This guy was my sensei, he was really really good at the physical operating, wise understanding, AND charismatic motivating parts of that role, I endorse him
Uh, okay. You know the whole “cholos love Morrissey” thing? I was going to some hipster show at Little Temple, get there for the first band and the audience is like a solid wall of like 40 of these guys, Dickies and flannel shirts buttoned at the top, shaved heads just fat enough so they have that little roll at the bottom of their neck, all arms crossed nodding at this opening band that’s honestly nothing special, and then when the set’s done they just up and leave.
And I’m like *what* the HELL was that and apparently it was Johnny Marr’s side project
Pf no. If anything I’m drawn to the canonical generational experience, which in the mid-2000s meant moving to Echo Park to Get Famous by going to parties with their own photographers, and in the 2010s meant moving to Portland and building social media rep by thinkpiecing about the alt-right.
Max landis is the same dude who went on Twitter and whined about how people don’t want original movies when like every movie he ever wrote bombed
“Casting Scarlet Johansson is the best thing that could have happened to Ghost in the Shell” Is a real thing that came out of this guys mouth, I legit want to die
I can name two, right now, who are in mainstream television shows and have a strong history of martial arts.
Lucy Liu and Ming-Na Wen.
Okay. Hold on.
I dunno if y’all actually watched the video Max Landis put out, but this post boils his argument down past his actual points and simplifies it so he looks like a racist idiot.
I don’t necessarily agree with his whole ‘Scarlett is the best thing that could have happened to this movie’ thing, BUT I do think the argument behind why he says it is actually pretty solid. There are different ways to get a movie green-lit and to receive substantial monetary backing for projects. One of those ways is to have an international big-name star attach their name to the project, because the industry sees a big name as a big draw for audiences and thus they think the movie will make money. Right now none of the well known Asian actresses on the market are actually big enough to be able to do that. Landis is not talking about how good Asian actresses are at their craft, he’s talking about how the industry views their relative star power. Also, Landis isn’t less defending the white washing, so much as explaining why it’s happening.
I do think it’s worth arguing that the movie producers could have tried harder to get green lit through other channel. It’s worth talking about how few Japanese people were cast, even outside of the main role. It’s worth talking about why the industry doesn’t put more value on Asian actresses, and why there are so few roles for them in the first place which limits their opportunities to become bigger stars. I also think Landis is out of line saying people shouldn’t be angry at the movie industry, but rather at the culture that makes it so we have no A-List Asian actresses (especially because the movie industry plays a large role in creating/disseminating that culture, as much as it is subject to the outcomes of the culture itself). But dismissing his argument out of hand isn’t actually going to help anyone improve the situation because it ignores the realities of big-budget movie production and the underlying causes that need to be addressed.
Also, I would like to point out that the character and story in question are fundamentally Japanese and neither Lucy Liu nor Ming-Na Wen are Japanese. While having an asian actress would be better than a white actress, it would still be pretty suspect to pull a ‘one asian is the same as any other asian’ thing. So if you want to suggest actresses, keep that in mind.
All good points.
I’ve noticed that often people on Tumblr will be right that someone is wrong, but wrong about why that person is wrong.
Something that isn’t mean but isn’t right either gets taken as something else that is much more, and much more obviously, horrendous.
The problem is, it seems that he’s wrong.
Look at Ms.
Johansson’s own filmography from the era before The Avengers. It’s not nothing, but going by IMDB, if you COMBINED the gross revenue for all 20-ish films she appeared in the 10 years before her first appearance in the MCU in Iron Man 2, it would be ~$475 million, less than Iron Man 2 individually and less than half of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Either he’s wrong about how Hollywood works, or, more likely, he’s wrong about the fact that Hollywood is justified in thinking that way (and hence he’s wrong that the movie industry is merely reflecting the preferences of the culture at large).
