Word: darrowing
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...beginning of the film, Lee turns to Nola, an extra on a film set played by Winona Ryder, and asks her, "Where do I know you from?" The volatile Leonardo DiCaprio plays Brandon Darrow, the heartthrob movie actor who bursts into temper tantrums in his suite at The Stanhope Hotel. When he is escorted outside by a police officer, he is greeted by hordes of pubescent girls waving Titanic-sized glossies of the superstar. The props people certainly didn't have to look far to procure those gems...
...feckless journalist has a dreadful movie script he's trying to push on his interviewees, and that leads to the film's central, most harrowing passage. For when he arrives to discuss it with Brandon Darrow (Leonardo DiCaprio, in a chilling performance), the star is exercising his power by beating up a girlfriend and trashing a hotel room. Undaunted, Lee starts pitching. And pitching--through a night of high-stakes gambling (he loses, of course), drugs and group sex. Slyly, sadistically, Brandon alternately encourages and discourages him. Degradation is power's prerogative. And besides, it amuses...
...Governor, Frank Steunenberg. Blame for the murder was quickly pinned on traveling "sheep dealer" Harry Orchard, who confessed to being a paid assassin for the Western Federation of Miners, one of the era's most powerful labor unions. The union's highest officials were indicted, and the young Clarence Darrow hired to defend them. The result was a kind of class war in miniature disguised as a frontier murder trial, pitting robber-baron capitalists against card-carrying Socialists...
...readers willing to push themselves along, however, Big Trouble has substantial rewards. Whether the subject is hard-rock mining, turn-of-the-century radical politics, Darrow's literary aspirations, or the rise of the American grand hotel, Lukas' digressions are richer and denser than some other writers' entire books. He footnotes his footnotes, which ruins the tale's momentum but makes for some informative side trips. Who knew that the Elks, the fraternal organization, was started by New York actors who worked all week and needed a Sunday wateringhole? Or that Darrow chose struggling writers for law partners, including...
...your rage against an evil that is universal. You deepen your sadness with stories--think back to the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, for example. Everyone in America wanted to hang those two in Chicago for murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks as a sort of Nietzschean thrill; Clarence Darrow, with a magnificent speech against the death penalty, got the idiots off with life imprisonment. Nathan Leopold was released in 1958 and lived to the age of 66, strolling upon a beach in Puerto Rico...