 Behind the Mask
A revealing documentary shows that some superheroes aren’t always super. By Bryan Reesman
Matt Ogen’s charming documentary Confessions of a Superhero,
out on DVD this month, chronicles the down-and-out lives of four
aspiring actors who suit up as famous superheroes on Hollywood
Boulevard to pose for photos with tourists, collect tip money, and get
a big-screen break (they hope). The film is simultaneously funny,
poignant, and creepy, showing the crew to be anything but the
invincible heroes they portray. There’s the physical: “The Hulk” passes
out in a Hollywood restaurant on a 106-degree day that almost melts his
plastic suit. And there’s the emotional: “Superman” is a recovering
addict. Here we list some of the major differences between the real
people and their Hollywood Boulevard hero counterparts.
REAL:
Wonder Woman,
a.k.a. Diana Prince | HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD:
Wonder Woman,
a.k.a. Jennifer Gehrt | REAL:
Superman, a.k.a. Clark Kent,
a.k.a. Kal-El | HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD:
Superman,
a.k.a. Christopher Dennis
| Wonder
Woman is an amazonian princess who leaves her native Paradise Island to
live in the world of men (and other women). She is said to be as
“beautiful as aphrodite, wise as athena, swifter than Hermes, and
stronger than Hercules.” and she is single.
| Jennifer
Gehrt is a former homecoming queen who left her native Tennessee to
pursue fame and fortune in la-la land. She is single — now. She
divorced after a quickie marriage in Las Vegas. “I’m very hard to deal
with,” Gehrt concedes in the documentary. “I’m very highmaintenance
when it comes to attention.”
| Kal-El,
born on the doomed planet of Krypton, is saved by his parents when they
put him in a rocket and send him on a course toward Earth. Here, thanks
to our planet’s lesser gravitational pull and yellow sun, he has
superpowers. (Look, that probably made sense in 1938.) Today, he lives
in a city named Metropolis and works, out of costume, as a
mild-mannered reporter.
| Christopher
Dennis is a reformed drug user who now smokes cigarettes in private,
since heroes don’t light up in public. He got off drugs after deciding
“enough is enough,” he says in Confessions. “I was watching TV [while
on drugs] and saw a death scene. It was almost like I was watching my
own death.” Dennis is now addicted to all things Superman. He has
crammed his Los angeles apartment with more than $90,000 worth of
Superman memorabilia.
| To
fight against the nazis in World War II. at least, that was the
original purpose when Wonder Woman moved to the world of man. Today,
she fights somewhat lesser evils of all kinds.
| To
become famous. “What else is there?” Gehrt asks. “Sure, a doctor saves
lives, but is he remembered? Is he there for all times? People are
still talking about Marilyn Monroe. People are still talking about
Elvis Presley. People in the entertainment business are forever here.”
| To
help protect weak earthlings, especially us american weak earthlings.
Early on, Superman declared that he stood for “truth, justice and the
american way.” Of late, that’s been updated, or maybe downgraded. In
Superman Returns, the latest bigscreen adaptation of the character, the
slogan has become, “Truth, justice, and all that stuff.”
| To
become famous. Dennis, as Superman, is now a semiregular on Jimmy
Kimmel Live!, which is broadcast just across the street from the Kodak
Theater and Mann’s Chinese Theatre, where the costumed heroes in
Confessions do their work. Those appearances have helped him land other
TV interviews and magazine profiles. “I like to think my future holds
fame and fortune,” Dennis says in Confessions. “I like to say I’ve got
the fame without the fortune right now.”
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The Legal Limits of Superpowers
All superheroes have their nemeses and weaknesses. For the Hollywood
Boulevard “heroes,” those are one and the same: the law. They are bound
by law to remain on public property at all times. And they are unable
to ask for money, no matter how many snapshots you take with one of
them. In Confessions of a Superhero, Christopher Dennis, who dresses up
like Superman, explains, “We don’t work for tips. We accept tips. You
also cannot name amounts unless you have a permit.” Argh! Those dreaded
permits.
