Earlier this morning director Rod Lurie (Nothing But The Truth, Resurrecting The Champ) e-mailed some friends with a couple of graduation pics taken at his alma mater, Honolulu’s Punahou High School — himself accepting the big diploma from P.H.S. president Roderick F. McPhee in June 1980, and some clean-cut kid named Barack Obama doing the same a year earlier. 2:05 pm: A link from Politico‘s Ben Smith.
Quinceanera co-directors and co-writers Richard Glatzer (left) and Wash Westmoreland (right) flanking star Emily Rios after yesterday’s Seattle Film Festival screening — 6.16.06, 8:35 pm.
(a) At a Capitol Hill club called Chapel, Cinematical‘s Kim Voynar, Americanese director-writer Eric Byler, Byler’s Taiwanese ally-partner(I’m bad with names…sorry) who worked on the film, and Americanese star Allison Sie — Friday, 6.16.06, 11:40 pm; (b) Americanese star Allison Sie, director-writer Eric Byler — Friday, 6.16, 6:20 pm; (c) Seattle skies are still blue and on the bright side at 9:40 pm, obviously due to the northern lattitude; (d) this photo of an obviously pleased holder of a Brookline High School graduation diploma has zip to do with movies, but it represents the culmination of a twelve-year effort and bestowing a moment’s attention doesn’t seem out of line.
It doesn’t aspire to high art or try for the sort of emotional engagement that makes you choke up, but Lexi Alexander‘s Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9) is nonetheless a very intense emotional hybrid thing, which is to say a sports movie and a bloody gang-violence movie mashed into one.
The lads doing what they know, love and do best in Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9)
I don’t know how well this mostly London-based film is going to do in the States given the exotic milieu and the thuggish attitudes (i.e., the world of boozed-up, ultra-violent British soccer fans), but it’s vibrant and original enough to warrant being seen and grappled with. It sure as shit is an experience and an education.
And it’s absolutely a career springboard for British actor Charlie Hunnam, who steals the show with a second-banana performance as a violent, in some ways immature, soccer fan who is nonetheless man enough to bring a sense of balance and compassion to an otherwise loutish lifestyle.
Hunnam starred in Nicholas Nickleby, and was in Cold Mountain, a Katie Holmes thriller called Abandon and the British TV series Queer as Folk, but who noticed? Now this 25 year-old has punched through.
The superficial tag is to call him a younger Brad Pitt with a Brit accent. What matters is that he conveys an inner groundedness and conviction on top of a sense of basic decency that you find yourself recognizing and responding to right away.
Hunnam is not just the star of Green Street Hooligans — he’s a star waiting to happen. Maybe. If he’s lucky and has the right agent and can do an American accent. (There seems to be some question whether or not he appears in Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust, which will debut at the Tellruide Film Festival in a few days). Whatever happens, he’s got it inside.
Charlie Hunnam
Green Street Hooligans is a story about a young American (Elijah Wood) on a visit to London who gets caught up in the violent world of English soccer fandom by joining a “firm,” which is a term for a gang that asserts and defends the honor of a given soccer team by parading around after soccer matches and confronting other firms and kicking their ribs in, or vice versa.
It sounds repulsive and cro-Magnon on one level, but European guys take soccer (which, of course, they call football) very seriously. And a lot of British working- class dudes are extremely furious about…well, I don’t know what precisely but apparently a lack of opportunity within a still-fairly-restrictive social caste system and having to make do with certain economic terms. I’ve been to London a few times and have felt this. The social-rage levels over there are much more intense among the disenfranchised than they are here.
And there are elements that go with being a firm member…tribal love, loyalty, security…that you’re not ever going to find vegging out in front of a computer or a TV, so there’s something to be said for it.
If you’re at all receptive to the values I’m speaking of and you can roll with fairly realistic depictions of street violence, Green Street Hooligans is affecting in a hormonal, territorial way. If it doesn’t exactly speak to Americans where they live in terms of being avid sports fans, it certainly is different and bracing and a movie to kick around and talk about and send your friends to.
