#no one can throw shade like vincent fucking price

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price - Madhouse (1974)

Throwing shade like a boss...

[see-arcane]

Ok I love the teacher au so much and just A. the discovery that the cryptid in tweed also apparently was the lead singer of concept band in college B. The teachers discovering him doing dramatic readings of creepypasta at lunch C. I don't know if England has anything like the DARE program but Daisy walks into class one day, says don't do drugs, and walks out. None of the students ever do drugs after that encounter.

A. “No. No, no, no, I’m calling bullshit, he can’t be Jonny fucking d’Ville on top of everything else. I won’t buy it.”

Before her friend can carry on with the article, they hear ‘Jonny’ drop into a few verses from “Pump Shanty” right behind them. They jump and whirl around to see Mr. Sims strolling away, pretending to sip his coffee.

B. Mr. Sims is a walking coat rack as it is, and Mrs. Cartwright is worried. They tell her not to bother. Mr. Sims is an oddball, so it’s safe to assume that maybe he has a reason to not be around when everyone else is having the midday break.

“Probably nibbling on a heart somewhere,” Mr. Carson, the gym coach hums over his sandwich, “Or maybe he does that psychic vampire thing where he eats your brain.”

“Or,” says Ms. Wendell over her microwaved takeout, “the guy has dietary issues. My cousin’s got a liquid diet thing that makes her look like a stick. It happens. Don’t worry about him, Viv.”

“I’m telling you,” Mr. Carson goes on, smiling around his rye, “He’s having a fresh brain right now. Has to keep his X-Men powers all fed up.”

“If that’s the case, I’m sure you’re the safest person here.”

Mrs. Cartwright leaves them as they throw napkins and plastic cutlery at each other like they’re their students’ age. She brings half her own meal with her, determined to leave some solid food with the scrawny oddity of Mr. Sims. 

Because, yes, he is odd, but in a way that reminds her of her grandson. A brilliant boy, but so, so forgetful about taking care of himself. Sometimes he passed out in his room, still working on a program or a new gadget because he’d skipped eating and sleeping for a couple days. 

So she looks for Mr. Sims.

And finds him only by pure accident. He’d not been in his classroom. Or the cafeteria. Or any other empty room. No, she spotted him outdoors, leaning like a scarecrow in the shade of an equipment shed. Mrs. Cartwright went out to him. Sneaking a smoke break, maybe? No.

No.

He doesn’t notice her even when she calls to him twice. He’s absorbed in a handful of papers he’s leafing through. It’s a stationery she doesn’t recognize beyond the header at the top. The Magnus Institute. 

Yes, she’s heard the gossip. Yes, she’s aware of the Work-Related Accident meme the kids are passing around. She doesn’t puzzle over it long. Not when she can hear Mr. Sims reciting the awful, gruesome story printed on those sheets.

Narrating it as if he were the poor, doomed man in its lines. The witness to the terrifying fate of his best friend at the hands of...of a thing that has no place being described so clearly. So much so that she can see it in her mind. 

She can feel its touch melting into her skin, spoiling it like bad meat. All of her that is not bone begins to soften and melt and fall away in rotten, putrid chunks...

“--Statement ends. ...Oh. Oh, God, Vivian! Mrs. Cartwright, can you hear me?”

She does. At some point the bagged leftovers had fallen from her hands. Mr. Sims scoops it up and tries to hand it back to her. She takes it back gingerly, as if the cold meatloaf inside--she shudders now, thinking of meat--is somehow tainted.

“Y-You--what was that?”

“A, ah, guilty pleasure,” he says, and looks truly, deeply guilty. “Playing Vincent Price.”

He hadn’t sounded like Vincent Price. He’d sounded like a man describing the liquefaction of his best friend’s flesh while the poor bastard’s skeleton continued to scream and live against its will. 

“You have a talent,” is all she can think to say. She walks away with her meatloaf and tosses it into the bin before heading back inside. She starts a vegetarian diet the next day.

C. The Beast that was once Daisy Tonner has been following the scent for days. Slow in the day, faster at night. Her quarry waits out here somewhere. Prey? Not prey? She has trouble remembering, sometimes. She knows she had wanted him to die once. Then a thing had happened. Crushing, crunching. The quarry had found her there. The quarry had freed her. 

Quarry still? Or Pack? The other one, the one chasing her, the one who is something important--she cannot remember the word ‘love’--had been the only one she considered Pack before. But the quarry changed that. Quarry was weak. Quarry should not be on his own. Quarry had to fix this. Make things quiet again.

