The Good and The Too Wild to Not Be Reviled: Intro

For your appallment, despair and delight...This periodic thread on a subject I've studied for decades: the bad boys who count in the arts are not always the obvious choices:


Charles Bukowski


Norman Mailer



Martin Amis


Charlie Sheen


Just one of the world's richest gangstas


An impressive rogue's gallery, I'll admit. But it's easier to look and behave like an outlaw to gain fame and riches than to brave ridicule and revilement by stubbornly going one's way. Here we will honor members of an exclusive club: The Too Wild to Not Be Reviled. Only one man in the following list of American directors can claim to be a member.

The five men were contemporaries whom Susan Dworkin called the Whiz Kids:  a 'central generation in American filmmaking...raised on the notion that the real auteur of a good movie had to be the director'. You know their names if not their faces:


Stephen Spielberg

Francis Ford Coppola

George Lucas



Martin Scorcese



Brian De Palma


One honest outlaw and real rogue in the bunch--and, not coincidentally, the single most reviled. The creative force behind Carrie, the Fury, Scarface, Blow Out and the notorious Body Double--aka 'the driller killer/porn film'--plots real bad boy chaos while drinking coffee or water and playing Trivial Pursuit.

He'll be our first subject. And from there we'll swing the spotlight to others you may not have thought Too Wild to Not Be Reviled.

 





and...?

Stay tuned!