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It is time I apologize to Brendan Fraser, recipient of the 2023 Oscar for Best ActorI
It’s an apology 25 years late.
Brendan Fraser, 2022 Best Actor
Once upon a time, long ago, I was a journalist working for a trade magazine covering retailing. My beat included entertainment and retailing back in the era when there were places called video stores and movies were on VHS cassette tapes.
One day a nice public relations person for the consumer products division of Universal Pictures called.
Would I be interested in an all-expenses-paid press junket to London to see the making of The Mummy and interview people involved with making the film?
The film’s stars were Brendan Frasier, who was looking for a break, and Rachel Weisz, a young stage actor who was then a newcomer to film. Maybe the PR person called it something nicer than a junket.
It took about a nanosecond to say yes. Los Angeles to London on Virgin Upper Class. Accommodations at Claridge’s, where the Queen’s guests stayed. A tour of the set at Shepperton, an historic film studio outside London owned at the time by Ridley and Tony Scott. Access to Universal execs, a lunch at the studio with some of the film’s actors. A private evening reception in the Egyptian wing of the British Museum with talks by curators and up-close-and-personal interaction with artifacts like the Rosetta Stone.
So, heck yeah.
Journalistic ethics? Those were a little fungible in the trade magazine world. Besides, the movie studios were the magazine’s customer, advertisers who paid the bills. As a journalist I could be as critical as I wanted about our prime target – retailers. We always wrote nice things about advertisers.
At the time Universal was a studio in desperate need of a hit. Universal also wanted to revive its famed monster movie franchise, which includes movies like Bride of Frankenstein.
Thus, the full court press with the press to promote a hoped-for hit in the making.
The next thing you know I’m flying Virgin Atlantic Upper Class in a 747 to London, getting picked up by a driver in a Land Rover and transported to Claridge’s in Mayfair, one of the swankiest hotels in the city, the kind of place where they iron the newspapers before they drop them outside your door.
The next morning the U.S. press got on a bus for the ride to Shepperton Studios in the Surrey countryside.
I knew this junket was a big deal when I realized that sitting across from me is Harry Knowles, founder of the then-hot movie website Ain’tItCool.com.
We arrive at the studio and a shepherded around Shepperton to see movie magic in progress, even getting to see a take of scene – the one where the character Beni, played by Kevin J. O’Connor, has his touch go out deep inside a pharaoh’s tomb and is subsequently consumer by flesh-eating scarabs.
At one point the scrum of journalists is led into a hallway where we “accidentally” encounter none other than Brendan Fraser, the costar of the film. Fraser is clearly on his way to start his day of filming as Rick O’Connell.
We were clearly supposed to be star-struck by our “unintended” encountered with Fraser.
But Fraser sees Harry Knowles. It is Fraser who is excited to see Knowles – a journalist — rather than the other way around. Fraser asks Knowles if he can take picture with him, producing a Polaroid SX70 instant camera.
The film won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for two others.
Fraser explains that Knowles was instrumental in pressuring a film studio into releasing Gods and Monsters, a partly fictionalized account of film director James Whale’s final days. Fraser starred in the film alongside Ian McKellen, Lynn Redgrave, Lolita Davidovich, and David Dukes.
The studio had apparently been balking at releasing the firm because of the homosexual plot line that drives the story.
Fraser, who turns in a great performance in Gods And Monsters, was very grateful to Knowles. The film displays Fraser’s substance as an actor.
Fraser then told a story to the assembled group about his grandfather – an RCMP officer who sometimes enforced weights and measures laws.
Fraser explained that his grandfather would sometimes thrust his arm into wagon loads of hay to ensure they were not hollow inside.
I see punch line of the story coming from miles away.
Totally jet lagged, my brain not in full control of my mouth, I blurt out “So, you’re telling us you father was the long arm of the law?”
The group falls silent. I grin anyway.
If Brendan Fraser could have killed me he probably would have at that moment. If his eyes had been how power laser beams I’d have two big holes burned though my forehead and out the back of my head.
Rachel Weisz
Brendan Fraser, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I had no self-control and shot my mouth off and ruined your punch line. I still feel bad about it.