So she Hunts. She finds his scent everywhere here, a ground he walks day after day. She doesn’t know that this day is a Saturday and that he will not be here now. She is deciding between laying in wait for an ambush or following the trail to where he lives when she smells smoke. 

A cluster of young things, passing something between each other, puffing. 

Just enough of Daisy Tonner remains in the Beast to be incensed at such young things falling into the habit. She hadn’t liked when--Jon? Was it Jon?--did it either. The Beast is simply not a fan of the stink. It hurts her nose. 

The Beast takes a slight detour from the Hunt to politely insist they kill such a habit immediately and permanently. 

For their health.

[itsblosseybitch]

Griffin Dunne: Who’s That Man? (article from ARENA magazine, Sept/Oct 1987)

Double Exposure: The $4.5 million it took to make Martin Scorsese’s black comedy After Hours and the twitchily neurotic lead performance were both the work of the same man, hybrid movie producer and actor whose next assignments involve the likes of Sidney Lumet and Madonna. David Keeps spends some after After Hours hours with Griffin Dunne. 

Griffin Dunne, leading man to Madonna in the soon-come Who’s That Girl, is not the sort of actor who swoops into a photo session with an entourage of managers, publicists and gofers. He enters alone, armed with a briefcase full of business pertaining to the next three or four films he will produce, and introduces himself with a winning humility and, on this particularly sweltering Manhattan afternoon, a perfectly reasonable request for a Budweiser. He graciously and gracefully agrees to a quick bit of barbering and slips into samples from Paul Smith’s autumn collection -- clothes that look very roomy on his slight five-foot-seven frame -- without a fuss. “Are you sure these weren’t for David Byrne,” he jokes. Griffin Dunne is one cool character. 

The same can not be said for the neurotic yuppies he’s portrayed in After Hours and Almost You, two critically acclaimed films that were released back-to-back in Britain and helped to establish him as the archetypal Manhattan man. “That’s a coincidence,” he explains over breakfast at a Greenwich Village eaterie a few blocks from his home. “The pictures were actually filmed a couple of years, but I guess if you looked at them as a double-header, you’d see similarities because the main character is New York. One thing I have noticed is that the guy I’m playing always wears a blazer. I’ve got to be careful about what I do next. Those jaded laconic New York type roles are creeping up on me,” he continues, his almost-black eyes widening as his voice rises in mock terror. “I may never work again and die a pauper because these two pictures are so much alike!”

Now there’s an unlikely prospect. Having successfully produced Chilly Scenes of Winter, John Sayles’ Baby It’s You and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, Griffin Dunne is in the unique position of being able to pay the bills and choose his acting roles carefully or develop properties for himself. The latter is an option he has exercised only once (After Hours), the former is an admitted luxury. “The problem with success is, the more successful you become, the more careful and calculating you have to be. While I dread being an actor and never knowing where my next job will be coming from, there was a great freedom in going from one stupid comedy into a play in some no-name theatre down on Pitt Street in lower East Siobokia. I get sent a lot of scripts as a producer and I don’t want to spend my time looking for parts for myself. I have an agent to do that. But that still doesn’t give me the opportunity to pick up the phone and say ‘Get me a script that is completely different from anything I’ve ever done, and I want to start working Wednesday’. “

There was a time when the very prospect of working in films - as an actor or a producer - was something to be avoided. Born in New York City on June 8, 1955 to actress Ellen Griffin Dunne and Dominick Dunne, who evolved from a television stage manager to a producer and now, a writer for Vanity Fair, Griffin was raised in Los Angeles amongst the privileged sons and daughters of Hollywood. He attended a pre-preparatory school at age 11. “All boys. You wore a coat and tie and got little swats if you got out of line. It was called Fay School,” he recalls with a shudder. “It was a bitch to say ‘I go to Fay School’.” He turns his head to the side to improvise a dialogue and with a sneer asks himself sarcastically, “How’s Fay?” “Fine thank you,” he mumbles, suitably humiliated. In his final year it became his job to order films for school entertainments. His very appropriate choice was Lindsay Anderson’s public school drama If... “It was a real underground thing. The attendance rate was incredible. They were hanging off the rafters. If you know the picture you know it takes them forever to kill those fucking teachers!”

The Fountain Valley school in Colorado proved a more nurturing atmosphere for the lad. Influenced by his uncle and aunt (the literary lions John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion), Griffin thought he would become a writer. “I just knew that film business was the last thing on earth I was going to be in. It’s like if your father goes to work in a car factory in Detroit, the last thing you want to do is go into the automobile business. I didn’t sit in judgement of Peter Benchley’s (OP NOTE: author of Jaws) drinking habits, but it was just too close to me. I was really verbal about it. Openly vitriolic, I would never be in show biz. I said that right up until a friend talked me into auditioning for this play.”