Unless, that is, you happen to be one of those absent-sports-gene types who just doesn’t feel it or get it, in which case it may seem too exotic and what-the-hell?
The U.S. release one-sheet (l.) and the British release version (r.)
I’m kind of in this camp (my favorite spectator sports are tennis and baseball), but I get what the film is putting across and I respect the effort and the craft that Alexander and co-screenwriters Dougie Brimson and Josh Shelov have put into making this world come alive.
The German-born Alexander, a late twentysomething who grew up with football fandom and knows this universe fairly well, has made a name for herself with Hooligans and has already gotten a gig out of it — a thriller for Disney called Labor Day.
When you`re watching Hooligans…I’m sorry, Green Street Hooligans …you have to keep telling yourself, “A young woman directed this, a young woman directed this.” But then Alexander is a former World Kickboxing champion who used to scrap with a Mannheim, Germany, firm for three years, so…
Green Street Hooligans won both the grand jury prize and the audience award for best feature at the South by Southwest festival last March, which should indicate something.
(It used the original British title of Hooligans at that Austin venue, and I can’t quite understand why the distributor, Odd Lot Releasing, feels that adding the words Green Street makes the film more appealing to U.S. audiences.)
Wood’s character, a Harvard journalism major named Matt Buckner, is the audience’s tour guide into this bizarre world of Brit football fanaticism. He gets into it by getting kicked out of Harvard only three weeks or so before graduation when his snotty fortunate-son roommate arranges for him to take the rap for cocaine found in their dorm suite.
(This isn’t a very convincing beginning. In Josh Shelov’s original script Matt gets the boot after he and some classmates are accused of having cheated on an exam, and he is specifically ousted because his friends don’t stand up for him — an issue of loyalty that is dealt with later in the film.)
Matt flies from Logan to London to visit his sister Shannon (Claire Forlani), who’s married to a steady-seeming guy with a vaguely pissy attitude named Steve (Marc Warren). But Matt has arrived on a day when Steve is taking Shannon to see Chicago in the West End, so he’s temporarily placed in the care of Steve’s wild-assed brother, Pete (Hunnam).
Suspicious of this wimpy-looking yank, Pete reluctantly takes Matt to his local pub to meet his crew, who are called the GSE — i.e., Green Street Elite, a two-fisted firm devoted to the West Ham soccer…I mean football team.
Matt is regarded with some distance but then wins the respect of the firm when the GSE gets into a street fight with another firm and he throws himself into battle with real ferocity.
I had trouble with watching this at first, with Wood being so small and sensitive-seeming with those big watery eyes of his. But then I understand and sympathize with his having wanted to de-wimpicize and add some machismo to his persona after playing Frodo in the Rings films. (Has there ever been a more dewy-eyed, super-weenyish lead character in a major franchise?)
Trouble arises when a GSE member named Bovver (Leo Gregory) uncovers evidence that suggests (without actually proving) that Matt may be an undercover journalist secretly writing a story about the firm. This leads to all kinds of betrayals and soul-searchings and double-backs, and eventually the GSE gang going up against an especially hated firm whose leader has been nursing a particular rage against Pete’s family for years.
Hunnam again…seemingly two or three years ago.
It’s not hard to step back in the middle of all this and ask yourself, “Why don’t these guys just chill and pull back from this stupid-ass gang attitude that necessitates getting into fights all the time?” It seems so primitive and stupid and unenlightened, etc. I understood the meaning of it and felt it to a certain extent, but it wasn’t exactly coursing through my veins.
Then I read Lexi Alexander’s explanation for the behavior of these guys (who are legion over Europe), and I started to feel it a bit more. As I mentioned earlier, she was part of a firm in Mannheim, Germany, for three years (accepted by the males because of her black belt kick-boxing abilities) and knows the turf.
