Switch and Bait

...Even mainstream movies sometimes began with a printed message testifying to their social worth, before moving on to all the kissing or shooting the audiences actually came to see...

...It's one thing to pass along a Hollywood nanny's allegation that an unidentified director-producer has Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine and author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 some spoiled kids: "Every time the four-year-old would have any kind of problem—she'd hurt herself, done badly in school, or gotten into a fight—her mother would immediately give the kid a candy, or ice cream, or Popsicle...

...Breitbart and Ebner warn us that entertainment journalism has been neutered by its need for celebrity access...

...It's a stretch then to complain about the fact that he won an Oscar for The Pianist...

...L*1...

...it's red meat for the red states...

...Let's have a little perspective...

...But the oddest thing about the chapter is that Breitbart and Ebner don't seem to recognize the implications of the story their source has told them...

...Frequently we encounter another sort of bait and switch...

...It's filled with stories that make Hollywood look bad or weird...

...This is a celebrity scandal...

...That Hollywood is Babylon...

...Hollywood, Interrupted does include some interesting new vignettes, of which the most entertaining is the tale of some C-list celebs involved in a scam to sell frying pans...

...Similarly, it's one thing to note that Roman Polanski sexually assaulted an underage girl...

...Barresi offers his take on the revelation two years ago that Michael Jackson had hired a gay porn director, Marc Schaffel, to helm the video for his song "What More Can I Give...

...But it's most convincing when it's telling us stuff we already know: that Courtney Love is a bully, that Barbra Streisand is an airhead, that Scientology is creepy, that Hollywood liberals can be sanctimonious hypocrites...

...the problem gets worse later on, when he's described doing something that sure sounds like suborning perjury...

...The trouble with Hollywood, Interrupted, Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner's "case against celebrity," is that it keeps giving us the bait when we're ready for the switch...

...The American Spectator paid me to read every word of this book, whereas the rest of you can simply skim past the lectures and dive directly into the dirt...

...Corroboration is not among the book's strong points...

...By Barresi's account, Jackson was unaware of Schaffel's history, and Schaffel was plotting to plant kiddie porn on Jackson's estate in order to blackmail the singer...

...At other times the authors seem to realize that the story they're pursuing isn't panning out, but they stick it in the tome anyway...

...this book, they promise, will dish out the seamy stuff no one dares to write...

...That celebrities can be crazy...

...Maybe, just maybe, he is a smarmy blackmailer...

...But the authors do engage in some reporting of their own, though I don't care for their usual modus operandi: to find a single source (often anonymous) and completely embrace her point of view...

...His tale of his interactions with the Michael Jackson machine are transparently self-serving, and the authors don't do their credibility any favors when they endorse his explanation for why he dropped a suit against the Jackson camp: "The only document of defense...made him look like a smarmy blackmailer...

...They pass along, for example, the wellestablished fact that the man who wrote the mediocre comedy Keeping the Faith has a history as a plagiarist...

...And then it all kinda peters out...

...In the days when independent producers evaded censorship by showing exploitation movies in tents at the outskirts of town, they learned to sell sex by claiming to educate us about its dangers...

...The authors have evidently confused the Best Director award with Humanitarian of the Year...

...That it's OK to obsess about famous people if you say you're criticizing them...

...And its earnestness is a terrible bore: It's always insisting that there's more to the book than gossip, that there's a thesis here, dammit, even if it's hard to say just what that thesis is...

...Why is this even in the book...

...He says he didn't plagiarize it...

...They call him...

...They're trying to make sugar sound dangerous, but the actual effect is to make cocaine sound harmless...

...In other words, if Barresi's story is true, it makes Jackson look like an innocent victim...

...The point of the book, I gather, is to give us as many tales as possible of celebrities and their hangers-on engaging in behavior that is criminal, or so irresponsible that it seems criminal, or so bizarre that it seems irresponsible, or so bohemian that it seems bizarre...

...That much might make for an entertaining read, but the authors feel compelled to preach to us while they're telling these tales, as though they don't trust the material to make their points for them...

...I guess you could call it a bait and switch, but if so it's an unusual kind: The viewer feels cheated if the switch doesn't come...

...He tells us that the clients include "b - actors" and "Hollywood writers doing `research,'" and "'old Hollywood' dinosaurs," but the closest he comes to naming names is "Hugh Hefner's personal physician...

...It's a gossip book, people...

...It's overreach...

...It's a bit much, though, to follow that up with the breathless revelation that sugar is "a substance one nitrogen atom away from cocaine...

...The worst you can say about him is that his handlers didn't pay off Barresi after they promised to...

...They tell us there are rumors that he plagiarized Keeping the Faith as well...

...The result isn't just overkill...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Switch and Bait Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon—The Case Against Celebrity by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner (John Wiley & Sons, 394 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Jesse Walker T ITILLATION GOES DOWN BETTER when you can claim you're actually bettering yourself by wading in the muck...

...And there is a fair amount of dirt here...

...Either he's got feet as cold as those of any other entertainment journalist, or the actors, writers, and dinosaurs weren't BOOKS IN REVIEW even quasi-celebrities and we're just reading about the antics of sexed-up rich people who happen to live in Los Angeles...

...It opens with a long, purple stream of prose about their source: a detective cum gay porn actor named Paul Barresi, most famous for recanting his claims to have carried on a homosexual affair with John Travolta...

...By the time you're done reading Barresi's resume, you might wonder just how reliable a source he is...

...In one chapter, one of the authors visits a semi-legal sex club and describes the debauchery on display...

...This might not be as severe a problem for the general reader as it is for the reviewer...

...The introduction identifies Breitbart as a conservative and Ebner as a "bleeding heart," but aside from a threepage segment on some slippery televangelists their targets come from the Republican playbook...

...T HE STRANGEST SEGMENT iS surely the section that promises to shed new light on the "sexual perversities" and "indiscretions unparalleled" of Michael Jackson...

...The theory that no one else will publish unflattering articles about celebrities is belied by the book's endnotes, a long litany of clippings from the mainstream press...