My Own Private Hollywood
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My Own Private Hollywood
By Blue | June 21, 2010 | Comments Off on My own private Hollywood
deepFUN.com - Copyright 2018 Bernard De Koven
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So, I ask, what else do I do to keep it fun here in the inner playground when the elsewhere isn't as much fun as it should be?
How many steps between this and that? How many breaths from here to there?
I count people, I count cars, I count whatever will count enough to keep me counting.
If that's not fun enough, I estimate. 67 steps to the bench. 24 chews to finish the salad. 138 heartbeats from here to the end of the article. And if that's not fun enough, I place my bets. An ice cream cone or similarly unjustifiable expenditure if I make it to the door of the store in exactly 100 strides.
I personally have had ornate lecture halls built wherever my selves gather so that I might, when need be, astound my self with my wit. Make myself laugh, wherever I am. Give myself standing ovations whenever so moved.
Deservedly so. Because on the inner lecture circuit I am widely known for my motivational speaking. I talk with a clarity and fluidity and practiced elegance that can capture the heart and mind of my inner audience. My words sound as well-rehearsed as a long-running play, and it's all improvisation! I can speak with equal authority, about truth and God, money and power, love and sex, sex and sex -- and I don't really have to know what I'm talking about until I hear myself saying it.
When I'm not speaking to myseslves, I sometimes find it absolutely hilarious simply to attend to one of my many open rehearsals, with myself eveso versatilly starring as actor and audience and everybody I need to be talking to.
I have become a big time entertainment industry, all by myself.
Billion dollar Summer blockbuster? I can illustrate my lectures with spectaculars whose production values make Hollywood seem like a cottage industry. Million-acre amusement park? What Disneyland can compare to the attractions awaiting me in my own private hollywood?
The book, the spirit, the experience
Bernard De Koven invites you to open a gift of playfulness at aplayfulpath.com .
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Kate Hudson has been charming audiences since her irresistible turn in Almost Famous . Now she's ready to prove her darker side is just as electrifying.
Q. What actress do you most admire? A. I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say my mom. Apart from the fact that she's my mother, she's a brilliant comedian and a force as a producer. She paved the way for women to produce and star in their own films, and to balance that with being the matriarch of our family is really inspiring.
Q. What do you think women in Hollywood could be doing more of? A. When women root for each other, we get so much further. And it's funny, because you don't see a lot of that. There's still a real imbalance of male and female positions in the industry. And the older you get, the more you witness it firsthand. Q. Are good female roles hard to find? A. They are—because in most male-driven vehicles, the female parts tend to be dispensable. I have faith that we can make female-driven films that are as interesting to men as they are to women.
Q. What did you learn from your mother about being a parent in Hollywood? A. My mom and dad had it figured out: They never worked at the same time, and they were very conscious of making anywhere we went feel like home. When you're working, the hours are brutal, but when you're not working, you have all the time in the world. That's always a difficult balance.
Keep clicking for Kate's comments on some of her most memorable roles.
"One of my favorite experiences. One, because I love Cameron Crowe. And two, because it was just such a wonderful movie. The whole thing was overwhelming—in the best way."
"I always had the most fun doing improv competitions in theater programs when I was younger, and that's what I love about making comedies: the challenges of timing and physicality and improvisation."
"Rob Marshall is an incredible choreographer, and he made me feel so comfortable. To be able to do that and share it with my mom, who was also a dancer, was pretty cool."
"Gael is an amazing, lovely, fun guy. We had some very intimate, tough scenes, and he was the best partner. I felt really lucky to work with him."
After nearly two decades on top, she continues to occupy the very spot she started out at:the risk-taking smart woman's actress.
Q. Have you ever had a casting-couch experience? A. Yup. When I was just starting out, someone suggested that we finish a meeting in the bedroom. I left. I was pretty shocked. I could see how someone who didn't know better might worry, "My career will be ruined if I don't give this guy a blow job!"
Q. How do you feel about the kinds of roles available to women today? A. Kind of dejected. There's a lot that's okay, but there's little that's really good, especially for someone my age. Sometimes you find out that something you really liked is going to someone 10 years younger. I find it heartening that Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock have been able to find and create amazing projects.
Q. How do you balance work and motherhood? A. It's really hard. One night in Nashville, my son was screaming with a terrible stomachache. I was like, "I have to get out of here!" but we had to finish. My friend Jenno, a mother of three who was producing, was great, reminding me that nine times out of 10, they just have gas.
Keep clicking for Gwyneth's comments on some of her most memorable roles.
"I thought we were just making this little art movie with insider jokes for playwrights. I never would have thought this movie would take off the way that it did."
"The movie I'm working on now, [Steven Soderbergh's] Contagion , has an amazing ensemble cast. I'll get to act with Matt Damon and Jude Law again."
"I wasn't in many of the action scenes. Since those take, like, two weeks to film, I would be lying by the pool with my kids and having picnics with them in L.A. It was awesome!"
"I've gotten really into the country thing—Miranda Lambert, Tim McGraw, Rascal Flatts, Hank Williams and his granddaughter Holly Williams. And I love, love Dolly."