“Reliable. Protective. Loyal. Consistent. That’s what I remember most about the firm…which was more than you could say about any of our parents,” she writes. “The firm was our family. What we missed at home, we found in each other..in our firm. The riots were about proving our love, because obviously a bunch of guys don’t walk around telling each other, ‘I love you, man.’
“Standing next to your friend when you’re facing thirty guys who want to punch your face in — that’s love.
“Coming back for somebody who fell or was left behind, despite the fact that you’re most likely going to get your ass kicked — that’s love.
“Watching your mates out of the corner of your eye in a fight, and making sure you come to [their] rescue when needed — that’s love.
“Getting arrested and not remembering anyone’s name when the cops question you — that’s love.”
The message of this film, she says, is never abandon a friend when the chips are down.
Green Street Hooligans director Lexi Alexander, star Elijah Wood at Austin’s Draft House after South by Southwest screening last March.
“When your friend is sick, don’t run. When your friend has a crisis, don’t run. When your friend is going through a streak of bad luck, don’t run. When your friend is being treated unjustly, stand behind him/her, or better yet, stand in front. And when you become successful, don’t leave your friends behind.”
That gets me. I know that if I had a dollar for every fair-weather friend I’ve ever had, I could buy a new 100 gig computer. I know I could certainly use a friend or two with a “firm” attitude. Couldn’t we all?
On the other hand, I haven’t punched or even shoved anyone since I was in the seventh grade. And I need my fingers to be agile and unswollen because I have to type all the time. And British blokes can afford to lose a couple of teeth now and then because they have a good national health care system to turn to — I don’t.
There’s a 1988 Gary Oldman film called The Firm (dir: Alan Clarke) that covers the same territory. Here’s the Amazon page for a buyable Alan Clarke DVD package that includes The Firm. I hear it’s strong and worth seeing. Anyone…?
Toronto Feed
“I read your mention about showing caution when it comes to Michael Caton Jones and particularly his Shooting Dogs, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival.
“Well, I saw it in Cannes and it’s very good — a decent, solid drama about the Rwanda massacre of ’94. It’s a fuck-Schindler-Benigni kind of film. No heroes, no innocent little girls, no redemption. And the carnage is great.
“I’ve read ‘A Time for Machetes,’ the Jean Hatzfeld book about the massive killings, and MCJ was pretty precise about a lots of things.
Hugh Dancy, John Hurt in Michael Caton Jones’ Shooting Dogs.
“Otherwise…
“Cronenberg’s History of Violence, as you know, is splendid. This thing grows in your brain (nyuk-nyuk) many days after the screening. I loved it. You have to see it again.
“Free Zone: Crap. Arghh. A cheater. Kiarostami without the ideas, Panahi without the balls. Step aside, you don’t need this.
“Cache: Amazing. Dry, cool, disturbing. Did you saw Haneke’s Code Unknown, which was one of the major influences on the 21 Grams narrative? This thing has the same eerie feeling. It’s funny, it works like a twin film with the Cronenberg piece. Besides, Auteuil and Binoche are the best married couple I ever seen in the screen in years. They just nail the atmosphere of ten-years-of-marriage in a way that Kidman-Cruise-Kubrick never did.
“L’ Enfant: It’s not as good as Rosetta, but…hmmm, I don’t remember anything good as Rosetta, so…nut it’s very good, it’s worth a look and the only problem is the age of the principal actor. I will leave you to discover on your own what I mean by this.” — Daniel Villalobos, Santiago, Chile.
Just Six
“Dunno if you get the Encore cable channels but Stuart Samuels’ Midnight Movies doc, which is playing Toronto, has been airing there all month.
“It’s an interesting movie that I caught late one night, and while I had hoped it would cover a broad spectrum of films it actually focuses on just six films — El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“While it’s something I enjoyed watching on TV, and I like five of the six movies, I would’ve felt a little let down if I’d seen it in a theater. It’s not bad, it just didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. Still, I always enjoy John Waters interviews and this one has plenty.” — Neil Harvey.
