May 22, 2010, Austin American-Statesman

Susan Tyrrell isn’t there when a journalist shows up to meet her. This is not a surprise. The journalist is expecting a no-show, a late show, a show-off — a show of some kind, preferably grand and spangled. Prickly and difficult will do, too. It is the type of interview you enter with a built-in flinch, light armor steeling you for things you’ve only heard about, weird stuff, wonderful stuff. Adventures, happy and horrifying, that you are sure will put you in a vulnerable state of unforeseen reaction — mouth gapes and head shakes — that grant your subject the upper hand. She’s feeding you, and sometimes the legend tastes fishy. Tyrrell seems like a feeder, shoveling forkfuls of braised auto-mythology.

Ah, here she comes.

Tyrrell is tiny. She is in a wheelchair. She has no legs below the knees.

She rolls up to the table, where I have been waiting with her close friend Yvonne Lambert of Austin band the Octopus Project. Lambert introduces us. I shake Tyrrell’s hand, which is wrapped in a scratchy wheelchair glove, and click on the tape recorder.

“Good luck with that bitch you’re interviewing,” Tyrrell says in the third person.

Now, there we go.

Tyrrell is a movie star, though she’d be the first to tell you that that star is all but extinguished, wisps of smoke curling off the ash pile of flops. Show business burned her early and she bears the scars with a rancor that’s lightly camouflaged by a beaming, charge-ahead optimism. She has a dry, wry, dirty sense of humor that deflects misfortune, curdles cynicism.

Tyrrell has acted in 75 films and television shows and earned a best supporting actress Oscar nomination as a blowsy barfly in John Huston’s 1971 boxing drama “Fat City.” She won a Saturn Award in 1978 from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films for best supporting actress in “Andy Warhol’s Bad.”

“It weighs a ton,” Tyrrell says. “I use it for a doorstop.”

She played a whore in “Islands of the Stream” (1977), a rowdy biker grandma in the John Waters comedy “Cry-Baby” (1990) and a three-inch-tall woman in “Big Top Pee-Wee” (1988). She’s appeared on “Baretta,” “Starsky and Hutch” and “Kojak.” She watched her roles increasingly consigned to misfits, hags, nutjobs.

Tyrrell speaks shakily but bitingly. Hers has not been an easy life, and you can hear it in her scratchy voice and punctuating groans.

Mother issues (they haven’t talked in 40 years). Hanging out with the outré Warhol gang in New York, where she had a nervous breakdown. A traumatic sexual incident with John Huston that forever damaged her. Wild soirées. A beautiful two-year love affair with Hervé Villechaize, the little man who played Tattoo on “Fantasy Island.” And, of course, the legs, which were amputated in 2000 due to a rare blood disease called essential thrombocythemia. She doesn’t give a damn about the legs.

At a glowing 65, Tyrrell has short-term memory lapses that fray her long, ropy anecdotes. Often she loses her train of thought. “Where are we now?” she asks again and again. Oh, yes …

Tyrrell on this busy night at hipster magnet the Highball wears a tight black T-shirt, straw cowboy hat, blue bandanna snug around her neck and black pants that are not filled by her prosthetic legs. Her lipstick is a kittenish red. She sports dark glasses, like a blind woman.

“Sorry about my sunglasses,” she says. “I have hideous allergies that eat my eyeballs out. It’s like cutting an onion in half and rubbing it in your face.”

Tyrrell was born Susan Cremer (pronounced Kramer and changed for showbiz reasons), but for years people have called her simply SuSu.

“They do. If they can stomach it,” she says. She named her rescue dog — “a gorgeous pedigree gray-silver poodle” — ZuZu. (“I love dogs,” she says. She agrees that the fur-covered purse in her lap looks like a small dog.)

Speaking of pups, a Salty Dog cocktail — a greyhound in a salt-rimmed glass — arrives. Tyrrell takes a sip and puckers. “Yowza!” The drink is strong. She likes it.

***

After years toggling between New York and Los Angeles, Tyrrell quietly settled in the Austin area two years ago. At the time she was in town to present a special screening of the 1983 B-horror movie “Night Warning,” in which she plays a psychotic aunt, at the Alamo Ritz. She couldn’t bear to hang around and watch the film. She loathes the movies that “I had to do that were all that were left for me” as her career waned.

“I didn’t look at it,” she says. “I was in nine different bars with nine different tequilas and just having a fine time.”

While in Austin, where her niece lives, doctors found a clot in her heart. “I was so sick and out of it on a couch for a year.”

She’s kept her residency low-key. “I don’t go out much. I don’t crave it.” Yet in April, at the Alamo South, she appeared at a screening of one of her favorite films, the surreal 1982 cult musical “Forbidden Zone,” in which she stops the show as the singing, jiggling Queen Doris of the Sixth Dimension. The movie was followed by an exhibit of her humorous, sexually charged paintings at the Highball.

Tyrrell lives in a two-story, plant-filled Cedar Park apartment with ZuZu, a smart-mouthed green parrot named Rico and a large scorpion she recently captured and put in a jar. She wants to move to South Austin. She has no idea how long she will stay in Texas.

“I’m not here for long, I hope. I want to see things. I’m nomadic. I want to keep traveling till I drop dead.”

There’s one thing she misses here. “I’m very sad that I don’t see more black people,” Tyrrell says. “When I’m at the market, I ask, ‘What did you do with all the black people?’ And they give me some lame (expletive). They tell me to go over I-35. I’m going to make that journey some day.

“I love black people. I adore them. It’s called soul, baby.”

***

Tyrrell’s acting career began on the New York stage when she was a teenager. Her first role was opposite Art Carney in the comedy “Time Out for Ginger.”

In New York she was sucked into Warhol’s orbit, becoming terrific friends with Candy Darling, a Warhol Superstar and transsexual drag queen. Tyrrell resisted Warhol’s blandishments to join the gang.

“I’m a loner and an outsider. Those things strangle me. For me, there is not strength in numbers,” she says.

Unlike the Warhol clan, “I didn’t do substance abuse then,” Tyrrell says. “But later on in life I found beer and acid. They were my best drugs. And mescaline.

“What do you take?”

***

John Huston destroyed her dreams of Hollywood stardom. The director of “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” hired Tyrrell to play the alcoholic Oma in “Fat City” and proceeded to pull the casting couch routine. Anger bubbles as she relates, in graphic detail, how he forced himself on her.

