05.08.06
Re-branding Anthony Pellicano
Here in Tinseltown, there are a lot of folks having problems understanding that the crimes which went down in this city during Anthony Pellicano’s mob-style reign were very real and not just some laughable escapade of a balding middle aged Italian man trying to regain his inner Tony Soprano. These are the very same people who produce the scripts that become our media driven concepts of reality. They must have gotten too used to just red lining any distasteful dialogue as they churned out their own press releases. This Hollywood Boys’ Club appears to still be attempting to do some aggressive positive re-branding of the Anthony Pellicano image despite an abundance of forever burgeoning evidence to the contrary.
Of course many involved in the media cover-up in Los Angeles are just looking out for their own guilty butts due to the collusive relationship that they once had with the ‘Pelican’. Then there is that element who truly believe that if it’s not sex, drugs and rock and roll, or at least larger-than-life, it won’t sell. Most, though, simply have genuine difficulty recognizing where fantasy play ends and reality begins. I’d like to remind these guys that the Pellicano saga was a bit more like a modern graphic novel than a D.C. comic book per say, except all the blood had this sickening human stench to it and didn’t really glow fluorescent yellow.
Pellicano was not only a bit off-balance, he was physically violent, a bully and a coward. Prototypically, men like that either go pretty far in society or wind up in prison. Well, Pellicano has managed to do both within one brief lifetime. That man always did say he was the “best”.
The other notion that these frustrated silver screen writers of reality seem to be unable to give up is that truly bad things don’t ever happen to nice people, though they privately revel in watching the rich and powerful tumble from grace. Repeatedly lately, the Los Angeles Times has been profiling select Pellicano victims in such a way that their despicable plights could easily arouse contempt. The LAT’s eulogies for Pellicano’s collaborators, the latest and greatest being to Bert Fields on Sunday, read like Greek tragedies as we watch heroes fall when their mortal weaknesses are revealed. Well, this is all just pure unadulterated garbage and there’s no reason to politely mince words about it.
Unless you’re secretly a pimply adolescent whose been trapped for years in his mother’s basement on the Internet only to emerge a forty something studio executive, you realize that bad things do happen to nice people all the time. A person absolutely didn’t have to deserve it to have their life destroyed by Pellicano. Most of the victims that I’ve met were only guilty of knowing or doing something that inconvenienced Pellicano and one of his clients. As for Pellicano’s A-list cohorts being simply poor, misguided, grateful recipients of his illegal spoils….yeah….right. Let’s try coming up with some better fiction please or at least a more plausible treatment. Ummmn-kay boys?