Grabs
Thursday, 8.25, 7:50 pm.
Fifth Avenue strollers from various walks of American life and of different faiths and political persuasions contemplating the notion of being gay and up for action — Friday, 8.26, 4:20 pm. I took a series of these photos, and for nearly 30 seconds an older woman and her daughter — tourists, I was fairly certain — who happened to be approaching stood to the side and waited for me to finish. It didn’t occur to them that someone shooting a street scene might be cool with a woman or two walking in front of the camera just as he/she snaps a photo. It could make for a more interesting shot…who knows? But this didn’t occur to them, and so they stood there for almost 30 seconds waiting for me to finish. That’s mainstream America for you. Very polite.
Sixth Avenue and 47th Street, or something like that — 8.25, 5:45 pm.
While speed-marching over to Dolby Screening Room (1350 Ave. of Americas) to see Lord of War — 8.25, 5:42 pm.
Iraqi War 101
“I believe you’re familiar with our Iraq doc Gunner Palace. Last week I devoured your column about the upcoming slate of 9/11 and terror films. It was a needed piece. For me especially, as the theme of reality vs. fiction has been at the top of my mind lately.
“Last May I was invited to a DGA panel discussion where they screened parts of Gunner Palace ‘against’ Iraq-themed episodes of ER and JAG as well as the pilot for Bochco’s Over There. Without going into critic mode, I must say it was surreal to sit in a theater watching fictional scenes from a reality that I was preparing to return to in ten days.
“In the last six months, GP has become something of an Iraq War 101 for creative execs. As you must know, there are at least 10 Iraq projects floating around and development people are looking for interesting takes on Iraq, so every so often we get a call.
“In the beginning I was resistant to the whole idea of fiction — that is, until I had the experience of trying to market a distinct reality to a tabloid nation. We’ve had a fantastic run with GP –I’ve only been home six weeks since January — and the film has been held up as emblematic, but we’ve also been keenly aware of both an audience disconnect and war fatigue.
“However, at the same time, I’ve sensed that the disconnect comes largely from an emotional inability to relate to the subject, a faraway reality, and I’ve perceived a certain hunger to understand the war beyond the rants of pundits.
“Your 9/11 piece raised interesting questions. In regards to this ongoing war, I’ve asked myself, when is soon too soon? Perhaps now is the time — and the public doesn’t need a decade for collective memory to simmer — rather, perhaps there is an urgency to get it right, to tell it like it is.
“I found this Roger Ebert quote the other day:
“‘Whether we are for the war or against it, we all know it is a terribly complicated struggle. There is a desperate need in this country for a film that will depict the war in honest terms.”
“I have not been one for emotional button-pushing, especially about a war that has become all too personal to me, however, as flawed as fiction often is, it has the ability to evoke very real emotions. The Deer Hunter comes to mind. Inaccurate? Without a doubt — down to the last detail — but it captured the emotional essence of an experience. From another war, another time, came The Battle of Algiers — fiction, yes, but a fiction so steeped in reality that it was banned in France. Something to aspire to…no?
“So I surrender to fiction and the urge to at least get it right, to answer Ebert’s call to arms, remembering what a 19 year-old soldier had to say about his experience in GP: ‘For y’all this is just a show, but we live in this movie.” — Mike Tucker
Out There
“Those Walk the Line wildpostings are all over San Francisco too. I saw them the other day and thought, isn’t that opening like months from now? I really like the look of it, and the heavy use of graphics over photos. Seems unorthodox for a biopic.” — Tom Kelly, San Francisco, CA.
Grabs 2
You don’t have to put a caption under every damn photo.
