(Bolding mine)
Than it must be for being the executive producer of Repo Man, the best movie made after Citizen Kane.
Really, I’m curious as to what his significance will be. I’ll be willing to bet that for most people it will be for the Monkees. After reading his Wiki bio the best I could come up with is the MTV tie-in. I never knew that piece of historical contribution until after I read his bio and I was there for “Video Killed the Radio Star”.
I was at the taping of the “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” he was on, and I had exactly the same impression. it was in Asilomar, and he was actually on-stage for it.
It seems like Tim Curry doesn’t speak much about Rocky Horror Picture Show but I don’t know if he’s drawn a hard line about it.
Hmm. My wife was in a small college class with her after she had done Up The People, and my wife never mentioned any bitterness.
I recall an interview that made the rounds about a year ago where Billy Bob Thorton the musician refused in a really weird way to not discuss Billy Bob Thorton the actor.
To be fair, Up The People was a bit of a different gig. Just sayin’.
Gotta agree with that. Sheesh!
How often did Up With People come up in that class?
I read the Up With People thing in Spy Magazine in the late 80’s. In the mid-90’s, I found out that a co-worker of mine was in UWP with her back in the day. He knew about it was pissed. My take is she was more embarrassed than bitter.
I agree with what others have said. Nesmith doesn’t have any problem with having been a Monkee. He’s been able to keep a reasonable sense of perspective on it. It’s not him avoiding the subject as much as it is the other three bringing it up more often than necessary.
That’s what I’m gathering…oh, well… :o
However, I’m digging the examples of people forsaking their previous fame vehicles.
A great philosopher once observed:
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Naismith doesn’t feel much the same.
Leonard Nimoy went through his “I am not Spock” phase.
Alec Guinness hated having people talk about Star Wars.
Eve Plumb (Jan Brady) intermittently dissed Brady Bunch reunions and such. I’m not sure what her stance is with regard to discussing the show. According to Wiki, though, when a fan asked her what her favorite BB episode is, she replied, ‘the last one.’
mmm
“Basketball! All you people ever ask about is basketball. I also coached wrestling and gymnastics. Ask about that sometime, why don’t you?”
Yeah, he seems to have made peace with it, like Nimoy with Spock.
Some performers have what I call the Tina Louise Syndrome, a specific “I would have been the greatest star of all time if it hadn’t been for arguably bad choice of role here” bitterness. It could also be called the Leif Garrett Syndrome (“if it weren’t for the studio making me do that bubblegum shit I’d have been a great rock star!”) or the Robert Reed Syndrome (one of the great putdowns of all time was when Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz got tired of hearing Reed bitch about how that role had destroyed him as a serious actor and said “If Bob bombed doing Hamlet he’d blame the writer”) or even the Faye Dunaway Syndrome (she’s blamed Mommie Dearest for wrecking her career- in truth, while the movie was an instant camp classic, her performance was actually really good, the material was just so over-the-top- her career was damaged more by age [Hollywood’s notorious for not being sweet to actresses over 40] and her reputation [rightfully or wrongly she has a rep as one of the most difficult to work with biatches in an industry that has no shortage of them, male or female]).
I have sort of a Mama Rose “If ya coulda been you woulda been… or not… either way quitcher bitchin’” attitude on it. Major Tony Nelson wasn’t a whole lot meatier a character than Ginger Grant but Larry Hagman came back many times bigger with Dallas, Jodie Foster graduated from Freaky Friday and Candleshoe G-rated comedies to multiple Academy Award wins, and Martin Landau survived Space 1999 and Harlem Globetrotters Go to Gilligans Island to have major roles in many respected movies and winning an Oscar for a movie that somehow bombed but everybody seems to have watched in the theater.
And for every Martin Landau or Jodie Foster there’s no shortage of extremely talented actors and actresses who just never got a major break to begin with or didn’t have the right looks or whatever. I call this the Ruth Maleczech Syndrome after an actress who’s on screen for about 2 minutes in The Crucible as poor deranged Goody Osborne; she’s absolutely brilliant for those two minutes, conveys the batshit insanity of the character but also her humanity, her pathos, the fact that somewhere in there is some intelligence and reason that understands what’s happening but is too powerless and nuts to do anything about it- just a brilliant performance. However her lack of movie star looks and other circumstances or perhaps personal choice [I don’t know anything about her as a person] she never became the next Kathy Bates or Judy Dench or other “actress nobody wants to see naked but works in quality vehicles due to talent anyway”.)
Without Ginger Grant or Mike Brady perhaps both actors would have won Oscars and been studied as greats from then on, but more likely- considering the number of unemployed actors and even the accoladed and once successful actors who have trouble finding work- they’d have had to take a job as servers or left the field to become realtors or ended up doing dinner theater in Arkansas and nobody ever would have heard of them.
Sorry for the ramble, but as mentioned, Nesmith seems to have made peace. Another thing with Nesmith is that after The Monkees he had some really serious IRS problems; they auctioned his house and many of his belongings (I think his mother bought the house) and he wasn’t in a happy place. Now he’s rich as sin from inheritance and from successful things he’s produced and from a multimillion dollar verdict against PBS so he’s much happier. The main negative thing about him and The Monkees from the past couple of decades was that Jones, Dolenz and Tork seemed resentful that he refused to go with them on tour or perform with them in their 1980s reunion tours UNTIL, completely to everybody’s surprise, their reunion tour succeeded many times beyond anybody’s expectations (they were selling out bigger stadiums than they had in the '60s and making more money from ticket sales than Guns’N’Roses, at which point Mike wanted in, but that just seems like good business sense and worked out for all of them. He also walked out on the last tour but so did Peter Tork; Jones and Dolenz both called that the tour from hell to begin with- everything went wrong- and after that they decided it wasn’t fun anymore and they’d all made a lot of money from the reunion tours and decided to pretty much call it quits.
I think now he sees it as part of his life, some good memories and some money, there it is.
I hear that Patrick Stewart has a stick up his ass about Star Trek.
The whole Tramp thing was something I figured (not being anything like an industry insider) I’d just never know. Props to wikipedia.
John Cleese, while not remotely in stick-up-his-ass mode, has said in very firm but polite terms that he’s done with the whole Monty Python thing. He’s glad people like it but it was 40 years ago.
And when you’re riding in a safari jeep with him, do NOT think you’re being clever by telling him “Hey, good job as J’onn J’onzz in the Justice League movie.” Just sayin’.