Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Photograph from “Big Love”, from HBO

September 23, 1947– Mary Kay Place:

“Right now, there seems to be this incredible variety of nicely written, nicely layered work that involves women our age. It’s a blessing, I have to say.”

She first came into my orbit in 1976 as a wannbe country-western singer who yearned to be a mother, on Norman Lear’s groundbreaking soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

You might think about her from HBO’s Big Love (2006-11) where Place plays just one of the wives of the late great Harry Dean Stanton and the polygamist mother of Chloë Sevigny’s character. At the same time, she was playing a mother on IFC’s The Minor Accomplishments Of Jackie Woodman (2006-07). For someone who is not one, Place has made quite a career out of playing mothers. She is Edward Furlong’s mother in John Waters’ Pecker (1998). In 2002, Place was Reese Witherspoon’s mother in the dreary Sweet Home Alabama (she was a bright spot) and played a Mormon mother of a gay son in the excellent film Latter Days (2003). Again, she played the mother of gay sons: Andrew Rannells’ on Ryan Murphy’s underappreciated The New Normal (2013) and Josh Lucas in the indie road-trip flick Youth In Oregon (2017), and, of course, Jonathan Groff’s mother on HBO’s Looking (2015). She is Amy Adam’s mother in Julie & Julia (2009), and Anne Hathaway’s mother in The Intern (2015). She currently plays a mother in the Netflix series Lady Dynamite.

More gay love for her work as Prue Giroux in Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City (1994) and Further Tales Of The City (2001), and as Lily Tomlin’s Frankie’s oldest friend on Grace And Frankie. She even plays gay as an Ob/Gyn who has a crush on Laurie Metcalf on the inventive, very funny Getting On (2013-15) on HBO.

But, Place doesn’t just play mothers and she doesn’t just act. She is an Emmy-nominated writer (M*A*S*H) a Grammy Award-nominated singer, and a busy television director (Baby Boom, Friends, The Minor Accomplishments).

I can’t just continue to type away with her credits; my fingers are tired. Let’s just say she works a lot, 40 film roles, and over 50 television appearances (including hosting SNL in 1977 and as the U.S. Surgeon General on The West Wing).

Place really is a terrific serious and comic actor, versatile playing bumpkins and sophisticates with equal conviction: singing in New York, New York (1977), a soldier in Private Benjamin (1980), heartbreaking as a disillusioned wife in The Safety Of Objects (2001).

For me, it comes down to two of her best and best known: Meg, the single corporate attorney who wishes to be impregnated by one of her past college friends in the Lawrence Kasdan’s ensemble piece The Big Chill (1983), and cowgirl singer Loretta Haggers on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

She won an Emmy Award for playing Loretta, and was nominated for a Grammy Award for the album Tonite! At the Capri Lounge With Loretta Haggers. Place wrote two of the songs on the album, both of which she sang on Mary Hartman as Loretta. She even follow up with another Loretta album Aimin’ To Please featuring Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Anne Murray and Nicolette Larson singing backup. Something to Brag About, a duet with Willie Nelson, made it to the Top Ten of the Country Charts in 1977.

Starting left: Louis Lasser, Place, Debralee Scott and Dody Goodman on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”, Filmways Productions

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was one of the most original, ground breaking shows on television, during a time when most series were anything but. It remains one of the biggest cult television programs of all time. It is truly demented and a must watch. The show’s title was the main character’s name stated twice, because Lear and the writers knew that important dialogue in a soap opera was always said twice.

Both a satire on daytime soaps and a comment on consumerism, the series takes place in Fernwood, Ohio, where housewife Mary Hartman dreams of the domestic perfection promised by magazines and television commercials. Instead, she finds herself suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: mass murders, low-flying airplanes and waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor. She has an impotent husband, and brooding teenage daughter, batty parents, a slutty younger sister, Fernwood’s devious mayor (a perfect Dabney Coleman) and identical twins played by Martin Mull.

