Put the Guitar Down
Fans of my radio program Get This will recall that for two years I tried and failed to get actor Angus Sampson to reveal a single detail about Spike Jonze’s movie version of Where the Wild Things Are, in which Angus plays…well, we couldn’t even get that much out of him. Since then, a further two years have passed and there’s still no sign of the movie, a reportedly loose adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book, which, at my school, was equalled in popularity only by Green Eggs and Ham, Harold and the Purple Crayon and an uncensored copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Internet rumours have plagued the film for years, and over the weekend I finally saw the trailer, which makes it look like a David Lynch-directed episode of The Banana Splits. I was pretty impressed until, halfway through, the following caption appeared:
‘Inside all of us…is hope’.
I have a theory that you can tell a film is in trouble when the advertising for it starts mentioning hope. Sendak’s book was dark and eccentric; I don’t remember anything about hope. Hope, a word that marketing people like to bandy about as though it were a quantifiable commodity, is the last resort for a difficult sell. If you’re sitting on a bleak Holocaust drama or post-climate-change nightmare, just throw in a bit of ‘hope’ and, bang, you’ve got the next Forrest Gump. I have no doubt that when the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road comes out, the word ‘hope’ will appear somewhere on the poster. Just as it did when Kevin Costner’s unsellable three-hour post-apocalyptic nonsense The Postman hit cinemas. ‘The year is 2013,’ said the tagline. ‘One man walked in off the horizon…and hope came with him.’ What actually came with him was a large sack of overdue phone bills, but apparently that didn’t test well, so the word hope was busted out, yet again. Not that it made any difference. By the two-hour mark, the only thing people were hoping for was the end credits, and by the time they finally rolled I was the only person left in the cinema. The only person to witness Costner’s final act of hubris. As the names of those responsible solemnly scrolled past, the director-producer-star of the whole debacle crooned the closing song himself. There is only one word to describe the result: hopeless.
The long list of actors whose egos allow them misguidedly to believe that anyone would give the remotest of fucks about their ‘music’ is well-known enough for me to forgo repeating it here. For several weeks, friends have been directing me to an item posted at BlindGossip.com, headed ‘Film Crew Hates Egotistical Actor and his Guitar’. The scurrilous and, in all likelihood, baseless piece alleges that an ‘Academy Award winner/nominee A-list movie actor’ had a clause inserted in a recent movie contract that required crew members to make regular visits to his hotel suite, where they would be forced to listen to him play his guitar and sing self-penned songs about his many feelings and accomplishments. The format at BlindGossip.com is such that the star is unnamed and site visitors are invited to speculate as to his identity. At time of writing, the four most popular choices are, in alphabetical order, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe, Jamie Foxx and Billy Bob Thornton. One name gets about three times as many votes as the others. You can probably guess which one.
Russell Crowe and I have four things in common. We were both born in 1964, grew up in New Zealand, appeared on The Late Show, and are unable to get our stuff played on Triple M. In 1995, Russell released a single called ‘The Photograph Kills’, and because Martin/Molloy was the only show that agreed to play it, we were favoured with an interview. Russell, who I first became aware of in Auckland in the early eighties, when, as ‘Russ Le Roq’, he punched out the single ‘I Just Want to Be Like Marlon Brando’, fronted up at our St Kilda studios at 10 am, bristling with energy and good humour. The interview went well and several jokes were made about Virtuosity without anyone getting punched. But then, as the tape was switched off and we started to shuffle out of the station’s ‘off-air studio’, Russell said, ‘So, have you guys heard the single?’
‘Of course,’ we replied. ‘We had it on in the office yesterday afternoon.’
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it on now.’
And for the next three-and-a-half awkward minutes, we stood there as the biggest name we’d ever had on the show grooved along to his own song, a brutal accounting of the ‘price of fame’, at the loudest possible volume.
‘Well, thanks again for coming in,’ we said, as the song faded.
‘Hang on,’ said Russell. ‘You’ve gotta hear the B-side.’
And, for a further three minutes, we all stood riveted to the spot, as a frankly confronting ditty called ‘High Horse Honey’ took to task a woman who, the song strongly suggested, needed to be knocked down a few pegs (click here to read the lyrics). At the song’s conclusion, Russell removed his sunnies and said, ‘You know who that’s about?’ We shook our heads and he replied with the name of a then-popular Hollywood actress, carefully bridging her first and second names with a ‘fuckin’.
While it is somewhat unlikely, if easily imagined, that this man would force crew members to sit through a nightly unplugged recital in his hotel room, I wouldn’t put it past him to make any who offend him the subject of a scathing TOFOG B-side.
One of the best heckles I ever heard of was allegedly directed at comedian Jimeoin during a mid-nineties gig at the Theatre Royal in Hobart. Jimeoin, or ‘Jevver’ as he is known, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not, in the comedy community, because of his propensity for starting gags with the words ‘Jevver notice…’, had decided to favour the crowd with some of his ‘serious songs’ from the infamous second disc that accompanies his 1995 album, Crack (not to be confused with the soundtrack to The Craic, which is easily done, as they have the same photo on the cover). As the story goes, after several numbers, Jevver asked the crowd if anyone had any requests. From the back came a voice, flat and measured, like a policeman negotiating with a gunman:
‘Put. The guitar. Down.’
Those are the words I think of whenever I see an actor bursting into (his own) song.
As you may have read, over the weekend one person was killed and seventy-five were injured at Canada’s largest country music festival, the Big Valley Jamboree in Alberta. As reports have detailed, a sudden freak storm devastated the festival, causing the stage to collapse moments before Kevin Costner was about to perform with his band, Modern West.
I wonder if he got the message.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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