That was Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and Griffin knew instinctively that he was the best man for the job. “Somehow I just knew I could say these lines better than anyone else. It was like being the only one in that room who spoke that particular language.” An actor was born and a bullshit artist began to operate. “I was the guy who ran the drama club, the art paper, the student council planning board. Teachers treated me like an adult, they really thought I was going places. They said ‘You’re not like the other students.’ I was, of course, a source of total disappointment, because I was exactly like the other students. I would get high and take the car off campus and try to get laid at every possible moment as soon as their back was turned.” 

Then, just as he was about to make a dramatic triumph playing Iago in Othello, he was busted. “Got caught smoking a little hash,” he winces. “All that was really there was what was in my lungs and it just trailed out of my mouth as I denied what was happening. And the teacher did not get a contact high and forget what he was doing. What they were saying was, ‘We’re going to change the rest of your life for that amount of smoke in your lungs’.” He was sent packing, forced to face up to parents who were “grief stricken”, he says with a comic frown, “chopped off at the knees.” Convincing the school authorities in a brilliant final thespian act that he needed to take the bus home in order to have time to think about his misdeeds, he hit the highway and hitchhiked home.

The odyssey that followed could’ve been a foreshadowing of the hassles that befell him as the stranger-in-SoHo in After Hours. “I was very worried about getting into any more trouble. And every car I got in was the most troublesome, criminal car. One guy would be driving a huge Cadillac convertible that he’d bought with a bad cheque. Another guy was AWOL from the army and there was this kid who’d just left ‘Juvie’ (Juvenile Hall) who was only a year younger than me, but also about four feet shorter. We’d spend a good deal of the time daring him to do things like climb out of the hood of the car to straighten out the antenna as we were crossing the desert. As soon as he got out there the driver would floor it, going about 95 miles an hour and swerving to throw him off. I thought, ‘OK drug possession, hot car, and manslaughter, all on the way home. Look at it this way, Mom, Dad, I was only kicked out of school for smoking hash!”

He lived in Los Angeles for the last gasp of his teenage years, working in a bookstore and as a shipping clerk for a cooking utensils firm, while going for auditions that were few and far between. After a few small roles on TV, he moved to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where, ironically, in the days before Dustin Hoffman, Griffin’s father had left his studies when he was told that he was too short to be a leading man. Though Griffin was spared the same advice, he worked more steadily in the restaurant trade - even selling popcorn at the candy counter of Radio City Music Hall - than he did in the theatre. Then he met Amy Robinson and Mark Metcalf (OP NOTE: misprinted with an e), two equally frustrated, equally unemployed actors, and the trio decided to become producers. 

(OP NOTE: Since Dunne, Robinson, and Metcalf were/are baseball fans, the original production company’s name was Triple Play Productions. When Metcalf left to focus on his acting, the company was renamed Double Play Productions).

“We went out to Cambridge and met Ann Beattie, who had written Chilly Scenes of Winter and she said it was like three of her characters walked into her living room.” Not surprisingly she allowed them to buy the rights for a film version at a very reasonable price. At age 23, Griffin Dunne had become a producer and had his first property. The trio turned the process of pitching the project to studios into an acting exercise. “It was exactly like a performance, but it was easier than going in on an audition. Here I had something tangible to sell, a book that I was passionate about. It’s hard to do that about yourself. What do you say? ‘Look at this interesting aspect of me. Then if you shade it with these particular attitudes I look like this!’ I wouldn’t want to see anybody do that.”

First released as Head Over Heels, and re-released more successfully in 1982 under the author’s original title, Chilly Scenes of Winter set the stage for the fledgling producer’s next triumph, John Sayles’ Baby It’s You, which introduced Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano to a large and appreciative audience of young filmgoers. In the meantime Dunne had appendaged several screen acting credits to his dossier, largely of the messenger boy variety.

“I’ve passed a ton of envelopes,” he laughs. “In this one film, The Fan (a potboiler starring Lauren Bacall as the intended victim of an overwrought admirer) I played a stage manager who was to hand a letter the killer gave me to Maureen Stapleton. The letter read ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you,’ and sure enough he does. So they spend the rest of the movie looking for the killer instead of asking me for a description. When I told the director, he said ‘Yeah, well, fine, can we just shoot the scene please?’ So I just couldn’t resist on one take. I went up to Miss Stapleton and I said, ‘Here’s a letter from the killer -- oops! -- I mean the man outside’.”