REAL:
Batman,
a.k.a. Bruce Wayne
| HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD:
Batman,
a.k.a. Maxwell Allen
| REAL:
The Hulk, a.k.a. Dr. Bruce Banner
| HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD:
The Hulk,
a.k.a. Joe McQueen
| After Bruce Wayne’s
parents are murdered before his eyes, he vows vengeance on criminals of
all kinds. Luckily, he’s inherited a fortune, which he uses to fund his
crime-fighting persona and to buy a lot of tuxedos.
| Maxwell Allen, who attends therapy
sessions in full costume, reveals that before he came to Hollywood, he
used to work as a bodyguard for guys with “really long Italian last
names.” He was also, he says, involved in gladiator fighting and money
collecting. “I’ve unfortunately left a body count,” he remorsefully
tells his therapist.
| Dr. Bruce Banner is a scientist
trying to create a powerful weapon for the U.S. military. But his
gamma-bomb experiment goes wrong, sentencing him to a life of permanent
split personality — as himself in moments of calm and as the Hulk, a
monster, in moments of extreme anger. Like whenever he watches The View.
| Joe McQueen became the Hulk in a
moment of extreme need. McQueen had sold his Super Nintendo and bought
a bus ticket to L.A., but he arrived with no money and no work. So he
spent four years living in the Hollywood Hills. Not in a good way: He
was homeless. Then he bought his Hulk costume and transformed himself
into a Hollywood Boulevard hero. “To me, it was a different way of
panhandling,” McQueen says in Confessions.
| To take out law breakers by
any means necessary. Early Batman even used handguns, and he didn’t
mind leaving a body count of his own. Later Batman, especially as
played by Adam West in the campy ’60s TV show, was less inclined to
murder. Although that Batman had no issues with vronk, splat, and kapow!
| To become famous. Unfortunately,
that’s not working out, Allen says. He explains that because he looks
something like George Clooney, he is often shooed away from projects.
But it’s not all bad. “My wife is kind of proud of the fact she can
tell people she’s married to Batman,” he says in Confessions. “And she
likes the fact that I look like George Clooney.”
| To find a cure for the ailment that
causes him to become a giant green being with serious anger-management
issues. At least, that’s Banner’s cause. For Hulk, the cause is to
smash.
| To become famous. “To be an actor —
that’s what I want,” says McQueen, who does go on to land a small role
in Finishing the Game, a parody of 1970s kung fu movies. “I’m out here
seriously trying to make a name for myself. I didn’t come out here to
get in a costume and stand on Hollywood Boulevard and make chump
change.”
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Surf’s Up
Singer Matthew Caws explains how rock band nada Surf became popular again, thanks in part to TV. By Bob Mehr
Popularity
may be overrated. At least, that’s what the band Nada Surf found out
when a song off its 1996 debut album High/Low became a surprise hit.
Titled “Popular,” the successful high-school-is-hard anthem helped the
New York City trio — singer/guitarist Matthew Caws, drummer Ira Elliot,
and bassist Daniel Lorca — build a youthful following in the United
States and Europe.
Commercial Rock
Selling out isn’t what it used to be. Like Nada Surf, these acts have gotten a boost from smart song placement.
1 The Shins
The Shins’ “new Slang” scored a McDonald’s ad, and
the band even wrote some original music for the Gap. But that’s
nothing. The Shins also have performed on and been praised by
characters from Gilmore Girls, and not only did their music make the
soundtrack of the movie Garden State but natalie Portman’s character
declared in the film that the Shins were a life-changing band.
2 Cary Brothers
Once a struggling nashville folk-pop songsmith, the now Los
angeles–based Brothers has become a favorite of Hollywood music
supervisors. you’ve heard “Blue Eyes” and “Waiting for you” on Scrubs,
“Waiting for your Letter” on Smallville, and “Something” on Bones. and
“ride” has popped up on ER, Scrubs, and the big-screen’s The Last Kiss.
3 Aqualung
A placement phenomenon on both sides of the atlantic, aqualung — the
pseudonym of British musician Matt Hales — shot to fame after his slow,
piano-driven melody “Strange and Beautiful” was used in a 2002
Volkswagen Beetle ad, later becoming a pop hit in his native united
Kingdom. In the united States, Hales’s song “Left Behind” has served as
the theme song for Chrysler commercials. His breathy tune “Something to
Believe In” has been on One Tree Hill, CSI: Miami, and Gossip Girl.
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But in the music business, popularity
begets expectations of profitability. And when Elektra Records execs
didn’t feel they had a “Popular”-style hit on Nada Surf’s sophomore
album, The Proximity Effect, the band and label parted ways. Then the
follow-up, when it was released in 1999, didn’t sell as well as
High/Low had.
But nine years later, Nada Surf’s 40-something
musicians are again finding themselves popular with a youthful set,
thanks in part to the critically acclaimed 2005 album The Weight Is a
Gift and also to getting their music heard on TV shows like The O.C.
and One Tree Hill and in films like Disturbia. “Our career arc has been
a strange one,” Caws says as the release date for Nada Surf’s latest
album, Lucky, nears. “We got it all backward. But in the end, we’re
where we want to be.”
