Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 70
Sign: Pisces
City: rural
State: Iowa
Country: US
Signup Date: 1/31/2007
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Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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Imposter Or Whatever Happened To Richard Beymer?
goes on sale
...Sometime in July, 2007 at Amazon.com
. . . In regards to the title, Whatever Happened to Richard Beymer?, before you conclude the author is a completely self-absorbed, self-promoting, egocentric, phony, bag of wind; hear me out.
First, let me set the scene. It's the late 60's, early 70's. The film West Side Story (that I starred in with Natalie Wood) and my 15 minutes of fame have come and gone. The Beatles have broken up. Ronald Reagan has given up doing commercials for 20 Mule Team Borax laundry booster and become Governor of California. Jimi Hendrix has OD'd on heroin, followed a couple of weeks later by Janis Joplin, and within a year Jim Morrison breaks on through to the other side.
America, in its infinite wisdom, makes Richard Millhouse Nixon president of the United States, an office from which he will be forced to resign due to a little burglary he gets involved in. Kubrick has released his masterpiece 2001 and blown our collective cinematic mind. Trying to figure out how to abandon Vietnam so America doesn't look like it got its ass kicked, the powers that be cleverly decide to sneak out under cover of the slogan "Peace with Dignity."
Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy follows behind a mule cart along with 50,000 other mourners, in a funeral procession bearing the murdered body of Martin Luther King. Kennedy is himself assassinated four months later, officially ending any dream of Camelot. Bob Dylan is still on the pop charts. Gas is 35 cents a gallon. Movies are a buck twenty-five. The Twin Towers are nearing completion. Indian gurus are flocking to the U.S. with their ancient Vedic wisdom to complete the picture show of being here now that some of us experienced in the acid coming attractions. And finally, we've landed on the moon. And for the first time in human history we are able to look back at ourselves from POINT OF VIEW of an INFINITELY WIDE Kodak Moment and see, if there were any doubt, the insignificance of our collective existence.
And me? I'm going through it stoned. I'm now in phase three of Timothy Leary's "tune in, turn on and drop out." Unemployed. Broke. Career in the toilet. Making 16mm underground films with my wind-up Bolex. Eating rice and veggies. Letting my barbershop haircut grow to my shoulders. Exploring love and peace in the day and sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in the night. Reading books about God realization and thinking enlightenment is just a few months of meditation away.
I'm living with an actress and filming our life together as we trip through our psychedelic love affair. We see the world through the news with Walter Cronkite who reminds us nightly—though not intentionally—that Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about. We're taking black-and-white Polaroids and waiting sixty seconds to see our naked images, and like John and Yoko, we're getting comfortable with what we see.
We're cohabitating in this one room garret on the top floor of a three-story dwelling that Jack London built in Hollywood at the turn of the century. There's a little shed on the roof. I turn it into an editing studio-slash-futon bedroom that we get to by pulling down a ladder and climbing up through the hole in the ceiling—forty bucks a month. The only connection I still have with Hollywood is what little I can see of the Paramount studio lot from my window. All is well though, in fact, weller than it's ever been in my life.
It was somewhere in here that Richard Lamparski called. Who's Richard Lamparski you may well ask? He's the author of a series of books entitled, "Whatever Happened to. . . ?" He tracks down the once-famous and not so-famous celebrities in show biz and fills you in on their fall from grace. You getting the picture?
Now, when Richard Lamparski calls and asks if you will be in his book you know that you have officially been accepted in the has been hall of fame. In other words, no one in Hollywood any longer cares who, where, or even if you exist. So I say, "Sure, why not? Come over. Let's talk."
I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought that some producer would see the piece and say, "Yeah, him, that guy from West Side Story . . . what's-his-name. Let's give him the lead in our next major multimillion dollar motion picture."
Dreams die hard.
So I do the interview and I get my page in the book with a picture between Frankie Avalon and Spanky McFarland. And there you have it, the final nail in the coffin of my short but "I"- opening career.
Then, just when I'm getting the hang of this love and peace business—a rude awakening. My girlfriend is introduced to this major rock star backstage after his concert, fucks him, and leaves with him the next day on his world tour. I find out watching TV that night. There she is with the rock star on the entertainment news waving to the crowd as they board his private jet.
I try to maintain but I go into a major tailspin crashing headlong into an abyss of self-pity. I'm trying to stay alive at this depth but there's not much oxygen down here. I don't know— maybe it's days later, maybe weeks, maybe months—I'm laid out on my futon obsessively going over my ever-increasing list of what could have beens when I catch a glimpse of the Lamkparski book.
