hell’s paving stones

Alternate title of post: “Vincent O’Kane: winner of drunken arguments or guilt-ridden, subservient blog writer?”

Hah! Take it from me, Joe is a sly one - and he’s never as drunk as I think he is. Last Thursday night, between two maudlin games of pool with a bemused Harry and the ever-eerily observational Jackson, he claimed that Charlie Kaufman is a shameless self-publicist. A diversionary challenge was substituted for evidence: “Name one other screenwriter who doesn’t direct or act”.

I flapped my mouth open a couple of times to the tune of, “The guy who wrote A Beautiful Mind. Uh, starts with A”, before composing myself. I gently tried to explain that Kaufman became a curiosity to Hollywood after making a string of unusual, sincere movies. The hitherto cynical and decadent film circles then chose to align themselves with him - and later to hype him up - out of fascination and maybe also a suspicion that he could be worth something. The idea that they had been won over by some kind of masterly careerist rhetoric on Kaufman’s part, I said, borders on conspiracy theory. At this point I made a tentative analogy with Benjamin Franklin’s demi-god celebrity in Paris during his time as the American minister plenipotentiary to France - that the hysteria surrounding Franklin hadn’t been generated (entertained, certainly, but not generated) by himself, but rather by the dynamics of social reputation and a crazed domestic thirst for novelty in Enlightment France. Confident that I had illustrated my point perfectly, I shouted the entire pub to a round - a gesture which met with a hearty chorus of HEAR, HEAR, VINCENT! and many congratulatory slaps on the back from previously surreptitious eavesdroppers.

This was not enough for Joe. “Those movies were interesting sure, but hardly original.” Why was it, he insisted, that it was Kaufman that I could name and no one else? The reason, he declared in a fit of unhinged postulation, was that Kaufman had aggressively sought, via his contract, to insert himself into the marketing of his movies. In so doing, he forced the development of the popular recognition of his name, which according to the fundamental laws of physics in Hollywood, accumulates power at the rate of:

P =[R(F$) + L] – l/m

Where R = reputation (as quantified by the relative success of dropping one’s own name in conversation with Kate Moss and getting a positive reaction without her appearing to associate the afore-dropped name with the person talking to her), F = the number of favourable reviews, $ = the net profit at the box office, L = the number of mentions in Letterman monologues during any given week, and l/m = the cost of 2 lunch mains, one for you and one for Harvey Weinstein.

Struggling to discover $105 in my wallet to pay the barkeep, I continued to protest against this line of unsupported reasoning. A little too quickly, Joe said: “Alright, you have until Saturday to write a post saying why I’m wrong”.

In one stroke, I’d been cornered into feeding my starving blog or else surrender my treasured and locally acknowledged status as an articulate, quick-witted dilettante. Uh…

By next week, I will supply you all with conclusive proof to believe that Kaufman is not masterminding his own rise to fame - proof garnered from a cross-sectional analysis of promotional material, Hollywood theory and other sources. Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2004 at 5:40 pm and is filed under People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.