I Phought Ptoo Much About THE PHYNX

THE PHYNX's epic saga of how our government manufactured a rock band to rescue celebrity hostages from a punishing dictator was too bizarre to even commercially offer in 1970, went on to flummox viewers like Steven Thompson during its days as a bootleg tape, and still leaves fellows like Paul Tabili of DVD Drive-In scratching their heads in its now wide availability. Perhaps the reason why Warner Bros. chose not to release a rock'n'roll espionage comedy called THE PHYNX - not in America anyhow - was because it seemed everything about it was unexplainable - from its title, to its use of relative unknowns in the leads, to its use of dozens of random cameos in its climax, to its point of view on its story and its audience. Was it supposed to be a riddle for the ages, as the title's homophonic cousin the Sphinx posed? Or was this riddle just a bad joke, and the title a deliberate misspelling to partially warn potential audiences that, much like the derided King from "THE WIZARD OF ID," that this collective was a band of finks?

In short, what the phuck were they phynxing?

Now, my close friend and longtime "BEAT THE GEEKS" dais companion Andy Zax could tell you the whole story, based on years of direct contact and conversations with people who were involved, and on his impressive collection of what little material from the film reached the public. Unfortunately for all of us, Mr. Zax and his luminous wife, The Lovely Lisa Jane Persky (yes, that is her official title), are incommunicado right now, no doubt blissfully relaxed in an undisclosed location taking the advice of Robert Fripp and watching the boring parts of Marguerite Duras' films until they are no longer boring. So, I guess it's up to me to attempt an explanation of this film, the better to prepare the hardy souls who either will be attending the highly-anticipated Los Angeles screening hosted by Patton Oswalt at CineFamily this coming Sunday, the 18th, or will later be inspired somehow to take the plunge and purchase the DVD released last fall by the genial fellows at Warner Archive.

It is impossible to talk about the origins of THE PHYNX (or, as William Ollier Jr. would have spelled it, "GHONX") without making the educated guess that Warner Bros. Records executive Stan Cornyn, credited as sole screenwriter of the film, was certainly trying to create a synergistic band concept for his label and parent studio in the same manner that Colgems Records (co-owned by Columbia Pictures and RCA) was able to exploit The Monkees on the three platforms available to them. Like the Monkees, the four members of Phynx were comprised of two nonmusicians - Ray Chippeway and Michael A. Miller, and two trained musicians - Lonny Stevens, a house songwriter for Motown, and Dennis Larden (nee Sarokin), founding member of Every Mother's Son, who released a popular single "Come On Down to My Boat", all four performing under their real names while creating caricatured versions of themselves. And as the Pre-Fab Four had assistance from respected songwriters and comedy writers for their series, Cornyn enlisted the legendary songwriting team of Mike Leiber & Jeff Stoller to write and produce songs for the band, and Bob Booker & George Foster, responsible for writing the #1-charting, Grammy-winning comedy album THE FIRST FAMILY with Vaughn Meader, to come up with a storyline to introduce the band. Notice these are the parties who get top billing in the opening credits, and not any of the cast.

Over the course of repeat viewings (and yes, to write this, I indeed watched the movie more than once), I have come to the conclusion that THE PHYNX is a movie that mirrors the evolving attitude of its creative process, in that it was conceived in cynicism but somehow stumbled into sincerity. The credits delineation of Booker & Foster recieiving only story credit while only Cornyn receives screenplay credit suggests that this may be less a philosophical shift and more of a studio salvage mission, but weirdly, these two conflicting ideas somehow do manage to flow into one another.

