Woodman
Only some information in the following paragraph is fictional...Woody Harrelson and I go way back. He was the boy bartender, "Woody Boyd," on television's blockbuster, "Cheers," while I was a boy bartender for my alcoholic father in small-town Iowa. I quit my high school basketball team the year he made the film "White Men Can't Jump." He acted in the movie "Indecent Proposal" the year Robert Redford tried to have sex with my wife. When I was broadening my mind in college in the mid-90s, he was broadening his resume of dramatic roles with controversial turns as the serial killer "Mickey Knox" in Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" and as the real-life title character of Milos Forman's "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
Dad and I saw Harrelson at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Broadway in 1999 as the lead in a revival of N. Richard Nash's 1954 play "The Rainmaker," and the mischievous actor provided an indelible image for a lifetime by reciting one of the key passages of the play while performing a handstand. After a brief hiatus from my big screen periphery, he showed up in last year's dramedy ensemble piece, "A Prairie Home Companion," director Robert Altman's "swan song" and a story about a theater in a small town that could have easily doubled for "Woody Boyd's" birthplace of Hanover, Indiana, at which the Texas-born Harrelson also attended college. Throughout his career, the actor has spoken out as environmentalist, social activist, and civil libertarian, making it easier for others like us to be thought of simultaneously as roguish sex symbol and global citizen.
Now in 2007, his career is exploding again. In a profile in today's New York Times, film reporter David Carr relates that the now-family man and resident of Hawaii "wears life like a beach towel around the shoulders and grabs what it offers with both hands." He portrays just the latest in what has become a long line of entertaining hustlers and con artists in the Coen Brothers recently-released masterpiece, "No Country for Old Men," of which I had the pleasure of seeing last night; and in addition to the soon-to-be-released films ("The Walker" and "The Grand") listed in the Times story, he'll star in short order in the film "Battle in Seattle," a screen drama in real-time, likened to "United 93," about the 1999 WTO riots.
"I thought I might eventually end up doing some quality regional theater," Harrelson tells Carr about the arc of his career. "Instead I end up with this role (in "Cheers") that everyone remembers. And hey, people who don't even know me like me because of that role. That's a pretty cool thing.
"Even cops like me," adds the long-time advocate of industrial hemp.
---
The Nation's Dave Zirin has my back on the topic of Barry Bonds, steroids, and federal indictments. What we're indeed witnessing is the United States Justice Department pursuing another "cheap political hit." And surely by coincidence only, they've found another black man to take that hit.
---
Super-blogger Ken Levine went to high school with actress Jan Smithers-- ingenue "Bailey Quarters" on TV's "WKRP in Cincinnati." On Thanksgiving, he linked to a rare extended-length version of "WKRP's" opening theme song.
posted by CM @ 5:42 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home