“Dad - lighten up. It was a joke. You raised a comedian!”
That actually turned my stomach. I’m going to be creeped out for awhile now.
I met Mel Gibson once but did not realize who it was until the next day, when I was told I had talked to him.
It was during the filming of “Air America” in Mae Hong Son, in northern Thailand. 1989. I was in a small restaurant owned by some Thai friends, when a bunch of movie people came in. They were everywhere at the time, so I paid them no notice and stayed busy with some mail I’d just picked up from the post office. (I lived in the town at that time.) The retaurant was of the type with floor cushions, no chairs.
I was sitting there reading my mail when one of the movie people asked me what was good there. I answered the moussaka was good, and it was true. Lak made a killer moussaka. I went back to reading my mail. The next day as I was heading out of town, I stopped in at the restaurant, and Lak told me. “Mel Gibson was in here last night.” “Oh, that’s nice,” I said.“You talked to him.” “I talked to him?” “Yeah, you told him the moussaka was good.” Oh, so THAT was Mel Gibson, I thought. I hadn’t even recognize him.
I heard Harlan Ellison speak in the early '70s and, even though I was a fan of his at the time, I was really turned off. He started off by asking how many of the audience were or wanted to be writers–almost everybody, it was a college crowd. He then ranted for forty-five minutes about how deluded we were, how bad our writing was going to be, why our stuff would bore editors to death, and how we should just give it up because we weren’t going to make it, we just weren’t good enough.
Yet I have known several writers who consider him a mentor, and a great one. So maybe he’s just not good in front of audiences? Was having a bad day?
In the mid '90s he came to Denver and apparently gave much the same speech: Why Your Writing Efforts Will Suck. By then he had earned the coveted Curmudgeon Weirdo award many times over, but in the '70s he was still a hot young writer.
The Penny Arcade confrontation with him while brief struck me as amusing. Talk about trying to dish it out but not being able to take it (if you follow the link you can just skip down to where it’s labeled ‘the story’).
Speaking of Steve Wozniak, I went to the same high school that he and Jobs had graduated from many years earlier, and my journalism teacher/mentor knew Wozniak somewhat. Apparently, Woz is basically just a big kid now… people are constantly trying to take advantage of him and his money, and he’s too nice to know how to say no, and doesn’t have the business sense to invest wisely. Apparently he’s also quite unhealthy and overweight.
However, the capping story, and my teacher swears this is precisely true, is that a few years ago, Woz married the woman who had gone to highschool with him, and had been the head cheerleader. (He, presumably, had been a big nerd.) He then pays to put her through law school, she becomes a divorce attorney… and then she DIVORCES HIM AND SUES HIM.
Poor bastard.
Suzanne Mulkern was already in law school when she and Wozniak remet at their high school reunion in 1988. She graduated from law school in 1990, and married Wozniak in November 1990. They divorced in 2004.
Confirmed at the Dopefest last night…WhyNot and I WERE both at the same Monaco show about 10 or so years ago. How weird is that? And, consequently, we both own the same Monaco CD, which she brought to the Dopefest to show me.
Seems like every succesful author gives aspiring writers that same advice: don’t do it, it sucks, you’ll probably fail, get a real job, etc. etc. Ellison’s far from unusual in that, although I suspect he was a good deal more… eloquent than most others. But the basic idea is that a writer is going to have to deal with all sorts of disappointments and discouragements, and needs to learn how to deal with them as early as possible. If being ranted at by Harlan Ellison is enough to put you off writing, then you didn’t have the intestinal fortitude for it in the first place.
Hmmm. Y’know, it was really hard to tell.
As for Harlan Ellison discouraging wannabe writers… maybe he just doesn’t want any more competition?
On that note, one of my favorite math anecdotes is the one concerning De Lagny:
In his death bed, he retained no further recollection of the friends who surrounded him and was not responding anymore.
One of his friends then attempted to see if he was still with them, and approaching him said close to his ear:
“The square of 12?”
The dying mathematician instantly replied “144.”
I have a few…
My buddy did promotions in college for a concert series. James Brown did a show once and my friend walked into his dressing room to see if he was ready to go on. He said the Godfather was eating a sandwich and getting a blow job and when interrupted he looked at my friend and said, “Can’t you see I’m eating.”
Carmen Electra is miniature and old looking in real life. I stood next to her in line at a trendy store in LA a year ago. If I didn’t realize it was her I wouldn’t have looked twice, nothing special in person. Ben Stiller has one of the larger heads I’ve ever seen and his wife Christine Taylor looked like a classic eating disorder case.
Another friend of mine invited me onto the set of a Wyclef Jean video shoot he was producing. Wyclef is very nice, but Queen Latifa was there and she was very standoffish. Also, she has terrible skin, they must hire out ILM to do her Covergirl ads.
While I was an undergrad my roommates ran into Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes and convinced him to come back to our apartment and get high, which he did. Steve is a big Santana fan, enjoys the occasional toke, and really doesn’t come off as very intelligent (even before he was intoxicated). Years later a relative of mine said he got stoned with Ed Bradley at a Rolling Stones show and Ed couldn’t handle his smoke.
I was at a party in Atlantic City last weekend, and Adrien Grenier’s band played and they stunk up the joint. He also has a big head, but not in Stiller’s league.
My worst celebrity experience (if he can be called a celebrity) was meeting Patch Adams. He was just a disgusting human being. He smelled, he espoused the type of Deepak Chopraish fake new age nonsense that never fails to make me vomit, and he was sexually aggressive to the point of being scary at the party he attended after speaking at my college. He was clearly trying to cultivate some kind of cult of personality thing, but he just didn’t have the personality for it.
Wait… what?
I don’t know about the enemas, but I’ve read that in his later years, Gandhi would sleep with a couple of nubile young girls, so he could actively resist temptation. By all accounts, that’s really all they did, sleep, but yes, kind of creepy.
Doesn’t sound creepy to me. 
Dave Mustaine was busy on his laptop in '93 when I delivered roomservice. Nice guy, wellspoken, reminded me of a fellow geek.
Woz’ own sense of integrity put quite a strain on his marriage several years ago following a reshowing on one of the networks of the movie, The Pirates of Silicon Valley. His website became known and he began to receive huge amounts of email regarding both the movie itself and other aspects of his life. It was a big thing to him to personally answer all of his email and it was taking up something like twelve to eighteen hours of his time daily…and it went on like that for months! I know for a fact (as a result of comments he made in answering my own emails) that his insistence on answering every single email he received to the almost total exclusion of his family was putting a hell of a strain on his marriage. This would have been around 2001 or 2002, and I’ve wondered how much a role his shutting out his wife and family for months on end so he could answer emails might have had in the eventual demise of his marriage.
I heard somewhere that he wouldn’t allow medical treatment for his wife, who later died of complications from pneumonia, because it was unnatural or some such (but then, awhile later, accepted malaria treatment for himself!). I’m a bit drowsy, so I’ll leave the confirmation or debunking of that one to future generations.
You should write a book about this.