Lisa Picard Is Famous Freshens Up the Topic of Fame

Very few people are truly famous in this country. But thanks to the relentlessness of the celebrity-manufacturing machine, pretty much everybody has a working knowledge of what it means to be famous. From Vanity Fair and Talk to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the media is full of articles about famous, soon-to-be-famous and once-famous people that concentrate on the person's prickly relationship with fame, and the burning issue of whether or not being famous changed that person. (The answer is almost always "No.")

The media's fake detachment from celebrity machinery is one of the funnier developments in recent journalism. The more supposedly advanced varieties of celebrity coverage try to take you inside the machine and demystify the people who profit from it, even as these same pieces cynically reap the benefits of pure celebrity worship. The Los Angeles Times routinely weighs in with lengthy academic analyses of tabloidized celebrity scandals?the Chandra Levy-Gary Condit freak show, the fate of accused child-molesting comedian Paula Poundstone?then dissects them according to the hard, cold rules of life in an industry town; of course what's really going on is an intellectualized rehash of other people's supposedly insensitive and cynical coverage?a slightly more clubby, company-town version of those New York Times analyses of O.J. and Monicagate that pretended to cover the coverage.

Entertainment Weekly is another exemplar of this have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach; the magazine's glib front-of-the-book profiles make a huge deal of seeing through the glamour fog?even pointing out, on occasion, those celebrities who unleash tinpot dictator publicists on the profile writers and otherwise try to micromanage their own media image. Then the magazine worships these famous control freaks anyway, through meticulously staged photos and pages and pages of dutiful prose.

Talk has a transcendentally noxious piece of fake-detached celebrity worship on its cover this month: a profile of Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt, who, like her Pay It Forward co-star Kevin Spacey, has long been rumored to be gay. Should outing be revived? Should the media even care about such things? Who knows? In Talk, the only thing that matters is the tease of glamour (and the glamour of the tease). The writer, Holly Millea, buries talk of homosexuality and the media's treatment of gay celebrities deep inside the story, then discusses it in the most evasive, vague, superficial manner possible. Yet the cover headline promises "Hollywood's most reluctant celebrity comes out swinging" (comes out, get it?), and the inside headline asks, with Beavis and Butt-Head cleverness, "What's Eating Helen Hunt?"

Buried just beneath the surface of nearly all such pieces?particularly the Hunt piece?is a fascinating mix of desire and resentment, craving and contempt. The media, society's mirror for better or worse, is appalled by its own complicity in the creation and protection of celebrities, yet it can't stop doing it, and it can't help protecting the machinery that does it, and can't resist flaunting its proximity to celebrity?a proximity that eludes the unwashed masses who read celebrity profiles. (The last paragraph of the Hunt article has the writer running into Hunt's agent at the Fred Segal store in Los Angeles, being reassured that Hunt "had fun" with the writer, then assuring the reader that "it's much more complicated than that.")

What links almost all celebrity writing?including the rare, honest, non-hypocritical variety practiced by the likes of the National Enquirer?is a tacit acknowledgment that the pursuit of celebrity (and celebrities) has become our national pastime. It's bigger than politics, bigger than art, bigger than any one sport?and the various attempts to explain it to non-celebrities nearly amount to an industry.

Woody Allen's pretentious, borderline-incoherent Celebrity only pretended to say something fresh about its subject; Julia Roberts, a textbook example of a super-privileged movie star, has addressed the topic of celebrity three times in the past two moviegoing years, in last summer's Runaway Bride and Notting Hill and in this summer's America's Sweethearts. (My favorite part of this year's Oscar telecast came when the Erin Brokovich star, who probably issues more public gripes about intrusive press coverage than any famous American since Nixon, revealed her inner bitch on live tv, sweetly reminding the orchestra conductor that she was one winner who would not be played offstage.)