He’s right. Presales. As far as a distributor in Buttfuckistan judging yet-to-be-filmed prospects is concerned, “[solid, well-told story] in [foreign language] featuring [talented and thematically appropriate thespian]” is arthouse shit (and neither of those quality promises are guaranteed), while “[cinematic output] featuring [actor his audience has not only heard of, but recognizes as an aspirational icon of humanity]” is a saleable product.
Anonymous asked: You hear anything about these Will Smith rumors when you were in L.A.?
That he and Jada Pinkett are each other’s beards? That’s the second most common Hollywood rumor I heard, after “Harrison Ford is a stoner” and ahead of Dan Schneider. Most everyone made sure to footnote that they’re good friends and love their kids.
I spent a lot of time experiencing things that pattern-matched to tropes that were goddamn ridiculous, realizing the actual experience was actually like that, and accepting that actual experience was just goddamn ridiculous. Highlights:
1) I hit my head and got amnesia once. It works exactly like all the cheesy plot devices.
2) When I lived in Echo Park it wasn’t even a rough area really. The first guy I remember welcoming me to the neighborhood did end up shot in his car but that was a weird case, and I did see the tags change as Echo Parque and Big Top Locos and some other punks struggled in the aftermath but feh, boys’ play.
Anyway it was mostly an area that used to be rough so the guys who had grown up there still had some street to them ;and I used to watch ridiculous kung fu movies on channels like 57 and 17 and 29 back before they were UPN and WB and even FOX and I thought it was ridiculous the trope where local toughs would show up at the dojo to challenge the students
And I was going to a dojo there and then, boxing/American Kempo/BJJ and this actually happened on the semi-regular - not like they came in gangs with sticks but they’d swagger in individually to show the fancy boys what’s what - and the students would win against some tough beefy dudes for the same in-the-movies reason that we actually knew what we were doing
(gym rats especially. they’d have strong muscles but only punch with a few of them, while the we punched with everything between the toes and the knuckles. anyway, you realized they weren’t used to punching people who wouldn’t stay there while the punch arrived and worse, would interrupt them by punching back)
I wasn’t there for it but there was this one time this wild-haired scraggly-clothed ranting older dude showed up claiming to be a genius black-belt and wanting to challenge our sensei, and the issue was
A) we were close enough to downtown LA (and the concentration of social services that produced Skid Row) that the more ambitious crazies were a regular feature of the street landscape
BUT
B) we were also not far from American Kempo’s “hometown” of Pasadena, where (stereotypically eccentric) CalTech types and JPL rocket scientists were overrepresented as students
and people could not tell how to properly categorize him
So someone was asking me for more Hollywood stories recently.
This one’s inspired by the recent case of a black woman in the audience at a Trump rally who realized she was being seated behind the candidate for the purpose of appearing in frame on broadcasts and, insulted, tried to ruin the shot by determinedly reading a book.
Anyway the story goes that in LA I knew one guy who worked in production on a bunch of game shows. When I knew him he was working the debut run of National Bingo Night.
Anyway, the centerpiece of the set was a super-sized bingo cage and balls that would serve for the drawings that drive the action. Like most game shows, the provision of prize monies - and thus the bearing of risk - was bid out to a bond company, and two bond company stooges on set were the only ones allowed to touch the balls, to guard against tampering.
The problem was that when the cage gadget was introduced, it malfunctioned constantly and would spew these giant man-sized balls all over the set, and then the entire crew would lean back and laugh while these two 20-something goons in suits scrambled around trying to manhandle them back one by one.
ANYWAY, that’s not really what I came here to talk about, the bit that hangs off that news hook is a more general truth about game shows, or any show with an on-camera audience, and that is that those audiences are all rigorously filtered and selected for aesthetics’ sake. The very first step in audience processing is to be paraded before production assistants, who make ruthless snap judgements on who’s telegenically attractive enough to be sorted into the “Pretty Audience”, to be seated in sections that cameras sweep for audience shots, and who’s relegated to the “Ugly Audience” that doesn’t appear in frame.
