A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Tippi herself at the age of 89. I recommend that format, though the print edition has 16 pages of photos which I'm sure are amazing. Tippi is a great narrator of her own life, and her life is WILD. No matter how detailed this review seems, trust me that there is tons of jaw-dropping material I didn't even touch on.

Tippi Hedren is an American actress of Scandinavian descent - "Tippi" is a Swedish nickname that stuck. She starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (her first film role!) and Marnie, but never had another starring role in a good movie. Her memoir explains why, and it's absolutely infuriating.

She then got involved in big cat rescue! Her home in Sherman Oaks, which for those of you who don't know was and is a placid suburb in Los Angeles, was filled with LITERAL LIONS. And she made a movie called Roar, shot in Sherman Oaks and starring THIRTY RESCUE LIONS.



I have seen Roar. It's clearly intended to be a charming family comedy about a family that visits Africa and ends up in a house full of lions, a la Doctor Dolitte. But you can tell that the shoot was wildly unsafe, the lions are real and not tame, and the actors (Tippi and her actual family, including her teenage daughter Melanie Griffith) are frequently about to be actually eaten.

I was curious about how all this came about. Tippi's memoir explains. Sort of. It turns out that some things, like devoting multiple years of your life to making a movie starring your unpredictable and deadly THIRTY RESCUE LIONS and FIFTEEN RESCUE TIGERS, are beyond explanation.

Tippi started out as a model, and loved it. I've never thought much about modeling as a career, but she shows why someone might like it. She got along well with the other models, she was interested in fashion, she liked the professionalism and technical aspects of it, and she was level-headed and didn't get sucked into drama. She moved on to commercials, which she enjoyed for the same reasons. (Commercials on television were a relatively new thing at that time, and that part is pretty interesting.) We might never have heard of her, except that Alfred Hitchcock saw her on a commercial, picked up the phone, and said, "Get me that girl."

Tippi was a fan of Hitchcock and was thrilled to be considered for a role in one of his movies. At first it was all a dream. He and his wife taught her to act - they were brilliant teachers, she says - got her beautiful costumes, and were going to make her career. And then things got creepy.

Cut for sexual harassment and assault. ( Read more... )

And then came the lions! Tippi had married Noel Marshall, who she says was very impulsive and sucked her into his craziness. She does say she was also responsible for her own part in the big cat madness, and that she was also crazy. But, she says, she's much saner and more practical when she's left to her own devices. This seems a little self-serving but also probably true: all the really crazy stuff occurred when she was married to Noel Marshall, and her continued involvement with big cats after they divorced was considerably saner. Tippi herself recounts the events with genuine puzzlement as to how otherwise more-or-less normal people could have done and believed such crazy and dangerous things.

Having been born into a cult and also worked on movies and television, I can vouch for a kind of collective insanity that can overtake groups of people who are, or mostly are, sane when alone. This goes double when working on a movie or TV show, because sleep deprivation, high financial stakes, overwork, and group culture are very conducive to temporary group insanity; it's as if you create your own mini-cult. It's easy to get sucked into and hard to explain afterward.

This sort of thing was clearly at work in the production of Roar, and also in the events leading up to it.

Roar came about because Tippi visited Africa as part of a humanitarian mission. I'm not going to get much into that side of her life, but she did a huge amount of it, mostly focusing on hunger and refugees, and was instrumental in helping Vietnamese refugees set up nail salons, a niche which they hold to this day. Also, she was once taught to fly a plane on the fly, so to speak, when one of the two pilots bailed after an emergency landing, and flew a plane full of aid workers solo something like three hours after her first lesson. Tippi's entire life is one long "it could only happen to Tippi."

Anyway, while in Africa she and her husband, Noel Marshall, saw an abandoned house that had been taken over by a pride of lions, and thought, "That would make a great movie!" They talked to several big cat experts, all of whom told them that was an insane idea. Then they met a big cat rescuer in LA, who told them that if they wanted to work with lions, they needed to get to know lions... and he just happened to have a lion cub in need of a home.

That set them on a slippery slope leading to a ranch full of lions. And tigers. And panthers. And an elephant. This was an even worse idea than one might imagine. Not only are big cats wild animals that cannot ever be truly tamed, fight amongst themselves, and can kill you without even trying, but the different species don't get along with each other. They repeatedly had to chase down loose tigers in suburbia while pretending to the police and neighbors that there were no tigers, and ended up in the local hospital so frequently that the doctors got used to the family appearing on the regular with lion bites, broken bones, and GANGRENE.

Have you ever tried to train a cat to do literally anything on command? Now imagine trying to train a vicious, feral cat. Now imagine trying to train forty vicious, feral cats who weigh 500 lbs.

Due to the impossibility of getting the lions and tigers and panthers and pumas to do anything on command, the movie was mostly shot by shooing them into the house, then putting the cast (Tippi, Noel, teenage Melanie Griffith, and Noel's two sons (the third son sensibly refused to get near the big cats and did production design) into the house with them.