Part of
your recent career resurgence has come from getting your music into TV
shows, movies, and even ads. How do those kinds of opportunities come
about? With us, we’ve been around long enough that people who
kind of grew up with our music now have the kinds of jobs where they
can choose bands for their TV show or movie or whatever. In the case of
The O.C., the show’s creator [Josh Schwartz] was a fan and called with
an idea for us to cover OMD’s “If You Leave.” That’s something that
really came straight from his vision.
But it’s not always that
romantic. We work with a company called Bank Robber Music. They’re song
placers. That’s their specialty — finding licensing opportunities for
bands. They put these things together, and then we’re asked to accept
them or turn them down based on whether we’re cool with the idea for a
film, or with a product, that our music will be used to advertise.
People
used to think of those kinds of opportunities as selling out. But
doesn’t it seem that in the past few years, the stigma associated with
bands’ allowing their music to be used in ads has faded? That’s
become kind of a moot point ever since the Shins did a McDonald’s
commercial. The moral concerns just evaporated immediately. No,
seriously, there’s a growing awareness that it’s really hard to make a
living playing music, and if doing the occasional ad allows us to keep
making records, then it’s okay. For us, it really has meant a lot. The
Weight Is a Gift was largely financed with the proceeds from a
cell-phone commercial in Belgium, of all things.
The thing
about being on a small label is that you do everything yourself. We
don’t get any tour support; we don’t get any money to make our records.
We love the label we’re working with, but we really have to front our
own expenses and pay our own way, and those licensing opportunities let
you do that.
It seems like
there was a different kind of career motivation behind each of your
records. How does Lucky compare with the others? After the first
album, it seemed to so many people that we were a fluke. So we were
dying to prove ourselves, which I think is a common second-album
concern. By the third album, we were really liberated, because no one
was paying attention anymore and we didn’t have a record company. With
the fourth album, it was like we had something to prove all over again,
because we’d had a little comeback success and didn’t have the element
of surprise anymore. By now, we’ve come to terms with all of that.
There’s never any clear intent with our records; we’re all over the
shop every time. There’s rock music and quiet songs, some sunny
melodies, some dark melodies, and everything in between.
Since
you have both a long-term fan base and more recent exposure on some
youth-oriented TV shows, do you see that mix reflected in your audience
now? Absolutely. Our live audience has really grown by a
surprising degree. It’s pretty widespread now. It is funny to look out
and see really young girls who were probably introduced to our music
from, like, One Tree Hill and then [see] a whole section of older fans
— record fanatics, guys with beards who are into anything that has
vaguely ’60s melodies. But, hey, I love those guys too. I am one of
those guys. Just without the beard, of course.
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Five Things Worth Seeing
Here are the top TV, DVD, and movie offerings this month. By John Ross
TV Show: The Complete Jane Austen, Masterpiece Theatre
Sounds Kind of Like: A high-school literature class assignment.
But It’s Different Because:
There’s no reading involved. This PBS series brings all of Austen’s
novels to life — six miniseries airing over the course of four months.
People You’ll Recognize:
Kate Beckinsale, who played a lovely werewolf-killing vampire in the
Underworld films, stars in Emma. Anthony Head, who played a
vampire-killing teacher on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, stars in
Persuasion. And Colin Firth, who ripped the heart from Renée
Zellweger’s chest (in the romantic sense) in Bridget Jones’s Diary,
stars in Pride and Prejudice.
Book-Report Alert:
In addition to airing dramatizations of all of Austen’s novels,
Masterpiece Theatre is also premiering a dramatization of her life in
the biopic Miss Austen Regrets.
When to See it: Airs Sunday evenings,
starting January 13.
TV Show: How to Look Good Naked
Sounds Something Like: What Not to Wear
But It’s Different Because:
Unlike the TLC show that breaks guests’ fashion sense down and then
builds it back up through the power of positive shopping, this Lifetime
series is entirely about making you feel good about the shape you’re in
— whatever that may be.
A Host You’ll Recognize:
Carson Kressley of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy infamy leads the way
here. But otherwise, there are no men allowed. This show is all about
women’s issues.
Five-Day Plan:
Though the show eschews plastic surgery and other dramatic quick fixes,
it still promises “both an internal and external makeover” in just five
days. How? Step one: Buy better undergarments.
When to See It: Premieres January 4 on Lifetime.
DVD: Pioneers of Television
Are You the Keymaster? And Other Questions Worth Asking:
Was Sigourney Weaver’s dad the brain behind The Tonight Show? Did Pat
Boone think early TV shows had a racist bent? Was Regis Philbin once
the young sidekick on a TV talk show? The answers to all of those and
more are part of this PBS series, which praises the early days of TV.
