole string of names, as though I have these names at my fingertips at the drop of a hat. (I don't. Well, I probably do.)
My sister--also on the committee, I guess--taps me on the shoulder and says, "He's Leonardo Di Caprio."
Oh hey. <snaps fingers> Right.
I apologize profusely and LDC shrugs it off: No big deal, he's cool.
Within minutes he's fired the lot of us under some pretext.
Nevertheless, I head down to the cafeteria with another committee member--who might have been Arden, from USC--to work on the monologue, because I know LDC isn't going to be ready in time with other writers and we have to get this done. And I know, in that way that you know stuff in dreams, that we will in fact be re-hired and everything's going to turn out okay.
Sadly, I woke up before I got to this triumphal denouement.
I have no idea what this dream means. Why in the hell do I have to dream about LDC?
Reprinted without permission from The New York Daily News:
Director Gus Van Sant says he's still in control of his remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." The director's reps are shooting down reports that the movie's producers have taken away his right to edit the shocker--due out just before Christmas.Producer Brian Grazer was said to be disappointed with the ending of the movie, but he couldn't be reached for comment.
Okay, for those of you who haven't heard, Van Sant is making a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, changing only the color and the actors. They're using the original shooting script. (Why, I don't know. I can't tell you why this struck anyone as a good idea. Please don't ask; I can't explain how this nonsense gets started.)
And Grazer is disappointed with the ending of the movie? Hello?
Let's face it, the ending of the original Psycho does suck. It's like 15 minutes of psychobabble about what made Norman do those terrible things. But it's part of the original, which you're remaking down to each and every shot. And those 15 minutes worked just fine in 1960, because the audience wasn't paying attention--it was screaming, having just seen something completely shocking, completely outré.
These days, guys win Oscars for killing people by chewing off their faces. A little something like a mama's boy in a dress knifing someone is, well....something probably happening at the grade school down the block.
If you're making a shot-for-shot remake of a classic--an idea that prima facie sucks--you can't just change the ending. What the hell are you going to do, rewrite just that bit?
I guess in this one Norman will run off with Marion's sister or something.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com