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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
If you were going to do "Mickey Rourke for a Day" now, how would you do it, given how weird he has become?
It wouldn't be the same. When I did "Mickey Rourke for a Day," which was maybe 1992, he'd had it as a star, but he was still in the tabloids. Now he's just a complete has-been. If you saw him in "The Rainmaker" or "Buffalo 66" you could see he's still a talented guy and very, very convincing as a real sleazeball. But it's almost unbelievable that there was ever a time that anybody thought he could have been a leading man, because of that cruel and unpleasant side that he has.
It's funny how actor after actor falls into that same trap. That is, if you want to be successful in Hollywood, you can play the antihero a few times. Usually you do it when your career has plateaued and you need to turn things around.
Richard Gere jump-started his career by playing a bad guy in "Internal Affairs." He was great in that, but Richard Gere is a talented actor. He has a couple of extremely annoying habits. He's got that squint. So when he made "Autumn in New York" with Wynona Ryder, you had two of the great squinters in the history of movies. All we needed were Helen Hunt, Renée Zellweger and Christian Slater and you've got a squinter's "murderer's row."
If you give people a steady diet of that kind of movie, you become typecast. Look at Vince Vaughn. He comes out in "Swingers" and he's very charismatic, very funny. Then he starts making other movies. So what does he make? He makes "Clay Pigeons" where he plays a very cruel serial killer. I mean most serial killers are cruel, but he's particularly unpleasant. Then he does the remake of "Psycho" and he's in "The Cell" where he's not the villain, but it's such a creepy movie nobody wants to see it. Well, you keep making these creepy movies and the next thing you know, you're Harry Dean Stanton.
So, I couldn't do Mickey Rourke today, because he's had it. It's like if you did Patrick Swayze. You couldn't do him now -- although in his time he was as good a one-liner as you could ask for. If you needed a joke, just put Patrick Swayze in the story. Just the name Patrick Swayze is great.
What do you consider to have been the lowest point of our culture?
Whatever you thought about how things were going to turn out in the '60s, nothing could have prepared us for Stallone. I really hated it when Stallone was a big star. I thought those movies were evil. I thought the Rocky movies were racist. I don't think he has any talent. A stupid man, making one stupid violent movie after another.
I feel that movies don't have to reflect reality, but they have to connect to reality in some way. So, if you make five movies about some short white guy from Philly who beats up a lot of black guys, what does that tell you about reality? I haven't seen any white guys winning any heavyweight championships in a long, long time.
So, I thought that those movies got into a real racist fantasy. And every time you say that, people go, "Oh, you're reading too much into it." No, I'm not.
And, then it's so interesting how the public turns on these people and all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, they don't make good movies anymore."
Oh, like when they were making "Cobra" and "F.I.S.T"?
What do you like about American culture? What do you think is good now?
I like the economy. I like money. I think money is great. I think the more that we all have, the better things are. I feel like we're sort of on a summer vacation right now. You watch these shows at night like "The O'Reilly Factor" and "Hardball" and they always want to create the impression that there are big issues that we're wrestling with. But there aren't. It's kind of mellow and I think that's good.
John Podhoretz wrote this column for the New York Post a couple of months ago which kind of said, "I don't like it that the country isn't as right wing as I am, but I can't do anything about it." He basically said, "We can't help the fact that the Reagan revolution is probably petering out and the country is becoming more and more wishy-washy, slightly left of center."
It's Ben and Jerry politics: Have the right sentiments. Express the right thing. Make sure all your economic bases are covered. Probably send your kids to private school. Basically be sort of soft and fuzzy on the environment and Internet privacy and everything like that. I think that's a pretty faithful description of America the way it is.
When I'm writing these books ridiculing people, it's not like I'm attacking the commissars in Stalingrad. It's just basically like, "These people are annoying." This is a generation that is just unbelievably annoying. But, you don't want to see them executed. I'm conscious of the fact that I'm ridiculing people, but I don't think they're villains. I just think they're silly and that's what satire is supposed to be about. The bourgeoisie constantly swings from one stupid idea to the next. It's not going to change in my lifetime. You get a new stupid food, or a stupid hat, or a stupid furnishing, or a stupid philosophy, so you make fun of it because it's incredibly annoying. But it's not the pivotal issues of our time.
I think that's basically the situation the country's in right now. People aren't going to stop wearing ponytails. Baby boomers won't stop being ridiculous. Baby boomers aren't going to grow up. They'll be 80 years old and people will still be listening to Hendrix and talking about the night we levitated the Pentagon. They're not going to let go of it. There's not going to be that moment when everybody sort of says, "We suck so much. We were so savvy and we sold out." There's never going to be that moment for baby boomers.
Baby boomers are going to go to their graves believing that they ended racism. They really believe that. But I think there are certain neighborhoods in Chicago where if you asked people they would say, "No, I think there's still a little bit of work that needs to go on."
It's not like when 11 percent of the "greatest generation" voted for George Wallace. That's not so great. That wasn't so nice. That wasn't such a fond moment. The greatest generation was nasty to minorities.
The baby boomers aren't nasty to minorities. They just ignore them. I suppose that's progress. It's better than lynching people, but it's not like you ended racism. It's just the whole [baby boomer] idea: "Well, we drove LBJ from office and we drove Nixon from office and we ended the war in Vietnam. That's enough. We're done. Can we see the dessert menu?"
