Joe's View

In this age of celebrity confidentiality agreements, it has become almost impossible for ex-staffers to write real memoirs about the horrors they faced working for a famous boss.

You will almost never read a negative on-the-record quote from anyone employed by a movie star or a media mogul because that would be a violation of the contract they signed when they went to work for the celebrity in question.

There is a fairly easy way around this pothole, however, as folks who worked for bosses ranging from Anna Wintour to Rosie O’Donnell have learned with their successful publication of memoir-like novels about the experience of working for a famous monster.

The latest example of the genre is “Spin” (St. Martin’s Press), a rather horrifying black comedy by Robert Rave about a too-naive-for-his-own-good Midwesterner named Taylor Green who talks his way into being hired by a powerful publicist named Jennie Weinstein (and who lives to regret that decision).

Rave once worked for the notorious New York PR woman Lizzie Grubman (above, on the night earlier in this century when she was involved in that famous Long Island nightclub car incident), so the folks at pop culture websites such as Gawker have been having a field day studying the links between “Jennie” and Lizzie.

The Grubman aspect of “Spin” will only be of interest to folks in the New York and Los Angeles media industries. What makes the book worth reading by the rest of us is Rave’s funny and appalling view behind the curtains of the PR business.

Taylor is perhaps a tad too innocent when he first crosses paths with Jennie, but the book is a valuable insider’s account of the extreme behavior of people who are desperate to get publicity for their clients and the journalists who are manipulated into delivering the stories the PR folks want.

“Most journalists are neither rich nor cool, so to be invited to a dinner party with an A-list star and a rock star they’ve idolized since childhood – you’ll get them every time. In basic form, it’s seduction. You’re seducing them,” Jennie tells Taylor.

“Spin” is much darker in tone than “The Devil Wears Prada” — it doesn’t have the career and relationship angles that made Lauren Weisberger’s novel a hit with young women who had never heard of Anna Wintour. Rave (isn’t that a great name for a guy who once worked as a flack?) takes us back to the vicious view of PR/press relationships that was presented in the great 1957 Manhattan melodrama, “Sweet Smell of Success.”

The most publicized documentaries these days seem to be as much about the filmmakers as the material they are covering.

Last night I watched a press DVD of “The Yes Men Fix the World” — a movie opening in New York and Los Angeles next month — which follows two activist pranksters named Andy Bichlbaum (above, left) and Mike Bonanno as they fake their way into corporate meetings to lecture businessmen about the downside of capitalism.

“The Yes Men” also managed to get on the BBC World News (below) to deliver a spurious announcement that Dow was going to spend $12 billion to settle with the victims of the catastrophic Union Carbide chemical plant accident in Bhopal, India in the 1980s (Dow has long since absorbed Union Carbide).

There is lots of mordant humor in the spectacle of these two political put-on artists making corrupt business people look silly and the way they show us how easy it is to disseminate false information through even the most august news organizations.

There is a rather nasty strain of cruelty just under the surface, too. Pity the folks in Bhopal who saw the false report and celebrated their long-delayed settlement from Dow/Union Carbide.  Bichlbaum and Bonanno say they simply wanted to put out the idea that a settlement should be made — small comfort to the folks who are still waiting for some financial help.

“The Yes Men Fix the World” will be opening at Manhattan’s best venue for the launch of an independent movie — Film Forum — so you will be reading a lot about Bichlbaum and Bonnano in the New York press in the lead-up to the Oct. 7 theatrical debut.

The film owes a lot to the work of Michael Moore (whose new documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” opens next week) and Morgan Spurlock (of “Super Size Me” fame).

These zany liberals have become comic show biz personalities whose careers have run parallel to those of the MTV “Jackass” crew and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Moore and Spurlock always put themselves in front of whatever expose that they are working on — and push for as many laughs as they can get — so that the tone and style of their films is not all that different from “Borat!” or “Bruno” (Baron Cohen’s zany skewerings of American politics and lifestyles).

I share much of the progressive politics of these comic non-fiction moviemakers, but I wish they were a tad more willing to push their causes rather than their own personal fame.

The obituaries for Patrick Swayze Monday focused on the two biggest box-office hits of his career — “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost” — but neither of those very solid movies have given me as much pleasure over the years as the actor’s down-and-dirty 1989 drama “Road House.”

Originally sold as a straightforward action flick, the movie proved to be a delirious (and mostly inadvertent) comedy about an NYU philosophy major named Dalton who has become a legendary “cooler” (head bouncer).

Because he is famed for cleaning up the sleaziest dives, our hero Dalton asks for — and gets — $500 a night.

“Road House” puts Dalton’s abilities to the test when he is hired to turn a dive into a singles bar in a Midwestern town ruled with an iron fist by a crazed businessman (Ben Gazzara) who extorts protection money from all of the merchants in town and trashes their businesses if they resist. The Gazzara character goes ape when Dalton starts romancing a local doctor (Kelly Lynch) who has always spurned the crime lord’s advances

The raunchy, over-heated dialogue (“I used to —- guys like you in prison!”), the brutal (and seemingly un-policed) way of life in the bizarre little town, and the wonderfully exhuberant performances by Swayze, Gazzara, Lynch and Sam Elliott (below, as Dalton’s best friend) combine to make this into one of the greatest guilty pleasure movies of the past 20 years.

What Leonard Maltion termed “brain-dead Yahoo fare” at the time of the film’s release, quickly became a cult film for movie buffs with a taste for the absurd. The picture’s cult status was recognized a few years back when a New York theatre troupe presented the movie on stage as a musical comedy (!)

