By
Dylan Grant
www.moviefreak.com
PART ONE:
THE CONCRETE CARPET
The DVD
release of Hostel, which also happily coincides with director
Eli Roth’s birthday, turned Rokbar into Rothbar the other night. I’ve
been to Rokbar, a happenin’ spot tucked discreetly off of Hollywood
Boulevard, many times, but never for anything so flashy. Anytime you
go to one of those events, you start to understand when people are
talking about meeting someone like Bill Clinton, the aura that comes
off them. There was a real charge in the air, a feeling that
something was going to happen, something like …
… Okay, I have
to be honest here. My hat is now permanently off to Joan and Melissa
Rivers. I never had much respect for them before, but this red carpet
stuff is really boring. In two hours or so of “arrivals”, only
a few minutes involved actual activity. The rest of the time is a lot
of standing around. I thought it was just me until I noticed one guy
so immersed in phoning in his food order that he completely missed one
celebrity arrival, while another offered to run across the street and
buy a girl cigarettes.
I wondered why
all these people bothered to come out when half the time they seemed
oblivious to what was going on. But then you realize how mercenary
the whole business is and it all makes sense.
When another
light stand was requested, the tech asked, “How long do you need it?”
“Eight,
eight-thirty max,” the photographer replied. “Just until Selma Blair
gets here.”
“Yeah,”
another photographer said, “we don’t even need to turn it on
until she gets here.”
“Right,”
concurred the first, “and if she gets here early, we’re out of here
early.”
Hmm, I
thought, a lot of fuss. Is Selma Blair a bigger celebrity than I
realize? I mean, aside from maybe Eli Roth, she was probably the
biggest name at this shindig, but her name was being thrown around
like she was the second coming of Angelina Jolie. Not that Selma
isn’t absolutely radiant or anything, but … Selma Blair?
It seemed like a case of publicist-driven hype, especially when a
security guard mentioned that he’d heard Quentin Tarantino might show
up, to which the photographer he was talking to merely replied, “Oh, I
don’t care about him. I’m waiting for Selma.”
Publicists
rule this game. It’s a relatively meager position that has been
elevated to the point of absurdity. They are gatekeepers who take
their jobs very seriously, and it would be hard to put up with
a lot of them if they weren’t, for the most part, smoking hot
chicks. Just about anything takes on a different tone when it
comes from the mouth of a girl looking hotter than the star she
represents. The job is really no different than that of, say, Scott
McClellan (who resigned on April 19). Imagine how much different
things would feel if the White House Press Secretary was a babe
instead of a pudgy, pasty, board-stiff white guy. As long as Bush is
making some changes to his staff, McClellan should be replaced by
Pamela Anderson, Tara Patrick or Carmen Electra. Things are bad
enough that he might need all three. At this point, hell, I’d settle
for any randomly chosen Hawaiian Tropic girl.
PART TWO:
JUST CHATTING
RANDOM THINGS
HEARD WHILE STANDING IN THE CROWD
“L. Ron
Hubbard owns it.”
“I’m trying to
get a picture for Prague.”
“As soon as
she found out she was pregnant she sold the story to People.”
“The client
should send you a 1090 at the end of the year.”
“Two in the
pink, one in the stink!”
“In the
corner!”
I was curious
as to whether or not, as an esteemed member of the press who was so
gracious and willing to cover this event, I would earn myself a free
DVD for my troubles. I wasn’t long before I heard two of my fellow
journalists discussing that very thing:
“Are we
getting a DVD?”
“Sheeeeeeit.”
Guess not.
PART THREE:
STRANGE CONVERGENCES
But when
are you going to tell us about the party?
All right, all right. Eli Roth was the first to arrive, and it was
cool to see because he seemed genuinely enthusiastic. He flashed a
big smile, the kind of smile that says, “I look good, I’m rich, and I
get laid a lot. It would be an easy thing to fake, but the
excitement radiating from this guy felt genuine. “Hey, is everyone
here to party,” he exclaimed and he bounced over towards us, standing
there in the middle of all those flashbulbs like a living Ralph Lauren
ad. “They laughed at me at my bar mitzvah when I said I wanted to
make horror movies,” he said gleefully, doing a strongman flex, “who’s
laughing now?” After what seemed like a lengthy session of posing, he
made his way over to E! for a long talk, then MTV and Inside
Edition. TV crews dominated the aisle, shoving their microphones
into his face. We can end you, Eli, seemed the smiled, implied
threat underneath it all. Lord knows he wouldn’t want to snub the
Ryan Seacrest network, even if their ratings are so low that at
any given time no one is watching. All the while, me and my
little handheld digital recorder never had a prayer. Eli does
seem like a cool guy, though, and a one-on-one interview would
probably go a little better.