Cut for human harm. ( Read more... )

Cut for animal harm. ( Read more... )

Tippi says they didn't realize that they were basically making the world's most expensive and dangerous home movie. It was finally released... and flopped. She says no one wanted to see a family film in an era when sex and violence ruled, but uhhh I don't think that was the problem.

She divorced Noel Marshall, more or less came to her senses, and realized that big cats should not be kept as pets NO SHIT. She has lobbied for bans on keeping and importing big cats as pets. She also founded the Shambala Preserve, which takes in big cats that could not be released into the wild, including Michael Jackson's tigers and a lion that used to belong to Anton La Vey. The big cats are all neutered, and have no contact with humans beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Tippi Hedren is now 94. She lives in a house on the Shambala site, with multiple rescue cats. (The lap-sized kind.) They are not allowed outdoors.

Here is a letter Jennette McCurdy got from her mom.

Dear Net,

I am so disappointed in you. You used to be my perfect little angel, but now you are nothing more than a little SLUT, a FLOOZY, ALL USED UP. And to think—you wasted it on that hideous OGRE of a man. I saw the pictures on a website called TMZ—I saw you in Hawaii with him. I saw you rubbing his disgusting hairy stomach. I KNEW you were lying about Colton. Add that to the list of things you are—LIAR, CONNIVING, EVIL. You look pudgier, too. It’s clear you’re EATING YOUR GUILT.

Thinking of you with his ding dong inside of you makes me sick. SICK. I raised you better than this. What happened to my good little girl? Where did she go? And who is this MONSTER that has replaced her? You’re an UGLY MONSTER now. I told your brothers about you and they all said they disown you just like I do. We want nothing to do with you.

Love, Mom (or should I say DEB since I am no longer your mother)

P.S. Send money for a new fridge. Ours broke.

Relatable.

Jennette McCurdy's mother wanted to be an actress, so she made her daughter into one. It worked out about as well as you'd expect.

Jennette's mother was a cancer survivor up until the point that she failed to survive; she made a video of her cancer diagnosis and treatments and made the kids watch it every weekend to remember how amazing she is. She whips out her "stage four cancer survivor" status on every possible occasion, to agents, directors, waiters, and security guards. And that is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

She pushes Jennette into acting, which she hates and is temperamentally unsuited for, to the point where she gets the second lead on a Nickelodeon show, iCarly. (Reading this book, I learned that the show was not about an AI named Carly, but three teenagers who make a sort of early vlog.) Jennette makes friends on set, but the creator is a creepy emotional abuser and fame is both her worst nightmare and feeds her worst tendencies.

Based on the title, I expected this book to be about how much Jennette hated her mother. In fact, the problem--well, one of them--was that she loved her mother. They were extremely enmeshed and living each other's lives, and up until her mother died of cancer, Jennette was desperate to please her. The disillusionment came later, when she finally took a breath and looked out at the wreckage of her life.

There's awful stuff in this book but it's also very funny. Jennette has a distinctive, sharp, very modern narrative voice. The chapters are structured like little short stories or TV episodes, often with punchlines. She sees two therapists, and remarkably manages to capture the actual experience of therapy very well. I laughed a lot, but in solidarity. Though her terrible relationship with her mother is bad for pretty much the exact opposite reasons and in the opposite ways that my relationship with my parents was bad, I found it very relatable.

It also has some excellent surprises I don't want to spoil.

( Read more... )

I listened to this in audio read by the author, which I definitely recommend.

Thanks for the rec, mildred_of_midgard!

Content notes: Child abuse, bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, cancer, mental illness, child labor, gross descriptions of vomit which I fast-forwarded.

A mystery benefactor (which emailing has now revealed to be my friend Halle) just sent me a Princess Bride T-shirt. Perfect timing. I just finished listening to this book.

If you're a fan of the movie, it's absolutely delightful. If you're not, I imagine it will drive you bonkers. This is a 100% positive account of a movie that everyone involved obviously had a great time making, which is both its charm and its drawback; all the "I love you guys!" could have probably been trimmed by about 10-20%. That said, it is more than mostly charming.

I highly recommend the audio. It's read by Cary Elwes (Westley) and includes interviews with most of the cast, done by them. Elwes has a lovely voice which I could listen to forever, and also does hilarious impersonations of everyone. Normally my favorite would be Andre the Giant, but it's not because his impression of Rob Reiner is, amazingly, even better. I would listen, just waiting for the moment when he would once again say, "Heyyyyyy Caaaaaaary..."

Elwes comes across as sweet and humble. This was his big break and still his most iconic role, and he's totally fine with forever being remembered as Westley. (All else aside, he was already a fan of the book, which he'd read when he was thirteen.) He has some hilarious stories from the set, a fascinating account of the making of the swordfight, and touching/funny remembrances of Andre the Giant. William Goldman is exactly as neurotic as one might imagine; Mandy Patinkin contributes a very moving account of his own role, which he took soon after his father's death. And while Elwes' massive crush on Robin Wright apparently did not lead to an actual romance, they bonded so much that they kept requesting re-takes of the final kiss, which was the last shot of the movie, and are friends to this day. Now that's what I call a happy ending.