The cynical atmosphere kicks in quickly after the animated opening credits, as hapless Super Secret Agency operative Corrigan (Lou Antonio filling what years later would likely be called the Hamilton Camp role), failing in the prologue to infiltrate Communist Albania, is brought into a meeting of all field agents - dressed as Klansmen, Black Power activists, Madison Ave. suits, hookers, Boy Scouts, and others, suggesting that the Government has extended its reach to every fringe group in America, ostensibly in the name of the public good, but more likely just to keep its foot in the door. The newsreel declaring that novelty stars like Col. Harlan Sanders, Butterfly McQueen, Edgar Bergen, and others are "World Leaders" is the kind of over-the-top sarcasm you find and tire quickly of about every 17 seconds on Twitter. When the anatomically suggestive supercomputer M.O.T.H.A. declares the strategy of collecting four random youths to form a rock band to get invited into Albania, the longtime music snobs' arguments about how anybody can be made a teen idol if enough money is thrown into the effort (a trope beginning with Stan Freberg and continuing in the noughts with MTV's 2gether) is milked heavily, right down to the po-faced "raves" from Dick Clark and James Brown. A sequence where mercurial producer "PhilBaby" claims he's conceived a hit single for months but pulls the title from a nearby newspaper almost exactly mirrors an incident involving Monkees' songwriters Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart bluffing Don Kirshner over what became the hit song "Valleri," an artistic subterfuge that possibly stuck in Leiber & Stoller's craw as they wrote the score. The band's SSA-muscled success, bizarrely enough, found intellectual company in Peter Watkins' scathing 1967 mockumentary PRIVILEGE, depicting a future London where business, church, and state unite in backing a sullen pop star in order to keep youth diverted from any subversive activity, so in all likelihood "Phynx" indeed meant that our interchangeable heroes are no better than narcs. As critic Graeme Clark wrote in his recent review, "For all its wackiness, for all its attempts to be down with the kids, THE PHYNX was all about The Man, by The Man, and who knows, possibly for The Man as well. Maybe Warners [buried the film because] we'd see right through it."

But just when you're about to share in the depicted exhausted exasperation of the bandmates themselves and bellow, "OKAY, WE GET IT," we get a good-hearted, if ham-handed, moment of empathy. Bandmember Dennis has escaped their literal musical boot camp and snuck back to his hometown, now attired in stereotypical but arguably zeitgeist-accurate hippie garb, and is shunned by all the citizens he remembered as friends, while a deceptively cheery song "Hello" plays underneath his rejection. He reluctantly returns to camp, where the other three guys, as if knowing all too well what happened on the outside, say "Hello." Where previously it would appear the creatives in charge thought little of hippies as a collective, this sequence suggests that they deserved common respect as individuals, and understood that for many, the only place where a man who looks against The Man (even when secretly working for The Man) can be treated like a man is among the men who get him. Okay, yes, it's as toothless a gesture as Pope Francis' "Who am I to judge" remark about gay clergy, but these establishment fuds were at least trying to be open-minded. After this sequence, the movie returns to its seen-it-all cynicism in a very sexist interlude, involving first a government-approved orgy, followed by a search for pieces of an Albanian penetration map justifying multiple sub-Mad Magazine-level sex jokes, but once the Phynx finally make it to Albania, the tone significantly changes.

The band discovers that, contrary to the limited intelligence the SSA has possessed, the Albanian President and his American wife are in fact virtual captives themselves to his Colonel Rostinov, because "he owns the tank." Taking advantage of their waning popularity in the States, the First Lady has in fact lured all the disappeared celebrities to her country to ease her separation hurt from America, since she is under the Cold War travel embargo of her Colonel, and appreciating the accommodations, the celebrities are in no rush to leave; much like Woody in TOY STORY 2, they are tempted to accept a sterile existence in a collection, feeling left behind by those who loved them first. The Colonel takes an roughly dim view of The Phynx, using them as publicity bait to pander to Albania's youth for the next likely-rigged election, not too far removed from the SSA's opinion of them as useful idiots. And amidst all this back and forth about the nature of fame and its outreach to people beyond a performer's home, followed by an ungainly curtain call of every former household name that's been cooling their heels in the President's company, Michael Barrett of Popmatters understandably posits, "...none of these cameos would appeal to the college crowd this film is supposedly courting or lampooning, and yet the whole project would turn off their parents too, and it did. So to whom did this barely released fiasco appeal except the 17 viewers who wanted bragging rights of having claimed that it wasn’t a hallucination?" But, I think I may just have the answer.

Imagine that you're an ordinary under-21'er in America, circa 1970. If you're lucky, you have five TV channels available to you - three network stations, an indie, and maybe a PBS affiliate. For all the "new" shows you're watching, you're probably also idly watching lots of reruns of old sitcoms and lots of Mid-Afternoon Matinee and/or Late Late Show movie broadcasts. You've got your own favorite stars of the present, to be sure, but you are getting a steady diet of images and performances of the past, of the people your parents and even grandparents grew up enjoying. You may not be into them, but if you watch enough TV like a typical '70's kid would, you're gonna know the faces. It's a cultural familiarity and osmosis we don't have today, when with hundreds of cable channels and programmable home video and online options, we no longer need to watch anything we weren't otherwise interested in just because "it's on right now."

