POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Tom Skerritt Changed My Life
By Dan Brown This has been a season of celebrity death. And the celebrities who are dying fall into one general category: Character actors who I’ve interviewed only once in my career as a journalist. Tom Skerritt passed last week. I interviewed him for an Alien 20th anniversary story when I was at the National Post in 1999. Check. Walter Koenig died this week. I interviewed him for an article about a Star Trek fan film when I was at CBC.ca in 2005. Check. Both are solid guys who made the most of their limited time on screen. And I like to think I learned something during the interviews I conducted with them, even if they were one-offs. When I spoke with Skerritt, he was an absolute gentleman. Just the fact he was willing to speak on the phone with some no-name journalist up in Canada says good things about him. I remember he told me about his affinity for The Duellists, which was Ridley Scott’s debut film and the picture he directed before starting work on Alien. Skerritt asked if I had seen the Napoleonic Era story, and I told him I hadn’t. “Treat yourself,” he replied warmly, meaning I would enjoy it. I have since then adopted that phrase. Whenever I'm telling a friend they should indulge a whim, I say with the same gusto, “Treat yourself.” They love to hear that. Unlike some big-name stars, Skerritt was pretty much the same guy off screen as on. That’s why I’d rather interview a character actor any day over the likes of Tom Cruise. Those who aren’t at the top of the A-list are willing to give honest answers and not just rely on a message track like politicians to get through encounters with journalists. Oh, and if you haven’t seen Alien, treat yourself, it’s a riot of character acting. (For the same assignment I also interviewed Skerritt’s co-star, Harry Dean Stanton, another character actor, he passed in 2017.) I got in touch with Koenig when the news broke that he would playing Chekov, the Star Trek character that made him semi-famous, in a fan film. This was a watershed moment. The thing is, by 2005, fan films had reached a new level of sophistication. So I asked Koenig, if a fan film stars an original cast member from Star Trek, and is written by a writer who worked on the original series, and has state-of-the-art special effects, how is that different from “real” Star Trek, especially if it’s embraced by the fan community? “I don’t think they can say it’s not Star Trek,” he said. “But it’s a Star Trek that has not been attempted before.” I admired his passion for the project, and he pointed out this wasn’t a bunch of amateurs in a barn somewhere pretend-playing Star Trek. And if people laughed at him for doing a fan film, what then? He was blunt: “Screw it if they feel that way.” Performers like Koenig and Skerritt aren’t divas, they didn’t put on any Hollywood airs or attitudes with the press. It was my pleasure to bring their stories to readers. I just hope actors like Martin Sheen, Ben Kingsley, George Takei, and Veronica Cartwright are taking care of their health, because I interviewed them, too, and I don’t want this trend to continue. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Legendary Priest is at Centre of Coady
By Dan Brown I recommend Donald Calabrese’s new graphic novel Coady for a couple reasons. First, you might – as I did – learn something about Canadian history, specifically about the Antigonish Movement in Nova Scotia. And second, the ending packs a powerful punch. In its languorous epilogue, the story takes a turn I did not see coming. The entire narrative strays into Twin Peaks territory. I won’t give it away, but do you remember how Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer had the same dream? It’s kinda like that. The rest of the book consists of alternating chapters. This structure is Calabrese’s way of telling two simultaneous stories. One is about the priest Moses Coady, who helped organize poor fisherman, farm workers and miners so they could improve their communities in the 1930s and 1940s, an effort that not only changed living conditions in Canada’s Ocean Playground, but also in other provinces and even globally. The other is about Kody Finnegan, a researcher who’s putting together a biography of Coady in the present day. She’s finding it hard to square the folk tales that have grown up around the priest, with what really might have happened back in the day. Is it possible Coady was strong enough to pull a horse and driver (not the other way around) when once visiting a remote village in the winter? At least one witness claims the fable is true.This uncertainty leads to some amazing scenes of magic realism from artist/writer Calabrese, as when Coady is depicted as a giant, in one panel writing on the landscape in a plowed field with a humongous pencil – literally making his mark on the province. In another