Reality Is Difficult
By James Pinkerton
15 May 2006
The hottest movie coming out of Hollywood, "The Anthony Pellicano
Story," hasn't actually been filmed yet. Nonetheless, it's real; the
action is taking place right now in corporate suites and law offices --
and jail cells -- all over Los Angeles. Perhaps I should explain.
The players in "Pellicano" are some of the most notorious and most
prominent bold-print names in Hollywood. The most notorious, of course,
is Anthony Pellicano, private eye to the stars. At present, Pellicano
is in prison on a weapons rap, but he now stands accused of additional
charges -- 112 counts and counting -- for wiretapping and for bribing
cops to do additional illegal surveillances. In addition, five others
have copped pleas, and five more have been indicted.
That's enough for a good script right there, but wait, there's more: On
April 18, movie director John "Die Hard" McTiernan pleaded guilty to
making "knowingly false" statements to the FBI about his past use of
Pellicano in a business dispute. Due to be sentenced in July, McTiernan
faces as much as five years in the slammer.
And according to the June issue of Vanity Fair, these criminal cases
are just the beginning. In what authors Bryan Burrough and John
Connolly gleefully describe as "the biggest scandal in Hollywood
history," some of the most prominent names in Hollywood -- celebrity
lawyer Bert Fields, erstwhile superagent Michael Ovitz, incumbent
studio mogul Brad Grey, fading actor Steven Seagal, many others --
could be indicted for contracting with Pellicano to do various dirty
deeds, from wiretapping to intimidation.
OK, so this scandal-brew could be the stuff of a great movie. And let's
not kid ourselves, Hollywood loves making films about itself: From
"Sunset Boulevard" to "The Day of the Locust" to "The Player", there is
no tale of skullduggery, mob violence, and murder that Tinseltown won't
take a liking to.
Of course, Hollywood is willing and eager to profit from the airing of
its own dirty laundry, but it's more than that: Show-people got into
show-business to mythopoeicize themselves -- to make themselves mythic.
Granted, they might not know what "mythopoeic" means, but, to borrow a
phrase, they know it when they see it. And they know they love seeing
it in themselves. And if they have to trade away their privacy, their
dignity -- and maybe their legality -- to get it? Small price to pay.
People will still talk about them, after they're dead; it's a form of
immortality that works even for atheists.
Am I overstating things? Well, let's consider this slice of life in the
Pellicano household; the source here is Pellicano's fourth ex-wife, Kat:
For the Pellicanos, a pleasant evening might mean
watching The Sopranos or one of the Godfather movies. Mafia rituals
fascinated Pellicano ... In business, where he crafted a tough-guy
persona designed to appeal to a clientele weaned on Jake Gittes and Sam
Spade, he was a man who playfully brandished baseball bats, allegedly
had a dead fish left on an opponent's windshield, and told clients they
were joining his "family" -- and no one hurt his family. He named his
son after Don Corleone's favored assassin, Luca Brazzi. On occasion Kat
felt he took the mafioso shtick a tad far. "There were times when he
would make my children kiss his hand like he was the Godfather," she
says. "He started to think he was Don Corleone."
OK, so Pellicano became so wrapped up in the movies that he lost it at
the movies. That happens. But what's remarkable about Pellicano is that
even with all his delusions of cine-grandeur, he wasn't locked up, or
consigned to some park bench. No, he was the go-to guy in Hollywood,
the man who made problems go away -- the "sin eater," as his many
grateful employers dubbed him.
And that's because, as Burrough & Connolly explain, the Hollywood
types who hired Pellicano had gone through the looking glass, too: They
thought Pellicano was what a private dick should be, because he acted
like one -- just like in the movies. As another private investigator
said of Pellicano, "I never took the guy seriously. The way he bragged
openly about wiretaps and baseball bats, I mean, I just thought it
wasn't real. I didn't understand that his Hollywood clientele lived in
that same film noir world and accepted it as real." As the authors
explain, "Pellicano could have thrived only in L.A. His mock-mafioso
act was tailor-made for Hollywood, which expects a private detective to
act the way detectives do in the movies, where illegal activities such
as tapping telephones and bribing cops are routine."