Now, consider what we mentioned earlier - the "World Leaders" that are disappearing from America in this tale are not our most august, valued artists. It's not Helen Hayes, Arturo Toscanini, or Norman Mailer that's gone missing - it's past-their-prime folks like Leo Gorcey & Huntz Hall of the Bowery Boys, Ruby Keeler, Andy Devine, Dorothy Lamour, Georgie Jessel, etc. Performers who subsisted for years off of one character role or their entertaining manner on talk shows, and whom were now considered "disposable." Just as disposable as handsome teen pop stars were being regarded, often by the exact same power brokers that were casting TV shows, making movies, and serving as our cultural arbiters. For that matter, how much difference is there really between a manufactured band of the '60's and, say, an untrained pretty girl in the '40's who got hired by a studio and received a new name and backstory and became, for a few short years, a movie star? If their intended audience ultimately takes pleasure in the work, does it matter if the performer's talent was organic or indoctrinated?

Thus, in its convoluted and schizophrenic manner, THE PHYNX is attempting to send an message of cultural rapprochement within the generation gap. Saying to that mythical bewildered teenager looking at the parade of has-beens, "These folks you've seen on the Late Show, that you don't get the appeal of? They entertained us once upon a time, made us forget our troubles for a while. Which is what I think you must feel when you listen to one of these bands that I don't get the appeal of." Saying to the parent stuck accompanying their kid to this movie, "Remember how much you liked these people you don't get to see anymore? That's how your kid will feel when the stars of their formative years are displaced. Their nostalgia is just as fond as yours, even if right now it's not nostalgia yet." Even to the performers themselves, most of whom indeed had not had any high-profile exposure in years until the stunt casting of this movie, there was a message - when the band opens their command performance to this audience saying, "America needs you," they're effectively saying, "We have not forgotten you. We're making our fans happy the way you did yours. We're the same." Whereas JFK spoke of "passing the torch" to the new generation, the filmmakers wanted to have the new generation say "Thank you. We won't let you down."

And after that big lovefest has taken place, naturally, we get to see our parade of guest stars eagerly sneaking out of Albania hidden in radish carts (Albania's best export hiding America's best export?), while the Phynx perform for the Albanian youth. No matter what their intended purpose was before, they have legitimate fans here now, and their sunshine pop takes on the quality that Sunday night's screening host Patton Oswalt so memorably admired about '80's heavy metal: it blows a hole in the walls surrounding the country so that our entertainment elders can get out, and the influence of future flavor of the month stars can come in. Of course it is naive to think that only killjoys with military hardware don't enjoy a good dog-and-pony show - after all, you should see the videotapes in Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin's collections - but this was made in a more innocent time. And they may have been on to something. Why was Deborah Raffin just another blonde on American TV but treated as a virtual goddess in China?

None of this admittedly way-too-deep analysis makes THE PHYNX a good movie, but almost every review I've read over the years wants to know what the point of this production was, and this is what I came up with. Perhaps if and when you decide to watch it, you will agree. After all, I managed to find one unabashed rave in my research. Or perhaps you'll phynk I'm a phlat out phoole. Whatever; I'd rather stick with my foolishly generous opinion. After all, if, say, I found my 1.5-game-show-years-of-fame self being absconded to Chechnya and forced to share living quarters with Stacey Q., Klinton Spilsbury, and that "Oi!" Jacko dude, I have the sad feeling nobody will be sending a rock band to retrieve my has-been ass.

So, for Lonny Stevens, mentoring under-the-radar actors in Studio City; for Dennis Sarokin, still making music somewhere in Nashville; and for Ray and Michael A., wherever they are: I'll gladly give a hand to the Boys in the Band. And say thank you as well, from one temporary solution to the leisure problem to another.

"I've got all the room in the world"

The day before Sunday, July 18th, 1999, I had a birthday. Quite a triple threat, really: my first birthday in Los Angeles, my last birthday of the millenium, and my 30th as well. Displacement, end-of-the-century psychosis, and mid-life crisis all at the same time! So as a gift to myself the following day, since the actual date was consumed working in an undisclosed madhouse, I spent most of the day at a Playboy Expo & Playmate Reunion at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. And the highlight of the visit, among many great conversations and autograph gatherings and a photo with The Man himself, was a surprisingly extended encounter with '69 Playmate and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOORS star Cynthia Myers. We talked about the movie, other current film, pop music, my career ambitions, her family...a generous amount of personal sharing for a first-time meet. She was rather upset no one informed her of the revival screening I had attended at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood earlier that month of BVD, or of an upcoming full retrospective Russ Meyer festival planned for that September, so I told her I would buy her ticket if she would be my date for the event.

