KING KONG

(Paramount)

Directed by John Guillermin Produced by Pino DeLauffentiis_

by Patrick Goldstein

My first clue that all this King Kong hoopla was getting out of hand came when I slipped into the local 7-11 for a case of Yoo-Hoo and a quick Rock Scene leaf-through for cleavage pix of Ms. Eleganza and saw a crowd of drooling little geeks besieging the check-out counter like Indians around a wagon train. “GIMMEEEE SLLLLURPPEEE!” they were all screeching—the urchins made such a racket that it took me twenty minutes just to stagger to the front of the check-outline (that Yoo-Hoo is heavy).

“What’s all this shit about!” I shouted to the old geezer behind the counter as the kids rummaged through the store banging on the freezer windows. The guy must have-been half-deaf, because. he started quoting me fertilizer prices (Can you believe it, a 7-11 store on manure?). I went over and collared one of the little demons, grabbing out of his hot little paws a sleazy plastic cup full of candy-colored sludge. The stuff smelled awful, sort of like the smegma salt they dump in Chicago streets after a heavy snow. “What’s this rotgut, kid?” I growled. He greedily snatched his cup back. “It’s a King Kong slurpee, asshole,” he sneered, slyly trying to kick me in the shins as he made his escape.

So it was. Kong meets 7-11: Whatta match-up. And that’s not all. Schrafft’s Candy is pushing King Kong chocolate and peanut butter candy (If you were addicted to Saturday morning TV like yours truly, you’d know how tacky the ads are, too). To top that, Sedgefield Jeans is giving away keychains with genuine hair from the mechanical Mr. K. (Actually horsehair, but then, who knows one set of pubes from another?).

Directed towards us more mature folks is the Jim Beam campaign, which offers a commemorative regal china bust of Kong (contents: one fifth) while busily promoting the King Kong cocktail (ingredients: one ounce bourbon, 3/4 ounce grenadine and orange juice—perfect for a Foghat concert).

I would bore you with more, but you get the picture, and I know what you -really want is the hot poop on the movie (Oh yeah, forgot about that, huh?). Well, let me tell you, as a bona fide alternate-voting member of the National Academy of Motion Pictures (Yeah, even get Christmas cards from Lou Wasserman), I am willing to give Kong the trophy already; it’s tough enough to get Marlon Brando on the podium, but a forty-foot ape?

Anyway, the movie’s not half as bad as you’d expect, after all the banana peel publicity. If you’ve seen the original picture, you know the plot, the producer has just updated it.

Instead of a movie crew looking for the Eighth Wonder of the World, we get a wacko oil company exec (played with imperfect foppishness by Charles Grodin, the guy who snared Cybill Shepherd in The Heartbreak Kid, so he’s had lots of practice with primates) hunting for an oil bonanza referred to as “the big one” (Yeah, lots of double entendres).

Along for the ride are a stowaway Princeton paleontology professor (Jeff Bridges) and the obligatory blonde bombshell (Jessica Lange). Bridges, who’s laden with straggly long hair and a beard (so we know he’s the ecology nut) plays the good gtiy Bruce Cabot role, while Lange (got to admit—she’s a pretty good looker) holds down the film’s romantic interest slot.

Supposedly she’s in love with Bridges but we all know who her real main squeeze is...the Big Bopper himself. The film’s hairiest problem is that it can’t make up its mind whether to milk the windy , improbable script for heartthrob melodrama or camp up the scenes for laughs. Of course, the script’s terrible, that’s why Kong steals the picture. He can’t talk. While everyone else is going down the gutter with banal speeches and lame repostes, Kong just blinks his sexy eyes, managing to look both endearing and menacing.

For Kong, the eyes have it. Only the young McCartney could rival a heavy-lidded stare so sultry and innocent. The technique works famously. Even my jaded companion, who’s earned her share of dream dates, crossed her legs for every Kong close-up. There’s even a couple of good gags that exploit the film’s obvious white girl/black giant sexual tension: too bad the special effects department couldn’t have built the star a suitably Kong-sized schlong. Then we could have settled that issue once and for all (I vote for Two-Tall Jones—you can even see it through his hip-pads).

I would tell ya the rest of the plot, but there’s not much to give away. Kong gets paptured, the cast returns to New York—you know the story. Let’s just say that Kong doesn’t have much hope for starring in the sequel. Although I can easily imagine him resurfacing in a , wimpy summer replacement private eye series, hopefully as “Kong-jack” “A tough but lovable police detective who sucks a palm tree instead of a lollipop”

Yes, the possibilities are endless.

Just remember—it wasn’t the airplanes, it was his agents who killed the beast and now they say there won’t be any sequels til the big guy gets a fatter percentage of the gross, more points for being executive producer, lets her boyfriend direct the pictures, hires and fires directors, tells Leon Russell how to rewrite the theme song, kicks Kris _ Kristofferson’s ass off the set until he sobers up_

Wait a minute, am I getting confused? Definitely. Like the storybooks say, one star dies and another is born.

Who’s On Next?

Report From The Press Counter-Convention

by Patrick Goldstein

Gay Talese looks depressed. Slumped over the makeshift speaker’s table, flicking cigarette ash off his rumpled grey suit, the lanky author of Honor Thy Father looks more than depressed. The poor guy seems positively suicidal. “What am I doing here with these cretins?” he mumbles distractedly to himself. “Is it the book? [Gay is still toiling on his War and Peace of sex in America] Is it my breath?”

