Word: fame
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Contemplating his own life in Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me (Random House; 568 pages; $25), Marlon Brando, aided by journalist Robert Lindsey, strikes a pose of injured innocence: he is a sweet-spirited, mischievous man- child who accidentally fell first into acting, then into fame and finally into self-contempt, and at 70 remains "an enigma to myself in a world that still bewilders me." That observation pretty well sums up the level of self- awareness (and self-revelation) he achieves in his book...
...poor judge of his own accomplishments -- he thinks he gave his best performance in Burn! Without a perceptive discussion of Brando the artist, the two books are left only with Brando the celebrity. But that celebrity has long since detached itself from the qualities that made Brando worthy of fame in the first place. It floats free over a landscape littered with tabloid trash, and few remember what he once meant to the very different culture of the 1950s...
Whether discussing food or crepe-sole shoes, the point is always to take the personal public, while preserving an intimate audience. That's why the thing most feared by a zine publisher is fame, even the notorious kind. Greta, for instance, is the publisher of Mudslap, but Greta is an alias, and she puts out her zine as she hitches rides in the boxcars of America's railway system. "I don't want anyone to know too much about it -- 'cause if they do, then people will think they're Jack London or Steinbeck. They'll go freight hopping...
...hopes to capture these miscreants and maybe write a best seller about it. A tabloid-TV newsman (Robert Downey Jr.) figures he can exploit their exploits, turning this Mansonized Romeo and Juliet -- 52 murders, no regrets -- into media darlings. A crazed warden (Tommy Lee Jones) is determined to achieve fame as the man who put them to death. It's the ideal recipe for a Stone-crazy parable of greed and abuse. Shake well, pull the pin and stand back...
Marilyn Monroe and the rest of those icons cemented in American celebrityhood on the world-famous Hollywood Walk of Fame are sinking, tilting or cracking. The cause: boring beneath the surface, in order to build a subway extension in car-dependent L.A. Transit officials called the mess "reparable and not unusual for tunnel construction of this nature...