There I am, just another "whatever happened to. . .? I was supposed to become a star, direct, produce, date models and movie actresses, be on the cover of magazines, jet around the world, be nominated for Academy Awards, be on the late night talk shows hawking my latest film, back presidential candidates, rub elbows with the elite . . . be a somebody. But instead, I'm wallowing here in my self-indulgent paralysis, rock bottom in obscurity.
Without really thinking, I find myself scribbling on a piece of paper: "Whatever Happened—dot, dot, dot?" Maybe this was a way to pull myself out of the doldrums. Maybe, if I went back over my life, wrote it down scene by scene, like a movie, I could figure out where the story fell apart and my destiny abandoned me.
Instead of going back and starting at the beginning with birth and all, I decided to begin where I was, stuck in my head, and work backwards from there.
What was immediately apparent was, I had been living my life backwards all along, inasmuch as my life had been nothing more than a continual search for proof to justify the clutter of my past so I could avoid the present. What could be a better definition of insanity than that?
So, for the next twenty years, I continued to write my backwards screenplay, rummaging around in ever and ever increasingly subtler crevices of my beleaguered psyche for clues to what happened to me.
CUT TO: YEARS LATER: Hollywood is so far in the past it isn't even on the radar screen. In the intervening years, I've switched from film to video. I've got everything of whatever happened to me on my shelves in intimate detail. Where most people write a journal or a diary of their life, I've videotaped mine—UP CLOSE and ZOOMED IN . I've got the uncensored version of Sex, Lies and Videotape. I've got all the good stuff before Hollywood cuts it out.
CUT TO: Somewhere in the MID-90's. WIDE SHOT . Moving up the PERUVIAN AMAZON RIVER . Me and a few other mind-expanding adventurers are going to meet up with a shaman who lives deep in the jungle. He will guide us through a mind-altering ritual, which consists of ingesting the sacred ayahausca plant, then laying back and surrendering to the clues that hopefully the universe will vomit up.
CUT TO: DEEP IN THE JUNGLE . I'm naked, covered in mud, stoned out of my mind, running around on all fours like some monkey man, having reverted back to a time prior to walking erect.
CUT TO: POINT OF VIEW THROUGH MY SONY MINI DV VIDEO CAMERA that I have strapped to my monkey hand, recording the whole adventure. I turn the camera on myself and catch a glimpse of my evolutionary descent in the LCD screen.
"Fuck!?" (Refer to cover photo.)
So, Richard Lamparski, all these years later, here's the answer to your question, "Whatever happened to Richard Beymer?" Nothing! He never existed. He's an image in mind, not my mind . . . Thee mind, a fictitious character made up to star in the movie of my so-called life.
So to fill in the blanks, here's a copy of my novel that was inspired by your question, that over the intervening years I have shortened, for economy's sake, to simply—'who am I?'
With gratitude,
R. B.
P.S. By the way, whatever happened to you?
THE BACK COVER
Richard Beymer is somewhat famous for acting in certain films and television shows bla bla bla . . . the most memorable being West Side Story opposite Natalie Wood and the role of Ben Horne on David Lynch's series Twin Peaks. Beymer is working on a second writing Verbal Contraptions that deals with scenes of desert landscapes jux-taposed with stylish bearded women . . . a totally nonsensical contriv-ance that most likely will never get published. For the last fifteen years Beymer has been living out in the wilderness of Iowa writing and directing a video-film which doubtfully—because of its oddity—will ever come to your local mainstream theater, but who knows? In spite of evidence to the contrary, Beymer continues to think he exists . . . and so on and so forth bla bla bla. . . .
This book-story-moviescript-thing is the most bizarrely styled piece of some-kind of convoluted medium I've ever read…funny and odd. Powerful and relevant to nothing. It turns the world in-side-out like the man on a train who thinks the ground is moving, then sees there is no ground, or train or even himself. Beymer is seriously nuts! He turns everything into a movie, even God.
-Rudy Wilson, author of The Red Truck
Way out there in areas where most people are afraid to admit they think. I had a challenging time with the book Like, oh my god . . . do I really want to go there? And . . . and then, there I am! Your words heighten and intensify my experience of being alive in this crazy world.
-Diane Frank, author of Blackberries in the Dream House
5:20 PM
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