He was able to use his comic gifts more successfully playing the sidekick role, “the very dead one” in An American Werewolf in London (OP NOTE: Title misprinted without the ‘An’) and the clean-cut brother of a gangster in Johnny Dangerously, “a big silly comedy.” Then a script crossed his desk which he simply could not ignore, for it contained all the elements he looked for in a film as both a producer and an actor. It was called After Hours, and it was the tale of a lonely word processor who meets a beautiful girl, loses her, loses his money and his house-keys and spends the rest of his evening on the run from assorted temptresses and loonies in the lofts and streets of New York’s SoHo. 

Griffin Dunne was no stranger to the inherent weirdness of such a scenario. “Last weekend I was out of town and a friend was in my apartment. I said don’t use the bottom lock. She did, and so I was locked out of my own apartment. I called my neighbors to let me in, but they were locked out of their apartment too. I found that out from the neighbors below. The owners are from Japan and they’re coming to get their apartment from me. I’ve now been through so many locks it looks like a Uzi got at the door. The locksmith is now an old friend of mine. I have the worst time with keys. I believe the first stage of manhood is when you live on your own and you’re given this set of keys. I’ve been through so many keys. They just leap out of my pocket!”

Griffin Dunne became After Hours’ hapless anti-hero Paul Hackett and his run-ragged energy leaped off the screen. Despite the fact that the entire film was shot at night, director Scorsese demanded that he remain celibate during the course of the shoot. For added punishment, Dunne himself also acted as the film’s producer: “As an actor your job is not to have distractions and be in a loose state where, when things are thrown at you, you can react accordingly. As a producer your job is to constantly anticipate problems, disasters, flare-ups, fiascoes. You’re in a constant state of tension. You have this little rubber ball with spikes sticking out of it in the pit of your stomach. In After Hours if there were times when it was five in the morning and I was starting to run out of anxiety adrenaline, I could think of how much the picture was going over-budget and I would suddenly get this hollow look in my eyes, my eyebrows would start creeping up on my forehead and I was ready to roll! But I never as an actor looked at the director and thought, ‘Gee, he’s shooting too much film, I must tell him to stop.’”

Though After Hours was a huge critical and commercial success, it pointed out some rather disheartening facts about the American film industry. “People are so obsessed with how much pictures cost. It really pisses me off,” he says with a furrow of the brow that makes you an instant sympathizer. “All anybody talks about with After Hours is that we made it for $4.5 million.(OP NOTE: $4.5 million in 1985 would be about $10.8 million in 2020) Who cares? Is it a good movie? Is it a bad movie? For some reason English films have avoided that. Probably because they were made with pounds instead of dollars and the critics are too lazy to figure out the currency conversion.”

Now he’s on a roll and it becomes quite clear that Griffin Dunne, as an artist and as a businessman, cares about the cinema passionately. “There are a lot of [OP NOTE: misprinted as off] young filmmakers trying to get off the ground here. It’s treated so condescendingly,” he splutters. “Those kids made that Personal Art film. Art film is a bad word for everybody - it’s a personal film. Or it’s an independent film, which must mean it’s personal. ‘Those kids made that picture and just look what they did. And their grandmother gave them $2.5 million for that?’ I don’t think it was their grandmother,” he continues with a lethal iciness. “I think they went to a major financing entity and they got the money, it’s playing in theatres now. GO SEE THE GODDAMNED MOVIE!”

(OP NOTE: Sir, this is a Wendy’s. All joking aside, I would love to hear the off-the-record version of this rant)

All of this seems particularly annoying to a man like Griffin Dunne because he’s proved that it can be done. “It’s just treated like it’s so cute. Now it’s possible to make films like Mona Lisa, Withnail and I or one of Stephen Frears’ movies in the States. There’s a lot more avenues of finance and they’ve figured out ways of distributing movies where they actually make serious money and it’s easier for people to get their money back on videocassettes and all the other rights. What we’re having a little bit of a problem with is the material itself. How do you find a script that doesn’t reek of being an Independent Movie?”

In Adam Brooks’ Almost You, which was written as a vehicle for Dunne and his then-girlfriend Brooke Adams, he found exactly that. An offbeat comedy about an adulterous husband, the film was warmly received in Britain after having been crucified by the American press. (OP NOTE: As someone who enjoyed that movie, I think the reason for that is because British audiences are more comfortable with unlikable or dysfunctional protagonists than American audiences. Also, this was the Reagan era with traditional values and all) “I found the character very touching and pathetic, but when it came out you would have thought I was a war criminal. An immoral louse. The worst of it was they would never say my character’s name.  They would say ‘Griffin Dunne is a duplicitous, weak-willed human being!’ People fuck around on their wives, what can I say? The way people went on, because I fooled around when my wife was in a wheelchair, it was like one of those Reefer Madness kind of movies. Like I was condoning it,” he says, lapsing into a sinister’s narrator voice, “C’mon kids, go out and smoke heroin. And while you’re there get married and fool around on your wife who’s in a wheelchair. Come with me to...THE MOVIES!”

