The author of Generation X visits Ted Rogers School of Management to talk about his recent collaboration with Metro News. He will be running a 20-day fiction series.
Read the live blog HERE!
Here’s a shot from the Q&A Richard hosted with the “Knights” of the Living Dead Russ Streiner, George A. Romero, and John Russo after the Oct 19, 2013 performance of “Night of the Living Dead Live”! Thanks to John Migliore for the photo!
Cast and producers of Night of the Living Dead Live with the Masters of Horror: Russ Streiner, George Romero, and John Russo. — with Marty Birthelmer, Richard Crouse, Dale Boyer, Darryl Hinds, Phil Pattison, Gwynne Phillips, Trevor Martin, Andrew Fleming, John Russo and Christopher Harrison.
The Devils was one of the most controversial films ever made, considered to be blasphemous, indecent and downright demonic — but top Toronto film critic and author Richard Crouse wasn’t put off. In Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils (ECW Press), Richard writes about a film so notorious that people have been talking about it for forty years.
Raising Hell examines this unique film in all its horrible glory via new interviews with cast and crew, including an exclusive interview with late director Ken Russell.
Today we welcome Richard to Open Book as part of our Proust Questionnaire series. In his answers to the Proust Questionnaire, Richard tells Open Book about sock lust, a flower with an appetite and the best meal to be had in Toronto.
The Proust Questionnaire was not invented by Marcel Proust, but it was a much loved game by the French author and many of his contemporaries. The idea behind the questionnaire is that the answers are supposed to reveal the respondent’s “true” nature.
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What is your dream of happiness?
Writing a perfect sentence… and having someone there to read it.
What is your idea of misery?
Being thrown in jail for something I didn’t do, or spending time at a cottage.
Where would you like to live?
Exactly where I live right now.
What qualities do you admire most in a man?
Kindness.
What qualities do you admire most in a woman?
See above… and dark curly hair.
What is your chief characteristic?
Self-sufficiency.
What is your principal fault?
Impatience.
What is your greatest extravagance?
My (uncontrollable) lust for buying Paul Smith socks.
What faults in others are you most tolerant of?
Drunkeness and ego.
What do you value most about your friends?
See above… actually, loyalty, humour and patience.
What characteristic do you dislike most in others?
Incompetence.
What characteristic do you dislike most in yourself?
My intolerance for incompetence.
What is your favourite virtue?
Diligence.
What is your favourite occupation?
Writing.
What would you like to be?
Keith Richards’s guitar pick.
What is your favourite colour?
Anything that isn’t taupe.
What is your favourite flower?
Audrey, the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors.
What is your favourite bird?
Lyrebird, an Australian bird that can mimic any sound in the world.
What historical figure do you admire the most?
John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. Thanks for the BLT’s!
What character in history do you most dislike?
Jay M. Arena, creator of the Child-Proof Cap.
Who are your favourite prose authors?
Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote and Richard Matheson.
Who are your favourite poets?
Ogden Nash, George Carlin and Edgar Allen Poe.
Who are your favourite heroes in fiction?
George Bailey, Ferris Bueller and Ziggy Stardust.
Who are your heroes in real life?
The people who read my books and watch my shows.
Who is your favourite painter?
Andy Warhol.
Who is your favourite musician?
In cascading order… David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits.
What is your favourite food?
The Piquant Shrimp at Southern Accent on Markham Street in Toronto.
What is your favourite drink?
Most anything in a pint glass… but especially Guinness.
What are your favourite names?
Andrea, Max, Jack and 国.
What is it you most dislike?
Wilful ignorance.
What natural talent would you most like to possess?
The innate ability to know how many chili flakes is too many.
How do you want to die?
While watching The Godfather… Part 62, which will star an actor who hasn’t even been born yet.
What is your current state of mind?
Cautiously optimistic.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Convincing my publisher to let me write a book about The Devils, a decades old movie not many people have seen.
What is your motto?
With a nod to Dr. Thompson: Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Bieber with members of his entourage, at the Royal York Hotel on Tuesday.
