In the history of Reefer Madness/Just Say No ad campaigns, no “scared straight” has ever been as effective as “I accidentally vomited on Jeff Goldblum”. Which I did do, in my youth, on a trip to Los Angeles when I was a jetlagged teenage writer, unaware of the strength of a sea breeze cocktail.
Jeff Goldblum wasn’t even involved in my life - he has, you’ll be surprised to hear remained steadfastly uninvolved. He’d simply walked over to greet a friend of his, who, having met me one hour earlier, was sweetly trying to steady me on the pavement outside a music venue. For this simple twist of fate, Jeff’s beautiful shoes were harshly rewarded.
If you are a soul of such depravity that you don’t feel this sufficient to scare a person straight, I’ll continue:
With vomit on my face - supplemental to that which I’d deposited on Jeff Goldblum -I then tried to kiss Rufus Sewell (who I also did not know) when he kindly walked me back to my hotel room following my public unburdening. Rufus (who does intermittently remain in my life) was kind enough to not relay the attempted kiss until a few years ago, when I was middle aged and would not die of humiliation, as I had a daughter to raise.
This happened when I was 17 years old, and I have never drunk again. I genuinely have maybe five alcoholic drinks a year and never ever more than one drink a month. Usually “California sober” means “I still smoke weed” not “My alcohol consumption is constrained by a fear of splattering our best looking character actors with my innards”. This abstinence has been entirely successful, only once vomiting adjacent to Colin Farrell, and that was purely helicopter related.
I hadn’t thought of my Night Of The Dark Seabreeze in forever. But it came back to me as I was finishing my latest novel, my first about a teenage girl since my debut two decades ago.
It may be an urban myth that particularly spicy foods can trigger a very pregnant woman to go into labour, but my latest novel was a pregnancy around which I developed my own suburban myth: there were particular movies and films I absolutely could not watch until I had delivered the manuscript because I was concerned their scent would overwhelm me and, by extension, my prose. That might seem like an unfounded fear for a novelist to have about the visual mediums of film and television, but the pieces I am referring to starred Nicolas Cage and, yes, Jeff Goldblum.
They are already overwhelming peformers, without dialing themselves up to 11 as they do, respectively, in ‘Longleg’s and ‘Kaos’. They are both such specific scents, and I wanted to write a book that was completely original with characters you’ve never seen before. Even though literature is a whole other art form (and this being a literary thriller, a different genre to Longlegs, which is a gothic horror and Kaos, Netflix’ retelling of Greek Mythology as highbrow soap), I felt I couldn’t risk the potential cross-pollination.
This is the highest compliment. If I am reading your book or watching your film whilst completing my own, it means I’m not concerned they’re going to mark me. And here is the crux of our culture’s admiration for Cage and Goldblum: they tap into the eternal human question of which of us is most like themselves? When Cage and Goldblum are acting they are by definition becoming someone else - and yet staying entirely themself at the same time. It is a mesmerising trick, like how Janis Joplin sometimes seemed to be singing two different notes at the same time.
A subdivision of my favourite ones offs, actors never to be repeated: Elliott Gould who no Gen Z kid would know but between 1970 and 71 was the TOP male box office star in America. Mumbling and strange and so so sexy (The Long Goodbye is your way in then I’d chase it with Little Murders. There are modern male stars whose screen presence is suggestive to me of “Not interested” and “not interesting”, and I won’t name them. But the 70’s were big on “Not interested” and “so interesting” because you then have Donald Sutherland and Roy Scheider. I once wrote that skateboarders are eternally attractive to us because there is no room on their board for you, a visual representation of the hot man who has no romantic space available.
In long gone olden days women on screen could also fit the same one off “skateboarder” status as Cage/Goldblum/Gould, women like:
Bette Davis
Joan Crawford
Barbara Stanwyck
Katherine Hepburn
Sigourney Weaver
Jodie Foster
Holly Hunter
Nicolas Cage and Jeff Goldblum are so thrilling because they are succeeding - have always succeeded - at being accepted as themselves, the core of what we all reach for. When you are visibly yourself, instead of getting love wrong, the people you hope to draw close can sigh “Yes Please!” or “No thank you”. As the ballad goes: “I see your True Colours, and that’s why I have moved away from the relationship”.
Speaking of dear, original Cyndi Lauper, things are a little more pliable for women with music than on screen. There is no one else like Cyndi or like Cher, no one ever sounded or looked like her. And though Dolly Parton and Debbie Harry are conventionally beautiful light eyed blondes, no one else has ever been anything like them.
Maybe I fixated on not getting any Nic Cage mannerisms caught within my words, on the path to accepting that my books are fucking weird. It’s the eighth fucking weird book I’m about to publish that doesn’t fit into any category. I do think the Chat GPT and AI revolution I find so horrifying has made me more attuned to originality when forging friendships and love interests and in my own writing. And, in my down time as a consumer, choosing which movie star projects to assign my precious time to. Face/Off excepted, there will be no AI Nicolas Cage. I feel the force of his molecules would, like kryptonite, render AI powerless.
A very beautiful friend of mine actually went on a date with Jeff Goldblum before he married his wife. When my friend, dressed to perfection, arrived at his hotel he opened the door and to her amazement she saw that he was wearing…
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