A two-time Oscar winner who masterfully subverts gender expectations, Swank says that her acting is about both connection and abandon.
Q. What have been some of your best moments in front of the camera? A. I'd put Conviction up there with Million Dollar Baby as two of my best experiences. Sam Rockwell and I had some scenes where the director yelled and we were dropped back on Earth. You literally go someplace else. That does not happen very often.
Q. A lot of your roles are based on real people— Boys Don't Cry , Freedom Writers , Amelia , Conviction . Why is that? A. I would say seven out of 10 scripts I get are biopics, and I don't know if it's because I have chosen to do a lot of them or if I just find them more interesting than some of the other scripts I get. It's really hard to come by a fictional script where there's a strong female character.
Q. Do you take pains not to carry yourself like a celebrity? A. I see myself as an actor—I don't see myself as a celebrity. I went to Italy last year, and I was driving around the country by myself, and people were like, "What are you doing?" Getting from A to B! In New York City, I take the subway all the time. I take it out to Shea Stadium and watch baseball games. It's easy to lose touch with people when you're not around them anymore. You become so secluded and isolated—and that's just not something I'm interested in.
Keep clicking for Hilary's comments on some of her most memorable roles.
"I went out and tried to pass as a boy every day for four weeks before filming. I got my hair cut in New York, came home, and pretended I was James [Hilary's cousin from Nebraska]."
"To work with icons like Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, learn how to box, and push myself to a new place is something I hold dear to my heart. I'll always be grateful to Clint."
"I still cherish the opportunity to learn how to fly and to play someone who was such an inspiration for me and a lot of other women. It was a fun, transformative movie."
"For Betty Anne Waters, I gained 15 pounds because that made her more believable. For me, it's all about servicing the story. There are few movies I've done where I can say, `That looks like me.'"
With three stunning features in a row and a fourth one on the way, this groundbreaking auteur is just getting started rewriting Hollywood history.
Q. Marie Antoinette was a huge project for you. What hurdles did you have to overcome as a woman directing a major film? A. It was big for me, although in Hollywood $20 million wasn't a big budget. But I got a lot of support from Amy Pascal, who championed me at Columbia. I think that without her, it wouldn't have gotten made. She was really supportive of my telling the story from a young girl's point of view, when maybe a man wouldn't have been. Q. What low point stands out for you in making a film? A. When I appeared in Godfather III . I had never wanted to be an actress, and I was 18, and being criticized for ruining my dad's movie was a hard thing. But I also think it makes you stronger. I felt that I could handle things after that. John Huston told me when I was very young, "Not everyone is going to like you," he said, "so don't try to get everyone to." And that was so liberating.
Keep clicking for Sofia's comments on some of her most memorable film moments.
"The sister Kirsten played was at the center of the movie's sexual drama. But Kirsten was a teenager too, so I think she was working things out for herself as well."
"I wrote the movie with Bill Murray in mind, who wouldn't sign a contract, but he sounded interested. So I went to Japan and started filming. It was a huge relief when he showed up."
"I loved Kirsten in that movie, and it was fun to do it with an irreverent attitude toward the history, which pissed some people off. But it was in the spirit of Marie Antoinette , who was a little rebellious."
"Elle Fanning is so radiant in this picture. She was only 11, and she was growing all the time. I wanted that moment when a man's child is beginning to become a woman and how complicated that would be for him."
My Own Private Idaho: The cult 90s film that blazed a trail
By Emily Maskell 27th December 2021
Thirty years on, Gus Van Sant's masterpiece still astounds. With their tender performances, its two stars Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix reinvigorated the pinup ideal, writes Emily Maskell.
Reeves and Phoenix give life to these two social-outcast delinquents with an intimate seriousness
Thirty years on, the disarmingly tender camp-fire moment still resonates with ground-breaking emotional force
My Own Private Idaho took its stars to places where Hollywood wouldn't take its heartthrobs
Keanu Reeves and the late River Phoenix were in their 20s when they starred in Gus Van Sant's 1991 cult classic My Own Private Idaho. The two actors were already well on their way to becoming household names when they diverted from Hollywood's well-trodden path to star in Van Sant's third feature: a queer, cult and unprecedented title in both Reeves and Phoenix's filmographies.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of My Own Private Idaho, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, and one of Van Sant's most quietly affecting titles. A moving and meditative character study, the film is an expedition of two young hustlers: Michael "Mike" Waters (River Phoenix), a narcoleptic vagabond yearning to feel the warm embrace of home, and the handsomely charming Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), a mayor's son who is wayward and indulging in sex work as he awaits access to his bountiful inheritance. Part arthouse cinema, part unconventional road-trip movie, My Own Private Idaho makes for a pivotal – if not definitive – outlier in the pin-up lineage of Reeves and Phoenix's respective acting careers.