People You’ll Recognize:
The series’ producers interviewed nearly 100 former golden-age stars,
including Dick Van Dyke, Jonathan Winters, Bob Barker, Tommy Smothers,
and the late Merv Griffin.
In the Golden Age, There Was No Progressive Scan:
But today, you’ve got a choice. You can either watch this four-part
series — split into mini-documentaries about the sitcom, the variety
show, the talk show, and the game show — as it airs on PBS stations
this month or get with the times and see it on DVD. It’s your call,
Grandpa.
When to See It: On the air beginning January 2. On DVD on January 29.
DVD: Shoot ’Em Up
Stars: Monica Bellucci, Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti
Jane Austen It Ain’t:
The title does not lie. This movie is as much an ode to the action
flick as it is anything else. It’s short on plot (which has something
to do with Clive Owen trying to save a baby) and long on the clichés of
the genre — stuff blowing up, people getting shot, and lots of
wisecracking.
Commando It Also Ain’t:
Derivative, Shoot ’Em Up is not. To wit, in the opening sequence, Owen
defeats some bad guys who are after a pregnant woman and delivers her
baby during the shoot-out. The Governator has never done anything like
that.
Best Line: Monica Bellucci to Owen, “Who are you?” Owen to Bellucci, “I’m a British nanny, and I’m dangerous.”
When to See It: The DVD hits stores on January 1.
Movie: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
Stars: Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Will Sanderson, Brian J. White
Peter
Jackson Did Not Direct: It sounds like another Lord of the Rings sequel
and the movie does contain magical forces and weird creatures, but
there are no hobbits here. Instead there is tough-guy Jason Statham as
a reluctant hero. Plus, Burt Reynolds. (!) And the director of this
all-out fantasy-action flick is not New Zealand’s Jackson but Germany’s
Uwe Boll, who has directed such, ah, interesting films as House of the
Dead and Blood Rayne.
Best Line:
Statham says, “Today we lick our wounds, bury our dead. Tomorrow we
gouge evil from its shell.” Evil on the half shell? Delicious.
When to See It: January 11.
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Mother Knows Best
The Sarah Connor Chronicles has to overcome futuristic killer robots and meet audience expectations. By Joseph Guinto
The new Fox series The Sarah Connor Chronicles films partly on the slice of Warner Bros. back lot recently vacated by the Gilmore Girls,
which means that small-town america just became a whole lot scarier.
Fictionally, anyway. actually, the two shows do share a common theme —
both are about a single mother raising an only child. Of course,
Lorelai Gilmore only had to deal with your normal mother-kid stresses,
not the constant threat of a suspicious FBI agent; a plethora of
murdering, time-traveling cyborgs; and the future fate of the entire
human race.
And that’s just the beginning of the challenges, for both the mom in Sarah Connor and everyone else involved with the series. The show picks up roughly where the second Terminator film
ended and thus shares the movies’ mythology. There’s still Skynet,
there are still T-100s and other terminators, and it’s still John
Connor’s job to save the world from the rise of the machines. But given
that there’s one big element missing — arnold Schwarzenegger — all that
stuff may just be beside the point. To work for episodic TV, this show
has to have the very complicated relationship between a mother and her
child at its core.
“Iconically,
Schwarzenegger is the thing we remember from the films,” says
21-year-old Thomas Dekker, who plays John Connor in the Fox series.
“But while people might have been scared of the Terminator or found him
cool, emotionally what people were connected to was Sarah Connor and
Kyle reese [Sarah’s guardian from the future] in the first movie and
Sarah and John Connor in the second movie.”
Which is not to say that the terminators in Sarah Connor aren’t
cool or scary. They’re both. (and, by the way, there’s more than one.)
But they aren’t enough. On the big screen, you only need to capture the
audience’s attention for two hours. On the small screen, you need to
hold people captive for years at a time. For a science fiction series,
that means making the otherworldly plotlines seem both impossible and
everyday. It sounds hard, but it’s been done before. The best
movie-to-TV franchise, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
worked well because it was viewable as both a weekly serialized horror
movie and a metaphor for the horrors of growing up when it seems that
the pressures of the entire world are bearing down on you.
“We
do have a single mother trying to raise her teenage son, so we’ll get
to address all that sort of angst you deal with growing up,” says Lena
Headey, who starred in last summer’s action hit 300 and is now playing the title character in Sarah Connor. “Plus, to all that, you have to add the fact that John is born to save the world.”