Like the soaps that it lampooned, the series featured far-fetched, elaborate plotlines that included murders of major characters by electrocution in a bathtub, by drowning in chicken soup, and by being impaled on a pink artificial Christmas tree.

Mary Hartman had a nationally televised nervous breakdown on The David Susskind Show at the end of the first season. After that, Mary was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she was delighted to be selected to be participant in the Nielsen ratings research family.

Way too controversial for any network in the 1970s, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was one of the first shows to be sold to local markets in syndication without a first run on a major network. In L.A. where I lived at the time, it aired at 11:30pm, and I rarely missed it.

Mary Hartman was played with genius by Louise Lasser whose numbed-out response to conflict with an ability to suddenly snap out of one state of mind and swing to its opposite. Lesser left the show in 1977, but the rest of cast carried on one more year in a new show, Forever Fernwood, including Place and adding Tab Hunter.

There have been many rumors that Place is gay, she never married and has never spoken much about her personal life. She seems most fulfilled by working:

“I enjoy directing. It’s a whole other head. I call that the ‘outside head’. Acting is the inside head. When you’re acting, you’re inside the head of your character. When you’re directing, it’s about everything.”

Cover via Legacy Recordings

Place lives in L.A. and has an apartment in NYC. Place:

“It’s enough to have life maintenance, friend maintenance and work maintenance. I feel my life is chock full. I’m totally satisfied. There’s plenty. Life is good.”

The post #BornThisDay: Actor / Singer / Writer / Director, Mary Kay Place appeared first on The WOW Report.

September 24, 1961– John Logan:

“The thing that made me monstrous to some people is also the thing that empowered me…”

Back in spring 2012, I caught an excellent, rather thrilling production of Red, an exciting and intense two character play about a slice in the life of one my most favorite painters Mark Rothko. Red was not, thankfully, an art appreciation class, but instead, a character portrait of an angry and brilliant artist. Set in Rothko’s NYC studio on The Bowery in the late 1950s, the play follows the initiation of a newly hired assistant, into the uncompromising aesthetic of Rothko (who grew-up in Portland), at that time that he was working on a commissioned series of paintings for the famous Four Seasons restaurant in the brand new Seagram Building.

Red captures the compelling relationship between an artist and his creations. Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant stage musical Sunday In The Park With George (1984) seems to me to be similarly successful in relating this theme.

The original London and Broadway cast of Red was cutie pie Eddie Redmayne and Alfred Molina. It won the Tony Award for Best Play and Redmayne won Best Supporting Actor.

Digging for a bit of information about the history of Red, I discovered that the gifted playwright John Logan is responsible for the disparate screenplays: Hugo (2011), Coriolanus (2011), Rango(2011), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2007), The Aviator (2004), The Last Samurai (2003), Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), The Time Machine (2002), Gladiator (2000), and Any Given Sunday (1999). He has worked with some truly great directors: Tim Burton, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and Sam Mendes, providing adapted and original screenplays, and often producing.

Logan is from Chicago where he worked as an actor for a decade before starting to write for the stage. Besides that 2010 Tony Award for Best Play, he has been nominated for an Academy Award three times, including the delightful Hugo, one of my favorite films about movies.

In the 2013 theatre season, Logan had two new plays produced: Peter And Alice, about the fictional meeting of the real life inspirations for Peter Pan and Alice In Wonderland, starring favorite Dame Judi Dench and sexy gay actor Ben Whishaw in London, and on Broadway I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers, directed by gay actor/director Joe Mantello and starring Gay Icon Bette Midler.

Logan provided the taut, smart story and screenplay for the 23rd James Bond flick Skyfall (2012). This Bond had a more obvious homoerotic subtext already inherent in the Bond series, but, this one includes a scene in which Bond, played by the delicious Daniel Craig, is tied to a chair as former MI6 agent-turned-villain Raoul Silva, portrayed by yummy Javier Bardem, the best Bond villain ever, who unbuttons his shirt after making a sexually charged remark, and Craig’s Bond responds: “What makes you think this is my first time?” The film sees the return of two recurring characters to the series after an absence of two films: Q, played by Logan favorite Whishaw, and Moneypenny, played by Naomie Harris. Skyfall is the last film of the series for Dench, who played M, a role that she had played in the previous six Bond flicks.