We exchanged email contacts, and while no actual date emerged (since the venue did give her an official guest invite later on), a correspondence and genuine friendship began, that heartbreakingly ended with her untimely passing earlier this month, November 5th. Many generations of men, including my own father, would have been left short for words to have an ongoing line of communication with one of the most lauded Playboy Playmates of all time, so this was a privilege that meant a great deal to me. As such, I figured that perhaps rather than concoct another essay about her significance to the cultural landscape, since there are plenty of very good ones already available, I'd rather just present in our own words, albeit slightly redacted for privacy, some moments to reflect the simple joy of having common ground with the lady behind those iconic images. It's nothing worthy of a Charing Cross Road address, mind you, but it's something you don't see everyday, Chauncey.

July 19, 1999: a proper thank you note post-convention

I can't thank you enough again for the great conversation I had with you today at the Playboy expo and for your autographing my BVD laserdisc. You really helped make a special birthday (my 30th) become even more special.
I don't have exact dates yet for the September Russ Meyer fest, but as soon as I do, I will send them to you. I hope you will still do me the honors of accompanying me.
Meeting you exceeded the highest of my hopes. You're sweet, kind, and deserving of all the good things you've got. Best of love and luck to you.

Hi Marc,
I'm glad I could be part of your birthday celebration...thank you for the info on BVD also I will watch for you to give me the dates and other info!

August 10, 1999: a quick shout-out to me while prepping for a Comic-Con appearance

Hey, Marc,
Get this......the two stars of the "Blair Witch Project" got hired by answering a casting notice in the back of Dramalogue!! That's why I love this crazy business.

November 17, 2007: a condolence note on the passing of her BVD co-star and former husband, Michael Blodgett

I just saw this blog posting from a few days ago about Michael's passing, and I wanted to send my support and love to you. I know that you had a
lot of difficulties in the last stages of your time together, but I'm sure he was a very important part of your life and that this is sad news for you.

Thank you so much for the notice. It is very thoughtful of you. Yes, we had more than our shares of ups and downs but everyone does. It was five years of non-boredom that's for sure!
I can't help my curiosity, do you know how he died??? He drank heavily for many years.

Unfortunately, I don't know any more details. So far, this blog entry is the only source I can locate for his passing - I guess the family hasn't submitted an obituary to the press yet. According to the post, though, the writer is a friend of [name redacted], so maybe you should drop him a note and see if he can tell you more. I don't think he'd mind.
The only thing I remotely know is that [another member of his family] was a member of the video store [I like to shop at], and I heard a few apocryphal stories from the store staff that he would pop in and chat but be very evasive on his whereabouts - there was suspicion he was evading taxes or some other situation.

On a completely different matter, the hot young director Edgar Wright (he made SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ, and one of the fake trailers for Quentin Tarantino's GRINDHOUSE) had wanted to screen BVD in December as part of a two-week program of his favorite movies at the New Beverly, but was told by Fox that they are withdrawing the film from circulation. Have you heard anything about this? Are those nasty people that control Russ' estate causing trouble and perhaps Fox is retaliating against them? They claim they no longer have the rights to it, but that sounds fishy considering it was their project in the first place, not one that originated with him.

It's all in Russ' secretary's hands..."Janis"....but she is so foolish, granted her and her boyfriend want to make all the money they can off of Russ, but they sure are NOT doing the right things. They don't even know how to interact with film people to preserve Russ' legacy. EVERYBODY could benefit..it could be a win win situation!
STILL trying to find out how Blodgett died. You are very perceptive...Michael wrote hundreds, maybe a thousand? bad checks, bullshitted a lot of people and never paid a dime in taxes. I know he was living in Santa Monica hotels. He always stayed there because I think he remembered doing "The Groovy Show" there and it made him feel good.
When I inquired about his death to Erich and he put me in touch (email) with [name redacted], of course I was very polite. She has not answered me yet. Maybe she won't? I just asked if he had had a long illness or maybe a heart attack.
Marc, if you hear anything please let me know....I'm curious if it was his liver....I have never seen anyone drink so hard in my life.