His next screen appearance should raise the stakes considerably higher and may establish Griffin Dunne as a solidly commercial leading man in romantic comedies. “I’d known about the script for years,” he says of Who’s That Girl. “It was the first screwball comedy I’d read that wasn’t a rip-off or a parody . The characters were really contemporary. Over the years I just slowly watched it get put together, slowly, slowly coming around to me. I had a feeling it was going to work out and I have that feeling very rarely.” It’s the story of one Loudon Trott, the standard “uptight kind of guy” whose world is thrown into utter chaos by the appearance of a dizzy but dazzling vixen. “I’m one of those inside-the-little-globe-there’s-a-madman-dying-to-break-out characters. But I was going as much against the nitwit-nerd as possible. I wanted to wear the best suit I could find. I look unlike anything I’ve ever looked before. You don’t wake up with hair like what I’ve got in this picture. I don’t even know what the hell I look like.”

The vixen is, of course, played by Madonna. “It was externally pretty crazy,” he says of the shoot. “A lot of paparazzi and fans. I guess for my survival I just shut it out. It didn’t bother her, so why should it bother me? If it bothered me it would show on the screen, but nobody would say, ‘Gee, he doesn’t seem to be there right now, it must be the fans.’” He laughs at the very thought of it. “I’ll fight for a disclaimer at the end of the picture!”

He’ll have to juggle his next acting assignment between efforts as a producer. Running On Empty, the coming-of-age story of the son of Sixties dissidents living on the lam, is set to be directed by Sidney Lumet with River Phoenix in the leading role and Robin Williams has been signed as the lead for a Disney-financed version of the stage comedy The Foreigner.

[OP NOTE: While Running on Empty was eventually released in 1988, garnering Phoenix a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Golden Globes, The Foreigner never materialized. I’m sure there’s some amazing stories that have yet come to light on the latter].

And industrious though he may seem, Dunne admits that he’s really good at not working, too. “It’s a talent that I’ve evolved over the past year or so. When I’m not working it never crosses my mind. I’m into maps. I’ll chart a trip and get a really good radio in the car, record a lot of tapes and hit the road. I’m really good at getting out of town and going to the beach. My problem has been collecting a lot of things over the years, but I’ve lived in sublets for the past 11 years, so I haven’t been able to settle into any pattern yet. Now that I’m moving into my own place, I’m glad. I’ll have people over so they can admire my spoon collection from my various journeys and I’ll even have shows. I will promise to bore them senseless with my passions.”

It’s unlikely he’ll be able to make the same claim in a professional capacity; his involvement on both sides of the camera and casting office have certainly produced an exemplary cross-breed of moviemaking professional, one that box office superstars-cum-executive producers of their own vanity projects could most certainly learn from. “One of the things I like about being a producer,” Dunne explains, “is that it’s opened me up on how to read a script. I like to think of the whole picture now, not just my role.” But having an awareness of what makes a film succeed in an increasingly byzantine business has not dulled his enthusiasm for acting, nor dimmed his onscreen spark. “It still is fun,” he demurs. “It should always be fun to get paid for taking fencing lessons.”

Always a wit, Griffin Dunne does seem most comfortable making a joke, even if it is at his own expense. Asked which of his screen characters he’d feel closest kinship to in real life, he deadpans, “I use so much of myself in them that I can’t imagine wanting to hang out with any of them.” And he’s equally nonplussed about his reputation as an independent force in the motion picture industry. The man simply has taste and if he likes to wear as many different hats as he can in this business, well, that’s his business - and he’s certainly very modest about his accomplishments.

“It’s difficult,” he concludes. “for me to say ‘I’m a rebel. I’m a maverick’ and put on little cowboy hats and stroll out of here into the sunset.” Especially, we both agree with a laugh, since it’s not even high noon yet.

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart

The House on Haunted Hill (1959) dir. William Castle

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Again, throwing shade like a fucking boss.

Vincent Price and Chris Warfield -

Diary of a Madman (1963) dir. Reginald Leborg

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

No one can throw shade like Vincent fucking Price.

Columbo; Lovely But Lethal 03x01 (1973)