Penny Dreadful, photograph from Showtime

Logan created and scripted my favorite series of 2014-2016, Penny Dreadful. The Showtime series is filled to the brim with gay sensibility and hot homo sex scenes. The title referenced penny dreadfuls, a kind of 19th century cheap, pulpy fiction publication with lurid and sensational subject matter. Logan’s brilliant thrill ride of a series draws upon a bunch of 19th century literary characters including Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray from The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Mina Harker and Dr. Van Helsing from Bram Stoker‘s Dracula, Victor Frankenstein and his monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, plus Dr. Henry Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Logan:

“I just love monsters. I’ve always loved monsters. When I was a kid I built models in my bedroom and I watched horror movies and read horror comic books. Only as I’ve grown up have I realized that the affection I have for them is a kinship.”

“Growing up as a gay man, before it was as socially acceptable as it might be now, I knew what it was to feel different from other people, to have a secret and to be frightened of it, even as I knew that the very thing that made me different made me who I was. I think all the characters grapple with a version of that, with a version of exceptionality. Can they come to peace with that thing that marks them as alien to their families and their loved ones? It was very personal to me, which is why I was so committed to writing all of it.”

“There’s a strong sort of outlaw tradition of queer response to horror. It’s a growing trend and a growing sociological and literary school of thought. The gay response to horror literature is very much en vogue currently and I hope I’m part of that tradition.”

Last year, he provided the screenplay for Genius, a bio-pic film directed by Michael Grandage based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor Of Genius by gay writer A. Scott Berg. It tells the story of Southern writer Thomas Wolfe and his connections with New Yorker Maxwell Perkins, his publisher. Perkins had already previously published works by the great American writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film stars Colin Firth as Perkins, Jude Law as Wolfe, Dominic West as Hemingway and Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald.

Up next, Logan is adapting Nathan Hill’s bestseller The Nix as a limited series for Netflix with J.J. Abrams producing and directing, and bringing Meryl Streep to her first television series.

His latest project was providing the screenplay for Alien: Covenant about you-know-what. Released at the start of the summer, it is a sequel to Prometheus (2012), the second installment in the Alien prequel series and the sixth installment in the Alien film series. It seems completely unnecessary to me, except that it stars Michael Fassbender. Still it was a worldwide hit. This installment was directed by Ridley Scott who did the original Alien (1979). More monsters!

Logan is no monster though. He is very attractive, in that butch, but broken impish Irish manner. He lives in Malibu and NYC. He has discreetly thanked an unnamed partner in his Tony Award acceptance speech for Red, and he has referred to him obliquely in interviews.

“I get out of bed very early. I’ve never been attracted to a Hollywood lifestyle. I live modestly. I don’t collect Porsches or do blow. I’m not comfortable socializing. I don’t go to Oscar parties. And nobody knows who I am. I value my anonymity. I’m rigorous about it.”

In the delightful Penny Dreadful I was very drawn to the fascinating character of Sir Ferdinand Lyle, a classic closeted gay character, played to perfection by gay actor/writer/musician Simon Russell Beale. He’s a dandy, his speech is a little lisping, his hair is kind of Trumpian ridiculous. Logan:

“Ferdinand Lyle is a fop, a joyous fop. But he’s also a very serious linguist and Egyptologist, and as the series unfolds, you see the intensity and the poignancy of that character emerge. The London of 1891 was not a time when gay men could be celebrated for their displays or affectations, as Oscar Wilde would be the first person to comment. So Lyle is, in one way, my attempt to grapple with the many complex sexual mores in the Victorian era.”

Beale in “Penny Dreadful”, photograph from Showtime.

For me, the best characters are the most complicated ones.

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