Dominick Dunne, Author
Dominick Dunne, chronicler of crime, celebrity, and the intersection of the two, has died at 83. Dunne had been suffering from bladder cancer. He was diagnosed last year, and his decline was sudden and largely unexpected, though Liz Smith reported on his condition just yesterday. It was a long and fascinating life. Dunne was a World War II vet. He was a TV director and film producer. He was one of the druggiest of the '70s Hollywood druggies until he cleaned up at age 50. He was a television star. When his daughter Dominique was murdered in 1982, he became a journalist. His professional home of many years lists his credits: Dunne—who joined Vanity Fair in 1984 as a contributing editor, and was named special correspondent in 1993—famously covered the trials of O. J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Michael Skakel, William Kennedy Smith, and Phil Spector, as well as the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He wrote memorable profiles on numerous personalities, among them Imelda Marcos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor, Claus von Bülow, Adnan Khashoggi, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. His monthly column provided a glimpse inside high society, and captivated readers. "He became our first star writer," Tina Brown says in After the Party, a documentary on Dunne. She hired him to write a story on the trial of his daughter's killer for Vanity Fair, and she calls him "the defining voice of the magazine." Dunne covered the trials of "the rich, the powerful, and the famous," he said in the same documentary. And "the reason I can write assholes so well is that I used to be an asshole." He's survived by sons Griffin and Alex and granddaughter Hannah. There is an obituary and a nice remembrance from Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. MORE >>
Tucker Max's Movie: Poop
Last night I went and watched the upcoming Tucker Max movie, in full. Here is what I saw, before I erase it from my mind entirely. It was bad. It was really bad. It was not bad in the good way. It was not bad ironically. It was not bad in the "Let's go see it because we like to watch bad movies like Knowing, and laugh at them" way. I do not want to say the wrong thing here, that might convince anyone that this movie is worth paying to see, even for train wreck purposes. This is the movie that happens when a narcissist—not an interesting one, though—writes an entire movie about how cool he is, and is given full creative control over that movie. Imagine someone you know who is an asshole. Now imagine that person being able to write and produce a movie about themselves, and how awesome they are. There you have it. The plot of this film: Tucker Max and two of his bros go to a bachelor party, meeting various cum sluts along the way. Whore bitches can't get enough of Tucker Max's bad boy personality, which is probably why so many of these twats want him inside of their vaginas. Tucker fucks a midget stripper and the world loves him for it, the end. Other highlights: Close-ups of poop, coming out of someone's butt, a lot. There's a wedding scene in the end where the guests are all white and the servers are all black. There's not a joke to go with that. The best character in the film is Tucker's friend Drew, because he looks like he was just dropped in from another movie, and can't wait to get back. Drew is a misanthropic video game nerd who goes to strip club and meets a hot stripper who is also a video game nerd and falls for him and they rush home and sleep together and Drew instantly bonds with her son and they become a couple immediately. This is as close to a plausible male-female interaction sequence as this movie gets. If you're still curious about Making a Mess In a Cum Slut's Mouth Because She Won't Let Me Not Do That, just watch our preview clips or read the script we published a year ago, which did indeed turn out to be pretty close to the final version. This movie is not, in fact, hilarious. [Pic: Flickr] MORE >>
Leak: How Mark Penn Converts His Wall Street Journal Column into P.R. Clients
Mark Penn, the strategist who dashed Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes, is the Wall Street Journal's "Microtrend"-spotting columnist. He's also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller. Only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter. Scumbag spotted! Mark Penn's latest (old, and none too insightful) 'Microtrend' column is about "glamping"—glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients. Burson Executive Vice President (and former Bill Clinton speechwriter) Josh Gottheimer urged Burson's senior staff—including Founding Chairman Harold Burson, US President & CEO Patrick Ford, and others, to use Penn's column as a tool to approach clients in the camping industry about business. Not only that—he recommends that Mark Penn "send a note" to the CEO of these potential clients requesting a meeting. You may recall that Mark Penn was canned as Hillary