November 20, 2007: verdict arrives

Blodgett died of some form of Hepatitis. Well, he always joked about his liver being donated to the Smithsonian.
Be good, be safe.
Happy Thanksgiving!!

December 4, 2007: complications subside

Edgar Wright was able to pull some strings with Fox and he will be able to screen BVD on the 13th and 14th of this month at the New Beverly for his film festival. (Fox claimed there's some sort of music problem involving Strawberry Alarm Clock that caused them to pull fhe film from circulation, but that sounds fishy). He's pairing BVD up with Bob Rafelson's HEAD starring the Monkees, and Micky Dolenz will be coming to introduce it on the 14th. So it would be an added bonus if you were able to attend that night as well.
Tonight, Edgar is showing BUGSY MALONE with PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, and Paul Williams will be there, so I'm excited for that.

Thanks so much for the update. Paul Williams....Sounds so exciting!
Life is so damn interesting! When you emailed me with the tragic news of Michael Blodgett's death, I went to the IMDB and posted my condolences...it was read by [a family member] who, in turn, passed it to [another family member]. To make a long story short we have become e mail friends.. if you can imagine that.
I mentioned that I have a friend (you) and you let me know when there will be showings of Dolls and events connected to it. She said she would like to view it with me...do you think the showing your telling me about would be a good one for her and I to attend?
I trust your judgment.
Keep up the excellent work!
Let me know how Paul Williams was...I hope he's a nice person.

The Sunday night show was incredible! The New Beverly was practically sold out. Besides Edgar Wright who was hosting, the other luminaries who showed up included horror director Eli Roth and screenwriter Diablo Cody, whose movie JUNO opens tomorrow and will likely be a big awards contender. Plus, as an added bonus, Wright added a surprise midnight show of ISHTAR to the program, and it was introduced by Quentin Tarantino! Paul was terrific, he spoke a lot about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (which was presented in a print almost brand new) and his career in general. I was struck by the fact that Paul is 67, but he looks even better than the "old" version of himself during the Faustian portion of PHANTOM. According to Quentin, who sat next to him, Paul had planned just to watch the first part of ISHTAR, since it started late and he's not a midnight person, but he not only stayed to the end, he sang along with all the funny songs he had written for the film. It was 3:30 in the morning when we all finally got out of the theatre, but it was a great time.
Now, when I spoke briefly to Edgar, he said there were still some kinks to work out in screening DOLLS next week, so there's a chance it may not happen. But I will keep you posted on that. So yes, absolutely, if it's a go, you should attend. You'll love Edgar: he's very handsome and energetic and I'm sure he'd get a kick out of meeting you.

What a fantastic turnout!! And, what a wonderful treat for all the fans!
Keep up the great work Marc!

And that, unfortunately, is where the correspondence ends. Part of the losing touch was just us going about our business and not having a real point-of-entry topic to start a new conversation. And, as I've learned in the recent days, a large part was likely the toll that cancer was taking on both her husband and herself; I had not seen her name attached to any of the events she had long been a fixture at, but I had chalked that up to other possible personal reasons besides ill health.

Which brings up the other reason I'm writing about Cynthia. Like many Americans right now, the combined costs of care for herself and her husband wiped out almost all their assets. The family does not have enough money to even pay for her cremation or for a chapel to hold a service, so a very generous friend and fellow Playmate is raising the funds to give her a proper sendoff. And they're pretty close to their goal, so I would like to play a role in putting them over the top. So if you have been reading as a fellow fan or just from a name-curiosity search, any dollar amount, even literally one dollar, that you can add to the till would be welcome.



Thank you, Cynthia, for large images and small kindnesses. See you in the long run.

Sarah Holcomb: A Letter for a Lost Friend

Hello, Ms. Holcomb. My name is Marc Edward Heuck. How are you? I know that is a banal question that gets thrown around for empty conversations several times day, but I am honestly interested. You don't have to give a boilerplate answer like "fine" or "okay" if you don't want to; I certainly don't like those vague terms. I always lean towards words like "reasonable" or "content" myself - it's still pleasant enough to let the moment fizzle and go back to the day's business, but it does makes the other person pay attention and notice that I'm not just saying what they expect to hear. And right now, I would like to hear whatever is on your mind, in however manner you would like to express it. 