“It was disgusting. He was looking down on me like an old hound dog. I was mortified. I thought I was better than that.”

She refuses to call it rape, and she never officially reported it.

She once told an interviewer, “He stole something sacred from me. He’s the seed for all my behavior.”

“That one incident was like a car crash to me,” she says. “I broke down. And I made a pledge to myself that I would always” — she pauses emotionally. “I’m sorry. I haven’t talked about this in years.”

It was a downslide from there, she says. Her acting career is “disappointing, to say the least. I loved Bette Davis, and I felt I was going to be the next Bette Davis. I knew I had it in me to do a dossier of roles. I so wanted it.”

I ask again about her career, as politely as possible.

“You mean how did I end up in so much crap?” she snaps.

“I don’t know if you really think it’s crap,” I say.

“Yes, I think it’s crap! I know what crap is.”

And that’s that.

***

If you want to see Susan Tyrrell soften like a marshmallow and radiate like a smitten teenager, bring up what is perhaps the highlight of her life, her love affair with Hervé Villechaize.

They met in the mid-’70s, when Tyrrell was starring in a play and the director needed a little person for a role. Tyrrell told a friend, “‘I need a most fabulous midget,’” she recalls, adding, “We didn’t say ‘little people’ back then.”

Her friend replied: “I have the midget-est midget for you.”

Tyrrell and Villechaize fell in love and lived together for two years in a Laurel Canyon house in Los Angeles. They later performed together in “Forbidden Zone.”

“He was so damn cute. I loved him. He rocked my world,” she says, almost giddy.

Long after their affair ended, Villechaize killed himself in 1993.

“Oh, I miss him. God, I miss him. We just had a blast together,” she says. “He was hilarious, had the most amazing wit. We cooked. He loved to wash my back. He was the best boyfriend.”

Tyrrell is single. She says softly, coming down from her memories, “I don’t even know if I’m open to love.” Yet she rules out nothing.

***

Self-awareness like Tyrrell’s, a scrappy realistic outlook, is hard-earned. She’s met adversity and slain it. There are grumbles but few regrets. One moment she fumes, the next she cackles joyously.

In the ’90s — “I’m terrible with dates,” she says — Tyrrell embraced her disappointments in the kaleidoscopic one-woman play “My Rotten Life: A Bitter Operetta.” She calls it a “swan song. I wanted to add everything up in a perverted way. Just the kind of show I like — nasty!”

It ran for eight months in Los Angeles. (A video of the show is at susantyrrell.com.)

She found refuge in painting in her mid-30s. She lived with painter George Condo for three years and started working on her own art when they broke up. Acting jobs had nearly vanished.

Tyrrell paints in acrylics, in loud hues. Human genitalia and “people gettin’ it on” are inspirations, she says. The paintings are lewd and funny. She stays up until four in the morning painting and gets up late in the afternoon. She’s even painted her prosthetic legs with luxuriant designs of lizards and roses that look like tattoos.

This is where the legs come in. This is where you’d think double amputation would ruin a person. This is where Susan Tyrrell gets tough.

Within days of the essential thrombocythemia diagnosis, gangrene set in.

“I kissed my legs goodbye way before they cut them off,” Tyrrell says. “I told them, ‘I know what’s going on. Just cut ‘em off! Quick!’

“I always said that I was the perfect person to lose their legs. If anybody has to lose them, take mine.”

She’s glib about it, and an explanation of her indifference is maddeningly elusive.

Tyrrell is on her second Salty Dog. “It’s good.” She looks at me. “You’re growing two heads.”

Josh Lambert, Yvonne’s husband, who is also in Octopus Project, has joined us. Josh and Yvonne have become two of Tyrrell’s best friends in Austin.

“Youth! We’re from the same tribe,” Tyrrell says. “That’s a treasure. It’s a love affair.”

Tyrrell doesn’t drive and needs help around the house, and Yvonne Lambert is there for both duties, as a friend.

“It’s weird and amazing to meet someone who’s so much older than you and find that you have so much in common,” Lambert says. “It’s fun to learn things from her, and she learns things from me, too.

“She’s so caring, so giving. I think a lot of people see her as a very salty, sassy, saucy lady, and that’s part of her. But the SuSu I fell in love with is this beautiful, good-hearted, sweet lady.”

For all the good in her life now, Tyrrell is restless. She’s not happy, but she’s not unhappy either.

“I’m not thrilled. To be happy I’d have to be cut free, traveling,” she says.

“I just want to go home.”

She doesn’t know where that is.

Jan. 9, 2009, Austin American-Statesman

Mickey Rourke, bless his heart, looks like a big basted bird in “The Wrestler,” a wincing character study of a macho man whose life’s passion has skidded to its expiration date. Rourke’s professional wrestler — a tights-and-tattoos brand of brawler — isn’t going down easily, though, and it’s this internal battle, not the cringingly theatrical ones in the smack-thud ring, that Darren Aronofsky’s brutal yet remarkably sensitive character study is about.

Rourke gleams with blood and sweat through much of the movie, and he radiates a bizarre, battered physicality that almost seems fabricated from old rubber. He’s Randy “the Ram” Robinson, a wrestling icon coming off the high of his glory years in the 1980s, when he was a superstar bone-cruncher, vanquishing the likes of the Ayatollah and other garishly named combatants. Bronzed and bulging on steroids, with a puffy, engorged face, Rourke’s Ram looks chiseled from red clay, like the less sunburned brother of Hellboy.

The film opens in a blast of hard-rock nostalgia, with vintage posters of the Ram’s classic bouts streaming by to the throb of Quiet Riot’s “Metal Health (Bang Your Head).” Then it goes dark and the screen portentously reads: “Twenty years later.”

Before it lights up again, you hear a wheezy, phlegm-larded cough, the requiem for a beaten and lonely man. The camera pans in on Rourke, sitting sweaty, head down, in an empty locker room. He’s just finished a bout, which has taken all he has. He’s the pugilist at rest, a self-styled warrior who has endured a life of blows and bloodletting in the name of gladiatorial entertainment.

The shot shimmers with melancholy beauty, bathed in fluorescent lights and cementing right there the movie’s soul-stripping concerns.