Right. Big plus. But there’s a big catch to go along with it. While no one is comparing Sarah Connor with Buffy just yet (and while I may be one of the few foolish enough to compare it with Gilmore Girls), Buffy had one major advantage: The movie was terrible. The Terminator
films, on the other hand, were arnold-tastic. So regardless of how well
executed the TV show is (and judging from the first few episodes, it’s
pretty arnoldtastic itself), it is almost certain to suffer by
comparison. and you can bet there will be comparison. On blogs and
Internet chat boards, it’s already out there. It can’t be bargained
with; it can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or
fear, and it absolutely will not stop. Ever.
That
is, unless a five-foot-eight-inch, slightframed, doe-eyed robot from
the future named Cameron can stop it. Cameron? Don’t remember a
terminator named Cameron? That’s because she’s been created just for
this series. The most advanced terminator model ever, Cameron is sent
back in time to protect John from whatever comes to kill him. also, she
sits next to him in homeroom. “My character was never in the films,”
acknowledges Summer Glau, the Firefly and Serenity
alumna who plays Cameron. “So I have a lot of freedom. But we feel
pressure as a cast and crew. We want people to know that we have
respect for the film but we are trying to do something different.”
Adds Dekker, “We’re not doing a remake. This is a reinterpretation.”
Ultimately,
given that the show’s reinterpretation leaves out one particular
terminator — one Arnold Schwarzenegger, unstoppable robot — who hunts
John in his suburban hiding place, the success of Sarah Connor
could be in Headey’s hands. We’ll need to believe that she’s Linda
Hamilton. She’ll have to be capable of raising the future leader of
mankind and also of making sure the kid doesn’t break curfew. The thing
is, she’s off to a pretty good start. “all I can do is do my thing and
play the role how I interpret it,” Headey says. “If that is embraced by
audiences immediately, then that’s brilliant. If not, then I’ll break
them down.”
From Big Screen to Small Screen » a brief and incomplete history of TV adaptations of feature films
1963: The Farmer’s Daughter
Sixteen
years removed from the feature film of the same name, which starred
Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten, this series won a Golden Globe and
managed to collect a pile of Emmy nominations in just three full
seasons. The plot followed a Swedish farm girl who moved to Washington,
D.C., to work as a U.S. congressman’s maid. Happens all the time.
1969: The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
This
1963 movie about a widower whose son, Eddie, is trying to get him to
remarry was perfect family-friendly TV for the late 1960s. And Bill
Bixby, who went on to star as Bruce Banner in TV’s The Incredible Hulk,
was the perfect lost-in-love father figure for four seasons. As long as
no one made him angry. You wouldn’t like Eddie’s father when he’s angry.
1970: The Odd Couple
Could
you improve on this Neil Simon play or on the movie by the same title
starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau? Not really. And you could do a
whole lot worse than this Tony Randall/Jack Klugman series, which
lasted five years.
1972: MASH
The
1970 movie, which starred Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, was no
slouch, but the TV series, which ran for 11 years, is legendary. The
show’s finale remains the highest-rated series-TV episode in history.
Plus, the show taught us how to make a still.
1974: Planet of the Apes
For
Charlton Heston, we’re willing to suspend disbelief and accept that
apes run the world. But when it comes to the TV version, we’ve got to
have more than Roddy McDowall in a ridiculouslooking rubber monkey
suit. This series, based on the 1968 movie, produced exactly 14
episodes.
1988: In the Heat of the Night
It
would have been hard to predict that Carroll O’Connor would go from All
in the Family to this movie-turned- TV series about race relations in a
small-town police force. But he did so to critical acclaim for six
seasons, even though the show wasn’t quite as edgy as the 1965 novel or
as the Oscar-winning 1967 movie that inspired it.
1990: Ferris Bueller
You
know who was in this television adaptation of the hit 1986 John Hughes
movie that starred Matthew Broderick? Jennifer Aniston. You know what
else? You can’t make a good TV series about a guy who skipped school
one day.
1997: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Best.
Adaptation. Ever. While the movie was neither scary nor compelling, the
TV show about a teenage girl with a gift for doing in the undead kept
you riveted. While the movie was pointlessly silly, the show peppered
its dark plotlines with smart comic relief. And while the movie starred
Luke Perry, the TV show, thankfully, did not.
2003: My Big Fat Greek Life
This short-lived series was a The Day After version of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Frighteningly unwatchable.
2006: Blade
Give
Spike TV credit for trying to produce some original, scripted content
rather than just airing another CSI rerun or a reality show in which
guys kick each other in the face. Then take that credit away for the
company’s having made a fun Wesley Snipes action-movie series into a
boring TV show in which the characters talk too much.
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