"Once I was part of the scenery

Now I am part of the problem

Everyone looks at me funny these days

But I'm not laughing

 Nobody knows what to say to me

Nobody bothers to ask

Once I was part of the problem

Now I am part of the past"

--Mike Viola

I know who you are. Like many who perhaps try to strike up conversation with you, I grew up in your shadow. You're roughly a generation older than I am, you were already making commercials and ready for college while I was still in middle school, so I was not supposed to be seeing you or the movies that you were so funny in. In fact, I recall my mother literally gave me a Come To Jesus speech when she found out my father let me watch them during my weekends in his custody. But the dirty deed was done, and besides having two movies that I would go on revisiting to the present day, I really liked Clorette DiPasto and Maggie O’Hooligan, I wanted to be friends with them. I didn't want to date them - Clorette was too young and sweet and to try heavy petting with her would make me feel as guilty as Pinto felt, and Maggie was so ruff and tuff and pissed off all the time that I probably would have annoyed her as a boyfriend - but they were good-hearted gals and it would have been fun to spend more time with them beyond what the VHS tapes offered. And so, as my lifelong obsession with film got honed and refined, and I started paying attention to character actors, I figured out that I wanted to be friends with you, Sarah Holcomb.

That's an odd statement to write, and I'm sure it's a hard statement for you to read, because I've spent a lot of time piecing together your life's story, and the recurring line I'm finding is that you didn't have a lot of good friends...or at least, the right kinds of friends. There were probably the enabler friends, the ones who knew that you had health necessities but instead of helping you manage them, they took advantage of them because they found it entertaining. And the fair-weather friends from the movie sets, who liked you hanging around unless you got to be all heavy and uncool, and then forgot about you when they moved on to other movies and other friends while you took the steps necessary to heal yourself. Certainly there were good, kind people who wanted to help you, but couldn't understand what you needed, or lacked the patience to be there when you couldn't go it alone. 

And among the myths that have arisen since you took your exit from show business, what is certainly the most heartbreaking one, provided that it is true - and I speak for many when I suspect and pray it is not - is that over the years, you have been passing your time in near-seclusion, never seen in pleasant company or sharing animated conversation with others. Of course, if that is true, maybe that is what you want, and from that track record of people letting you down in the past, I would not find any fault with that choice. Similarly, hearing a complete stranger in the cyberverse say they want to keep company with you may well sound sour as well, since I don't really know you, we're not in the same city, and "cyberhugs" are empty treacle when one feels really isolated. 

"That's the memory I filed on the fringe

Along with the memory of the pain you lived in

I don't have the password

But the path is chainlinked

So if you've got the time

Set up the tone to sync

Tap in the code

I'll reach you below

Hello, hello

Are you out there?"

--Poe

Sifting more through the truths and the speculation in the wake of your exit, I can imagine the hurt and pressure of trying to keep all your conflicts contained in that harsher period of history, when mental and emotional obstacles were not spoken of in the common vernacular, but were more often fodder for ridiculous third-act twists in horror movies. Today when bad wiring and bad choices reach critical mass, an entertainer can publicly say they are seeking help and no one will blink. Heck, I have close friends who speak candidly about their struggles with depression or bipolar behavior and the progress they are making in keeping it from devastating them. We might be a society that overdiagnoses and overmedicates what is arbitrarily determined to be aberrant activity, but at least we understand that these are real problems and no one need apologize for them. In this modern climate, I could easily imagine you engaging in some gallows humor, perhaps using that lovably terrible Oirish accent from CADDYSHACK to mutter "Ran outta me meds agin; that's a' ah need!". I can't help but feel that you could have been much more at ease in those later years that I came of age, and would not have to make the all-or-nothing choice that you did. 

"You had a dream

You know you dreamt so much

You had a dream

You know it meant so much

You're just a victim of the circumstance

I mean, what else could you do?

You saw your dream and you just took a chance

And for a while your dream came true

What could you do?"

--Pete Ham

What troubles me most in the fog of rumor about your life now is the notion that you take no pride or pleasure in your small but potent body of work. That because of all the terrible realities that took place when the cameras stopped rolling, you can't look at Clorette today and laugh, and appreciate that you had excellent comic timing. Or that in the off chance someone recognized you and tried to compliment you, it would only send you back to the bad times and thus darken the moment. Again, a perfectly legitimate and understandable reaction if this is true, but as a viewer who loves to watch your finest hours, still a sad thought. Because it was not just Elton John sitting in the 22nd row and looking at you and our other favorite screen females with simple innocent thoughts of appreciation and respect back then, and today there's even more of us who genuinely like you for being such a great presence in those movies. To learn of any apocryphal sordid events offscreen would not nor should not diminish our love of you and the work, and it seems to me that when you've brought that genuine, unblemished pleasure to millions over the decades, that has to be a good thing, something for which you deserve to reap the rewards.