Justin Bieber was in town Tuesday, promoting the soon-to-be-released movie about his life—all sixteen years of it. There was a press conference yesterday afternoon in the ballroom at the Royal York Hotel. Torontoist was invited, of course.
The ballroom at the Royal York would be a pretty lavish backdrop for a state dinner, let alone a publicity stunt. There are painted ceilings in there, and chandeliers. The dour, stylishly dressed writer seated next to us theorized that Bieber’s handlers had simply over-prepared, in case of an unexpectedly large turnout. But Bieber is famous on such a galactic scale, at the moment, that his publicists probably could have pulled the same or better number of media outlets if they’d held the presser in a public washroom.
Though even the public washrooms at the Royal York are really nice.
Bieber was late, and the assembled crowd of journalists began to get restless. A paper placard with his name on it was perched (somewhat needlessly, what with the galactic fame) on top of a red-velvet-fringed table on a dais at the head of the room. A reporter for TVO Kids was the first to succumb to the temptation to get her picture taken with the placard, which would have been maybe a slight breach of decorum had she not been ten years old. Then Steve Murray from the Post did the same, but he’s a satirist, and so not always taking himself seriously is kind of his job. Then half-a-dozen other reporters, none of them children or satirists, did likewise.
So yes: Even Justin Bieber’s name, printed on a folded piece of paper, has more personal charisma than most of humanity.
The first indication that His Biebness had entered the building was the arrival of his security retinue: a cadre of men built like refrigerators, wearing suits and Secret-Service-style earpieces. (They might have been employed by the hotel.)
Then, almost forty-five minutes after the scheduled start of the presser, Justin Bieber took his seat on the dais, alongside a few members of his entourage (his security guy, his stylist) and Jon Chu, who directed the Bieber movie.
Up close, the first thing that impresses itself upon one about Bieber is how small and very authentically kidlike he is. Next to the full-grown adults on the dais, he looked like a doll. And yet he had a way of taking control of the entire situation.
“Hey, where my fans at?” said Bieber. “We have so much room in here. Why don’t we bring them in here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes more sense.”
Perhaps twenty adolescent girls filed in from the hallway and took some of the seats that weren’t occupied by members of the press.
“I’m not really good at press conferences,” he continued. “I’m not really sure how this works. If you guys could inform me how this works, that would be great.”
Fans react to Bieber’s answers during the Q-and-A session.
CTV’s Richard Crouse, who was moderating the press conference, asked Bieber when it first dawned on him that he was “really famous.”
“Um, I don’t know. I still don’t really notice it. I’m still just, like, a regular teenage boy,” said the guy with a security detail and, now, a personal cheering section of twelve-to-fourteen-year-old girls. “And I mean, my fans have been here since day one, and I wouldn’t be here without them.”
The twenty girls let up a unison “Woo!”
Crouse asked if Bieber still cleans his room. “I do clean my room,” said Bieber. At another point, he spoke about living in geared-to-income housing in Stratford. But that was years ago. Like, at least two.
Bieber had a way of projecting an appealing humility. It may have been false, but the point is that he knows he needs that image—knows that it’s a defence against backlash and a key component of his appeal to the core Bieber demographic.
And he seems to know his demographic.
Talking about the movie, he said to the assembled reporters: “Some of you are probably a little surprised you liked it, right? Be honest.”
Then he singled out the dour, stylish writer sitting next to us. It was as though he’d read the room already, and had picked out the one person most likely to be hostile to the project.
“You liked it, right?” asked Bieber.
“Yeah, I enjoyed it,” said the writer.
Bieber cut him off: “You enjoyed it. It’s a good movie whether you like me or you hate me.”
Twenty minutes into the conference Bieber interrupted a lineup of journalists waiting at a microphone for their turns to ask him questions, and gave the cheering section a chance to pose one of their own. He called on a girl. She took the mic and laid out her query: “Will you marry me?”
“We get that question at least once a day,” said Bieber. “The answer is: never say never.”