If you come in a group of friends, they won’t hesitate or apologize to split you up by attractiveness, because after all this whole process isn’t something they’re doing for you, it’s something you’re doing for them.
Thought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week:
what we need are variable length television episodes. The entire problem with Law and Order is that, if they’ve found the bad guy and we’re only at minute 20, he’s not the bad guy. Even if it’s four minutes from the ending there’s probably still a twist coming, so someone is going to pull out a gun and/or jump out a window. You know everything you need to know about how an episode is going to play out just by looking at the clock.
Movies have this problem too. No, the protagonist isn’t going to die, we’re only 45 minutes in. No, their grand plan to crush the villain isn’t going to work, we’ve still got another hour that they’re going to have to fill somehow. Okay, this grand plan is going to work, because we’re down to eight minutes.
Reading a detective story or law story is pretty much the exact same problem - setup, obvious misdirection, apparent resolution that we know is a lie because we’re only halfway though the page count. I knew Harry Potter wasn’t dead because I could feel seventy more pages in my hand.
And that’s print, so we can’t fix it, but now that lots of people read on ebooks I’m astonished there’s not an app that lets authors set false endings and false lengths to their stories. And has no one recut Law and Order to be a thousand times less predictable just by virtue of not always lasting exactly 43 minutes plus commercial breaks? I would pay a lot of money for a Netflix-of-lies full of television episodes and movies of varying length and thus, for once, genuinely unpredictable.
Not sure this is solvable for movies* or books, but I think variable length tv is on it’s way in. British tv has always had, compared to the US more variation in episodes per series (often because of actor availability) and more variation show length between series, including season of the same show. They’re more willing to vary episode lengths within a show too, and it’s quite good for suspense like that trick where the extra long series finale resolves a bunch of plot threats unexpectedly quickly, leaving the viewer unbalanced, that works much better with an 85-minute episode or whatever than with a US style two part finale.
Anyway I’m fairly sure the reason British tv is so much more variable is that a) the schedules are more flexible b) miniseries are way more popular so people are okay with a Luther series of three 80 minute episodes or whatever it was. Netflix is even more extreme in terms of point a, and webisodes and minisodes are ramping up b, so the potential is there for good things on this front!.
*Well, it’s already somewhat solved for movies as a whole because standard running times have expanded so much: when I first started watching Hitchcock and Hammer Horror movies I would always get blind sided by the ending - it’s only been 90 minutes!
(and can’t you just turn off page count on your e-reader?)
Don’t think variable length will help much because no matter what the length is you’ll still be able to go “hey, there’s still 15 minutes/25%/wevs left”. You could do it if viewers watched blind to the length which I suppose could technically work on Netflix where you’re not tied to the “4 regularly spaced cliffhangers that keep people bound for 3 minutes worth of ads” model, but I don’t know how many people are going to be like “Ah, a new episode’s out! I know what I’m doing for the next 2 hours and/or 30 minutes and will be satisfied either way, and don’t mind that without a scrollbar to tell me I can only skip around through VHS-style FF/REW controls.”
You can kind of get away with stuff like that in movies - consider the fake happy ending to The Ring - because not that many people will be thinking “ah yes, this is 106 minutes long and my internal timer that I started after the previews and kept up the whole time I was sitting enthralled in a dark room says we’re only at 87”.
I think if anything the way to deal with this is to wield the audience’s genre/medium-savviness against it. Joss Whedon’s always been good at that but what was really a master class in the technique was the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. You’d be like “well, obviously that guy can’t be the perp behind the case-of-the-week because he’s clearly in the middle of a multi-episode character arc that would fuck up/a member of the main cast” and then an act or two later you’d be like “welp”.
Everyone and -where I know has been praising Fury Road, correctly.
