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Sunday, March 25, 2001
Zan Overall will be standing on 32nd Street in Los Angeles tonight, barricaded at some distance deemed comfortable for the slick sycophants and even slicker principals gliding into the Shrine Auditorium for the 73rd Annual Academy Awards.
Oscar itself is not as old as Mr. Overall, who'll turn 75 in June. Zan took a new bride last October and moved from Van Nuys to Woodland Hills, Calif., where his career as a musician and noted protester continues to flourish, sort of. On the phone the other day, he divulged this evening's careful strategies.
"I'll be targeting 'Erin Brockovich' and 'Chocolat,'" he said, and then he read to me from the hand-lettered signs he'll be carrying, trying to get someone in that eight-block radius to pay attention on the remote possibility that they'd like to think a little harder than Joan Rivers. "'Erin Brockovich' -- phony as Julia Roberts' cleavage!"
Oh Zan, is that nice?
"Junk science in the service of lawyerly greed and anticapitalist activism."
Uh-huh. What else?
" 'Chocolat': The latest politically correct comic book-crude attack on the culture."
OK.
"Thirteen Days," he says, "A deceptive, antimilitary hagiography of Kennedy."
Of course, "Thirteen Days" is not a nominated film, but that's all right. Zan hasn't seen it, anyway.
"But I will," he says.
The night one year ago that I was privileged to join Zan for the Oscars, we were both standing on 32nd Street, both witnessing our first Oscar Night, both genuinely repulsed.
After most of a week in Hollywood, I'd found the whole circus a prime social vulgarity, a festival of money and ego and self-aggrandizement not unlike the Super Bowl but with fewer related arrests. Zan didn't care much for that, either, but he was more concerned with content.
He regards Hollywood as a kind of cultural munitions factory being run by the left, a perception even lefties would have a hard time countering. Still, Zan sees a lot of things that way, being a vocal soldier on the political right.
How far right? Zan makes Dick Cheney look like "Puffy" Combs.
On Oscar Night 2000, he was upset about "American Beauty."
"The villain is a retired military officer, retired honorably I presume, and he is so despondent over a brief homosexual advance that he winds up killing his neighbor, while the hero is someone who drops out of the American system and smokes marijuana with a young neighbor boy, who is a dealer. And that has a chance to win the Academy Award for Best Picture! I mean, am I the only one this bothers?"
A few hours later, "American Beauty" indeed won the Best Picture Oscar, an honor I thought it fully deserved despite the presence in that defining category of the perfectly exquisite "The Cider House Rules." For me, the winning film's validation recognized the distinctive beauty of banal desperation and self-loathing and brilliantly illustrated some contemporary social archetypes.
It was a bit of a relief frankly to see this part of the culture recognize genius in its own genre's darker streets. Weren't we tired of watching a film like "Gaslight" lose to a film like "Going My Way," of watching "A Streetcar Named Desire" lose to "An American in Paris," of watching "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," lose to "Gigi," "The Exorcist" lose to "The Sting," "Taxi Driver" lose to "Rocky," of seeing "Pulp Fiction" and "The Shawshank Redemption" lose to "Forrest Gump"?
Zan isn't exactly keeping score that way. It's not another kind of Hollywood that he'd like to see, it's another kind of America, a kind that's never coming back. I hope someone notices him tonight. CNN filmed him last year, but never showed that part of the tape. He's as worthy a part of Oscar Night as anyone in the better clothes.
I mostly disagree with him politically from about 180 degrees, but I know he's right about this: Anyone who swallows the Hollywood product whole does the mind a stinging disservice.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com