Never Say Never is the title of the movie. And so in one breath he’d reassured a fan that he wasn’t beyond her reach, romantically—that he was just an ordinary teenage guy—and had also plugged the 3D theatrical extravaganza that he stars in.
The conundrum of Bieber’s fame is that, to keep it, he has to be at least nominally ordinary, otherwise the legions of fans who’ve turned him into the hottest shit on all the internets might no longer consider him boyfriend material. He needs to oscillate between extremes of celebrity and banality so quickly that all we see is a blur. The fact that he was able to do this in a room stacked with skeptical adults made him seem uncommonly smart.
Justin Bieber during a press conference for his documentary film “Never Say Never” in Toronto on February 1. (CP Images)
Justin Bieber kept the crowd waiting at the Royal York Hotel on Tuesday afternoon, but when he did show up – well, the afternoon wasn’t just for the reporters in the room, anyway.
“Whassup?” calls out the 16-year-old Canadian pop sensation – his hair a little looser than constantly photographed; his face starting to firm toward adulthood – as he appears from the wings and takes his seat 45 minutes later than scheduled for about 50 reporters and photographers. “Hey! Where are my fans at? Are those fans out there? There’s a lot of fans out there, right? But there’s, like, so much room in here.”
“Should we bring ’em in here?” someone calls out.
“You should bring ’em in,” Bieber – keeping the wardrobe simple today with a modest grey hoodie – concurs. “Yeah, yeah, yeah – that makes more sense. I love you guys behind the cameras and stuff. That’s cool, right? But what’s the point if my fans aren’t here.”
Playing up the “Rocky” theme while a score of teenage girls comes in through a lobby door, Bieber points out toward them: “Everyone give it up for my faaaaans!”
The small and tidy phenom from equally small and tidy Stratford, Ontario, is making a home-ground whistle stop on the promotional push before his 3D half-concert/half-documentary feature, “Never Say Never”, hits the cinemas big-time on February 11. Flanked on a Royal York ballroom stage riser by the closest-knit of his team – stylist Ryan Good and strapping security chief Kenny Hamilton to his right; general manager Allison Kaye and Toronto journalist and moderator Richard Crouse to his left – Bieber had been setting off squeals since just before his press conference was scheduled to begin, at 2 p.m.
Reporters looking to bookend their TV reports take turns before Bieber’s arrival by occupying the space marked for him and giddily running through intros. “Have a great Bieber day!” gushes one talking head; another pumps up the adrenaline for his thought-to-be-imminent arrival with rapid-fire effusion before being prompted, in a stunt, to get out of the chair.
“…Awkward…!” she zings. Um… yeah. But, in its own sidelong way, gleefully par for the course.
“I’m not really good at press conferences,” Bieber says at the outset. “I haven’t really done a lot of them. So, I don’t really know how this works. You guys can inform me about how this works. That would be great.”
Crouse leads into an upbeat and fast-moving 25 minutes that feature a few questions about the making of “Never Say Never” – which not only chronicles the 10 days before a long-anticipated (and somewhat nerve-racking) sellout show at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, but fills in the details of Bieber’s less grandiose background – and a lot of questions of a more “16” magazine variety.
The answers pretty much tell the level of the questions:
– “I think that Twitter’s such a good thing because I’m able to just be, like, interactive with my fans. I’m able to talk to them. They feel like they’re a part of me, which is really important.”
– “I’ve gotta say at first, like, a year ago, I was, like, all about Sour Patch Kids, right? They were the greatest things. But then my fans – they started bringing them to every show. Everything I was at. So, I kept eating them. Now, it’s like if I eat another Sour Patch Kid, I’m probably gonna just throw up. Now, I really like – well, in Canada, they’re Bigfoots. In America, they’re Swedish Fish. Canada’s better, obviously. Ketchup chips are good. I love them.”
– “I never wore long johns. Just sweatpants or something.”
– “I miss Tim Horton’s. I miss Timmy’s. I miss my Ice Cap. I miss seeing my friends and family. I miss my dog, Sam.”