I think you are a great actor.
Your amazing comeback and underdog Best Actor win for The Whale is a genuine inspiration.
And I really am sorry for messing up your funny story about you grandfather all those years ago at Shepperton.
And it turned out The Mummy did help Universal break its slump.
The Mummy was the number one film in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend in May 1999, grossing $43 million in 3,210 theaters. The film’s weekend box office was the highest non-holiday May opening, and ninth-biggest opening of all time. The Mummy grossed more than $155.4 million in the United States and Canada and $261 million internationally. Its worldwide total gross was $416.4 million.
The Mummy helped make Rachel Weisz a big star.
I did write about the film, but within the context of Universal and other studios reviving their monster movie franchises, which eventually translated into sales of videos at retail as well as related licensed consumer products.
The studio that was hesitant about releasing Gods And Monsters shouldn’t have been. Although not commercially successful, it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for McKellen, Best Supporting Actress for Redgrave, and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, was born in November 1664 in Paris.
He was the youngest child of a lawyer/civil servant father and a mum who was low-ranking nobility. He had a brother and two sisters. His was a sort of an upper middle class family 350 years ago in Paris.
Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Voltaire is famous for his wit, intellect and cutting criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church. And for writing Candide.
Voltaire was an advocate of free speech, freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Any one of of those things could get you into A LOT of trouble in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
“The Best Of All Posssible Worlds” Voltaire thinking about Candide
He was imprisoned twice and temporarily exiled to England once for criticizing the French government. Voltaire wound up doing hard time for a naughty rhyme. A satirical verse accusing the Régent of incest with his daughter resulted in an 11-month, from May 1717 to April 1718, in a windowless cell with 10-foot thick walls in the Bastille.
Candide meets a slave mutilated in the Caribbean sugar fields.
Following his Bastille stint, François-Marie Arouet became Voltaire. The origin of the Voltaire moniker is unclear, but apparently refers to the Arouet’s family’s home area in France. As Voltaire, he kept on writing and kept on being very naughty in various ways.
One fact about Voltaire’s life is certain. Voltaire was one mean writing mo-sheen.
Voltaire wrote in almost every literary genre. He wrote plays, poems, novels and essays. He produced respected historical and scientific works. During an 82-year lifetime, he dashed off more than 20,000 letters while churning out more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. And the guy didn’t even have a typewriter.
But with Candide Voltaire scored his greatest hit writing as a satirist criticizing intolerance, religious dogma, and French institutions of his time.
Voltaire’s character Candide encounters Butt Biting Sex Apes
Published under secretive circumstances in 1759, Candide, ou l’Optimisme (Candide, or The Optimist) simultaneously became a great success and great scandal. Candide was immediately banned due to religious blasphemy, political sedition, and hostility to authority all disguised as naïveté.
This made Voltaire’s wild tale of Candide wildly popular.
Three hundred and sixty years later Candide is considered Voltaire’s magnum opus. Many scholars consider Candide a vital part of literature’s Western canon.
Leonard Bernstein,1955
With its fantastical story line, pointed humor and insightful portrayal of the human condition, Candide has inspired numerous authors and artists to adapt it to their times. Indeed, the concept of gardening with Candide has even spawned an app to sell you gardening stuff. Within this slim novella, Voltaire’s Candide travels the known world, encountering butt-biting sex apes (spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well), the Inquisition, an earthquake and tsunami. Voltaire even manages to highlight the savagery of slavery when Candide meets with a slave mutilated in the French Caribbean sugar cane fields.
And that brings us to Gardening With Candide, or The Optimist Grows It Alone and why Candide is relevant during these new times of plague and political failure. It’s RDScally and the Obstweedles turn at perverting Voltaire’s demented yet insightful adventure yarn.
Nitty gritty details about Voltaire, Candide’s adventures and The Obstweedles’ own HGTV-meets-corona-virus era interpretation is revealed in Part Deux: “The Best Of All Possible Worlds.” It’ll even explain the butt-biting sex apes. Promise.
Meanwhile, here’s a sample track from Gardening With Candide.
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