So much of Rourke’s resigned and furrowed performance, heralded as the actor’s unlikely comeback, emanates from his flamboyant appearance. His look reveals volumes about the character: the paid-for tan and spangly spandex pants; the steroidal heft and the peroxided, Portuguese man-of-war hair cascading down his back. These are the trappings of showbiz, choreographed wrestling included, and the traps of maintaining high-voltage vanity. (The Ram even drives an old Dodge Ram van. He clings to that kind of chintzy pride.)

But vanity’s a dicey addiction for a guy in his mid-50s who uses his body as a weapon. He’s dented, perforated and creaky. His ticker is on the blink. He wears a chunky yellow hearing aid, an exquisite touch by the filmmakers that telegraphs a violent past and a compromised present.

Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert Siegel (a former writer for The Onion) give Randy a parallel character in the aging stripper Cassidy, played with bruised spunk by Marisa Tomei. Both work jobs that trade in glamour and that are allergic to age. Her fine looks have scarcely dimmed, but customers are starting to notice the crow’s feet on this 40-ish mother trying to fulfill frat-boy fantasies. Randy likes her a lot.

A smallish, human-scale drama, “The Wrestler” moans with melancholy, if never too loudly. It’s sharp enough to catch the humor of life, even when it’s down, and to latch on to even the flimsiest of hopes. It knows how people operate, and it’s keenly attuned to place, presenting desolate pockets of blue-collar New Jersey like a dead-end tundra where old wrestlers go to die. Alongside the iffy romance with Cassidy, Randy also is thrown an estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), who doesn’t know how to hate him and a demeaning day job that requires a ghastly hair net.

The film also nails the crazy cartoon fury of professional wrestling, which leapfrogs sport and flourishes into an absurd theater of pain that runs on fictional rivalries and blueprinted grudges. Metal chairs bonk heads, plate-glass shatters across torsos, bodies are pile-driven into coils of barbed-wire. Aronofsky keeps it live and raw in the ring, with hand-held cameras chasing the frenzy. There’s none of the ethereal, slo-mo grandeur of the boxing matches in “Raging Bull,” just smashing, trashing whiplash.

With a cast of hulking real-life wrestlers, the pre-fight parlance between brawlers smacks of truth. “I’ll give you a low blow, follow-up with a bulldog,” Randy’s opponent tells him as they strategize backstage. Or my favorite, which quivers with sadistic humor: “Are you cool with the staple gun?”

At moments like this, the film edges toward docu-realism. Aronofsky, perhaps chastened after the failure of his flatulent fantasy “The Fountain,” shoots with economy and a plainspoken indie grain that’s conducive to the straight-forward story of loss and redemption so familiar in the sports drama.

Of course, what makes the movie work as well as it does, enlisting our empathy with a big heart and emotional sobriety, is Rourke playing a role that so uncannily reflects his acting career. Like the Ram’s, Rourke’s winning streak — “Diner,” “Pope of Greenwich Village,” “Body Heat,” “Barfly” — took place in the ’80s. Rourke then, in tabloid argot, flipped. His movies got worse to dreadful, their toxic gasses killing his career.

“The Wrestler” reeks of regret and curdled dreams, but its star, in a searingly tender performance, fights hard against the dying of the klieg lights. Maybe that’s why the film wears its valedictory air so comfortably.

She’s bubbly and beaming, high-volume, with a flip of dark hair and a face like a lollipop. She irks as she endears, bemuses as she bewitches. She’s a bundle of energetic contradictions, bursting here, retracting there. Her expressions blink and change like a neon sign. Her eyes are popping globes. And she just sold you a bunch of car insurance.

Flo is her name. She’s the spokeswoman for Progressive Auto Insurance, lighting up televisions in a series of commercials in which her perky cashier pitches the money-saving merits of Progressive to customers. She works in a sterile, all-white big-box store, and her florid makeup stands out like paint spilled in snow.

First she caught our eye; now she’s snatched our heart. Viewers are smitten. They’re crushin’. They want to know: Who’s that girl?

From a recent blog at HoustonPress.com, with the headline “The Cult of the Progressive Car Insurance Chick”:

“Am I the only one completely and totally enamored of the woman in the television ads for Progressive car insurance? You know, the ones starring that babelicious brunette named Flo with her ‘tricked-out name tag’ and her ’60s style eye makeup and her kissable red, red lips?”

No, sir, you are not. There’s more where that mash-note came from, out there in the blogosphere’s infinite confessional space: “She’s hot.” “She’s weird but, God, she’s fine!”

Others have naughtier ideas that they’re perfectly comfortable sharing with the world, even if we can’t do so here.

“It’s so weird,” says Stephanie Courtney, the actress who plays Flo.

We spoke to Courtney because we had to. We had to know if she was real or just a cartoon character. If she was at all like the effervescent Flo. If she really wore that much make-up and, hey, who does your hair?

Courtney, 38, has been playing Flo for about a year, and was recently signed to do 12 more Progressive ads. Which makes her the face and voice of Progressive, a peer of the Geico gecko (do they ever hang out, compare rates?) and the Verizon guy. She follows in a heady tradition of corporate mascots, from Palmolive’s Madge to Tony the Tiger.

It’s been quite a ride for Courtney, a senior member of famed Los Angeles improv troupe the Groundlings. (Courtney and the group performed in September during the Out of Bounds Improv Sketch Comedy Festival in Austin.)

It began with a simple audition for a commercial last fall. She showed up in a polo shirt and ponytail. She did some improvisation.

“They wanted someone with a lot of personality,” Courtney says by phone from her Los Angeles home.

They liked her and signed her.

Then, the look. That look.

They cut her hair, gave her bangs. They subjected her to two hours of hair and make-up.

“They tease my hair, spray it and stick the headband in it,” Courtney explains.

“And the makeup is like painting a portrait on my face,” she says, laughing. “It’s insane. It totally changes things on my face. It’s like having a mask on.”

One of Flo’s best-known lines is: “Wow! I say it louder.” (You had to be there.)

Courtney has popped up in the movies “The Heartbreak Kid” and “Blades of Glory,” and was one of four leads in the smart adult comedy “Melvin Goes to Dinner,” which won the audience award at South by Southwest in 2003. She also has a recurring role as a gossipy switchboard operator on the hit show “Mad Men.” And you can see her doing yoga in a new Glade commercial.

The job pays well, Courtney hints. She doesn’t have to worry anymore about pesky things such as rent.