The lobby of the famous Brill building on Broadway and 48th (or is it 49th?) I took this last night around 7:35 pm, just after slipping out of a preview screening of Pride and Prejudice upstairs. A romantic breakup scene in Alexander MacKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success was filmed right here roughly 48 years ago. Susie Hunsecker (Susan Harrison), terrified sister of ruthless columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), has just called it quits with jazz musician Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). Dallas and his manager Frank D’Angelo (Sam Levene) walk down the hallway and out of the building as a glum-faced Susie leans against the wall near the elevators. As they’re standing outside on Broadway, Milner says to Levene, “Look inside and tell me if she’s still standing there.” Levene looks. “She’s still standing there,” he says.
This newspaper ad on behalf of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is apparently aimed at the March of the Penguins crowd. You almost want to pet this guy. Timothy Treadwell, the “star” of Grizzly Man did, in fact, pet a few until one day…
A block or two west of CBGB’s — Sunday, 8.21, 4:40 pm.
Thursday, 8.25, 5:55 pm.
Free and Clear?
On Friday, May 27, Tom Cruise took Katie Holmes to a town called Canadian, Oklahoma, partly to acquaint his newly beloved to a phase in her indoctrination into the Church of Scientology.
The Hollywood couple were in this remote corner of America’s heartland to visit a Scientology-backed drug rehabilitation center called Narconon Arrowhead, located about an hour from Tulsa on the shores of Lake Eufaula. And Tom basically took Katie through the whole this-is-Scientology, start-the-education-process thing.
Smiles and giddiness: Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes.
Cruise’s sister and press rep LeeAnne DeVette called from Germany early this afternoon (Manhattan time) to say “yeah,” the story is true.
Details of the visit were relayed by an anti-Scientology blogger named Dave Touretzsky, who’s been called a solid and trustworthy source by two journalists I know and trust — a reputable east-coast big-city journo I spoke to this morning, and a journalist pal and book author who knows the whole Scientology scene cold.
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I e-mailed the Pittsburgh-based Touretsky to get some more particulars but he didn’t respond by deadline.
The visit wasn’t denied this morning by Luke Catton, who works for Narconon Arrowhead’s public relations representative Gary Smith. “Tom’s a supporter, but I really can’t say anything and I think I should leave this up to LeeAnne to comment,” Catton said.
Holmes’ representative, Leslie Sloane of Baker Winokur Ryder’s New York office, said she’s “never been told” about the Oklahoma visit.
One of several T-shirts (among many different styles and colors) offered on www.freekatie.net.
According to Touretzsky, who wrote that the story came from “a hidden source” within the Narconon organization, Cruise and Holmes visited the facility for roughly four and a half hours. They left after Tom gave a speech at the weekly Narconon “graduation” ceremony.
The Hollywood couple’s brief visit ended when Cruise took Holmes by the hand and led her up to a hilly, sand-covered area next to an old wooden fence. Cruise released Holmes from his grip, an eerie Martian chorus came up on the soundtrack (“Uhhhaahhhhahhh!”), a hole in the sand appeared and suddenly Holmes was gone….
Sorry, but I felt I needed to throw in a laugh.
All Scientology inductees are sent through a “purification process,” which is apparently what Holmes is doing now.
DeVette says that Narconon Arrowhead “is not a Scientology center. It’s a secular program…it’s not a Scientology church.” She says one of the items on her brother’s agenda that day was showing the facility to a German journalist from Bild magazine.
Katie Holmes (l.), Scientology babysitter Jessica Rodriguez (r.) at London premiere of Batman Begins as they appeared in photo on page 26 of Tuesday’s N.Y. Daily News, adjacent to Lloyd Grove’s column.
According to the facility’s website, Narconon Arrowhead “offers not only a comprehensive model drug treatment program in a non-traditional, non-institutional setting, but also a full training and apprenticeship or internship program for professionals interested in this new and effective approach to drug rehabilitation and prevention.”
It also says that Narconon Arrowhead “houses the Narconon network’s International Training Center,” blah, blah…but it’s a Scientology operation, okay?