section he grows so large during a conversation that his interlocutor fits on his shoulder. The parts featuring Finnegan will ring true to anyone who has been through grad school, including unkind comments from colleagues (it has been said university politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small). The deeper she gets into the priest’s story, the harder time she has distinguishing history from lore. To make matters even more interesting, if the biography sections are to believed, there was no one who did more to demystify the Coady legend than the clergyman himself. I spent a year working at a newspaper on the East Coast as a young journalist and I don’t recall hearing much about the Antigonish Movement, which – although he was derided in public meetings as a red by hecklers – Coady and his allies billed as a third way between capitalism and communism. And that ending! It still gives me a shiver. Coady, Donald Calabrese’s debut as a graphic novelist, is published by Conundrum Press. As always, I would love to hear in the comments about what graphic novels and comics you all are reading this week! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: This Column is Based on an Incredible True Story
By Dan Brown Based on a true story. Inspired by real events. Based on the incredible true life story. When it comes to marketing movies, phrases like these matter a lot. How do I know? Because no studio marketing team in Hollywood history has ever passed up a chance to use them in their ad campaigns, even if the film in question bears only a passing resemblance to the truth. But my purpose today isn’t to argue movies inspired by real-life events aren’t all that real or true. It’s to try to understand why these phrases keep popping up on movie posters and in trailers. So here’s the thing: When a motion picture is marketed as a true story, it lands differently. In the minds of movie fans, it’s not in the same category as fictional stories. It’s more compelling. In 1976, the film version of All the President’s Men debuted. It was based on the reporting of Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who were real journalists whose Watergate stories helped to force Richard Nixon, an actual U.S. president, to resign. About a year later, a George Lucas movie called Star Wars was released. It featured actors playing aliens, starship dogfights in space, laser swords, and a mystical power called the Force. None of that stuff is real. These two studio productions were received by audiences in radically different ways, and no discerning movie fan would put them in the same category. All the President’s Men horrified audiences because it told a story that everyone had lived through in real life. Even if Star Wars enthusiasts loved wookies or droids or Jedi Knights, no one expected to bump into them on the street. All the President’s Men appealed to a different part of an audience member’s brain, the part that detects BS. As I’ve noted in this space before, I work with young adults in both of my day jobs. And the word I hear the most from university students these days is “authenticity.” They are starved for it. They distrust its opposite – the fake, the plastic, the constructed. If a product is perceived as authentic, they will want to try it. If a celebrity is suspected of being a different person from how they outwardly present themselves, they are repelled. They distrust slick, surface representations. They want the real deal. And the big brains who work in the marketing departments in Tinseltown are aware of this, and they use this knowledge to their advantage. That’s why you still see films being sold on the fact they are true stories. That is, they are authentic. Which is why another 1970s release, The Amityville Horror, had the tagline “The terrifying truth behind a real-life haunted house.” The 1993 UFO-abduction flick Fire in the Sky had a similar advertising prompt: “Based on a true story. White Mountains, Arizona . . . Six workmen entered the forest. One didn’t come out. What really happened?” And it’s never going to stop. Even decades from now, when hologram technology has been perfected, or the studios invent a way to beam movies directly into the human brain, you can bet future marketing professionals will be making the same claims. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Review of Elise Gravel’s True Colors