Lisa Picard Is Famous, a comedic mockumentary written by its two unknown stars and directed by actor-filmmaker Griffin Dunne, doesn't have many new things to say about fame and its practitioners, but it freshens up the topic by concentrating on three people who haven't quite made it yet?a couple of New York-based aspiring actors (co-writers Laura Kirk and Nat DeWolf) and the documentarian (Dunne) who looks on as they pay their dues. The film's most worthy aspect is its portrayal of a working actor's life, which consists of studying acting, going on auditions and viewing contemporaries' success with a mix of dreamy good cheer and childish resentment. (Because we're engaged in the lives of these characters, we can't help sharing these feelings; in this film, as in America generally, anyone who's not already a celebrity is a de facto wannabe.)

The title character, a young, pretty, not terribly accomplished bit player, is chosen as the subject of a film about celebrity on the basis of having starred in a racy Wheat Chex ad. (Her agent says it ruined her for more upscale commercials.) She also scored a "brief but crucial scene" in the made-for-tv women-only weepie A Phone Call For Help, starring Melissa Gilbert. (The former Little House on the Prairie star plays herself in the clips.) Lisa auditions for commercials and other tv gigs and keeps getting turned away for reasons that are never explained to her; the most humiliating rejection comes when she loses a national ad to a much younger model who seems as if she can't act a lick, but has that indefinable something?freshness? A hot bod??that signals impending success. Meanwhile, Lisa's roommate and best friend, the openly gay Tate (Nat DeWolf) goes on his own humiliating auditions while struggling to get over a busted relationship with a successful, closeted male soap actor. He channels his frustration into a truly self-serving one-man play titled Hate Crimes and Broken Hearts, in which Tate bemoans his breakup with the soap star while pretending to say important things about homophobia and gay bashing. The play is so vain, shallow and earnest (Tate delivers the final monologue in boxer shorts) that you totally believe it could become a momentary sensation that draws celebrities like Spike Lee and Charlie Sheen (both of whom play themselves).

The writers' skewering of Hollywood liberal bandwagon-jumping is the funniest thing in the picture. A close second is Tate's reaction when Hollywood throws big-time option money at him, then changes everything about his supposedly personal one-man play; in an appallingly frank admission of his own cynicism, Tate repeats the same old industry lies about how a story that's been changed in every detail is still the same story. The play wasn't about personal expression; it was about getting attention. It's the more rarefied, pretentious flipside of Lisa's quest to play a diverse array of characters in tv commercials and made-for-tv cameos; and it's a variation of the filmmaker's supposed urge to deconstruct and understand the phenomenon of celebrity?a process which, for some strange reason, requires the filmmaker to be a constant presence in his own story. (Does British documentarian and supreme narcissist Nick Broomfield, who perfected the look-at-me-I'm-making-a-documentary documentary, even realize that he's being made fun of?)

I understand why some have compared this film unfavorably to This Is Spinal Tap and Waiting For Guffman, but while Famous isn't as comedically rich as those films, it's much gutsier, darker and more honest; where the former films view ex-celebrities and wannabe-celebrities with faintly condescending bemusement, Dunne's movie goes an important step further, indicting its fictional characters, its fictional filmmaker and the very existence of the movie you're watching.

Bonus irony: if this picture gets decent reviews, its phony wannabe-stars might become real ones. Dunne, the son of Vanity Fair's Hollywood scandal reporter and professional name-dropper Dominick Dunne, is already in newspapers flogging the project, getting more press for a film about celebrity than he's ever gotten for his own fame as an actor or filmmaker. The New York Observer's brilliant entertainment guy Frank DiGiacomo recently chronicled Dunne's attempts to promote Famous in a piece that opened with Dunne running into Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter at Da Silvano. Thus did a fake film about fake celebrities that critiques real celebrity become the topic of an intelligent feature about celebrity with loads of references to celebrities. The crowning touch was the cover illustration: a caricature of Julia Roberts. It was a hall of mirrors Charles Foster Kane could get lost in.