Though. You talk about directors able to succeed big with big-budget action blockbusters with a distinctive, suit-unfriendly vision, you know who comes immediately to mind? Mel Gibson.
(His creative signature is the twinned themes of freedom and the violation of the human body.)
Hollywood has a legend that the McCarthyite blacklist was broken by prohibited filmmakers “secretly” working behind frontmen and then revealing their involvement after the films in question racked up praise and awards.
We had a former child star who once I knew him I noticed had bit parts in everything, and voices in half the kids’ cartoons in production. He actually took the biggest chunk of our time, mostly mediating between his (stage) mom and (former child star) girlfriend as they tried to outmaneuver each other for control of him. He booked hella jobs tho, so worth it.
Anyway when he was coming in we had to lock the door to the waiting room because otherwise he would burst in and monopolize our time because he’d just never learned how not to be the center of attention at all times. Like once when the managers were taking a call while they waited on a contract to print he used the time to come out to the assistants’ room, pull out a deck of cards, and do fucking magic tricks for us.
And the weirdest thing about it, it wasn’t actually grating. They were good magic tricks! And he was very charming and charismatic! Dude just didn’t have an off switch.
What else… oh, there was a guy who had been a soap actor but hadn’t worked in a while and the calls I overheard pushing him were these ridiculous dances of talking around things, like “Oh yeah, he’s GREAT, and everyone loves him, ALWAYS HAS, and aah, you know, that’s just catty rumors, really he’s never even been ACCUSED of ANYTHING, certainly not raping his costar in her trailer, anyway WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE, he’s a WHOLE NEW MAN now, have you heard about his newfound passion for animal rights activism?”
Oh also we had Aaron Carter for a while, which among other things means I’ve actually seen his shitty motocross movie. Dude would never ever return calls, if we actually needed to talk to him we had to contact him through Lou Pearlman’s office. Now this is an industry of assholes and these managers held their own, but that’s the only guy I ever saw them tangibly afraid of.
Yeah that is a big change. I worked for LA talent managers for a while and I’d spend all day reading breakdowns (descriptions of roles to be cast in upcoming productions) to flag ones to submit clients for. You’d see a lot of roles listed white, a few various types of brown, but the majority were unspecified. This being America though, unmarked race is implicitly white and while you can often get a nonwhite actor an audition for an unmarked role it’s rare to get a callback, let alone cast.
So all those cast at once for unmarked (or even other-marked!) major roles, yeah that is huge.
That said I guarantee you she’s right on the money when she chalks this up to the success of Empire and other minority-led shows last season, and if we don’t see any more such hits who knows. Hollywood output is easily 80% attempts to pattern-match to recent hits (and even that more the window dressing than the load-bearing elements).
The one exception though, the DisneyLodeon empires had very carefully engineered diversity, the ethnic mix of shows was calibrated before the concept was even fleshed out. (DisneyLodeon is the closest thing to the old studio “star system”, where roles and even whole productions are less important in themselves than as opportunities to “break” a member of your talent stable as a star, then to have lead roles and movies and music careers crafted around them).
Like, if a Disney show was written with roles for asian girl A, black girl B, and caucasian girl C, they might consider reworking B around a particularly good-fitting asian actress, but then A would definitely be reworked black to rebalance.
Back around the casting of the Wizards of Waverly Place pilot, we had a client, girl of 14 (but you might not have guessed it - among teen actors, boys tend runty so they can play younger than their age; girls tend short but precociously developed so they can play hotter than their age). She was maybe a quarter Mexican so we had two headshots and contact sheets, one with her real name and everyday blue-eyed appearance for white or unmarked roles, one with brown contacts, black hair, and a Spanish surname for latina roles.