An account of the making of Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic terrible movie, The Room, by the leading actor, who was also Tommy’s roommate, Tommy’s friend, and one of Tommy’s five credited assistants on The Room, two of whom never appeared on the set and one of whom was dead.

You can get a sense of The Room by watching this thirteen second clip: the unfathomable choice to shoot on unconvincing green screen in a parking lot rather than use the actual roof or studio they had available, Wiseau’s peculiar costume (chosen by himself) and even more peculiar line delivery (“I did not hit her, I did nawwwt! Oh hai Mark”), and most peculiar of all, Wiseau’s acting, which goes beyond mere woodenness to give the impression of an alien or robot attempting to imitate one of those strange “human” creatures.

Those thirteen seconds, Sestero tells us, took three hours to shoot due to Wiseau’s inability to walk, talk, hit his mark, or emerge from the Port-A-Potty-like outhouse without whacking his head.

The Disaster Artist is both an account of the making of a world-class bad movie and a character study of the world-class oddball who created it:

Even today, a decade later, I still can’t unsee Tommy’s outfit: nighttime sunglasses, a dark blazer as loose and baggy as rain gear, sand-colored cargo pants with pockets filled to capacity (was he smuggling potatoes?), a white tank top, clunky Frankenstein combat boots, and two belts. Yes, two belts. The first belt was at home in its loops; the second draped down in back to cup Tommy’s backside, which was, he always claimed, the point: “It keeps my ass up. Plus it feels good.”

Sestero may be a decent actor when not directed by Tommy Wiseau, but based on his lack of other credits, I suspect he’s a much better writer. His prose is a pleasure to read, and his depiction of the doom-laden hilarity of the making of a truly terrible movie is dead-on.

Tommy Wiseau is a strange, mysterious, lonely person who won’t say where he came from or how old he is, and has apparently unlimited funds. He connects with Sestero in a relationship that starts off casual and ends up taking over his life.

Sestero is a struggling actor who is inspired by Wiseau’s ability to be totally himself (he has pens printed with “Wiseau’s Planet,” which he may have beamed down from; that would explain a lot); Wiseau seems to be attempting to figure out human interactions by studying the one person willing to be his friend, with a side of spooky fixation a la The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s all fun and games until Sestero is lying awake and seething at 4:00 AM while Wiseau is hanging upside down like a bat from the pull-up bar he installed on the door to Sestero’s room.

I tried to imagine Tommy's mind from the inside out. I saw burning forests, blind alleys, volcanoes in the desert, city streets that plunged into the ocean, barricades everywhere, and all of it lit in the deep-cherry light of emergency.

The book is dead-on about the way you can slip into a friendship with someone you like at first, who then reveals more and more clingy weirdness until you suddenly wake up wondering how the hell you put up with it for so long and run for the hills. Once Sestero is no longer rooming with Wiseau, he’s more able to appreciate Wiseau’s peculiar brand of charm. Which does exist, but is best enjoyed from a distance.

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

"I have never really been any good at stage makeup. Before the photo call for Henry V I made the fatal mistake of listening to a fellow actor who had watched part of the dress rehearsal from the gods. 'You're so fair, lovey. We can't see your eyes. You've got to fill in your eyebrows and use more mascara.' Never listen to advice like that. As a result of all this I am now haunted by pictures of that production in which I look like Joan Collins and Groucho Marx."

Branagh's film of Henry V started a chain reaction of events which caused me to major in theatre and later get a master's degree in playwriting. His autobiography, written before the film was released but after it was shot, seems to be out of print. I was able to obtain a copy in NYC, though, and I bet it's in a lot of bookshops.

If you're even remotely interested in theatre, and probably even if you're not, this is a tremendously fun book. Contrary to persistent accusations of being full of himself, one of the great charms of the book is Branagh's self-deprecating humor and his willingness to regale us with stories about embarassing moments and horrible or uninspired performances. I found the book very inspirational when I was younger(I checked it out of the library repeatedly) because it portrays a boy with a little native talent and a lot of flaws who manages, through hard work and careful study, to turn that little bit of talent into something quite extraordinary.

The other notable thing is that it's extremely funny. Especially if you've done some live theatre. It's full of hilarious anecdotes about lost props, improvisatory Shakespeare, mad Australian directors, and those ideas which seem so good in the rehearsal hall...

Regarding a new play about Olympic athletes:

"With only days to go we received the last scenes of the play, and many of us were still confused by the convolutions of the plot. I still don't know whether the leading athlete had taken the drugs or not, or whether the 'drug' was actually a placebo. Fortunately by the time we reached this point in the play my character was cracking up and it was quite conceivable that he had no idea what was going on."