Chris Jericho
was right behind Eli, and he’s much smaller in person than anyone
might imagine. The former undisputed wrestling champion is listed at
five-ten and 230 pounds, but that can’t be right. The guy is so
slight you’d never look twice at him. The Walls of Jericho looked
more like a gate. The WWE is great at making these guys look like
hulking mounds of human flesh. I had the same reaction a few weeks
ago when I ran into The Rock at Sony. Man, I thought, maybe these
dudes really aren’t on ‘roids.
Behind all
this, as the bulbs were popping, the crowd of onlookers began to grow,
and a woman and her two kids came up next to me for a peek. Quickly
sizing up the situation, the mother said, “I don’t even know who
that is.” She disappeared into the night, only to be replaced by
someone else. Most of them looked like tourists. (Why is it that
when people are on vacation they dress like they belong either on a
golf course or in a Laundromat?)
“What’s this,”
they all asked.
“A DVD launch
party for the film Hostel.”
“Oh yeah,”
they said, noticing for the first time the sign covering the entire
side of the building. “That’s Quentin Tarantino’s movie.”
Well, actually
it’s not, but you can hardly blame them for thinking so. The
publicity juggernaut that accompanied Hostel was so tied to
Tarantino’s name that Eli nearly became a footnote to his own film.
Jay Hernandez,
Derek Richardson and Barbara Nedeljakova (Natalia in the movie) all
came, but there was no sign of Selma. More rumors flew that Tarantino
might come. Some studio executives showed, as did some girls that
didn’t look familiar from anywhere. More tourists came, too, and
there were two guys in motorized wheelchairs, zooming up and down Las
Palmas. One smelled like rotten crotch and took the opportunity to
ask for change, (When no one even looked at the guy, I couldn’t help
but think of something Kenneth Burke once said: “Stopped a stranger in
the street and told him my misfortunes, though he kept glancing in the
direction of his appointment.”) and the other yelled “hey, fuck you”
at one of the security guards and took off down the street. The
tourists were all focused on the Rokbar entrance, where really nothing
was happening, when all the while there was a great show going on
behind them.
8:30 came, and one of the
photographers said, “That’s it. I’m calling time of death.” The wait
seemed to be over, but no one was going anywhere. The music coming
from inside was loud enough that we could all hear, and it made
passing the time a little easier. Time outside seemed to stop, while
the party inside seemed only to be getting started.
Finally
someone spotted her. “Selma’s here,” he yelled. Through the line of
heads I could make her out, walking with a strange gait. Is she
drunk? Does she have some kind of spinal condition? Hemiplegia? No,
just a huge bandage on one of her feet. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t
outside very long, and at first didn’t even look like she wanted to be
there at all. The obviously painful injury did not prevent her from
gliding into a few easy, natural poses for what photos she did allow.
And that was
that. She was there and then she was gone. The spare light went out,
and it seemed that things were winding down. But just when it looked
to be over:
“Hey! Hilary
and Haylie Duff! Turn the fuckin’ light back on!”
Hilary and
Haylie, who looked to be out with the whole family, were not even
there for the party. They were there for dinner at Bella Cucina next
door, which meant that every photographer there had to swarm over to
the restaurant to shoot them. Now, I happened to be standing right
there, and if you’ve ever been in the middle of something like that,
twenty or thirty photographers zooming towards you, sucking all the
air out of the neighborhood, it can be a little intimidating. It
gives you a different perspective on the whole thing. I might as well
have not even been there, but I was right in the middle of it, and it
felt like anything could have happened.
On a brighter
note, Hilary is much better looking in person than she is on
television. She looks like the girl in the mall who catches your
eye. Haylie looks like the girl in the mall who has a hot sister.
That really
was the end after the Duffs disappeared behind the tinted windows of
Bella Cucina, and the sidewalk cleared almost instantaneously. All
the questions had been asked, all the pictures taken, and no one, it
seemed, was staying for the actual party, which seemed like the only
reason for being there in the first place. I looked around the
sidewalk, which looked like a kitchen at the end of a party. Joan, I
thought, you can have it.
Article Posted: April 21, 2006
