In review: Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in
Babylon — The Case Against Celebrity by Andrew Breitbart and
Mark Ebner (John Wiley & Sons, 394 pages, $27.95)
TITILLATION GOES DOWN BETTER when you can claim you’re actually
bettering yourself by wading in the muck. In the days when
independent producers evaded censorship by showing exploitation
movies in tents at the outskirts of town, they learned to sell sex
by claiming to educate us about its dangers. Even mainstream movies
sometimes began with a printed message testifying to their social
worth, before moving on to all the kissing or shooting the
audiences actually came to see. I guess you could call it a bait
and switch, but if so it’s an unusual kind: The viewer feels
cheated if the switch doesn’t come.
The trouble with Hollywood, Interrupted, Andrew
Breitbart and Mark Ebner’s “case against celebrity,” is that it
keeps giving us the bait when we’re ready for the switch. The point
of the book, I gather, is to give us as many tales as possible of
celebrities and their hangers-on engaging in behavior that is
criminal, or so irresponsible that it seems criminal, or so bizarre
that it seems irresponsible, or so bohemian that it seems bizarre.
It’s filled with stories that make Hollywood look bad or weird;
it’s red meat for the red states. (The introduction identifies
Breitbart as a conservative and Ebner as a “bleeding heart,” but
aside from a three-page segment on some slippery televangelists
their targets come from the Republican playbook.) That much might
make for an entertaining read, but the authors feel compelled to
preach to us while they’re telling these tales, as though they
don’t trust the material to make their points for them.
The result isn’t just overkill. It’s overreach. It’s one thing
to pass along a Hollywood nanny’s allegation that an unidentified
director-producer has some spoiled kids: “Every time the
four-year-old would have any kind of problem — she’d hurt herself,
done badly in school, or gotten into a fight — her mother would
immediately give the kid a candy, or ice cream, or Popsicle.” It’s
a bit much, though, to follow that up with the breathless
revelation that sugar is “a substance one nitrogen atom away from
cocaine.” (They’re trying to make sugar sound dangerous, but the
actual effect is to make cocaine sound harmless.) Similarly, it’s
one thing to note that Roman Polanski sexually assaulted an
underage girl. It’s a stretch then to complain about the fact that
he won an Oscar for The Pianist. (The authors have
evidently confused the Best Director award with Humanitarian of the
Year.)
This might not be as severe a problem for the general reader as
it is for the reviewer. The American Spectator paid me to
read every word of this book, whereas the rest of you can simply
skim past the lectures and dive directly into the dirt. And there
is a fair amount of dirt here. Breitbart and Ebner warn us that
entertainment journalism has been neutered by its need for
celebrity access; this book, they promise, will dish out the seamy
stuff no one dares to write.
The theory that no one else will publish unflattering articles
about celebrities is belied by the book’s endnotes, a long litany
of clippings from the mainstream press. But the authors do engage
in some reporting of their own, though I don’t care for their usual
modus operandi: to find a single source (often anonymous) and
completely embrace her point of view. Corroboration is not among
the book’s strong points.
Frequently we encounter another sort of bait and switch. In one
chapter, one of the authors visits a semi-legal sex club and
describes the debauchery on display. He tells us that the clients
include “b-actors” and “Hollywood writers doing ‘research,’” and
“‘old Hollywood’ dinosaurs,” but the closest he comes to naming
names is “Hugh Hefner’s personal physician.” Either he’s got feet
as cold as those of any other entertainment journalist, or the
actors, writers, and dinosaurs weren’t even quasi-celebrities and
we’re just reading about the antics of sexed-up rich people who
happen to live in Los Angeles.
THE STRANGEST SEGMENT is surely the section that promises to shed
new light on the “sexual perversities” and “indiscretions
unparalleled” of Michael Jackson. It opens with a long, purple
stream of prose about their source: a detective cum gay porn actor
named Paul Barresi, most famous for recanting his claims to have
carried on a homosexual affair with John Travolta. By the time
you’re done reading Barresi’s résumé, you might
wonder just how reliable a source he is; the problem gets worse
later on, when he’s described doing something that sure sounds like
suborning perjury. His tale of his interactions with the Michael
Jackson machine are transparently self-serving, and the authors
don’t do their credibility any favors when they endorse his
explanation for why he dropped a suit against the Jackson camp:
“The only document of defense…made him look like a smarmy
blackmailer.” Maybe, just maybe, he is a smarmy
blackmailer.
But the oddest thing about the chapter is that Breitbart and
Ebner don’t seem to recognize the implications of the story their
source has told them. Barresi offers his take on the revelation two
years ago that Michael Jackson had hired a gay porn director, Marc
Schaffel, to helm the video for his song “What More Can I Give.” By
Barresi’s account, Jackson was unaware of Schaffel’s history, and
Schaffel was plotting to plant kiddie porn on Jackson’s estate in
order to blackmail the singer. In other words, if Barresi’s story
is true, it makes Jackson look like an innocent victim.
The worst you can say about him is that his handlers didn’t pay off
Barresi after they promised to. This is a celebrity scandal?
At other times the authors seem to realize that the story
they’re pursuing isn’t panning out, but they stick it in the tome
anyway. They pass along, for example, the well-established fact
that the man who wrote the mediocre comedy Keeping the
Faith has a history as a plagiarist. They tell us there are
rumors that he plagiarized Keeping the Faith as well. They
call him. He says he didn’t plagiarize it. And then it all kinda
peters out. Why is this even in the book?
Hollywood, Interrupted does include some interesting
new vignettes, of which the most entertaining is the tale of some
C-list celebs involved in a scam to sell frying pans. But it’s most
convincing when it’s telling us stuff we already know: that
Courtney Love is a bully, that Barbra Streisand is an airhead, that
Scientology is creepy, that Hollywood liberals can be sanctimonious
hypocrites. And its earnestness is a terrible bore: It’s always
insisting that there’s more to the book than gossip, that there’s a
thesis here, dammit, even if it’s hard to say just what
that thesis is. That celebrities can be crazy? That Hollywood is
Babylon? That it’s OK to obsess about famous people if you say
you’re criticizing them? It’s a gossip book, people. Let’s
have a little perspective.