How much is Courtney like flamboyant Flo?

“It’s me at my silliest,” she says. “You start off with a script, but at the end they usually let me put a little zinger in there. We put a little mustard on it. That’s when it gets fun.

“Flo could be one of my improv characters, always on and sort of cracked in a weird way.”

But who is Flo? What is she? People wonder …

Like this blogger: “Is it her fabulous comic timing, her over-the-top facial expressions, her cute-as-a-button retro flip? Or is it the slight hint of a bad girl that lies just under the surface? The promise of a tattoo under that checkout girl uniform? The possibility of a motorcycle parked out back?”

Her character has been compared to a vintage Vargas pin-up girl, ’50s burlesque dancer Betty Page and, adds Courtney, a “fetish chick.”

“I don’t know what it is,” she says. “The way I play her, she’s pretty much the most asexual thing on TV right now. I think the Geico lizard puts out more sexual vibes than Flo does. But I do think the cavemen are totally crushable.”

Though Courtney is engaged to a sixth-grade teacher, Flo appears alluringly single. So pine away, in the same brunette-crush way you did with Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island” and Velma on “Scooby-Doo.”

Because things couldn’t get much stranger than they already are for Courtney. Top this: People are dressing up as Flo for Halloween.

“That makes me so happy. But I do have to warn them that it takes two hours in hair and make-up,” she says. “I wish them luck.”

Werner Herzog admits he’s a “skeptic” of 3-D movies, but he made a concession with his new film, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” a 3-D documentary that takes a wide-eyed tour inside the Chauvet Cave in France, whose vast limestone walls are emblazoned with animal paintings more than 30,000 years old—the oldest ever discovered.

Because the cave is accessible only to scientists, Mr. Herzog had to acquire special permission from the French government to film inside and had to adjust to extreme time and technical limitations, using a crew of only four.

What the veteran filmmaker, 70, discovered inside was a world of subterranean splendor, namely cave paintings in pristine condition—Ice Age menageries of rhinos, lions, mammoths, bison and cave bears, amid glistening lunar-like surfaces.

Mr. Herzog, whose career straddles both features and documentaries, narrates “Forgotten Dreams” with his signature blend of philosophical, humorous and grandiloquent commentary, adding a layer of curious depth to the images.

The film, opening April 29 in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, then other cities, isn’t just for art house audiences. Children can appreciate its riches, said Mr. Herzog from his Los Angeles home: “You do not need to be an intellectual to be in complete awe at what you are seeing.”

The Wall Street Journal: What was so special about this subject that you decided to shoot in 3-D?

Mr. Herzog: As normal, thinking people we assume that paintings on the wall are fairly flat. But when I was checking out the cave for the first time without any cameras it was immediately clear that it would be imperative to shoot in 3-D, because it’s all limestone in the cave, a drama of formations, bulges and niches and protrusions and pendants. And all of this was utilized by the artists 32,000 years ago. A bulge would be the neck of a bison charging at you. A niche would serve as a place where a shy horse would look out. So it was really, really clear that it had to be 3-D.

What drew you to the cave in the first place?

In a way, cave paintings are where my own intellect and fascinations began. When I was 12 or 13 I saw a book about cave paintings in the display window of a bookstore. And it was just staggering, so striking to see this. There was a horse and it said “Paleolithic paintings,” and I really wanted to have this book, but I couldn’t buy it. I worked for months as a ball boy on tennis courts. Each week I would sneak by the store and see if the book was still there. I was afraid somebody else would buy it. Finally I bought it in this kind of awe. Looking at these paintings in that book is still in me. I actually explained this to the French minister of culture. That was one of my arguments why I had to make the movie and not a French director.

Was there any contest of what was most beautiful to you in the cave? There’s so much there—the crystal formations, the stalagmites, the ancient animal bones on the floor and the paintings themselves.

It’s interesting that you’re mentioning it, because when you enter the cave the first thing that’s most unexpected is the beauty of the cave: the crystal cathedrals, the stalactites and stalagmites, the bones—exactly the sequence in which you describe it. It’s stunning. Four thousand skulls of extinct cave bears, rib cages, vertebrae. And then you have the almost fresh footprints of the cave bears, though you know they went extinct 20,000 years ago. The freshness is so stunning, so fresh that you think that somebody is looking at you from the dark. But for me, it would be the lions that are most beautiful. A whole group of lions is stalking something. We do not know what exactly. Their eyes are exactly aligned. Every single lion is crouching and sneaking and stalking something. The intensity of this panel is incredible.

How does this movie fit into your body of work thematically?

I thought about this because right now I am finishing this film “Death Row” with death-row inmates, which will be a 90-minute or two-hour film. But I have material of such intensity that I will also make what I call in quotes a “mini-series” of films based on singular cases. And I thought about what the title might be of the mini-series. It dawned on me that it would be something that would also fit the cave film: “Gazing Into the Abyss.” The cave film is really looking deep into the origins of the modern human soul, looking into the dark recesses of time, where time becomes unfathomable. There is an abyss of time, an abyss of the human soul. And in “Death Row,” wherever you look, you look into an abyss, an abyss of the human condition. It’s a theme you can see in many of my films, such as “Aguirre.” It doesn’t mean it has to be a dark gaze into it. Sometimes you look into the wonderful, joyful side like in “Bad Lieutenant,” where you have the bliss of evil.

You’re an extremely fast filmmaker, a lot like Woody Allen.

Woody Allen is like a snail. He makes a film a year. I make two to three films a year.

How do you do it?

I make fast decisions. I know what I want to do. Projects are pushing me so hard that you can’t even believe it. I have to wrangle them, like home invasion. How do you get the burglars out of your home, how do you get them on the screen? I edit digitally and you can edit almost as fast as you are thinking. Many of my colleagues lose themselves in the possibilities. They create 22 parallel versions and can’t decide which one is the best. I just do one and do it straightaway with all the urgency of the material.

Dec. 2, 2005, Austin American-Statesman

David Carradine has long skinny legs that are stretched out like bamboo poles, naked, knobby, porpoise-smooth. They are exposed from the ankle to way up the thigh, several unsettling inches past the tan line to scary areas that make one’s eyes avert in a violent spasm. He looks supremely relaxed and casual, sunk deep in a chair with those bare legs leveled at the floor, elbow propped on an arm rest to keep the cigarette in his fingers close to his faintly duckish lips.