If you want to know more, here are two websites exploring the whole Narconon program and history in a thoroughly nasty and negative fashion.
The more I read about it, the odder the whole Cruise-Holmes-Scientology thing sounds. I can’t fully explain or articulate it, but those hairs on the back of my neck are picking up some curious vibes.
Cruise and Holmes may be genuinely in love (c’mon…you have to bend over and at least allow for this), and there’s certainly nothing wrong with a little spiritual focus and discipline to keep a relationship on track, and I don’t know about every last aspect of the Church of Scientology, although I’ve done some reporting about it and know the general lay of the land.
Rodriguez-free Holmes on Batman Begins red carpet at London premiere.
All I know is that after reading Lloyd Grove’s column yesterday in the N.Y. Daily News about Cruise and Holmes and that Scientologist baby-sitter Jessica Rodriguez, the one who’s been following Holmes around like a bodyguard as she does publicity chores for Batman Begins …for some reason Grove’s story has uncorked images from John Carpenter’s They Live and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
By mentioning these famously paranoid thrillers I’m obviously casting a negative light upon the Church of Scientology. But they’re a very guarded and controlling organization with a penchant for paranoia and secretiveness, and if you ask me they’ve more than earned their reputation.
And I think there’s something seriously diseased about Cruise professing to love and honor and respect Holmes but at the same time arranging, according to Grove’s column, to have her followed around by a Scientology “minder” like Rodriguez.
I just know creepy vibes when I feel them.
On the other hand, at least one story about Cruise trying to control Holmes is apparently bogus. I’m speaking of the one that ran in the New York Post about Cruise allegedly telling Holmes not to play the doomed Warhol model Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl.
Hickenlooper, a friend, wrote me about this a couple of days ago and referred me to a statement he put up on the IMDB about this (see next story).
The key declaration in Hickenlooper’s statement is that the story about Cruise telling Holmes not to do Factory Girl because Sedgwick was a druggie and portraying such a person would go against Scientology beliefs is “blatantly untrue and stupid.”
“I don’t even know what Factory Girl is,” Cruise recently told an interviewer. He added, “The thing you’ve got to know about Katie is that she’s an incredibly bright and self-determined woman. She makes her own decisions.”
Okay, cool…but if that’s the case, why is Cruise allegedly paying Rodriguez, a 26 year-old Scientology upper-cruster (I’m told she’s on Cruise’s OT IV level within the organization) to “keep Katie on the path,” according to Grove’s source, as well as monitor her press interviews and encounters with people and, according to Grove’s story, give Holmes religious instruction from time to time?
In other words, Cruise believes there’s a chance that Katie might stray from the path and become…what?….infected by the skepticism of all those lurking non-Scientologists (journalists, etc.)?
There’s a report at Radar magazine’s website that refers to a Scientology magazine called Source in reporting that Rodriguez “ascended to the level of ‘New Operating Thetan IV’ (the same as Cruise) in January 2004.
“According to sources close to the Church, this means Rodriguez has joined the elite group of Scientologists who’ve been enlightened with the six-figure secrets of Xenu, the evil intergalactic ruler who implanted ‘thetans,’ or alien spirits, in earth’s volcanoes 75 million years ago, after which they escaped and invaded human bodies.
“As a ‘new OT IV,’ Rodriguez has the power to ‘control life, thought, matter, energy, space, and time,’ according to Scientology’s official site. Rodriguez has the ability to spot any ‘suppressive persons’ who interact with her celebrity charge.”
I know how strange this all sounds, but it gets a lot weirder than this…trust me. To really know and subscribe to the theology of Scientology after you get to OT III is to be suspended several feet above the earth’s surface with little Martian tentacles sticking out of your forehead.
Really…what kind of boyfriend hires someone to keep his girlfriend on the spiritually straight and narrow? I’ll tell you what kind of boyfriend does this. A control-freak boyfriend does this.