By Dan Brown Elise Gravel’s True Colors came out last year, but I only now got around to reading the faux memoir. It was worth the wait. This graphic novel – in the form of a fictionalized diary – is charming and deeper than you might expect of a childhood diary. Gravel is a Montreal illustrator of children’s books, and creator of her own graphic novels. I’m not a woman who grew up in the 1990s, but I still appreciated her book. Off the top, I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending: In the afterword of True Colors, Gravel explains that when she was little, experts believed ADHD could only affect boys. “I was a girl who stayed out of trouble, but I would get really anxious and I felt different than the other kids – more immature, and just . . . weirder,” she says, looking back at her younger days. She wouldn’t be diagnosed until she was 35 years old. The rest of the story is told from her younger perspective. The first entry comes on September 28, 1991, as Gravel starts high school. It’s clear she’s dealing with a lot. “I’ve been feeling like a mutant lately,” she writes. “I don’t feel like being me today anyway.” She is “just normal enough” to fit in with her friends and classmates, although people are always telling her she’s too intense. The drawings that accompany her diary entries call to mind the work of Matt Groening and Lynda Barry, with a little Keith Haring thrown in. The kid version of Elise has lots of questions about herself, and the way the world works, such as “Do I have an actual personality, or am I just a collage of what I think other people want me to be?” and “Why do farts smell worse when you fart in a bathtub?” The reader can tell that she is at war with her own brain, which churns out “tons of crazy ideas.” A girl of many quick-to-pass obsessions, the central relationship in her life isn’t with her parents (who barely get a mention), but with her friend Asma, who is the only person who really gets her. The two are tight, until a third girl enters this Garden of Eden. Elise is despondent when the other two girls do things, like going to a movie, without her. Will she recover from this spiral? You’ll have to find out for yourself. I recommend True Colors, even if you weren’t a teen girl in the 1990s. You might not get the Milli Vanilli or Sam the Record Man references, but Gravel has done something unlikely by capturing the essential truth of what it feels like to grow up geeky. I would put it in the graphic-novel canon alongside Gilbert Hernandez’s Marble Season, which was also a Drawn & Quarterly publication. It’s just that good. As always, would love to hear in the comments about what comics or graphic novels you are reading these days! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Pop-Culture Column: Tom Cruise Isn’t The Only One Who Can’t Open A Movie
By Dan Brown There are no more A-list celebrities. Not if you define the term as an actor whose appeal is so broad, they can put enough bums in seats to ensure their new motion picture debuts in the top slot at the box office on its opening weekend. According to this definition, guess who’s not on the A-list? Some big names. Tom Cruise. Brad Pitt. Anne Hathaway. You may have heard how Cruise, the performer known for starring in the Mission Impossible and Top Gun franchises, came out with a new movie a couple weeks ago. Known for marketing the hell out of his work, Cruise’s megawatt smile and fetish for doing his own stunts couldn’t compel enough moviegoers to march to movie theatres earlier this month for a No. 1 debut. His environmental satire Digger pulled in just $8 million when it opened in theatres on the weekend of Oct. 2. You read that right – not $80 million, but $8 million. That amount made it the No. 4 movie that weekend. It’s expected, according to such news sources as Variety and Forbes, Digger will lose $245 million, making it one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history. And Cruise isn’t the only celeb who has been kicked off the A-list in recent weeks. Pitt’s Heart of the Beast, in which he co-stars with a German Shepherd, earned the third slot with $20 million when it opened on the weekend of Sept. 25. That may seem like a solid number, but consider this: The re-released Avengers: Endgame pulled in $26 million to win that weekend – and it’s a movie from 2019. There were signs Heart of the Beast was in trouble when the marketing campaign began to focus on Pitt’s canine co-star. That’s right: The cute dog was featured more prominently than Pitt himself. That’s how little confidence the film’s makers had in the laconic actor’s ability to draw an audience. Oh, and did you know Anne Hathaway had a movie out earlier this year? Not Verity or the Devil Wears Prada sequel or The End of Oak Street, but Mother Mary, which premiered the weekend of April 24. You likely aren’t the only person who hasn’t heard of it. Mother Mary was rejected by movie fans, coming in ninth that weekend with a total of $1.3 million. Hathaway probably owns houses worth more than that. The through line here is how having a big star in your motion picture isn’t a guarantee when it comes to performing well at the box office. We are conditioned to think such celebrities as Tom Cruise are sure bets when it comes to drawing a crowd, but it ain’t so. Their gravitational pull isn’t all that reliable. This is happening in the same year when feature films without big names – think Backrooms and Obsession – became wildly profitable after being marketed on the strength of their “concept” (Hollywood’s buzzword for a film’s genre), and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in box-office revenue. The unavoidable conclusion: Star power isn’t working at the multiplex right now. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Fall 2026 Mini-reviews