Carradine is dressed as a caveman. Cave-people, according to the Discovery Channel, didn’t wear much apparel. Innocent of vanity, they sported spots and dashes of clothing — loin cloths, tattered shorts, shredded bikini tops, sometimes nothing at all. And so Carradine, former star of the indelible television series “Kung Fu,” in which he sometimes wore little more than a monk robe, is sparsely draped in the rags of primitive man. His shoes are ratty moccasins, his shirt random scraps of earth-tone felt. His pants: nonexistent.

“This is only half of it,” Carradine says with a swell of pride. “I throw fur on top of it all.”

He points to a heap of fake black fur on the floor of his actor’s trailer, which rests on the magnificently dusty moonscape of a limestone quarry in North Austin. Scenes from the movie “Homo Erectus” are being shot here, one of the film’s many locations, including Hamilton Pool and Enchanted Rock, that suggests prehistoric landscapes. (A limestone quarry? How very “Flintstones.”)

“And in the movie my hair is sticking straight up like this,” says Carradine, teasing out long, wild gray-blond strands to make a static-electric blast. “Out to here.”

What are you going to do when playing a caveman but go with it? Carradine seems to be having fun with the role of Mookoo, the blustering chief of his cave tribe. His son Ishbo, who is goading his species to evolve, is played by a Woody Allenish Adam Rifkin, the film’s writer and director. Talia Shire plays Carradine’s cave-wife and Ali Larter (“Legally Blonde”) plays Rifkin’s elusive dream girl. “Homo Erectus” is the third low-budget feature produced by the University of Texas Film Institute and its for-profit arm, Burnt Orange Productions.

Carradine’s last major role was the title villain in Quentin Tarantino’s martial-arts revenge opus “Kill Bill,” the success of which hurled the actor back into public view after a disappearance that seemed to have lasted decades. Actually, it did last decades. His most recent watchable film before “Kill Bill” was the Jesse James western ”The Long Riders,” co-starring his brothers Keith and Robert. That was 1980.

“Playing in ‘Kill Bill’ helped,” Carradine says. “Up until then everyone was saying ‘Grasshopper.’ Now everyone says ‘Bill.’”

Climbing into Carradine’s trailer, one is swallowed in a rich fog from his English Ovals, fancy, filterless cigarettes he lights the way some people pop peanuts. He has the grainy rasp and paper-bag flesh of a smoker and the gruff pluck of someone turning 69 on Thursday.

“He’s so fit!” says Carolyn Pfeiffer, head of Burnt Orange, on the set of “Homo Erectus.” “He’s doing lots of action scenes. Right now they’re shooting a battle. I wish I knew his secret.”

Carradine doesn’t rise or offer a hand when a visitor enters. He produces a flask from a leather satchel, takes a quick nip, puts it back. Smoke twists from his mouth and nostrils.

He took the caveman movie because he didn’t have anything else to do. Script unseen, he accepted the part, saying “Why not?” Eventually, he read Rifkin’s screenplay.

“It’s genius. It’s half-way between Monty Python and Quentin Tarantino,” Carradine says. “It’s full of philosophy while being funny.”

Gazing over Carradine’s extensive career in B bilge and drive-in titillations, it’s apparent the actor might take a lot of roles before reading the script. A magazine once dubbed him the “Most Working Actor in the Universe” because he made 19 movies in 18 months. “Actually,” Carradine says, “they missed a couple.”

Like Michael Caine if he made mostly genre and exploitation flicks, Carradine can’t say no. A dependable character actor, much like his famous father John, Carradine loves to work, and needs the money. He knows he’s made irrevocable rubbish. Many of his movies are exiled straight to cable and video.

But there have been significant movies. He was the lead in Martin Scorsese’s 1972 Hollywood debut “Boxcar Bertha,” played Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s “Bound for Glory” and co-starred in Roger Corman’s cult favorite “Death Race 2000.”

“I have made 112 feature movies,” Carradine says. “Some of them were great and some were phenomenal: ‘Bound for Glory,’ ‘The Long Riders.’ What about the one I did for Ingmar Bergman (‘The Serpent’s Egg’)? What other American actor can say they starred in a Bergman film?

“I always thought I should do everything,” including keeping up his longtime roots-rock band Soul Dogs, he says. “But you do movies that are straight to video, the studios don’t want you. So I’ve always been catch as catch can. I’ve turned down stuff that is odious to me. But if it’s at all interesting I tend to do it. It’s not always about the money. I just like to work.”

But sometimes it is about the money.

“I went through a period when I was trying to get out of a hassle with the IRS, and I said the way I’m going to do it is by taking every role and make enough money to pay them off,” he says. “It didn’t work. I’ve just about got rid of them.”

Despite “low-tide moments,” Carradine kept working. “I thought, What am I going to do to get out of this? I’m going to wind up like Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

Eventually Tarantino, known to revive atrophied careers, wrote a prime piece for Carradine, whom Tarantino plainly idolized. “Kill Bill” sparked Carradine’s comeback. “Homo Erectus,” he hopes, will fuel the momentum.

“This is going to be a very hot little movie. It’s really cheap but we’re doing it right. It’s going to look like it cost a lot more than it did. And I managed to get paid pretty well,” he says.

“I mean, hey, I’m living in a big house with a lot of land around it. I have a clay tennis court. I’m driving a Ferrari. I have no complaints whatsoever.”

He crosses his naked legs. Smoke seeps from a grin.

“I think people have woken up to the fact that I’m still around and that I can still kick (bleep).”

A wonderfully bizarre transformation occurs in Harry Altman when the rubbery 12-year-old is stumped by a word during the National Spelling Bee: He turns into Jim Carrey.

In the documentary “Spellbound,” Harry stands at the microphone and is lobbed the word “banns,” a seemingly slayable little noun that wraps its tentacles around Harry’s brain and squeezes tight.

The boy chokes, and the struggle within his head is displayed in an anarchy of facial contortions that would make Tex Avery blush. His face resembles a wrestling match under a sheet, twisting this way and that, stretching, crinkling, tongue flailing, eyes bulging.

Looking as if he sipped strychnine, not so much stalling as trying to shake free the proper letters, Harry is told by the judges to get a move on. We worry about the child.