‘As the website of the current Laurel Canyon Association notes, “restrictive covenants were attached to the new parcel deeds. These were thinly veiled attempts to limit ownership to white males of a certain class. While there are many references to the bigotry of the developers in our area, it would appear that some residents were also prone to bias and lawlessness. This article was published in a local paper in 1925:
Frank Sanceri, the man who was flogged by self-styled ‘white knights’ on Lookout Mountain in Hollywood several months ago, was found not guilty by a jury in Superior Judge Shea’s courtroom of having unlawfully attacked Astrea Jolley, aged 11.
“Wealthier residents were also attracted to Laurel Canyon. With the creation of the Hollywood film industry in 1910, the canyon attracted a host of ‘photoplayers,’ including Wally Reid, Tom Mix, Clara Bow, Richard Dix, Norman Kerry, Ramon Navarro, Harry Houdini and Bessie Love.”
The author of this little slice of Laurel Canyon history would clearly like us to believe that the “wealthier residents” were a group quite separate from the violent hooligans roaming the canyon. The history of such groups in Los Angeles, however, clearly suggests otherwise. Paul Young, for example, has written in L.A. Exposed of Los Angeles’ early “vigilance committees, which stepped in to take care of outlaws on their own, often with the complete absolution of the mayor himself. Judge Lynch, for example, formed the Los Angeles Rangers in 1854 with some of the city’s top judges, lawyers, and businessmen including tycoon Phineas Banning of the Banning Railroad. And there was the Los Angeles Home Guard, another bloodthirsty paramilitary organization, made up of notable citizens, and the much-feared El Monte Rangers, a group of Texas wranglers that specialized in killing Mexicans. As one would expect, there was no regard for the victim’s rights in such kangaroo courts. Victims were often dragged from their homes, jail cells, even churches, and beaten, horse-whipped, tortured, mutilated, or castrated before being strung up on the nearest tree.”
And that, dear readers, is how we do things out here on the ‘Left’ Coast.’
Had a college girlfriend who passed on that when her mom was a girl at a sleepover in the foothills at the Valley mouth of the canyon, in one of those hillside houses where the basement has a sliding glass door, Captain Beefheart and his band showed up drunk and uninvited and had to be shooed away.
Only Canyon story of my own is that when I was riding Blue Bitch up around there the timing chain snapped and I had to glide/push her down, not only was that the only time I’ve ever had motorcycle problems that someone else didn’t stop to offer help, but the other drivers on the road were downright obnoxious about me being in their way.
No overnight weekend parking in that part of Weho so I just pushed it east down the sidewalk on Hollywood. Stopped in a liquor store and got a flask, pushed it 200 steps on one side, took a drink, switched. By the time I was clear of the nightlife district I was kind of drunk and figured I was close enough to Vermont where it starts to go downhill, so I kept going and managed to mostly glide back to my mechanic’s place behind the Mexican Mafia nightclub at Sunset and Silverlake.
Back when I was back in LA trying to be a screenwriter I did, as a lot of people in that situation do, a bunch of script coverage. Script coverage is basically reading a script (as a rule of thumb, scripts run one page per minute of runtime, with a lot less text per page than prose) and generating a 2-4 page summary and evaluation.
There are a few reasons you might have coverage commissioned: to evaluate a script for purchase and development; to judge its writer’s skills for employment on other projects; to judge its suitability for a particular actor or director; or just so you can pretend to have cared enough about it in Hollywood’s back-scratching favor economy.
The one constant is that it’s done by assistants or freelancers on behalf of executives, agents, or other “suit” variants who can then pretend they’ve actually read and judged the script themselves. Suits who make decisions relating to scripts are, as a rule, actively proud of the fact they don’t read scripts (or anything else).
On the one hand this makes sense; to them the script is a means to the end of making a deal and by treating it as a vestigal irrelevance they can attribute all glory of a successful deal to themselves. On the other hand, the hand that cares about human culture, this is worse than genocide, and would still be so even if I were particularly bothered by genocide.
Movies basically only have intelligible plots because movie stars have enough self-respect and pull to insist on only working on projects that do, which is why so often when you see a movie starring some interchangeable young models fresh off a fandombait CW series they don’t.