Cruise is extremely likable and engaging to all who meet him, but he is also very clenched and wired tight. He does terrific work and a few directors I know personally think he’s one of the greatest guys to work with. Nonetheless, I keep getting this sense of a guy who needs to obsessively micro-manage every last detail of his life, and who strongly believes in keeping the castle walls high and thick and well-fortified.
Maybe that’s necessary in these crazy tabloid times, but when you reach the point of hiring a twentysomething Scientology hardcase to keep tabs on your new girlfriend as a way of keeping her from saying or thinking the wrong thing, then I think you’ve really crossed the Rubicon.
Rodriguez “goes everywhere with Katie,” Grove’s source said. “She’s never more than a quarter-step behind her. When you ask her who she is, she says, ‘I’m Katie’s best friend.’ She’s known her for six weeks!”
Holmes announced at a London press conference on Monday that she’s officially converting to Scientology. Grove reported that this announcement “seemed to provoke a glare from her Batman Begins co-star Michael Caine.”
My anonymous big-city journalist friend, who’s been investigating and writing stories about Scientology for 25 years, says “there’s no such thing as conversion to Scientology. It’s a very gradual, step-by-step process. You have to do the basic communication courses, and then you have to eventually go ‘clear.’ And all Homes is right now is an initiate.
“But eventually the water will rise and she will eventually be a boiled frog. Drop a frog into boiling water and he’ll jump out. But if the frog isn’t aware that the water is slowly heating up, he gets more and more acclimated to the rising heat and then eventually he’s boiled and in the pot.”
I’d like to think Katie Holmes is going to wake up from this episode one day and roll her eyes and say to herself and hopefully everyone else, “What was I thinking?” After all, a lot of Scientology believers (not just beginners but people on upper levels) bail out.
And when she does, Homes is going to start to realize that all the Scientology skeptics and dissers — including people like Sheila Cameron, the creator of FreeKatie.net — were on her side all along.
Cameron launched the site after watching Cruise’s couch-bouncing appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show last month. She’s been quoted as saying she’s surprised by the amount of attention the site has attracted.
“I just wanted to make a funny comment on a poorly handled media storm,” she told E! Online. “No one can deny that there is a feeling of unease about many of the couple’s public appearances, and I’m happy to create a place where people can vent on the issue from whatever side they like.”
Holmes, needless to add, doesn’t feel as if she’s a prisoner and is just sailing on the enzymes that kick in when you really connect with someone, and that’s great. If she and Tom are really in love, fine.
Holmes being receptive to Scientology “isn’t necessarily about psychological fragility,” my east-coast journalist friend comments. “Maybe she just wants to have sex with Tom Cruise and be his girlfriend and so she naturally wants to go along with the program. She used to have his poster on the wall in her bedroom, and he’s richer than God and he’s the biggest actor there is.”
And maaaybe she felt her career needed a little boost.
Holmes has also been making some changes in her professional life. Last week she canned her CAA agent, Brandt Joel, and replaced him with Cruise’s CAA reps, Rick Nicita and Kevin Huvane. This week she fired her longtime manager, John Carrabino, according to a report on E! Online.
George Says…
Director-writer George Hickenlooper (The Man From Elysian Fields, The Mayor of Sunset Strip) has something to say about Tom Cruise and Katie Homes, and it’s all groovy and glowing.
Hickenlooper is in pre-production on Factory Girl , a biopic about the tragic life of model and Andy Warhol scenester Edy Sedgwick. The film will be produced by Bob Yari, and is based from a script by Captain Mauzner and Simon Monjack.
Holmes was going to play the lead role but now she’s not, but Hickenlooper want sit known the casting didn’t go south because Tom Cruise talked her out of it because of some Scientology objection.
Andy Garcia, George Hickenlooper, Mick Jagger on set of The Man From Elysian Fields.
George has posted the following on his IMDB site; here’s a slightly edited version of it:
“First let me say that Katie Holmes is one of the most elegant, intelligent and charming actresses I have met during my career in film. She’s a delight to talk to and has a real old-world sophistication that I find tremendously appealing.