On Monday, the literary blog Barrelhouse demonstrated the odd attraction “Road House” has for some people in novelist Chuck Klosterman’s dead-on appraisal of the movie:

“’Road House’ is sort of an amazing film because, if you discount the science fiction genre, it is the least plausible movie ever made. Because you go through every scene, and every twist to the plot, every single one of them is completely impossible. It just starts with this impossible premise that there’s a nationally famous bouncer that people seek out, that somebody could have a reputation for being a great bar bouncer. And that he would go to NYU and major in philosophy. I remember there’s a monster truck involved at one point. It’s crazy that one guy would run a town in this despotic way. And the bar that it’s set in, it’s the bar that’s got a live band, all these great looking women, but sporadically throughout the night people are having chairs broken over their heads and getting hit by bottles. There’s no way this place would stay in existence, and even if it did, hot people wouldn’t go there. To a bar where people consistently got thrown through plate glass windows? I find that I like to watch ‘Road House’ just because it’s set in an alternative reality. A place in which I would like to live.”

Despite all of the hoopla surrounding the 40th anniversary of Woodstock last month, Ang Lee’s charming film about the run-up to the 1969 music festival — “Taking Woodstock” (above) — has been one of the year’s notable box-office failures.

On Sunday, when I caught up with the picture at a local multiplex, I was part of an audience of five. Perhaps the (very long) string on baby boomer nostalgia has finally run out.

I have to admit that I can’t blame people in their 20s and 30s who are sick and tired of 50- and 60-something media folk dredging up the greatest hits of their long ago youth.

Can you imagine how members of the counterculture would have reacted in 1969 if everywhere you turned there were TV and magazine and newspaper features devoted to the pop culture of 1929?

(I love the music of The Beatles, but do you believe all of the coverage that was given to the release of that Fab Four video game and CD boxed set last week? Enough already!)

Tonight at the Fairfield Theatre Company, I’m hosting a screening of “Gimme Shelter” (below), a classic documentary that shows the dark side of the 1969 pop music scene and the boomer youth culture.

The movie follows the 1969 tour of the The Rolling Stones, with a special emphasis on the free concert that ended the tour — the nightmarish music festival at the Altamont Raceway near San Francisco that resulted in four deaths (including a murder right in front of the stage as Mick and the boys played “Sympathy for the Devil”).

Less than six months after the “peace and love” of Woodstock, the Altamont gathering displayed the dark side of the rampant drug taking that was destroying the counterculture from within.

The emphasis in the Woodstock movie was on the music and the idyllic upstate New York setting. In “Gimme Shelter” the filmmakers decided to focus their cameras on the audience while The Stones performed and the result is an appalling vision of the ultimate bad trip — young people too wasted to react to the atmosphere of imminent violence (and the absurdity of the festival organizers hiring The Hells Angels motorcyle gang to provide “security”).

If you’re looking for a strong dose of what might be termed anti-nostalgia, join me tonight for the screening of “Gimme Shelter” and what should be a lively discussion after the movie.

(Doors will open for the free “Martini and a Movie” evening at 7 p.m. tonight. “Gimme Shelter” will be shown at 8 p.m. For more information, visit www.fairfieldtheatre.org)

Tim Maleeny came up with an expert plot for his San Francisco mystery “Jump” ( Poisoned Pen Press), but it’s the warmth and humanity of his characters that made this book such a pleasure for me to read on vacation last week. Published in hardcover last year, the book was reprinted in paperback a few months ago.

Maleeny opens with a death that doesn’t seem to upset many people. A much-hated landlord takes a leap off the roof of his apartment building in what at first appears to be a suicide.

When that theory starts to seem a little too neat, the detective in charge of the case, Danny Rodriguez, decides that his old partner — the recently retired Sam McGowan — would be the perfect guy to get to the bottom of the crime since he has lived in the building for several years.

What goes unspoken in the younger detective’s request is his feeling that Sam has been too isolated in the months since his wife died — the ex-cop has been drifting in a haze of grief.

The case does interest Sam, however, because he disliked the dead man as much as his neighbors — the landlord was cruelly indifferent to a request made to help Sam’s ailing wife by fixing a lobby door the woman found increasingly difficult to open as her illness worsened.

The title has a neat double meaning, referring both to the plunge taken by the creepy landlord and the leap Sam takes back into the world of the living. Indeed, virtually every character in the novel seems poised to make a jump into a new life.

Maleeny finds great humor and warmth in Sam finally getting to know the diverse population of the old building, including two hapless brother drug dealers, a pair of young women who are making a killing from putting on internet porn shows in front of their apartment’s Webcam system, and a world weary female jazz singer named Jill who takes a shine to Sam at their first meeting.

The building becomes a microcosm of San Francisco’s function as the city so many people look to for acceptance of whatever quirks they might possess.

As the story unfolds, the whodunit aspect moves into the background as we care more about Sam and the (mostly) delightful folks who live in his building.

Maleeny leaves plenty of room for diversions from the plot, diversions that end up becoming the best parts of the novel, including a wonderful chapter in which the whole life and philosophy of an elderly woman is sketched in as she bakes some cookies for other people in the building.

“Some people took all the joy out of life just trying to survive. The way Gail saw it, people like that got old long before she ever did, in spirit if not in body. Why all the fuss? Everybody died…She took another scoop of batter and licked it off her bony finger. Life could be sweet if you just made it that way.”

I’m taking a two-week, end-of-summer break at the beach in Delaware. Will have plenty to write about and to show you when I return on Sept. 14

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for some good, dumb, end-of-summer fun check out the 3D “Final Destination.” On a bad beach day Monday, I saw the movie and got a kick out of the Rube Goldberg zaniness of the violent setpieces.

See you shortly!