What if stardom isn't all it's cracked up to be?

[Susan]

But I loved him ...

Dawnette Knight was obsessed with Michael Douglas. She claims to have met the actor in 2002 at a party in Florida. She knew he was married to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, and she didn't like it.

Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar in  2003 for her role in "Chicago," became her hated enemy. Between January 2003 and May 2004, Knight sent 19 threatening letters to Zeta-Jones, describing what would happen to her.

One said she would be chopped up in pieces "like Sharon Tate was." Another said: "We are going to slice her up like meat on a bone and feed her to the dogs."

Read more ....   But I Loved Him ...

What do you think about stalker/fans?  If you get rich and famous, it could happen to you! 

[Susan]

Right!  I forgot about that one. Very sad  ...

[Susan]

So Cammy, you didn't like Easy Rider. What about Five Easy Pieces?

Want to tell us what other movies were on the "sucky" list in that book you mentioned?

[Cammy May Hunnicutt]

I thought Five Easy Pieces was also totally boring and pointless.  OK, you're disaffected?  So what?

But it wasn't stupid like Easy Rider.

The blurb on that book says  "Did you know that no one actually heard Charles Foster Kane say "Rosebud"? Or that the movie Lawrence of Arabia acts more like he hates the Arabs? What about the film "classic" that's blatantly pro-KKK? Or the fact that the whole premise of Hitchcock's endlessly-praised Rear Window utterly invalidates itself? When you saw Sunset Blvd. and just didn't get it, you weren't the one in the wrong "

 

Obviously he's talking about "Birth of A Nation", that great classic (for some reason) or motion pictures that jerkily and ham-handedly tells us what stupid monsters Negros were and how the KKK helped save us from them.

 

Tell you another one that I just can't STAND... "It's a Wonderful Life".  So of course they show it over and over every year.

 

 

I'm not well-read enough in this field to know, but are their books like that as well? Big deal classics of crime fiction everybody kowtows to, but really don't make much sense?

 

[Caroline Trippe]

Let's not forget that many of the movies we now find boring or irritating or even pointless were actually pretty innovative for their time.  It's the best we had. And some of them, like "Easy Rider" and "Five Easy Pieces"  did reflect changing cultural values. You have to give them a little credit for that. Disaffection is a common theme now---but then, it seemed new and relevant.

It's easy to find examples of ruling class hegemony, prejudice and misogny in some of the so'called "classics."  Their moral stance was unambiguous. Now that our values have shifted, we challenge what we see as benighted.  No art form has actually been spared the scrutiny of politics , especially feminism. It's good to be aware, but one can go too far in condemning everything. Everything has its place in the continuum. We have to learn from what went before--to change what is "wrong,"  and use positively what is good.

So even if "Sunset Boulevard" was silly---but it had a dark heart: the solipcism and relentlessness of overweening egotism and fear and hatred of change---it gave Carol Burnett some of her best material. ;)

[Susan]

Caroliine, I agree with your comment about putting films into cultural perspective. Pot smoking Jack Nicolson and Dennis Hopper? Would never have happened in the 50s. And then we get Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Yowza!  

I actually think Sunset Boulevard is a pivotal film. It kicks off the 50s with a film that brands the Swanson character with a scarlet A, not for adultery, for AMBITION. Big no-no back then. Hey, the boys were back from WW II and they needed the jobs. And then, at the end of the decade, along comes Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, with its weird gender-bender themes. Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis in drag.

[Caroline Trippe]

And then we get Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Yowza! 

Almost forgot about that one! Yowza!  David Lynch is brilliant, though often hard to "get."  It can take awhile.  But what he does incredibly well is use all the techniques and devices that movie-goers have come to expect to build intense suspense, then he'll dash those expectations or turn them into something else. I always feel that he is commenting on films of the past but also on the desires of the audience---what is your deepest dread,  loathing, need? He makes watching a movie a primal experience. The first time I saw "Mulholland Drive" I didn't really  get it. Then, second time around,  I did. A friend said,  "Think of it as a dream."  It still gives me chills. 
And speaking of Ambition---it shows what that can do to a person, how the movie industry uses women, and turns dreams into nightmares.

