The Redemption Of Ethan Hawke
And other fun stuff from Peter Biskind’s Down And Dirty Pictures.
My favorite thing about D&DP isn’t the repeated, and withering, trash-talking of Robert Redford’s crappy management, toxic favoritism, and humorless championing of homeworky socialist epics. (Understand: that is great. Occasionally a chapter has gone by with no mention of how the Sundance empire is still managing to exist despite Redford’s best efforts to up-fuck every aspect of it from casting to catalog, and it’s as though Biskind is like, “By the way, Redford: still intransigent and annoying! And back to our story.” Redford’s exhortation “Be funny, like Chekhov!” is kind of everything you need to know about the guy, and very little of it is good.) It isn’t the packaging of the quotations, which is also excellent and really lets the individual voices of the speakers come through, whether it’s Kevin Smith’s casual rat-a-tat of F words or the way Soderbergh indicates a self-deprecatingly agonized pause.
It’s the redemption of Ethan Hawke, whom I’d gotten used to thinking of as a greezy trifler despite mounting evidence to the contrary — including his ongoing association with Richard Linklater, and his collaboration with a former client of ours at King Killer Studios (said client is a solid hang, so his respect for Hawke was good enough for me). But Hawke has a number of lines in D&DP that made me think, generally and not just differently about him.
People try to make you feel bad, say, “So you’re happy being a fringe artist?” “Yes! Yes I am. What kind of a real artist isn’t a fringe artist?” … I see young actors right now, making so much money, getting sucked up into so many movies, it just scares me. If actors and directors have a corporate mentality, then who in the world doesn’t have a corporate mentality? (192)
He calls Miramax’s “part of the family” rhetoric “fraudulent”; says somewhat condescendingly that, while he agrees with Ben Affleck that you can make art within a studio system, “I don’t know how subversive Ben wants to be”; notes without rancor that Quentin Tarantino “doesn’t play any ball. A lot of the rest of us are not so gifted that every little pee we take is gold”; and is fine with being in the kind of movie “that plays at Film Forum in 25 years.” Some of it comes off as faintly immature thinking about what makes an artist or a maverick, and I can’t swear I want to have dinner with the guy, but on the other hand, this is someone who’s had to sit front-row at “the difference between ‘actor’ and ‘movie star'” every day of his adult life, particularly during his marriage to Uma Thurman, and he makes some good points about the film equivalent of the disappearing middle class.
Tags: Ben Affleck books Down And Dirty Pictures Ethan Hawke Kevin Smith movies Peter Biskind Quentin Tarantino Richard Linklater Robert Redford Steven Soderbergh Uma Thurman
I feel like he’s one of those people you run into regularly in NYC, though (or did at one point), and he was invariably the scuzziest (greasy hair, smelly b.o., etc.).
RE: the ‘actor’ vs ‘star’ battle: a few years ago I was in a dingy 3rd floor E. Village rehearsal studio with him and about 12 other people for a play reading — he was a friend of the writer, so just there to watch — and, with minimal grooming and a crisp shirt, he had such an insanely glowy movie star glow about him that I almost laughed out loud. The fame aura is real, people.
I can’t. Perhaps it’s shallow of me, but I can’t.
Lather, rinse, repeat, Ethan. Then we can talk.
In other news, another book to add to my list! Whee!
Hawke can come across as both insightful *and* whiny (especially the films he’s directed), often at the same time, though I do agree with his statements here for the most part. It’s just too bad they had to come in something like Biskind’s book. Many film lovers see Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” as one of the great, if not *the* great, books about the 70’s in film, but to me, the entire tone of the book was, “Yeah, wasn’t it great that all the guys who made so many notable films in the 70’s did so many drugs and” – to quote a film by Hawke’s favorite collaborator – “dogged so many chicks, man?” And while Biskind seems to have done his homework with not only Redford but Harvey Weinstein, once again, the book suffers from the same tone of self-satisfied scuzziness (whatever you think of Billy Bob Thornton, I would like to know what he did that made him deserve what Biskind does to him here).
My sister and her friend were in an NYC Starbucks one day; her friend looked at the guy in front of them and said to my sister, “Hey, isn’t he famous?”
It was Ethan Hawke. His daughter was with him and found the whole thing very funny. I don’t think Hawke himself has a sense of humor. Maybe I missed it, I don’t know.