How I Got Cast in Frances           You've got to believe me on this one. When punk first hit, I was but a lowly second string film critic for the Weekly. It took a while before punk ever hit the silver screen but I still wanted to participate, so in a blatant attempt to look fashionable and curry favor with the music department, I allowed the hippest Hollywood barber, Atila, to have his way with me, follically speaking. I sat in his chair and said "Do whatever you want," allowing him the respect one would bestow upon a modern day Picasso, only instead of paints and oils, electric clippers, carving to the skull, not a haircut, a living statement, allowing this barber to totally flip out, creating out of my head a momentary moment of art guaranteed to eventually grow in.             I thought I looked great, and headed to a screening at Paramount, one of my favorite lots. I purposely parked far from the screening room, allowing me to saunter, casually drop into sound stages, see what's happening, check out the scenery. Nothing more fun than sneaking into closed sets, trying to figure what in the hell is being shot there, occasionally moving things around to deliberately confuse the next day's shoot, taking pictures of myself, or others, pants down at the podium or in the captain's chair.             But this time I was just walking down a street, an ordinary street in the lot when I ran into a friend who was headed towards an audition. I dropped in and found myself herded into a group of scraggly people. The casting department got one look at me and immediately offered up the role of an inmate in the insane asylum in the movie Frances. No doubt about it. The haircut got me the gig.             Of course when I showed up at the set for my first day's shooting, the local hairmeister immediately tried to fix my hair, adding his own creative embellishments to Atila's masterly original work. The costume department fit me with an appropriately seedy set of rags, torn sweater, baggy pants, slippers. The assistant director led me to the set and gave me my only instruction of the day; Hang around Jessica Lange all day and act nuts. Not much of me ended up in the picture. I'm mainly a menacing blur in the background. I did get the shot at the top though, personally signed. HINT #1 It's always dangerous to offer a celebrity a Polaroid you just took of them. You're offering them the option to keep it, and you may never see it again, particularly if you make them look abysmal, as I often do. Many a star has tried to hang to their portrait, sometimes because they like it and I let them, but more often because they hate it and they don't want anyone to see them looking that way. In this case, I left her face alone, and she liked it and signed it. Other times they tried to grab it in order to destroy it. See William Shatner and Bill Maher.

 

Emulsional Problems