Rushfield Babylon

In 1984 Gary Coleman came to Crossroads School, where he enrolled in my class.

Of all the schools in the world, Crossroads was probably the one were Gary probably had the greatest chance of living anything  resembling a normal life, given the liberalisness of the school meant that people generally didnt get beaten up for being short, etc and the school’s showbiz connections where every third parent was Barbara Streisand meant that he was not the spectacle he might have been elsewhere.

But that was not much of a chance.  Even given all that, he was still Gary Coleman, at that time - with Strokes nearing the end of it’s run, the highest paid TV star on Earth, and not in any way shape or form anything resembling a normal kid.  So despite it being Crossroads, the gawking and spectacle of his presence was not minimal.

And it soon became clear that while he wanted very much, fairly desperately in fact, to enjoy some of the trappings due to a “normal kid” he was completely without any experience in how to behave with people his age.  

Of all the bad hands people have been dealt in life, of the people who I have known up close, compared to the starving in Mongolia, Gary had as about a rotten combination as anything I’d seen.  I won’t give the details, but there was very much a horrifying tragedy about his life, a desperation that I think at age 16, was too big for us his classmates to comprehend or take in.  

This was a kid who had been shoved on stage before he knew what the stage was; who had been farmed out by his parents to a network that used this child and his instant catch phrase as their trained seal while entirely depriving him of the life of a normal child. At this phase, Strokes had moved from NBC to squeeze once last season’s worth of blood out of it on ABC.  We didn’t know then how the parents were systematically pillaging the fortunes their son was bringing in, but I do recall a sorta uncomfortable feeling about his father coming to pick him up in a massive, I believe Rolls Royce every day.  And then there were his health problems which kept him in more pain than any of us knew and ultimately forced him to drop out before graduation.

But despite all this, there was this sense of some incredibly energetic mind trying to do things, striving, searching for his way, as all teenagers are, but with far fewer guideposts.  On one end of the spectrum was the day he came to school dressed in an elaborate and impressive astronaut’s uniform. On the other end, he was writing screenplays - something back then that teenagers didn’t really do - which he carried around in his briefcase, spinning plans for a writing/directing career.

Given all that he had to deal with, its not surprising that he was never able to find the way through all the clutter of his life, the baggage of being Gary Coleman, to live out his dreams. How many of us after all do, with far less clinging onto us.  

The last time I saw him was a few years after high school in a video store in Westwood. Strokes was long over by then, and he was buying up a huge selection of movies to watch, and clearly didn’t have anyone to watch them with him.  I wish I could say I reached out a hand to an old classmate, but again, we were young and selfish, and too new at life to understand how his hyperactive clinginess was born from a real tragedy not just like a nerd being annoying.

As I grew older and watched now from afar, the reports his life get stranger and stranger, it became more clear how much what had happened in those days had cost him; to have your childhood stolen by our nation’s major industry when you are very young, small, ill and fragile, how does one recover from that and ever just “be normal”, particularly when you remain, long after the show has ended and the money is gone, such a recognizable figure, someone who, where ever you go will live with being a character that you never were given the chance to pick.   Sadder still to think, from the very little glimpse I got, that there were real dreams in there that would never find their way to the light.

Even in death, as we can see on twitter today, the joke of being Gary Coleman is what the world sees first.

Rest in Peace, Gary.  And hope that you’re now in a place where the road is for you and you alone to choose. 

Early front runner for The Most Awkward Answer to a Simple Straightforward Question Oscar.

Question: What was the appeal for each of you to do this film?

Katherine Heigl:  I’ve obviously been doing a few romantic comedies, and what I loved about this particular romantic comedy was that it had the added element of action, so it was a slightly different take on the formula. Although I love the formula and I will continue, hopefully until I’m too old to do them, to do romantic comedies, this just had an energy and this thing that made it unique. I loved being the broad character to Ashton’s straight guy. It was really fun to not be the straight guy, for a change, and Ashton made it really fun and easy to do that. When I saw the movie, I was very entertained, and that’s hard to do when you’re in it ‘cause that takes you out of it. With this movie, I just had such a good time watching it and thought, “That’s exactly what we were going for. I love it!”

Translation: Things have been going pretty well making horrible comedies.  My agent is happy, the taps in my home flow with water bottled from my private glacier in the Alps, life is good.  So when we were given 18 scripts to choose from that were exactly like the previous ten movies I’ve done, I said, sounds great.  When’s my call time.  But then my agent said, well, we can’t do all of them. I made a sad face and said, but they’ll still pay me for all of them right?  And he said, no, sadly, they only pay you for movies you actually make not just ones you want to make.  I said, Hollywood sucks and he said, I know right.  So we tried to figure out how we would pick which movie to do.  We looked at the scripts, and basically it looked like a lot of words on pages and I said, its not like audiences are going to be reading these movies are they?  And he said, totally, they aren’t at all.  So it was getting late and I said, is one of these movies any, you know, like better than the others. And he said, no, I don’t think so but there’s really no way of knowing, you know what I mean? We sighed and then he said, But….if you look closely The Killers is the only one that begins with a “K”.  I thought about it and said, wait, doesn’t Kutcher also begin with a “K”!  And so does Comedy!

He said, you’ve got an amazing eye for good material. And I said, I know, right. And so that’s why I’m really excited to have made this movie.

Kutcher: That’s so weird. That’s exactly what happened to me!

Proposition I: Battle Royale is a great film

Proposition II: 3D is a fraud

Proposition III: When fraudulence is attached to greatness, fraudulence wins. Proof: Apocalypse Now Redux. Proof: Re-mastered Star Warses.  Proof: Rereleased Exorcist. Proof: Colorized It’s a Wonderful Life.   Corollary: The 3D’ization of Battle Royale is an abomination which will live in infamy.

Proposition IV: When evil is done to evil, the result is mainly good.  Proof: The Second World War. 

Question: Does that make the 3D’ization of Pirates of the Carribean 4 a force for good?