About myself: To be honest, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the idea of being a celebrity. I don’t even like the word “celebrity”. In a perfect world, for me, it would be nice to be an actor without having to negotiate the attention. Over the years I’ve been able to meet some very interesting people because of my work and I have had the opportunity to travel more extensively than I probably would have otherwise, and I look forward to more of the same in the future because being famous definitely has its good points. Sadly, though, being in the public eye isn’t what it used to be. The celebrity air originally was more rarefied than it is
today. In the days when the studios controlled careers and images there was a mystery surrounding the stars of that era - and respect. An actor was on the big screen at the local movie house and aside from magazine and radio interviews and the occasional newsreel that was pretty much the limit of his/her exposure to the public. They didn’t have to worry about some numb nuts taking an embarrassing picture of them with a cell phone or endure the
microscopic scrutiny of a bunch of talking heads There was no internet or cell phone or Blackberry. In the information age just about anyone with a computer can click on YouTube and presto chango a new celebrity is born, though the way celebrities are treated today I can’t imagine anyone who would want to be one. In the last few years, there has been a profound sea
change in the public’s attitude toward people of notoriety.
Celebrities have become open season with huge bulls eyes emblazoned on their foreheads.
Aside from the ubiquitous electronic access into celebrities personal and professional lives there seems to be a proliferation of celebrity news shows and more and more time set aside on regular news shows for celebrity gawking. Vilification of someone because they’re in the public eye has become a national pastime. Stories about celebrities abound on the web full of unflattering photos and the most venemous verbal abuse imaginable. It’s the anonymous bloggers, however, that are the most pathetic of the lot, pathetic because they are so cowardly. It’s truly amazing, isn’t it, anthropologically speaking, that so many people given the opportunity to say something about someone will go right to the negative with lies and rumors
of lies. The big reason for this sniping is that there is no accountability. In the blog world anybody can say anything about anyone and remain in their little secret hiding place. That is why I am so pleased and indeed, relieved to finally have a site on My Space that will allow people and maybe even the occasional critter or two, to express themselves about me
or anything else on their minds. I look forward to getting to know a little bit about those of you who have been kind enough to take an interest in my work. I will attempt to communicate with as many of you as I can and hopefully set straight some of the controversy surrounding recent events in my professional life. What people wish to write is, of course, up to them.
I look to people like you to help define what this space will become and when I respond to something it will be with sincerity and respect for the thoughtfulness of the individual who has taken the time to write a questionor comment.
I’d like to Meet: I’d like to meet any one who doesn’t have a hidden agenda or some scam they are trying to run on me.
Interests: Literature, Drawing, Writing, Music, Chess, Cooking, Martial Arts, Working Out, Traveling, Studying Charts of the Financial Markets, Emotions, Psychology, Hiking, Going to the Beach, Sudoku, Crossword Puzzles, Etymology, Geometry.
Music: A very important mainstay in my life. A lot of my favorite songs will probably seem pretty dorky, some are too embarrassing to even share until we get to know each other better, but for whatever reasons these are the songs that I like. For the past eight months or so I’ve been listening to a ton of Country/Western music, especially the songs from the 50’s and 60’s. Some of my favorites are singers like Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Porter Wagoner, Faron Young, Ray Price, Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, Ray Charles. Those are the singers I remember my parents and their friends listening to when I was growing up.
My parent’s best friends were a couple name Jack and Hazel Green and the Greens lived in a modest three bedroom house on a cul-de-sac in Bellaire, Texas, a suburb of Houston where I grew up. I remember the Greens had enclosed their rear porch and converted it into a sort of Polynesian “Trader Vic’s”-like sanctuary complete with palm fronds, tiki knickknacks and long strands of bamboo beads hanging from the doorway. They, my mom and dad would turn the lights down low and play country western music and drink and dance away the weekend nights. The low, colored lights and the sound of the steel guitar in the country songs set the perfect
Polynesian honky-tonk mood. Aside from “Ring of Fire”, “I Walk the Line” and for some bizarre reason a major jones for Johnny Horton’s “North To Alaska” I had absolutely zero interest in C/W music back then, I suppose because my parents had listened to the genre so much.
Like most kids I thought that anything my parents listened to was something I should
definitely not. Like most kids I was more into the British Invasion groups like The Kinks, The Dave Clark 5 and The Beatles. I knew every lyric of every song. When I was alone at home I used to put their albums on the turntable and sing into a microphone. I couldn’t play any instruments, I think I used an old broom handle for some kind of guitar prop. I got pretty
good with that over the years. Yes, I was a real penis head.
During high school my first “serious” girlfriend (“serious” meaning the one I lost my virginity to) and I used to go to Prince’s Drive-in everyday after school for cheeseburgers, shakes and cigarettes. The songs I remember playing on the car radio in those sublime, carefree days were like signature themes to our romance while others touched me on more of a personal level.
Some still do - songs like: “Love Is Blue”, “Walk Away Renee” by The Left Bank, “It’s Your Thing” by the Isley Brothers, almost any song by the Four Tops, Dionne Warwicke’s “Theme From Valley Of The Dolls”, “MacArthur Park” sung by Richard Harris (a distant cousin of mine) and written by Jimmy Webb, in fact I liked a lot of the Jimmy Webb songs that Glen Campbell sang around the late ‘60’s, any of the Simon and Garfunkels especially “Scarborough
Fair, “I Am A Rock” and “Sounds of Silence”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Most of the songs I liked had a wistful quality about them, usually they were about someone left alone because of a broken relationship or someone confused and standing solo against the world trying to figure it all out – like most teenagers. Three years later when I broke up with my first “serious” girlfriend it was one of the saddest experiences of my life.