Gus Van Sant's 1991 cult masterpiece is full of sweeping vistas of Idaho (Credit: Alamy)
While My Own Private Idaho journeys from Portland to Idaho to Italy in search of Mike's mother, Van Sant's first stop is to spotlight the Hollywood heartthrobs in a whole new light. The first close-up glance viewers are granted of Phoenix is Mike's expression as he receives fellatio. The explicit moment precedes a barn house falling from the sky and smashing on to the wide, open road. Instantaneously, this teen idol sheds his poster-boy skin, and lurches towards the unconventionality of Van Sant's magisterial vistas of Idaho.
With a liberal attitude towards sex, sex work, and queerness, Van Sant transposed the young gleaming Hollywood stars into his indie cinematic frame. But asking viewers to empathise with the potentially unfavourable queer, social-outcast sex workers was a risk for the actors. "In 1991, even 14 years before Brokeback Mountain, the conventional Hollywood wisdom was that it was career suicide for a leading man to be identified as gay," Gavin Edwards , author of Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind, tells BBC Culture. It is as if these two actors were outrunning the trappings of Hollywood fame by venturing out of the realm of heartthrob typecasting.
The figure of the hustler – not the Richard Gere-type gigolo – serving a male clientele was not just outré, but also unconventional for mainstream 90s audiences. Midway through their journey, Scott and Mike meet one of their past customers, Hans (Udo Kier), at a hotel. After some passes in the lobby, the trio go to Hans's room and have a threesome that is shown with a mirage of quasi-stop-motion tableaux vivants . Van Sant's camera burrows at awkward angles with overlapping limbs and high-contrast shadows.
Van Sant's arthouse cinematic style is another factor that forgoes the traditional depiction of the Hollywood heartthrob. While My Own Private Idaho's DVD cover description notes how it stars "America's hottest young male stars", the film's artistic flair and unorthodox imagery is less focused on flaunting the beauty and charisma of its actors. Instead, it contorts their golden-boy image into directionless, negligent and lawless characters. This departure from leading-man conventionality was incontrovertible, as Vincent Canby , in his 1991 New York Times film review, notes: "The performances, especially by the two young stars, are as surprising as they are sure." Reeves and Phoenix paint Scott and Mike with a genuine authenticity that doesn't poke fun or reduce the characters to hollow comedic opportunities, giving life to these two social-outcast delinquents with an intimate seriousness.
The film inverted the movie pin-up idea that audiences had grown accustomed to in other ways, too. The usual floppy hairstyle and boyish charm of the Hollywood leading man are replaced by a shaggy cut paired with untamed stubble. This grungy aesthetic also blends into Beatrix Aruna Pasztor's costume design. Mike is rarely without his burnt-orange dirt-scuffed jacket. Van Sant implements this gritty-edged style throughout his cinematic world; it is a million miles away from the action hero or suave-gentleman archetype Reeves and Phoenix could have otherwise channelled.
There is a disarming tenderness in the relationship between Scott and the narcoleptic Mike (Credit: Alamy)
"It's certainly the case that there are trends in each era that come to temporarily define male imagery on the screen and that are reflective of cultural changes," Dr Karen McNally, reader in American film, television and cultural history at London Metropolitan University, tells BBC Culture. Many Hollywood movies of the 1980s presented "a hyper-masculinity of the Reagan era. Michael Douglas's entitled white masculinity in Wall Street and Fatal Attraction and the aggressive physicality of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger became emblems of the hyper-male politics and culture of the 1980s." It was this hardened masculinity, one that was unmoving and stoic, sitting at the intersection of mystery and virility, that Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho went on to undermine. From the physical closeness of the two characters to Mike's physical weakness with narcolepsy, the brutish male is non-existent here.
The pair's previous film roles had been accessible and wide in appeal. While Reeves starred in the comedy Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) as the titular Ted, and was a top-billing action hero in Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991), Phoenix was coming into his own, and acting in mainstream blockbusters, including the younger version of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
During the 90s, however, Reeves and Phoenix were couched beside contemporaries who were playing very different roles. The likes of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Ethan Hawke, Will Smith and Heath Ledger embodied a new, emerging generation of charming, modern leading men. While these actors can be grouped together as 90s heartthrobs, their work differed hugely.
On the more expected side of the heartthrob range, you have an actor like Will Smith, whose blossoming breakthrough matured with his late 90s appearance as the charismatic blockbuster star in Men in Black (1997) and the headlining hero in the action-thriller Enemy of the State (1998). These mainstream macho-saviour roles, once the epitome of the heartthrob's work, were gradually being replaced by sensitive pin-ups: Matt Damon's Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting (1997) allowed him the best of both worlds: to be a mathematic genius, and have the emotional sensitivity to cry. DiCaprio was also leaning towards this portrayal of a more sensitive masculinity, as he recited Shakespearean verse throughout Romeo + Juliet (1996).
Both of these films see rigid masculinity unravelled. It is My Own Private Idaho, however, that is the very epitome of this radical pivot. In lieu of pin-up roles, Reeves and Phoenix – although remaining a part of this heartthrob collective – present the most outright recalibration of the traditional teen-idol template in Van Sant's film with their emotionally sensitive performances. As Dr McNally puts it: "The introspective vulnerability of outsiders displayed by Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho becomes almost a reactive backlash against an earlier brand of masculinity and an attempt to redefine the screen male for the next decade."
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