“This is one of the reasons I thought she would be a wonderful Edie. Katie’s own charm would capture an early moment in Edie’s life when she was living in Cambridge, was still innocent, before she went to New York and began her downward spiral.
“At the same time, I thought it would be exciting for an audience to watch Katie Holmes (who has previously played strong, girl-next-door type roles) play a character who takes this dark journey. Katie thought it would be exciting too.
“Over the course of several months, we had almost half a dozen meetings where we talked extensively about the script. On one of those occasions in New York, Katie came dressed very much like Edie. She was breathtaking. I was convinced she was my girl for the role.
“About two weeks ago, the New York Post (which has become nothing more than a muckraking tabloid) wrote a very defamatory piece about why Katie decided to ‘drop out’ of Factory Girl. They claimed that Tom Cruise didn’t want her playing a role where she would be a drug addict because that would go against his Scientology beliefs. This is blatantly untrue and stupid.
Edie Sedgwick
“If Tom Cruise felt that way, would he have ever appeared in a film like Magnolia ? Come on… Katie dropped out of Factory Girl because her commitment to doing press for Batman is overwhelming. She has an extensive press tour over the summer in Europe and Asia that would cut in to our rehearsal time.
“Shooting for Factory Girl begins in two months. Both of us felt she couldn’t balance both and that she wouldn’t have the time to do the research to take on this very demanding role, which would be very different from anything else she has ever done.
“Katie is not doing my project because she is the consummate professional, and wouldn’t want to take on a role where she couldn’t give 100%. No actor would want that, no director would want that. Tom Cruise had nothing to do with it. Cruise is a true gentleman and I feel bad about how he is currently being treated in the press. Leave the poor guy alone. He’s in love. That New York Times piece that ran about him last week was a disgrace. It felt more like Star magazine.
“Anyway, I guess it just goes to show you how cynical the media has become about love. Journalists should get lives of their own and stop destroying other people’s.”
Hickenlooper adds at the end of his statement that a piece is supposed to run [this Friday] in Entertainment Weekly about all this. In case it doesn’t, he says, here’s the straight poop.
More Grabs
Late-night eats on Kenmare Street and Lafayette Street — Sunday, 6.12.05, 11:10 pm.
McDonalds sign located in a Polish neighborhood…just checking to see if anyone’s paying attention. The sign is actually located on Canal Street just around the corner from….Chinatown! (Brilliant guess.)
Nicely renovated, freshly-painted condos on Brooooklyn’s Montrose Avenue, just west of Bushwick and a stone’s throw from my summer apartment
View of Manhattan skyline from north 6th Street, which cuts into Bedford Avenue in the western section of Williamsburg, the hip Brooklyn neighborhood that’s been totally Anglicized and yuppified and made expensive for all concerned.
Myself, web designer and Samizdata creator Perry DeHavilland at Laurel Canyon party that happened sometime in late April. I just happened to run across this, and it has nothing to do with anything.
This sturdy, German-built contraption is called a Party Bike. It’s for hire in the Times Square-Rockefeller Center area for $150 per hour (roughly $21.40 per person), and it seats seven people. Everyone pedals while the commandant controls the steering and braking. Naturally, there’s a Party Bike website.
Relatively small, oddly located Party Crashers sign on 41st street between Broadway and 7th Avenue.
This very cheerful female MTA worker (right), working in a booth at the R station on Broadway and 40th, told me she felt she had no choice but to write this posterboard sign to help out the hundreds of tourists who’ve become totally disoriented once they walk down the subway entrance staircase.
This vertical cluster of signs, located at B’way and 43rd, looks much bigger and more…I don’t know, a lot more “whoa” than what this photo suggests.
Shot of Chicago’s downtown theatre district taken by Look magazine photographer Stanley Kubrick in 1949.
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