Word: gongs
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Fans of Chinese film rejoice: Gong Li is back. Star of the mainland-Chinese classic Raise the Red Lantern, Gong Li took a break from acting to live as a housewife in Singapore for the past few years. But with the contemporary drama Zhou Yu's Train, she returns to the screen in a familiar role: the dreamy, ethereal beauty drowning in doomed love. Gong Li's sculpted cheekbones and anguished eyes are up to the task, but the self-conscious Zhou Yu's Train never quite manages to pull out of the station...
...ways to tell the truth, and Chuck Barris has avoided most of them. His 1984 book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was subtitled An Unauthorized Autobiography, and it claimed that while he was creating game shows like The Newlywed Game and The Dating Game and hosting The Gong Show, he was a contract CIA assassin--a claim he still refuses to say was untrue. The movie version, directed by George Clooney and written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), which opens nationwide on Jan. 24, has tales the book never even imagined. "He wrote stuff out of nowhere," Barris...
...just so happy that people might think I wrote that line," Barris says. When asked if he feels that way--that his life was ultimately one of wasted opportunity, of empty hucksterism signifying nothing--he doesn't pause: "Are you kidding? The Gong Show was the four best years of my life...
Barris plays the '50s pop hit he wrote and recently recorded on a CD with his band, Chuck Barris and the Hollywood Cowboys, a reunited Gong Show orchestra. "I thought with the movie coming out maybe I could sell a CD," he explains, before ruing that the Web wasn't around in 1980, when he could have sold GONG SHOW REJECT T shirts. When I tell him it's not too late, he nods. Half an hour later he says, "The website is a good idea. Maybe I'll give that a shot." Along with Hollywood mementos, the apartment...
...does read the paper, in particular the articles that are once again being written about him, and he still cringes at the phrase "king of schlock." He is only slightly bothered that the cultural hand-wringing over his shows has been made moot by the Gong Show-izing of television. "The moral is, Hang in there because things are going to change," he says. Then he rethinks. "I tried to write an epilogue, and I came up empty. The only moral I came up with is, There is no moral...