Clinton's campaign strategist after it emerged that his firm was trying to get a contract to do PR work for the nation of Colombia—work that went against Clinton's own political position (a story that the WSJ broke). We pointed out at the time that it was idiotic to expect a full-time PR exec to be anything but a PR exec—Penn's job is to bring in business to Burson (one of America's biggest, and shadiest PR firms), and anyone expecting Burson to pass up business opportunities because they somehow clash with Mark Penn's various other hobbies will be sorely disappointed. Moonlighting from his PR career has already screwed a politician. Now he's screwing a newspaper the same way. Here we have a Wall Street Journal columnist whose firm is taking his newspaper columns fresh off the press and running to any company connected to the column's subject of the week, trying to get them to sign up with said firm—led by the columnist himself!—for PR work. At best, Penn has a conflict of interest here that can only be resolved by resigning one job or the other. The least generous interpretation would be that Burson-Marsteller is purposefully using the editorial space of the Wall Street Journal as a business recruitment tool—fooling one of the nation's most prestigious papers into giving it ad space it can use to promote its own clients, for free. Either way, whatever sort of credibility Penn had as an expert who spots trends based on data rather than on his own firm's business considerations is clearly shot. WSJ parent company Dow Jones' own Code of Conduct states that "The Company will suffer, for example, if our customers cannot assume" these principles are followed: • Our analyses represent our best independent judgments rather than our preferences, or those of our sources, advertisers or information providers; • Our opinions represent only our own editorial philosophies; or • There are no... MORE >>
Ted Kennedy: An Assessment
Edward Kennedy, the last surviving son of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, was the third-longest serving US Senator of all time. He was a drunken degenerate. And he might've been the best argument for the US Senate ever elected. Kennedy's parents, corrupt political fixer Joseph Kennedy and strict Rose Fitzgerald, had grand ambitions for their sons Joseph Jr., John, and Robert. But Ted, the baby, was allowed, or maybe expected, to be a charming lightweight. The family mocked him for being fatter and slower than his superstar brothers, and he accepted their ridicule good-naturedly. In the 40s, the family disasters began stacking up: his sister Rosemary was lobotomized and institutionalized. Siblings Joe Jr. and Kathleen died. All this by the time Teddy was 16. When brother Jack, a sitting Senator, ran for president in 1960, the family sent Teddy out on the thankless and impossible task of winning the Western States. When he failed (not costing Jack the election, thankfully), he expressed a desire to stay out west, with his wife Joan. With his brothers in DC running the nation, Ted wanted to lay low and perhaps work toward a political career on his own terms. "The disadvantage of my position," he told an interviewer, "is being constantly compared with two brothers of such superior ability." But Joe told him to move to Massachusetts and take Jack's Senate seat, and so Ted did. He won a bruising primary battle with the very grudging support of his brothers and cruised to victory, whereupon Jack was suddenly gunned down. In the summer of 1964, Ted was in a plane crash that killed one man and nearly paralyzed him for life. (His recuperation provided him an opportunity to educate himself, at least.) And in 1968, his brother Bobby, then running for president (because he saw Eugene McCarthy draw blood from LBJ and decided to go in for the kill himself), was assassinated in California. And so, Teddy, the dumb one, was now, at 36, the last Kennedy brother. He declined to seek the nomination for the presidency, not knowing that he'd kill his chances forever the following year. Ted was a drunk, and he fucked around. That was true his entire life. He was an intellectually lazy, louche rich kid, whose family bought him his education, his job, and even found him an acceptable wife. He got kicked out of Harvard for cheating in 1950, and when the Boston Globe threatened to reveal this fact as Ted campaigned to be a senator, the president, Ted's brother, invited the reporter over to make sure that the actual news get pushed to paragraph 5 and the headline remained vague. So when, in 1969, he got wasted and drove a car off a bridge, killing a woman he'd left a party with, without brothers or a father to take care of it, it is not surprising that he did not know what to do. Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne, a former employee of Bobby's, were driving back to Edgartown, or to the beach, or who knows where. Kennedy drove off a narrow bridge with no guardrail into the water,... MORE >>
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