Saturday, March 10, 2012
Blind Items Revealed
March 24, 2008
On
Saturday night I was supposed to go to this Young Hollywood party.
However, I wasn't feeling really young, and so decided to not be the guy
who goes to try and make himself feel young or to pick up women who are
less than half your age. Hello Bill Maher. Yes, he was there. The
oldest in the crowd by about a decade.
At one point I had wanted
to go because I had planned on playing a game that I really enjoy but
had not played in awhile. I was going to go to the party as Hans. A
portly banker from Germany complete with German accent and some German
vocabulary thrown in for good measure. I was going to get drunk off my
ass and introduce everyone to my exchange student companion. Lots of
people play similar games when they go to bars or such, but in this
game, you know in advance what you are going to do and stick with it no
matter what.
I used to play the game all the time. Back in the
day, I was friends with an A lister. Not like best man at a wedding
friends, but before he hit it big with one really huge movie, he would
go out often and about a third of the time he would drag me along. To be
dragged along you had to be committed to the game. Although our Academy
Award nominated actor had not had the huge hit at the time, he was
known and was recognized not so much by name, but as, "hey aren't you
the guy who was in... you were so good." This actor is an incredible
actor, and he felt that to enjoy going out, you needed to be able to
truly let go which was not possible if you were trying to protect your
brand such as it is, and so came up with these elaborate characters.
This was truly method acting.
When he decided to portray a
stockbroker with a serious coke habit, he spent the entire party shoving
what looked like coke up his nose like it was the last coke on earth.
This party just happened to be right after he had just got some of the
best reviews in his career, and I don't know if he consciously or
unconsciously chose a character that would really allow him to forget
for a night, or what. The thing is that even though he sucked up a ton
of coke that night, it was the only time I ever saw him doing it. He
just really got into these characters.
There was one party where
he looked someone who just walked off a 70's porn set down to the
polyester pants, open shirt, gold medallion, and Tom Selleck mustache.
It was like a Halloween costume, but he bet everyone he knew that he
would find at least one woman who would actually go home with him. He
did better than that and actually had two women almost coming to blows
over this guy because they both wanted to go home with him.
As he
became more well known it was harder to get away with doing them
because no matter what he did, or what role he took on, invariably
someone would recognize him and ask him what he was doing and at that
point he would just go home. I know when he had his huge blockbuster, he
was professionally happy, but it effectively put an end to his theater
within a party that he loved so much and didn't give him an outlet to
really just let go and be whoever he wanted to be for just a night. Now,
he just hangs out at home with a friend or two and his current
girlfriend of the day, but whenever I am at a party and see someone who
clearly does not belong or is way over the top, I always look really
closely to see if maybe he has decided to give it one more shot.
Leo DiCaprio