“Spellbound” works on us like that. We start to worry about the eight children who are its subjects as we follow them from home and school to the annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., the Olympiad of word nerds. We want the lot of them to win, vanquishing gnarly, polysyllabic octopi like “cephalagia” with hand-on-hip aplomb.

But of course not all triumph, and the tension that mounts as the kids painstakingly excavate letters from their heads like paleoanthropic bones — epochs seem to pass between each halting D and Y — is as gripping as anything in theaters right now. (That includes “2 Fast 2 Furious,” which seems to have spelling difficulties of its own.)

The thrills and misspells in director Jeff Blitz’s remarkable debut — it was nominated at this year’s Oscars and won the jury award for best documentary at South by Southwest in 2002 — spring from a gently probing narrative about those kids in school you either haughtily ignored or on whom you inflicted industrial-strength wedgies. Unless, um, you were one of them.

The subjects, ages 12 to 14, are a bookish bunch, whose spectacles, braces and gangly physiques don’t fuel their chances for cool-dom. They come from all parts of the United States — an affluent Southern California enclave to a Texas Panhandle farm — forming a tidy mosaic of cultural and demographic diversity.

And they come with fascinating backstories that become the film’s collective front story. Angela Arenivar’s parents are ranch hands, Mexican immigrants who barely speak English. Against all odds, she takes it upon herself to beat the bee. Ashley White is an African American girl who lives with her siblings and single mother in the D.C. projects. And Neil Kadakia is a rich kid whose stringent father is the Great Santini of spelling.

“Spellbound” begins as a engaging window into American lives ripe with thematic resonance: cultural values, regional disparities, the funny and troubling mechanics of the modern family unit, scholastic ambition and the availability of the American dream to those who reach.

It’s powerful and affecting material, giving the film its dramatic ballast. But it’s the bee that stings. Scenes of little kids spelling big words are the movie’s equivalent of a fire-strewn car chase; this is the action.

Nervous entertainment enfolds us as we watch contestants try to deconstruct words by scribbling them on the palm of their hand with a finger or mouthing various spellings before committing to one. It’s nerve-wracking to see a face scrunch into an asterisk of concentration, yet it’s a joy to see a curtain of euphoric relief come down when a speller nails it, as though he or she got an empty chamber in Russian roulette. One of many priceless moments happens when a stunned contestant does a near-double-take after she improbably spells “Chateaubriand.”

Yet no one can surpass Harry in facial acrobatics. In a film that defies cinematic possibility, Harry radiates an irresistible über-geekiness that’s as eccentric as it is endearing. More comic relief than star, he’s something of a spastic, a breathless chatterbox with protuberant ears, a perfect bowl of hair and an amazing seal-bark laugh. Somehow he worries us even when he’s not competing.

Editor Yana Gorskaya gives “Spellbound” a fine-weave and impeccable timing for drama and laughs. She shapes what could have been a cacophony of human interest into a harmonic narrative that moves almost musically: Competitive tension is the drum roll, defeat the quick clang of a bell and odd, colorful Harry the blazing guitar solo.

May 17, 2007, Austin American-Statesman

Coffee, now.

The two men, more like really hairy boys, arrive pouchy-faced, rumpled, enveloped in the whiskers of Alaskan moose hunters. The fussy publicist says no photos will be allowed, that Luke and Andrew are in a “just out of bed” mode. It’s 30 minutes past noon in a sunny suite at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Coffee — a fine idea.

Luke, Andrew and Owen — the adorable, scampish Wilson brothers — are in Austin again, this time for duty. But fun, always, is also on the itinerary. Austin is a second hometown for the Dallas natives.

The Wilsons’ new comedy, “The Wendell Baker Story,” enjoyed a red-carpet preview the night before at the Alamo South. Luke wrote it, he and older brother Andrew directed, and Luke and Owen co-star with film warhorses Kris Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton and Seymour Cassel. Made in Austin in 2003, the movie received its world premiere during South by Southwest in 2005. It’s taken a while to secure distribution, but the movie finally opens Friday.

Owen, Hollywood bigshot, ducks today’s press obligations. He’s probably still in bed.

Luke wears the same charcoal cords and button-up black shirt he wore to the previous night’s screening and after-party, which took place at the Wilson brothers’ favorite Austin bar, Club DeVille, where they are routinely spotted.

Andrew, in T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, is the gregarious, big-smile, firm-handshake Wilson brother. Luke, sporting designer sunglasses indoors, is the mumbly, taciturn, reluctant Wilson brother. (Owen is the invisible, bent-nose Wilson brother. “Does Owen even exist?” Andrew wonders aloud.)

Pressed on whether they just fell out of bed, the brothers deny it, but their laughter betrays them.

“Luke ran the lake a couple of times,” Andrew says.

“We did a kick-boxing class,” says Luke.

“We did an urban Pilates class,” Andrew adds.

The sunglasses do not promote their case.

“My eyeballs hurt,” Luke mutters. Andrew laughs.

Still no coffee.

Andrew’s effortless nice-guyness prompts him to snatch the reporter’s tape recorder off the table and hold it up between him and Luke for maximum voice absorption. It’s a heroic gesture. Luke grips a hardback of the new Warren Zevon biography and, for some reason, a pen. The brothers sound alike. It’s a laid-back, adenoidal voice, laced with a curl of Texas drawl.

Dump the bats. The Wilsons should be Austin’s mascot, its scruffy, heart-robbing poster boys. They embody the slightly dazed, out-late, up-late energy of South Austin, the unpressed stylishness of a hip city utterly comfortable with itself.

“When you come down here from Dallas, it’s pretty apparent Austin’s more our speed,” Andrew says. “It’s by far the best town in Texas, and maybe the best town in the country.”

“Our favorite town is El Paso,” Luke deadpans.

Hotel San Jose, Jo’s Coffee, Güero’s, Hula Hut (Andrew’s favorite Austin spot), the Austin Golf Club — these are the brothers’ hangouts.

“I just like driving around in Austin,” Luke says. “I always feel like a cop” — he mimes one hand on the steering wheel, nodding coolly — “just cruisin’ around.”

Funny, they don’t mention any local music venues.

“The thing about Andrew is he hates live music,” Luke says. “I actually do, too.”

“How can you say that in Austin?” says Andrew.

“It’s (expletive),” Luke says. “They play too loud.”