– “Shout out to YouTube!”
The whole world of Bieber’s though, with his adoptive entertainment family keeping him company on stage and keeping him moving throughout “Never Say Never”… it can’t help but bring up the big question: Who does he trust?
“For sure,” he answers. “There’s so many people that are just new in my life. You can’t just think that someone’s going to do something wrong – because if you think like that, you’re not going to be happy in your life. You always have to expect people to do the right thing, but at the same thing you have to guard yourself and make sure you’re letting the right people in.
“All these past two years, these people have become like my family – just travelling with them every day. We’re going to fight like family and we’re going to have good times like family. Overall, at the end of the day, they’re here to make sure that I just become a good person, overall.”
“Never Say Never”, beyond showing singing and dancing sequences from last year’s My World tour, fills in the legendary blanks of Bieber’s seeming rise from nowhere. The famed YouTube clips of Bieber busking outside the Avon Theatre in Stratford and sweetly singing Ne-Yo songs as a wee neophyte on a local stage are included, but there are a few more digs deeper from the home vaults: Bieber bundled up to shovel snow, Bieber entering the Stratford Star talent contest (and finishing second), and some astounding footage of eight-year-old Bieber holding his own as a jazz drummer in a band with full-grown musicians.
There are the expected appearances by celebrities, mentors and peers. Producer LA Reid speaks of how he knew he’d heard “the Macaulay Culkin of music” when he was alerted by Scooter Braun, the aspiring (and relatively inexperienced) Atlanta manager who nabbed Bieber on YouTube faith alone. Usher, who famously took Bieber under his wing, is on-stage and off-, duetting live while also admonishing the young star for balking at health drinks designed to preserve his vocal cords.
“You’re not gonna be 16 forever,” Usher warns, like an older brother, as Bieber holds his nose backstage and downs a special concoction that he complains “tastes like dinosaur pee.”
There is talk of the famed hair, and of his allegiance to his mother Pattie Mallette and the rest of his Canadian family. But, mostly, “Never Say Never” is about the fans – be they the screaming girls in braces outside Toronto’s Air Canada Centre and Ottawa’s Scotiabank Place, or even the 40-somethings at the Royal York press conference who can’t keep their crazed enthusiasm dimmed.
“There’s gonna be haters, no matter what,” Bieber admits at the conference. “People wanna see you succeed, and then once you’re there, they want to bring you down. It’s a weird world. But that’s how it is.
“There’s people who aren’t gonna like me, and that’s just – if they watch this movie and they really get to see that I’m just a nice person, and I’m not like… A lot of people think I’m just a factory machine, and people just put me together out of recycled product. Well, I really worked hard to get here. There’s so many people that helped me.”
And, with that in mind, Bieber invites one of the fans at the press conference to ask him a question. A young girl in a purple hoodie can’t get it out fast enough.
“Will you marry me?” she asks.
“We get that question at least once a day, too,” Bieber responds. “The answer is – you know – never say never, right?”
Richard Crouse is a noted critic, author and broadcaster. He is the host of a show about movies called – what else? — Richard Crouse’s Movie Show on E! and the Independent Film Channel. Crouse is also a frequent guest on many national Canadian radio and television shows. In April 2008 his new Saturday afternoon radio show, featuring movie reviews and news, began its run on News Talk 1010 CFRB in Toronto.
He is the author of six books about popular culture, including the runaway bestseller 100 Movies You’ve Never Seen and its equally popular follow-up, Son Of The 100 Movies You’ve Never Seen.
Crouse is also one of the “usual suspects” at This is Not A Reading Series. For the TINARS launch of his latest book, Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, he joined forces with the brilliant comedy troupe Monkey Toast. At TINARS, Crouse has also interviewed Kathleen Turner, roasted Marc Glassman, and, most recently, was a “celebrity assassin” at the event to launch Graham Roumieu’s 101 Ways To Kill You Boss. He will interview novelist Tony Burgess and award-winning filmmaker Bruce McDonald about their acclaimed adaptation of Pontypool Changes Everything, at The Gladstone Hotel Ballroom on Tuesday March 3.