So that said, let me tell you about three scripts I remember doing coverage on (this was mostly 2005-07ish): the one that “got around”, in that I ran into the most people that also remembered having read it; the one I considered the best (but never got made as a movie); and the only one that actually got produced.
The one that got around: The Short Season
This was a script about a small-market but locally beloved baseball team and its general manager who, resigned to the fact that he didn’t have the resources to field a winning team, resorted to clever publicity stunts to keep up attendance and entertain the fans. At one point he fields an all-little people lineup only to discover that thanks to their tiny strike zones they’re quite competitive. Meanwhile the owner (and/or league, I forget) are plotting to abandon the team’s home city in favor of a more lucrative market.
This script was actually pretty decent and I could see it as a viable movie, but “mid-list sports dramedy” isn’t really something studios make very much anymore. Part of it is that the then-current* business model for movies was to finance films on foreign presales which were largely based on the brand recognition of star actors, and there weren’t really any A-list star roles here - I could see the manager/lead going to a Pierce Brosnan or Val Kilmer type, the love interest to a Cameron Diaz/Kirsten Dunst, but honestly I doubt there was a single player role strong enough to draw Peter Dinklage’s interest.
The best: Chasing the Whale
This was about a young man rising to prominence as the hospitality manager of a Las Vegas casino, and the mega-rich “Whale” super-gamblers he courted. I later read, and recognized as the source text, Whale Hunt in the Desert, the best pimp memoir since Iceberg Slim. The plot was an excuse to show off all sorts of colorful fun shit but for all that wasn’t bad, and I could see this as a great comeback vehicle for a Tobey Maguire or Daniel Radcliffe. I have no idea why this wasn’t made, particularly after The Hangover made bank and everyone in town must’ve been looking for a Vegas movie. Dumb industry politics is my guess, maybe whoever owned the rights was asking for too much money, who knows.
I read this one with an eye towards a possible role for Aaron Carter (the managers I was working for seemed to specialize in child stars, former boy band members, and ex-SNL token brown girls. When the Family Guy movie came out and Stewie asked future-Stewie whether they ever found a role for Ellen Cleghorne I bust a gut because finding that role was literally my job at the time. Well, future-SNL token brown girls too, we also had Nasim Pedrad). My summary was “well a lot of this seems to be resting on the strength of the music, I hope it’s good because the rest is fucking terrible”, and though I didn’t see it that seems to be the critical consensus.
* well, for a while there before the ’08 crash they were also funded on German and Eastern European tax credits. That explains the career of Uwe Boll - his movies were absolutely terrible but he could keep to a schedule and a budget, and with all the tax credits they didn’t actually need any sales to be profitable - whatever they got was just gravy, and acquiring recognizable video game licenses was a cost-efficient way of starting off with a built-in opening weekend audience. Also some stuff with Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Asian box office, which is why even stuff like 2008’s Dark Knight will have semi-extraneous segments with Chinese locations and stars.
I would probably rip off this sign and put it on the front door.