Because I don't know if you ever spend time on the internet, or Google yourself, but you are still on our minds. A one-time encounter with a kindly railroad worker has become your unofficial messageboard for fans and former schoolmates of yours, trading memories and prayers. You have inspired orginal artwork, and eclectic mixtapes. And, well, a whole bunch of urban legends...

 

"In 2000 I heard she lived in Boston. Thats all i know"

"I googled her name and came up with a photograph on the website for Northern Arizona University. Account for age and it sure looks like her."

"A Providence radio DJ claims to have seen a former cast member of Animal House working in a convenience store near Brown University."

"Sarah still resides in Connecticut receiving government assistance far removed from the public eye and prefers to remain that way."

 

...and the one thing in those tall tales that is indeed clear to all of us is that wherever you are, you're not coming back, and you'd like us to let you be. And for as much as we miss you, we just want you to be as untroubled as possible, so we are all keeping our distance.

 

"But it's too late to say you're sorry

How would I know, why should I care

Please don't bother trying to find her

She's not there"

--Rod Argent

Thus, this is where my outreach to you ends. For all I know, you will never read this letter, and things will stay as they are. But in that microscopic chance that you would ever want to say something, anything, to a receptive stranger...I'm an easy person to find. In the meantime, I guess all I can do is play you a song.

 

If it is true that you've dismissed your previous achievements as nothing, well then, to borrow from your own quotebook, "Tanks fer nuttin'." Because for many of us, your "nuttin'" was really something.

"Wherever she is, I hope she's doing fine,

But I wish that she would phone or drop us a line.

Till then I've got nothing to ease my mind,

And I'm thinking about her all the time"

--Ray Davies

"No, I better, I say, I better not look; I just might be in there."

Twelve years ago this very day, I became a Los Angeles resident. First parked my car in the garage, slept a night in my apartment, bought a bag of Jack in the Box. It was easily the biggest change in my life I ever made. I came out here with a dream, a dream that to a significant degree is still unfulfilled, but if you consider that the average sleep cycle contains multiple dreams, then it can safely be said that while one has yet to arrive, others have been lived out quite nicely.

I do not think it is hubris or hyperbole to bring up the fact that a significant portion of today's readership of this blog is due to the generous nature of filmmaker Edgar Wright. When I declared his most recent film to be one of the decade's best, he liked my words so much they were tweeted to over 200,000 followers, many of whom came to visit, and out of that contingent a select few have chosen to continue visiting. I subsequently had occasion to provide some material assistance to Wright's second programming block at the New Beverly Cinema and again received both public and private gratitude from the genial maestro. While I do not classify myself as any kind of professional critic, and he has been just as generous to my friends Julia Marchese and Peter Avellino so I am not any kind of golden child, I daresay I have not witnessed this kind of mutual appreciation between creative visionary and cultural arbiter since Werner Herzog and Roger Ebert. And it serves as template for one of the installments of the REM cycle that came in the package with my move to the West Coast. 

Like many a child of the '70's, I was raised on the groundbreaking story and song omnibus FREE TO BE YOU AND ME, and among my favorite pieces was Betty Miles' modernized (and to some degree, benevolently sanitized) legend of Princess Atalanta and the foot race, where a headstrong princess plans to thwart her father's desire to marry her off by agreeing to wed the winner of a marathon she knows she will trounce all competitors in, and an ordinary boy who wants merely an audience with the princess and trains fiercely to compete in the race and match her skill. They end up in a tie at the finish, the boy refuses to accept the marriage unless the princess desires it also, and both parties choose merely to spend an afternoon getting acquainted and go their separate ways, with the narrator proclaiming that perhaps they will meet again, perhaps not, but in either case are living life as they wish. While most read this as a feminist spin on traditional fairy tale myths, few seem to pick up that it is also a rather observant parable on aspects of our desire for fame which a lot of people never quite understand.