W:
How long have you been collecting the “Best Movies You’ve Never Seen”?
R:
I’ve always been a fan of outsider and cult movies so I guess I have been collecting these titles for my whole life. I grew up as a movie obsessed kid in a tiny town in Nova Scotia. This was long before Video Stores dotted the landscape, so I had to rely on television (we only got 3 channels) and the local movie theatre to get my fix. The theatre was amazing. The town, Liverpool, was originally meant to be a very busy port so it had a very grand hotel and an opera house, but it was never as successful as hoped and the opera house was eventually converted into a movie theatre. The movie theatre could literally hold half the town’s population. It was grand and it was great. Also, because it was located at the very butt end of the distribution path the programming at the theatre was a little erratic. One day they’d play a Hollywood blockbuster (although six months or so old, but new to us), the next might be a Bruce Lee flick coupled with a Russian art film. I was indiscriminate and went to see them all and I think that’s what gave me my eclectic taste in movies.
W:
Of the 200 that you have assembled thus far in book form, what is your personal favourite?
R:
They’re all like my kids; it’s hard to pick a favorite but I’m really partial to The Cameraman’s Revenge in the Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen. It’s a 1912 stop motion animation film about a jilted husband whose revenge involves filming his wife and her lover and showing the result at the local cinema. All characters are played by animated insects and the results are so realistic one critic wondered if director Ladislas Starevich taught bugs to perform for the camera. It’s a bizarre, beautiful artifact from one of the pioneers of the art form.
W:
What is the difference between a ‘little known’ and a ‘cult’ film? Are such semantics merely a matter of marketing?
R:
All “little known” films would like to be “cult films.” If a film is little known, I guess it means that it is also little seen, whereas cult films have a life that transcends the actual movie. Cult films develop dedicated fan bases who go see the movie over and over, dress up and even act out the films. Little known movies don’t inspire such fanaticism… and usually have an inch of dust on them at the video store.
W:
Where do you stand on that perennial conundrum: rock, paper, scissors?
R:
Rock when I’m feeling sad; paper when it rains and scissors at tax time.
W:
Dozens of movies are released every week. You can only review a fixed number on your show. How do whittle down the stack, to the titles that will receive coverage?
R:
I generally see pretty much everything that comes out and review different movies for different outlets. On Canada AM I stick with the big guns, the Hollywood blockbusters; on my CFRB radio show (Saturdays at Noon!) and my E! show, Richard Crouse’s Movie Show, I generally mix it up with a bit of Hollywood tempered with Canadian titles and cool foreign films and docs. In print, on my website (www.richardcrouse.ca), the CTV.ca and CFRB websites I generally cover as much as I can.
W:
What books are currently on your bedside table?
R:
I read a lot and there is always a stack of books piled high on my bedside table. I just read Eric Nuzum’s Dead Travel Fast, a fascinating look at vampire culture and history. I recently finished Deconstructing Sammy, a look at Sammy Davis Jr’s troubled final years by Matt Birkbeck. I bought it because of the back cover blurb. It’s a grabber! I’m one chapter away from finishing Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood and am midway through Hellraisers, a book about the drunken exploits of Peter O’Toole, the Richards—Burton and Harris—and Oliver Reed.
W:
If you could put one recent cinematic trend on ice, what would it be?
R:
Bio pics that end with the main character dying only to reappear in a feel-good montage just before the credits roll. The old Hollywood wisdom says that heroes aren’t supposed to die at the end of movies, so I think bringing them back is a cheap trick to try and placate an audience. I get it, but I don’t like it. Going into these movies we know Harvey Milk and Che die, there’s no reason to bring them back for one more ghostly turn before the camera.
W:
Who is your favourite character on Sesame Street? Why?
R:
Ernie, because I think he has a secret life.
W:
You have participated in countless Hollywood junkets over the years. Do any stand out in your mind as being particularly surreal?