But of course, reality soon came crashing down on Pellicano, who seems
destined to be imprisoned for the rest of his life. And as for his
famous clients, many of them could end up in the clink, too, if
Pellicano talks. But so far, true to his version of the gangster code
of omerta, he's not talking. Those nervous clients must be hoping that
nobody slips Pellicano a DVD of "The Valachi Papers".
In Hollywood's world of fakery, only the fake seemed real. Indeed, the
fake was real, because Pellicano and his associates committed real
crimes that hurt real people. The challenge for the rest of us is to
thresh out truth from fiction -- wish us luck.
Because while Aristotle maintained that art imitates life, it seems
that Oscar Wilde's counter-wisdom -- life imitates art -- is more
relevant to our time. The predominance of artifice hit me years ago
when I was reading Michael Herr's Dispatches, a memoir of his time as a
war correspondent in Vietnam. Herr described soldiers who channeled
John Wayne -- the actor who, during World War Two, never left the
safety of Hollywood -- to help them make sense of their "role" in
genuine combat. On another occasion, a wounded Marine, awaiting
treatment at a medical aid station, found himself under fire from a
random enemy sniper: "I hate this movie," the Marine snarled.
Closer to home, how many college kids have consciously emulated the
toga-partying, don't-know-much-about-history-ing "Animal House"
lifestyle? And who doubts that Chicagoan Chris Farley, the chubby
cut-up who died of excess at age 33, was inspired to live out, briefly,
the example of Chicagoan John Belushi, the original chubby cut-up who
died of excess at age 33?
And so we come to the argument made by Neal Gabler, author of Life: The
Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. As Gabler puts it,
entertainment is "the most pervasive, powerful, and ineluctable force
of our time -- a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized
into life." Writing in 1998, Gabler illustrates his thesis with such
media playthings (playing and played) as Michael Jackson, the
Unabomber, and Mark David Chapman.
Had Gabler, who is my colleague on the Fox "News Watch", waited a few
years, he could have written whole chapters on such spectacular stunts
-- played with full media savvy by hammy jihadists -- as suicide
bombings, beheading videos and, in all its hideous splendor, 9-11.
Terrorists have become the stars of their own horror movies.
And the carnage of combat, more than any other kind of "show,"
continues to summon the myth-minded. Patrick Dollard, hearing the siren
call of war, abandoned his lucrative career as a Hollywood
agent/manager, traveling to Iraq as an "embed" to make a documentary.
But along the way, Dollard seems to have jumped the sand dune; he
declared to The New York Times that he had become like the character
Kurtz, the crazed-renegade Army colonel played by Marlon Brando in the
1979 film "Apocalypse Now". One of Dollard's four ex-wives told the
Times, almost unnecessarily, "He'd rather deal with a fantasy than a
reality. Reality is very difficult."
Indeed, reality is difficult. So we can admire the example of Harry
Palmer, the captured British spy who withstood the brainwashing efforts
of his East Bloc captors by grinding a piece of broken glass into his
hand -- the pain kept him rooted in reality. Oh wait, that was in a
1965 movie, "The Ipcress File," based on a Len Deighton novel, starring
Michael Caine -- and in fact, it was his own government seeking to
brainwash him, in a London basement tricked up to look like a Lubyanka
dungeon. But still, the bloody-hand plan is still a good
counter-measure, if you are ever subjected to mind-control, from any
source.
But OK, a better role model for "reality therapy" is the very real
Daniel A. Saunders, prosecutor in the Pellicano case. He's charging
ahead, after his glitzy quarry; The Los Angeles Times reported just on
Tuesday that the prosecution is adding an attempted mob-style "hit" to
Pellicano's rap sheet. Yet interestingly, it's also been reported that
DA Saunders first went out to LA to get into acting, only eventually to
drift into lawyering. Now, as a legal straight arrow, he threatens to
nail the Hollywood establishment to the wall. But of course, that
doesn't mean there can't be a movie deal for him down the road. Surely
the embers of stardom still smolder in Saunders' soul.
Coming soon: "The Anthony Pellicano Story." That life-the-movie is in
production now, even if the story is still unfolding and the script is
still being written.
James Pinkerton is TCS media critic and fellow at the New America Foundation.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=051506F