James Mangold's WALK THE LINE more explicitly provides similar insight into what we might call the Atalantian myth. At the beginning of the movie, boy Johnny is shown as fascinated by show business, lovingly quoting Foghorn Leghorn, and more importantly, a fan of precocious child star June Carter, the unspoken key being that she is living the life that seems so unlikely but that he yearns for: comfort, warm family, singing, success. While he grows older, he aspires to the dream, works at it quite fiercely, but he otherwise follows the patterns of sensibility by marrying a childhood sweetheart and getting a salesman job, because everything he's experienced says he won't make it, even dwelling on the fact that he really does not know first wife Vivian that well, but he begs her to marry him because he has already absorbed the notion that she is as good as he deserves or can expect. Then Johnny breaks out. And now he's considered the equal of a hitmaker like Elvis. And, more importantly, the equal of June Carter; he gets to talk to her and be friends with her. He's gotten validation that yes, what was seemingly impossible is happening, and unfortunately, his wife hasn't dreamt as large as him. Sure, she loves him and is happy for him, but she sees entertainment as a job that can be left behind when at home, when he sees it as his whole reason to go on.

Let me compare this to a plot thread in Stephen Hopkins' rather terrible HBO biopic THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS. There is a crucial scene where he tells his wife and family that he's leaving them because he "loves Sophia Loren more" than them. Maybe those were his exact words, but in the way it is presented in the movie, it is not correct to his character. Yes, Sellers was a cold, selfish bastard who put himself ahead of his family as opposed to Cash, but in a way they were similar. What Sellers was likely trying to convey to his first family was that after years of being the chubby boy who did silly acts in the longshot hope that a pretty girl would just look at him, he was now getting that kind of attention without having to be "on." He was in love with what Loren represented, that he was cast as a romantic suitor for her in a movie (where, in keeping with the Atalantian myth, she was playing a princess), and that it was considered plausible to do so. Again, it may not be fair to compare two famous people of different integrity, but the execution of this common obsession which unites Cash and Sellers is handled better. In both biopics, we see the requisite road flings, the tension at home and on travel, the channeling into drugs and violence. But Hopkins' agenda is just to show what a nasty prat Sellers was, at best an egotist and beauty/star-fucker, while Mangold understands that Cash stays drawn to June because in his youth, he basically wanted to be her, and upon getting to know her, and their heretofore unknown commonalities (overshadowed by a "better" sibling, sublimating insecurity through comedy, dealing with public shame over a first divorce), realizes (too late for his own marriage) his insight was better than he could have guessed and that they were meant to be in each other's lives.

Sure, on the surface this is naive, and could be interpreted as suggesting that Jodie Foster should have had a one-nighter with John Hinckley. But this does get at why we love certain stars: the notion that they are doing the things we would like to do, and that if we worked hard enough on our own, we could be on equal footing to them. The term I particularly like for this status of equillibrium comes from professional wrestling. Most matches you see on TV are called "squashes" - some ham-and-egger gets pummeled by the star in under two minutes, demonstrating that the erstwhile challenger is clearly not in the same class as the victor. But then there are the matches where someone still rather unknown but not obviously green is in the ring with a much bigger name, and that match goes for a longer stretch, and even if the star still wins, he has made it look like that new guy was a legitimate challenger, and the crowd starts respecting that new guy more and paying attention. It's called "The Rub." An established, respected performer elevates a lesser-known individual and gives them the appearance of being on their level. And all of us who ever plucked three chords or first learned how to say "To be or not to be" go forward in the hope that our skills will be strong enough to earn that rub from those that inspired us. 

Which is where I drag myself into the story. I would be lying if I didn't admit to some of my hopes upon moving to Los Angeles being unrealistic. In some cases, such as meeting a pretty ingenue at a premiere party and asking for a phone number, they still are. And on those nights where you're looking at $30 in the checking account and how many $1000's in credit card debt, in a cluttered apartment where no woman has set foot for as many years as it took to release "Chinese Democracy," you wonder if the whole megillah is a misguided notion. But in the decade-plus I've been here, I think it's safe to say on more than one occasion I've run that foot race with Atalanta, and spent some wonderful vigils together. Whether it was Mark Cronin putting me in pole position on a silly game show for 130 episodes, or Edgar Wright tweeting this blog to some of you this past New Year's Eve, there have been enough applications of The Rub to tell me that my dreams are still worth pursuing.

So here's to 12 years of training, prayers, and vitamins, and down-to-earth princesses. Let's keep running a while shall we.