I did a few video game manuals back in the day, bottom of the barrel stuff, the license I worked most often on was Bratz, most of the games on systems that had been superseded years ago. The betas were buggy and missing the art and sound assets, and let me tell you it’s a trip to realize it’s your actual job to restart a game 30 times so you can finally walk around a mall full of blank-faced mannequins and listen to Stephen Hawking talk about how fun it is to go shopping with your friends. That said Bratz has a reputation as My Little Hoochie Mama, but if you pay attention to the Bratz mythos, which is an actual thing I just wrote, it’s about how no matter what you look like or what your interests are, if you put in some effort you can make that identity seem awesome. I mean, as long as Commodities, right? I also did a Zoey 101 game, a Drake & Josh game, or maybe The Suite Life of Jack and Cody. Actually, I might’ve done both. The Nickelodeon games were mostly shovelware that THQ released as a condition of the Spongebob Squarepants license, mostly minigame collections though some of them were passable adventure. Real people worked on them though, the biggest part of my job was taking the two pages in the design document that detailed the one unique and novel thing the designers had come up with to justify this project to themselves and cutting it down to a sentence or two of Press B to Do A Thing. Oh also before that I was an intern for some managers who specialized in third-string boy band members, Broadway threat-and-a-halfs, SNL castmembers from a decade ago, and child actors. They had an office at Hollywood & Vine, which like pretty much of “Hollywood” still located in and around the actual neighborhood of Hollywood seems impressive to out-of-towners but screams “low rent” to anyone who knows anything. The world of child actors is basically the most dehumanizing thing in the universe, the DisneyLodeon machines are exact replicas of the old studio star systems, and anyone who says “it can’t really be like that, no mother would subject her precious child to such a thing”, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAAAAHAHAHA. Yes, I’ve heard all the Dan Schneider rumors, they’re completely believable but at the same time they’re so obvious that anyone could make them up, and god knows the industry likes being catty and there are people who would stand to gain from taking him down. Besides what would it matter, the studios can spend more than your life’s worth in one month doing discovery and are perfectly willing to spend a fraction of that on cutting you a check instead. They’ll make it back in a second selling ancillary merchandise rights anyway. Like, you know, video games. What did I say about Raymond Chandler getting it right? There were parents who wanted a wholesome life for their child and it needed to be explained that we aren’t a goddamned afterschool enrichment program, we make money when you book and if you’re not dedicated to booking why are we dedicating resources to you? I mean, I wasn’t capable of explaining this at the time, I yet needed some polishing but LA’s good at that. (If you actually want to make a living through skilled thespianism, as opposed to rolling dice on celebrity, go into voice work.)
Also I knew a girl who told me this story that she went clubbing with her cousin once, and at the end of the night the cousin was like “let’s go to Jack’s place”
So they went up into the hills, got buzzed in at a gate, there are other girls there and obviously they and the cousin are used to this, walk in to a kitchen with the glasses and the ice and the gin and the tonic and the cut limes laid out, and prepare their drinks, and head out to the hot tub - and if this wasn’t the exact hot tub Polanski banged that girl in, it would be its successor - and there, of course, is Jack Nicholson.
And the girls take off their clothes and get in, and so does she, and then suddenly all the girls started making out with each other, and Jack turned to her and said
“You know, I’ve had sisters, but I’ve never had cousins.”
She was really freaked out and got out of there.
She told this story five or six times one night shortly after, and each time afterwards she was left looking at the listener, waiting for commiseration, and they blinked at her, uncomprehending, and said “wait, you turned down sex with Jack Nicholson?”
I was one of them, and I’d do it again. I mean, if you’ve seen Stevie Nicks lately she’s on a roughly comparable glide path, but if she told me to get down on my knees and eat her, like, she’s Stevie fucking Nicks, you know?
Leonardo DiCaprio’s doing an impression of Jack Nicholson on a Japanese tv program
When I was in LA Jack Nicholson gave me shit about the contents of my cart in a supermarket checkout line, not even kidding. In the Albertsons on Alvarado there was this dumpy old guy behind me wearing mirrored shades and out of nowhere he said “I can tell you don’t have a girlfriend, ‘cause you don’t have any fish in there”. And it just went from there. He asked what I was doing in LA and when I explained the spec script I was writing he said “fuck, that sounds terrible”.
Eventually he put his groceries on the conveyor belt and it was like, Capri Sun and boxes of microwave burritos. I was like “dude, what the hell”, and he said that yeah, one of my friends lost his job and I’m buying food for his family to eat, ‘cause god knows I’m not about to let him stay at my place again.
It was all really charming and towards the end I was starting to suspect, but I was like “no, Jack Nicholson isn’t that old and decrepit” and a short drive and google later, well.