To Gay’s right is a sextet of “distinguished” panelists, all corraledto discuss “Obscenity on The Run” at the fifth A.J. Liebling Counter-Convention of Journalism. (For those of you unfamiliar with the hallowed traditions of “Get me re-write, sweetheart” journalism, A.J. Liebling was a pioneer press critic, while the counterconvention title dates back to the debut gathering, which rivaled a stuffier, pinstriped slumber party. Somehow the dumb name stuck).

Anyway, on the starboard side are A1 Goldstein and Larry Flynt, publishers of Screw and Hustler respectively;

Molly Haskell, Village Voice film critic; Charles Rembar, a noted porn attorney; Larry Parrish, the crusading Memphis district attorney who has led ' the Deep Throat prosecution; and Professor Ernest van der Haag, from NYU, on hand to lend the DA some highbrow anti-porn support.

The moderator, New Yorker theatre critic Brendan Gill, is on hand to keep the proceedings in some order. The day-long fete offered other panels (New Times columnist Robert Scheer I stumped for Gordon Liddy-style break-in investigative reporting while during the “Gossip” panel Womens’ Wear Daily writer rjJancy Collins confessed “If it won’t kill little childred, I’ll print it”) but for my money, the obscenity crew supplied all the ingredients of a good front-page read: controversy, virulent character assassination, unintentionally comic self-styled experts, lurid poll data, sexual anecdotes, the threat of fisticuffs and even a pinch of hard news.

The panel’s ribald antics took on many of the characteristics of Jacobean drama, dividing participants into conveniently clustered warring camps: Goldstein, Flynt and Talese (poor Gay, an innocent amongst thieves).forming the sexual freedom faction, van der Haag and Parrish opting for harsh, scorched-earth tactics, and Haskell, nose high in the air, filibustering for art.

“I think what we need is not more sex,” she sighed, “but more art. It’s ludicrous to talk about porn films [a distasteful pause] in the same breath as Ulysses.” Most of the crowd groaned audibly. My neighbor, Molly’s hubby Andrew Sarris, glanced at me crossly. “Isn’t she missing the point?” I ventured.

A1 Goldstein put it more articulately. “I’m not upset with people criticizing me aesthetically,” he wheezed, his voice cracking like Andy Devine. “I’m upset about incarceration: What’s wrong with the lewd exposure of genitals?” he added, nudging Flynt, who scribbled notes during the debates. “Most of us know more about how to change a tire than how to fuck.”

Flynt, who entertained the capacity crowd with his blustering malapropisms (“Let’s have releuent pictures,” he suggested at one juncture), took up the cudgel . “There are two kinds of people who oppose pornography,” he explained, with hilariously forced dramatic effect, “those who don’t know what it is and those who don’t know what they’re missing.”

This set off a wave of predictable feminist outrage. “If you’re so dedicated to the First Amendment,” growled one pudgy woman in patched jeans, “why don’t you give the magazine away—for free?”

This desperation lob was just the kind of provocation Goldstein (who, it should be noted, has utterly no relationship to your humble correspondent) [What are you worried about, Patrick?—Ed.] had hoped for. He leaped to the offensive. “When John Stuart Mill [wrong Al, try Holmes] said it’s not OK to yell fire in a crowded theatre,” he croaked, “little did he know that the true test of the First Amendment credo would be for me to l shout pussy in a theatre full of j feminists.”

This sally prompted scattered boos from the predominately working press crowd. It also killed any chance of serious, issue-oriented discussion.

Thereupon, the afternoon skidded | downhill. Ms. Haskell glared fiercely, Mr. Flynt offered windy mixedmetaphor orations (my fave: his comparison of a recent Supreme Court decision to “sowing dragons’ teeth in the fertile soil of the First Amendment”), while the remaining experts practiced their dusty high school debate tactics.

Professor van der Haag came to life with a salvo against permissiveness. “No society can survive without affectionate bonds between people,” he opined in a thick Teutonic accent. “If they look at each other simply as orifices and organs, as if they were flies to be swatted...”

Parrish, the Memphis DA, filled out the Pirandellian stock company perfectly. Obviously cast as the heavy, he sported a razor-trim and natty blue suit and tie , spouting interminable legal rigamarole guaranteed to send the most alert jury into a stupor. (Your correspondent, far from alert at this juncture, lapsed into a semi-coma.)

“It’s OK for you to read Screw in the privacy of your home,” he noted deep into the monologue, “but it’s not all right for A1 Goldstein to publish or distribute it.” This roused Gay Talese from his novelistic rev/erie: “You mean only A1 Goldstein can read his magazine and be within the confines of the law?” he sputtered. Parrish stared impassively down the table. “That’s correct,” he replied cooly. A1 Goldstein beamed. As long as they spell my name right...

After this exchange the audience \X/as pretty much anesthetized. The debates apparently brought our esteemed auteurist neighbor to the verge of slumber as well. Ms. Haskell continued to glare. I wandered off in search of Nora Ephron and a stiff drink (well, not exactly in that order), determined to ask the star of the panel on “The Art of the Interview” some incisive questions.

Like: “Does Sally Quinn bleach the bottom half too?”, “Did Carl tell you who. Deep Throat was?” and, naturally, “Where’s a cozy little tavern on the East Side?”.. .very technical stuff, you see.

As I left, Ms. Haskell had launched yet another counter-offensive for the cause of art , so it’s difficult to truly do her thesis justice. As I reached the exit, though, she said: “The porno film business is only out for the quick buck.” Some disgruntled, spectacled survivor of the copy desk shook his head furiously back and forth, saying, “That’s quick fuck, honey, quick fuck.”