The Naomi Watts character in Mulholland Drive was certainly a "soul sister" of the Gloria Swanson past-her-prime star. Both ambitious, both discarded. The one declined from greatness, the other denied her opportunity.

[Susan]

Yeah, the best (creepiest?) part of Blue Velvet was the opening shot where you see all these BUGS crawling underneath the lawn and then the guy mowing the lawn has a heart attack. However, I confess that I saw Mulholland Drive and it bored me to death. Also confess I was never a Nick Nolte fan. Can't even remember the Naomi Watts character.

[Susan]

Cammy, I agree that Birth of a Nation was blatantly racist, but plenty of people figured that out decades ago. Rear Window? I found it pretty creepy, like most of Hitchcock's movies. Hated Doris Day singing Que Sera tho (The Man Who Knew Too Much).

Yep, I've never been able to watch more than 30 minutes of It's a Wonderful Life. But Citizen Kane is still a pretty good movie. Seriously, I doubt you could get any 10 film critics writing today who would agree on the "best" 100 film classics. Well, maybe Singing in the Rain   :)

[Caroline Trippe]

. Well, maybe Singing in the Rain   :)

Who couldn't love that one!  If for nothing else than Gene Kelly's dance with the umbrella in the rain.  And oh my god, those Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dances. Twitty plots, sublime dancing. Sometimes sheer beauty is enough to justify a film.

I probably couldn't name ten "best" movies, much less 100.  I am not really a diehard movie buff, to be honest. I'd rather read.  But somehow over my lifetime I've managed to see a lot of movies, including a lot of foreign films. If I had to come up with a list of favorites, there would be quite a few of those on it. 

Seems to me the idea behind naming "favorites"  is to pinpoint the ones that were , to use your word, pivotal in some way. But most people think of the ones THEY liked best, for whatever reason!

[Susan]

Yeah, Gene Kelly was great. And I loved it when Natalie Portman did an imitation of him in The Professional. One of my all time fav movies (her first, I think)

Movie and TV critics love writing about the "best" films or shows. BTW, harvard is doing a series this summer of Paramount's 100 best movies.

http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012julsep/paramount.html

Meanwhile, Boston Globe TV critic Mathew Gilber just compiled a list of the "best" or shall I say most influential TV series. sorry don't have the link but if you google you'll find it.

 

[Martyn V. Halm]

"What do you think about stalker/fans?  If you get rich and famous, it could happen to you!"

I don't think so. For several reasons:

• How many authors would you recognise if you meet them on the street?
• Readers tend to be different in their fandom than movie goers. And not all actors suffer the same fate - it's mostly the handsome 'stars' who get the wrong attention. I haven't heard of stalkers targeting Xander Berkeley or Kathy Bates.
• Readers might like my work, but that doesn't mean they are jealous of my wife. Living with me is not as exciting as reading my stories.
• I write suspense about an assassin. I had a beta reader confess that she was glad that I lived on the other side of the pond, as the details in my writing scared her. As I share quite a few skills with my protagonist, messing with me or my family might have consequences most stalkers would like to avoid.

[Susan]

Actually, many readers would recognize big name authors who put their photos on their books. Male and female authors. However, women are in much greater danger from stalkers than men. [see my blog post on Olivia Newton John, who had not one but two stalkers after her.]

As for liking an author's work, that's not what stalkers are looking for. They want attention. They want to be as famous as the star (of whatever type of work, acting, music, writing) they stalk.

Patricia Cornwell has been stalked for years by a man who claims that she stole his ideas.

For many years, I was a professional musician. A good friend of mine, another female trumpet player, was stalked for seven years. The police were sympathetic, but this was before the anti-staking laws were passed in the 1980s. She finally had to move out of state to escape him. This inspired my second novel, DIVA, about a ruthless deranged man who stalks a beautiful female flute soloist. 

The stalking of women (and yes, a few men) is a serious problem in the US. Check out the domestic homicide stats. Appalling. I detail some of these on my blog also.