Looking back on this time I think I was probably mourning the loss of the joy of these songs as much as the loss of the relationship. Then when I was 22 and started making movies I had a fling with a girl who showed me there was more to music than the tortuous, self-pitying drivel I
was listening to and she turned me on to the California groups and singers like Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Neil Young, the Beach Boys with their “walls of sound”. The Beach Boys were a particular revelation to me because growing up I had listened to them on the radio and thought they were just about surfing and car songs. I never appreciated the tight
harmonies and the production values in their recordings. I went back and started listening to all of the music my stoner friends had been into like The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Traffic, Grand Funk Railroad, The Byrds, Taj Mahal, Emerson Lake and Palmer, just to name a few.
Under the fog of cannabis, I was, for the first time able to absorb and really appreciate the guitar riffs and progressions in the music of these artists. It seems absurd to me now that I wasn’t more cognizant of what was then considered the darker, grittier side of rock and roll, but once I got religion I was all over R&R. Bob Dylan was someone I started listening to a lot around this time. Most of these experiences were a musical revelations to me and instilled in me the need music to be an integral part of my life always. Over the years the soundtrack to my life has changed. I have gone through various periods of intense music listening where I will buy tons of albums, CDs (now its iTunes) and focus on just one genre for months – Reggae
(Wild Tchopotoulas), Classical (all the B’s, Mozart, Stravinsky), Opera (Carmen, Aida, Magic Flute), Blues (Howlin’ Wolf), Boogie (John Lee Hooker), Jazz (John Coltraine, Miles Davis), Ragtime (Scott Joplin), Dixieland (Pete Fountain, Satchmo), R&B (Temptations, Prince, Four Tops), French (Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet), Italian (Pavarotti, Cecilia Bartoli), Latin (Selena),
Gospel (Mighty Clouds of Joy), recently it was 80’s music (Tears For Fears, Steve Winwood). Presently, as I mentioned before, I am listening to a lot of C/W and I must say there is a penetrating soulfulness about this music that connects to something deep within me. Maybe because I’m from Houston it’s just that “Texas thang”. Maybe that’s what they call “roots”. All I
know is music is one of Life’s precious gifts that help ground and identify us to ourselves and our culture. Hearing a song can instantly bring back a long ago forgotten memory and put you right there in a specific place and time. From moments like this we gain perspective about our feelings past and present and we are able to guage how we’ve changed over the years. I’m more interested now in the structure of a good song and how it is sung. I am also able to listen to music from some of the more difficult periods of my life and only remember the good times. The newer artists I like are Goldfrapp, Amy Winehouse, Alicia Keys is pretty cool and so is Norah Jones, and Mariah Carey. As I write this list I guess I like mostly women singers, though Iggy Pop is pretty cool and Lou Reed has the best phrasing since Frank Sinatra. I guess I’ve gone on long enough about music. Did I mention Elvis and Roy Orbison? Enough said. This should give an idea of the kind of music I like – just about every damn thing you can stick in an iPod.
Movies: Favorites: (not necessarily in order of preference) “The Bank Dick”, “La Dolce Vita” (the film that incidentally inspired the origin of the term “paparazzi”), “The Graduate”, “Gone With The Wind”, “Belle De Jour”, “Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia”, “Pulp Fiction”, “To Kill A Mockingbird”, “Fargo”, “Irreversible”, “Sunrise” which is a great old silent film, any comedy with Cary Grant, any comedy with Carole Lombard. I could go on and on with more selections because I like a great many movies for any number of reasons. Presently, I am reading a book of interviews with European film editors and watching and re-watching some of the films they talk about. I like a lot of my own movies like “The Last Picture Show”, “The Last Detail”, “Parents”, “The Longriders”, “Midnight Express”, some of the “Vacation” movies with Chevy, “Kingpin”, “Independence Day”, “Brokeback Mountain” “Real Time”, . I am also quite fond of a movie my wife Evi directed me in, “The Debtors” with Michael Caine and Catherine McCormack, a very funny romantic comedy. Right now I am working on another film that my
wife is directing. The first movie I remember seeing was “Old Yeller” at the Airline Drive-in in Houston. I also remember seeing Elvis’ first movie “Love Me Tender”. I was around 7 or 8 at the time. My dad really turned me on to movies. We would stay up watching the late show together and he would tell me who all of the actors were. We’d do dialogue back and forth,
imitating the actors. It was by doing this that I got interested in performing in talent shows at school and around town locally. I would work on different impressions every day after school. I would stand in front of a full-length mirror and make up material into a tape recorder, when I
wasn’t singing songs. It was during this time that I became interested in acting in high school.
Books: Presently I am reading a book of interviews with European film editors called “Fine Cuts”. Recent reads include “The Fountainhead”, “The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life”, “Guns, Germs and Steel”, “All’s Well That Ends Well”, “The Art Of Planning In Chess”, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Schizophrenia”.
Heroes: Any one who has the courage of their convictions. Many times such individuals are derided and denigrated because of their beliefs, behavior or the way they express themselves. Their actions usually go against what’s accepted by the status quo. The only lasting change that has ever come about in this world is by those people who have had the courage of their convictions in the face of all doubters and oppressors.