“That’s blasphemy in Austin! Don’t you understand that? Saying I hate live music is like saying I don’t like being from Texas,” says Andrew before he confesses, “I’m kind of an old fuddy-duddy. Sometimes it’s just too dang loud for me.”

The coffee remains undelivered.

To galvanize a caffeine-deprived conversation, Andrew suddenly looks at Luke and asks, “Do you have a place here? That’s what people want to know.”

“Are you actually asking me that?”

“There’s a rumor that you have a place here.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t have a place here. Huh.”

“I’m looking for a place.”

“Where are you looking?” Andrew persists.

“East side,” Luke says. “My friend, Liz Lambert, who runs the Hotel San Jose, just bought some land on the east side.”

We ask whether he’s going to build his own home.

“I think I’d just do one of those — what do you call those things?” Luke says.

“A yurt?” offers Andrew.

“A what?”

“It’s like a teepee.”

“No.”

“A geodesic dome?”

Luke laughs.

“Igloo? Come on, man.” Andrew says.

“No, what are those things called? They’re little modern places that you just buy and set up.”

“Pre-fab.”

“Yes!”

Ta-da. Two big green mugs of coffee are carried in for Luke and Andrew.

Luke takes a sip. “It tastes like Starbucks.”

“Hold on, I’ll be able to tell you,” Andrew says. “I’m like a connoisseur.”

He sips, then coughs loudly, wearing a grimace. “That’s Starbucks.” He picks up six packets of real and artificial sugar and shakes them as if he’s going to use them all in one cup.

Luke protests. “I’m all for Starbucks. Just because it’s successful I’m not supposed to go there?”

“God, man!” says Andrew. “Remember to keep Austin weird.”

“Pardon?” says Luke, as if he can’t believe his brother just said that.

“You heard me.”

Nov. 3, 2002, Austin American-Statesman

For the poor newspaper critic, sandwiched between the twin tyrannies of limited space and lightning turn-around, there is no soul luckier than a critic at the New Yorker.

Each week, we flip to the back of the magazine to consume the latest feast of erudition, savoring the gourmet prose, swishing succulent epiphanies and cracking teeth on bones of contention. We envy the elegant typeface, marvel at the breadth of brain-power lent to the task.

Most of all, we swoon over the space. Newspaper folk write in inches. New Yorker scribes write in acres. Their minds are granted fenceless fields in which to gambol and cartwheel, run far and wide and swing from tree branches. They can digress and allude and seemingly take all day.

The extravagant space is one reason why the magazine’s second-string film critic Anthony Lane (David Denby is its chief film critic) has become a New Yorker star. On the page and in person (or at least during a recent phone interview), Lane is irrepressibly verbose. Words disgorge in precise eruptions, flittery but finely thought-out, crisp, lyrical and witty. But, still, copious.

Lane needs the magazine’s roominess to do what he does: write possibly the funniest, smartest and most urbane film musings in the nation. His expansive, riffing prose is allowed to roam and breathe. Filmmakers adore his words as much as readers. Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson and Steven Spielberg are a few directors who have called or written Lane with praise.

Lane recently turned 40 and has just released his first collection of journalism, “Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from the New Yorker,” a 753-page tree stump engorged with roughly 100 movie reviews, a dozen excellent literary critiques and 20 or so profiles on everyone from astronauts to Julia Roberts.

Both exhilarating and exhausting — its sheer volume of distilled dazzle winds you — the anthology indeed goes to show that nobody’s perfect, not even Lane. This is not a swipe; no writer or performer (Lane is both) is flawless. Often you can sense Lane sweating for laughs, winding up for the big guffaw that turns out a groan. His clamoring need to entertain distracts from his spotty film knowledge, which he convincingly caulks with learned intuition and cultural acumen.

Lane is naturally being looked upon as heir to the late Pauline Kael, who perked up and aerated the dowdy vocabulary of criticism for three decades in The New Yorker. But the two are very different critics. Where Kael was harsh and decisive and rarely gallant, Lane is dapper and polite, with a gossamer touch and jolly countenance. Lane critiques with skipping insights, not spike-shoed stomps.

Irony is a way of being mean without looking your subject in the eye, and it is Lane’s handiest weapon. But occasionally the Briton peels off his white gloves: ” ‘Meet Joe Black’ is endless, bewildering, starved of logic, and, if you stand back from it, something of a joke. In short, it feels like death.” He chops down “The Phantom Menace” to a single epithet: “crap.”

In the book’s introduction, Lane admits he shrinks from blanket judgments. “The primary task of the critic . . . is the recreation of texture — not telling moviegoers what they should see, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading,” he explains.

“Any serious critic should have his thumbs removed surgically before they start the job,” Lane told me by phone. “The whole thumbs-up, thumbs-down is the least interesting part of our job. I’m not quite sure why our (opinions) should have any more validity than anyone else’s. Just because we’ve seen more movies than them doesn’t mean we’re better or worse judges. It’s what we do to back them up that’s important. . . . In Kael’s pieces, I feel her almost standing up and hectoring me. I think she genuinely, passionately believed in her judgment. I think she physically held to them and defended them in a spirited way, more so than I would.”

It is partly this timidity that has rendered Lane something of a lightweight in the eyes of more academic-minded film critics. Venom is frequently flung from pedants such as The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, who has dismissed Lane as a “stand-up comedian,” and former New York Press critic Godfrey Cheshire, who called Lane’s prose “gaseous and cute” and Lane himself “the most embarrassing high-profile film writer in the United States.”

“I’m sure some of it is true, and I bow to the superior knowledge of most of these guys who do know far more about movies than I do,” Lane responds. “I respect what they do far more than they respect what I do.”

But what Lane has on his detractors is sheer literary dash. His writing has a levitating effect. It flounces and sings, each sentence leaving behind a trail of stars. Amid the virtuosity, he still manages the dirty business of criticism, invoking historical and aesthetic context with authority.

“If we wrote about movies with the same slightly dogged intensity that we write about poetry or fiction — I’m not sure what it would come out sounding like,” Lane says. “It wouldn’t sound like somebody who actually goes to the movies and enjoys it. . . .

“I want to reproduce the conditions in which the viewing public gets to see movies. So if it seems I’m sort of coming upon them and tackling them and then walking away from them, I hope that’s not a fault. It’s in the nature of moviegoing itself.”

