GONE are the days of the simple running feud between paparazzi and celebrities. Now it’s an all-out crime wave of violent assault between civilians and celebrities. Tom Cruise’s water squirt by a TV prankster was the parody version of the real thing — Leonardo DiCaprio’s nasty bottle-in-the-face attack. Both incidents indicate that the magic protective ring is gone.
It must be a little embarrassing for DiCaprio to admit that he was mistaken for someone else, if no more shaming than his ponytail in Gangs of New York. And if his irate assailant gets jail time for disfiguring his looks, one can only imagine what Mickey Rourke’s plastic surgeon is feeling.
Since when did celebrities turn into such victims? Hollywood has always produced a stream of violent assaulters. Robert Mitchum, Oliver Reed, Jack Nicholson (taking his golf clubs to a car bonnet), even Zsa Zsa Gabor demonstrated the original bitch-slap to the Beverly Hills policeman who tried to give her a ticket.
These days, we are reduced to making do with Christian Slater fending off an allegation of sexual harassment to add to his matrimonial woes.
Perhap the main reason for the celebrity-victim trend is that our generation’s leading hairy bad boy, Russell Crowe, keeps attacking such puny victims. At least Alec Baldwin (note the common link of gorilla-thick hair chest), was acquitted of slugging a paparrazo he’d sprayed with shaving foam. Crowe’s “hold the phone” manoeuvre was directed at a humble receptionist. The last time he lost his temper publicly, it was to throttle a television producer who had dared to cut his on-air poetry recital.
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Come on, Maximus, please. You’ll be unleashing hell on the maid next.
As Crowe keeps failing to learn, the rules of celebrity living run very closely to the rules of movie telling. In film, you say the stronger the villain, the stronger the hero. In life, it’s no different. Every celebrity assault withers into backlash when the victim is an unsuspecting law-abiding civilian. And it gets downright suicidal, career-wise, when the victim is a female spouse.
Tom Sizemore, the grizzly character actor from Saving Private Ryan and Blackhawk Down, has admitted to losing an $18 million fortune and moving into a garage after his conviction for beating up his then girlfriend, the “Hollywood Madam”, Heidi Fleiss.
Still, at least those involved actually recognised each other,which is more than can be said for poor Leo.