R:
Strange things always happen to me when I go to LA. Two of the strangest have involved Gary Busey. (Caution! Dropping names ahead.)
On a hot June evening in 1992 I had dinner at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Malibu called Granita. We scored a great table on the patio, and were seated between Johnny Carson, who had just retired, and Gary Busey, who was celebrating his birthday. The meal was relatively peaceful until Busey started opening his gifts. He insisted on showing us each of his presents, which was fine, but he had a lot of presents, and we were trying to eat. Eventually we stopped commenting on the gifts and tried to enjoy our meal. It was then that I felt a bread roll hit me in the back of the head.
“Hey! Tell Wolfgang we’re having a food fight,” Busey hollered as he winged another roll in my direction.
I didn’t know what to do, and didn’t really want to get involved, but the rolls kept coming, so eventually I threw one back at him, hitting him in the chest. I’m sure Mr. Carson was impressed with my aim. Thankfully someone at the table (I think it was his mother) got him to stop, and we never progressed past the rolls into throwing hot entrees at one another.
I didn’t see Busey for another eleven years, and much has happened in the intervening years. He has worked steadily, mostly in straight to video movies that earn a “Terrible,” or “Appalling” user rating on IMBD; he had a plum sized tumor removed from his sinus cavity, has been arrested and become a born-again Christian. He has starred in a couple of reality shows, Celebrity Rehab and I’m With Busey, a reality show a la The Osbournes. I think the show’s tagline says it all: “Somewhere, between reality and insanity, Is Busey.”
He is sitting inside with a group of people, including a friend of mine from Toronto. At one point Busey decides that he wants to smoke one of his large Cuban cigars, and comes outside to our table. Actually he looms over the table, sitting on a ledge above us, with his feet resting on one of the chairs. Introductions are made. I tell him I am from Toronto.
“I have made ten movies in Toronto. Ten in Vancouver and three in Montreal,” he says loudly.
“I must have missed those,” I’m thinking, but say nothing.
When I don’t take the bait he starts spouting Buseyisms, which are basically acronyms of his invention which contain his philosophy on life.
“Do you know what FEAR stands for?” he asks me.
Not sure where this conversation is going, I say no.
“FEAR… False Evidence Appearing Real,” he says. “F-E-A-R.”
Wow.
“Do you know what LIGHT stands for?” he hollers.
Before I have a chance to answer, he says, “LIGHT! Living In God’s Heavenly Thoughts… L-I-G-H-T.”
I have a feeling this is going to go on for a while, so I order another drink.
They came in quick succession… GOAT! Get Over Adulterous Tendencies! BIBLE! Beautiful Instructions Before Leaving Earth!
Then, to make a peculiar scene even more bizarre we were joined by one of Busey’s friends, Sal Pacino. No, that’s not a typo, I said Sal Pacino, father of Al. Sal is in his eighties, but has a strong resemblance to his famous son. He was wearing a very cool belt with the letter “S” on the buckle, and didn’t say much. He didn’t have much of a chance to, as Busey holding court, sucking up all the air on the patio.
I wondered if it was just me who didn’t really know what Busey was on about, but later read a quote from his son Jake, who said, “He’s always telling stories about monkeys and toads and rockets… I can never understand what he’s talking about.” Good, even his blood relatives can’t comprehend him. I think if I could identify with what he was saying then I would have something to worry about.
Anyway, as quickly as he joined us, he was gone, leaving nothing but perplexed looks and a cloud of cigar smoke. It was definitely the oddest celebrity encounter I have ever had.
W:
What songs would you put on a mixtape CD for a cineaste you were courting?
R:
I used to be the king of the mix tape, but my skills have dulled in recent years. For sure I’d kick off with Misirlou by Dick Dale and finish with Jarvis Cocker’s Running the World from the Children of Men soundtrack. In between I’d wedge in some Tom Waits, perhaps Singin’ In the Rain, some Elvis Costello and lots of Ray Charles. No mixed tape is complete without some Ray Charles, preferably Midnight or I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You.