By Dan Brown Time for more mini-reviews! Here’s the lowdown on the stack of comics I picked up last week at L.A. Mood. As always, there’s no logic to these choices – other than each book showed up on my monthly pull list or I found it on the new-releases shelf in the store. Escape From New York: Escape From Chicago No. 1: Any fans of Snake Plissken out there? If so, you’ll want to pick up this Mad Cave Studios series. At this point in the Escape timeline, the United States has splintered into isolated, walled prison states (after Snake escaped from New York and L.A. on the big screen, methinks the Windy City is the next obvious setting for the character). The highlight here is the art from Val Rodriques, whose precise lines and panel play bring Frank Miller to mind. My only nitpick: Man, this one is grim. Needs more John Carpenter-esque satire. Batman of Two Worlds No. 1: Part of DC’s All In marketing campaign, I thought from the cover this would pair the main-continuity Dark Knight with his Absolute counterpart. I was wrong. No universes collide. Instead, we have Batman featured in a tale titled Short Cuts, and Absolute Batman in Cut Short. These are eight-page stories, so the pace is brisk. The art by Javi Fernandez and Nick Derington is uniformly strong. Concrete: Stars Over Sand No. 3 and 4: Have I told you lately how happy I am Concrete is back? This is the kind of smart storytelling that I love, so I give this miniseries my strongest recommendation. It is not to be missed. These two chapters detail Concrete’s shattered thinking as he copes with amnesia. Scientist Maureen Vonnegut, the title character’s love interest, also takes a harrowing helicopter ride. I miss the narrative voice from 1970s comics, but Chadwick’s “voiceover” here is simply masterful. Added bonus: Gorgeous painted covers. Fantastic Four First Foes: Dragon Man No. 1. All I saw was the Alan Davis cover, so I didn’t realize this series features not the comic-book Fantastic Four, but the Fantastic Four from last summer’s First Steps motion picture. So Mister Fantastic is drawn to look like Pedro Pascal with his dumb moustache. Most of the action revolves around Ben Grimm’s Thing, who is rendered in a Jack Kirby-esque way by artist Mark Buckingham. Fantastic Four No. 16: Another one-and-done story from series writer Ryan North, who has been alternating single-issue tales with longer story arcs. This issue takes the FF back to their roots as explorers, and outlines the consequences when the quartet reveal themselves to a planet of aliens that has previously not had First Contact. The plot is too convoluted to explain here, but imagine what would happen on our Earth if researchers found conclusive evidence that Jesus Christ wasn’t divine. Each time the Fantastic Four try to correct their mistakes, they end up just doing more harm to the unfolding history of the alien planet. Might have worked better as a two-parter. Fantastic Four DNX No. 17: Marvel’s First Family find themselves in what seems to be an endless cave. To make matters worse, they can’t remember who they are. It’s fun to see their personalities slowly (yet not fully) emerge as they try to find an exit. The Thing, because of his stony body, gives himself the name “Johnny Rockman.” I won’t spoil the ending, but there’s a reason why there’s so much humidity in that cavern. Bizarro Year None No. 3: I’ve never been a huge Superman fan, so clearly I’m not the target audience for this title, which has Bizarro trying to emulate the Man of Steel. I do love all the opposite comedy though. Life on Bizarro World is the result of “unintelligent design” and smoking is good for your health: “A pack a day increases lung capacity and wellbeing,” cigarette labels state. Co-written by Kevin Smith. The art from Nick Pitarra gives off Mad Magazine energy. Comics! The Magazine No. 7 and No. 8: Love the in-depth interview in No. 7 with frequent collaborators Ed Brubaker (writer) and Sean Phillips (artist), known for such tales as The Fade Out. There is also a focus in No. 8 on the ubiquitous pop-culture character du jour, Dungeon Crawler Carl. And yes, I do flip to the back to check out the comic-industry power rankings before reading anything else in the mag, whose digital director is London’s own Brian Garside. Why watch or listen to comic podcasts when you can read about them? What comics have you been reading lately? Anything good? I would love to hear your recommendations in the comments. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
