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"Hey, George: Go back to the E.R. before Frank sends you there! Yo, Brad: Dino could spit you out like an olive pit!"
Dec 11, 2001 | At a moment in history of unprecedented encroachments on civil liberties, and in a city plagued by poverty, crime and complaints of police corruption, a handful of citizens took to the streets Friday to vigorously protest the remake of a mediocre old movie.
As protest mastermind Will "the Thrill" Viharo tells it -- yells it -- Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's Eleven" is the last straw in Hollywood's systematic and shameful plundering of holy cinematic history. Viharo is a movie nut, but more than that, he's a Rat Pack nut, and the 1960 version of "Ocean's 11" is sacred territory.
Beginning at 6 p.m. on Friday, he, his wife, Monica, and a few others positioned themselves in front of Oakland's Jack London Cinemas and began shouting at passing cars. The cars occasionally slowed down and asked why they were being shouted at. They're robbing our past, the protesters explained. These new guys don't know the first thing about "cool," and yet they're trying to remake a movie that's about nothing else.
Putatively Viharo and his acolytes are devotees of cool. "We celebrate the lost art of being cool," he says. As a professional rep theater host at the Parkway theater and full-time lounge lizard, his love for '50s and '60s culture translates into a love for cool. The problem with this conceit is that Viharo himself couldn't be further from cool. He's got the accouterments -- the shoes, the jacket, the vocabulary -- but ultimately he's a film geek in Frank's clothing: Name a B movie and Viharo will tell you who manufactured the monster's fangs. More to the point, anyone so vociferous on the rules of cool, well, that's not cool.
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Viharo would probably be happy to admit he doesn't cut the mustard. He may have a slick wardrobe, but his real devotion is to simply being devoted. There are just as many framed black and white headshots in his home as you'd imagine -- Yvonne Craig, Deborah Walley, Stella Stevens. Where there aren't head shots there are movie posters. Somewhere in the middle is an old placard that says, "It's Frank's world -- we just live in it." Two days before the protest, Viharo wears an evening jacket and slicked-back hair. He's bulldog-stubby. For guests, he has a rum and Coke ready to go.
He's also a talker. Within two minutes I know the story of his marriage. Viharo had been hosting a screening of "Jailhouse Rock" when he pulled a pretty brunet up on stage from the audience. He and his "permanent lovely assistant" were married by a Dean Martin impersonator. The original "Ocean's 11" screened in the background. I've since met the impersonator. He looks just like Dean Martin.
On Viharo's coffee table are poster-board signs cut into the shape of martini glasses for Friday's protest: "Hey George -- go back to the E.R. before Frank sends you there!" And "Yo Brad -- Dino could spit you out like an olive pit!"
"The remake is an insult to their legacy," Viharo says. "The original 'Ocean's' cast were genuinely cool. They were basically just playing themselves. These [new] people are just acting."
Viharo isn't generally bogged down by self-doubt. He prefers talking to listening, and if you propose that, say, George Clooney et al. are "just acting" because, in fact, they're just actors, he puts a hand up and talks louder.
He may have the disposition of a man whose culture has been stolen, but it wasn't his until he himself stole it a few years back; Viharo is candid about his self-invention. He's been a lounge lizard all his life -- he was born in 1963 -- but it took a while for him to discover this. There was a beat period in the '80s, for example (one assumes it was Neal Cassady photos instead of Jayne Mansfield in those days).
The epiphany came at a Rat Pack reunion he attended in 1988. Something clicked, and he began easing himself into a new "personal style." He bought his first sharkskin jacket in the early '90s. In 1993 he wrote a detective novel, "Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me." Then, in 1997, he was asked to host a midnight movie series at a rep house, and "Will the Thrill" was born.
"In my 20s, life was like a tragic poem. Now it's like a comic book," he says. "This is an identity that I created for myself."
Like all good self-made men, Viharo has a blind spot. In a living room punctiliously appointed with Hollywood starlet photos, stacks of old records and other '50s and '60s paraphernalia, he sees no irony in protesting the idea of remaking. Ask him if he himself isn't a remake and the hand comes up again.
"Do you like the Beatles?" he asks, leaning forward.
"Yes."