This glibness remains Lane’s strength and weakness as a critic. “A critic,” he writes, “is just a regular viewer with a ballpoint pen, an overstocked memory, and an underpowered social life.” Is that so?

That’s a dumbly demotic comment made for laughs and amity, and Lane is quick with similar unhelpful lines.

Still, his writing is such a treat most of the time that allowances can be made. The suggested approach is to savor Lane as a writer first, a film critic second. With writing this entertaining, it is positively churlish to resist it.

Feb. 7, 2003, Austin American-Statesman

Lauren is not getting naked.

Somehow, the bleached blonde with a toffee tan thinks that a girl can get wild without really getting wild. That in this day and age a girl can attain most righteous wildness by spurning the fundamental step of giving the public a peek.

What gum drop world is she living in?

When the video cameras from “Girls Gone Wild” come to your town — and they came to Austin on Tuesday night — there are certain expectations, and every single one of them has to do with bare skin. The “GGW” cameras do odd things to young women. Naughty things. Namely, they inspire women to lift their tops and expose themselves, often while their tongues hang out sloppily. This is called wild.

Not, says Lauren.

“I will not be showing (anything). Absolutely not. No way. It’s called ‘Girls Gone Wild,’ not ‘Girls Gone Naked,’ ” says Lauren, who, like many in this story, withheld her last name. The 21-year-old with a leonine mane of yellow hair and jeans low enough to reveal lots of red silk thong works at a bar and is studying to get her real-estate certification.

“I don’t look down on any girls who are wild enough to do that. To each her own,” she says. “But that’s just not my style. You’ve got to leave room for the imagination, you know.”

Thirty minutes later, Lauren was taking it off.

There she was, on stage at country-dance warehouse Midnight Rodeo in South Austin, gleefully lifting her Girls Gone Wild mini-tank top for about 700 howling, whooping, screaming, yelling, barking, caterwauling young men, who were apparently seeing their first bare breasts. Writhing with professional panache and shooting a carnal glare at the boys, Lauren’s soft-spoken modesty melted, then hardened into Elizabeth Berkley in “Showgirls.”

Woooooo-yeeeaaaahhhh-owwwww! went the men.

Ha! went the dozen women on stage.

The women, ages 18 to 23, were competing in a “Girls Gone Wild” talent contest (is lap dancing a talent?), the winner of which will appear on a “GGW” pay-per-view event in March.

The direct-order video company’s Austin stop was part of a 31-city tour that’s brought camera crews to San Diego, Philadelphia, Dallas, Lubbock and, the night before, San Marcos. First prize Tuesday night was $100 cash and an all-expenses paid trip to Panama City, Fla., where the winner will take part in another “GGW” contest.

It’s a common perception that in party aka college towns, Mardi Gras has become a kind of open-air flesh bazaar. Like members of a native tribe, grunting young men proffer tacky plastic beads to greedy women, who gladly, if drunkenly, haul their tops over their chests and under their chins for impromptu peekaboos. The boys go wild.

Joe Francis, the 29-year-old multimillionaire who created “Girls Gone Wild,” decided several years ago to bring video cameras to these and similar spring breaky gatherings. Give the girls beads, make them go wild, tape it and sell it.

“GGW” boasted more than $90 million in direct-response orders last year and the brand has become shorthand for “drunken-girl antics.” “GGW” trades in “normal people” and avoids strippers, Francis says.

The company’s 83 titles include “Craziest Frat Parties,” “Ultimate Spring Break” and “Sexy Sorority Sweethearts.” MGM is making a feature film based on the video exploits, something between “Spring Break” and “American Pie.”

Francis says any young woman will lift her top for the low price of guaranteed male attention.

“You’d be surprised, man,” Francis says by phone from his L.A. office. “Every time I go out, I see a girl who I thought would never do it.”

Joe, meet Lauren.

“I know, I know,” says Lauren, holding her forehead like a kid who’s been caught breaking a promise. She’s backstage, being escorted by the “GGW” crew to the winner’s circle. Lauren won the contest.

“It was the heat of the moment,” she explains.

Sociology of a shirt lift

“I’m not drunk enough,” says Crystal Woodworth, a bespectacled blonde in a white tank top.

Tonight, she’s leaving the stripping to her peers.

“I encourage them. If you have a beautiful body, why can’t you share it with everyone else?”

Crystal’s friends have been wheedling her to do it all night.

“Why do I have to go on stage to do it? I can do it for you myself. I don’t need that extra push. I do it for my friends all the time.”

Crystal is a good friend.

On the other side of the rambling, neon-splashed dance hall, — where bar servers sling Day-Glo shots in test tubes and a guy named Robert is coaxing his girlfriend Stephanie to get on stage — giggle Amanda Brown and Melissa Dotson, 19-year-old University of Texas students.

The brunettes are dressed in tight, slight outfits that would pass for loincloths in some cultures. They rushed to Midnight Rodeo when they heard about the event on the radio.

“We’re lookin’ to be famous,” Melissa says.

“We get off on it,” Amanda says.

“We’re not doing it against our will in any way. Not everybody has to like it,” says Melissa. “We’re not porn stars. We’re 19, we’re experimenting, we’re having fun. We’re out there.”

On stage, Amanda and Melissa gyrate, kiss each other and lift up each other’s shirts. (They eventually take second and third place.)

The boys hoot with stadium-rock abandon. They slaver and yell obscenities. Their eyes bulge like bloodshot moons. The overall expression on their faces is something like this: !!!!!!!!

Wes Parnell, a slightly slurring 22-year-old UT student, assumes the role of resident sociologist and human behaviorist. He speaks waveringly, but with confidence. He spies two young women registering for the contest.

“Oh, they’re going to take it off,” Wes assures us. “They don’t have a choice. When they get up on stage and start drinking alcohol, they start doing things that they don’t know they’re doing. They love it, they absolutely love it. Girls start seeing what the guys think and the guys trick them into doing more.”

There’s a study of what makes girls go wild waiting to be vetted for psychological illumination. We can listen to Wes, or we can drag in an expert in feminist media studies.

That would be Mary Kearney, assistant professor of radio-television-film at UT, who explains, “There’s some recognition when you’re a woman in your late teens and early 20s that sexuality is a form of power for you. And for a lot of younger women, it’s the only form of power they have. They are told on a daily basis that their primary goal in life is to get male attention. So if they’re getting it by lifting up their top, so be it.”

Especially for middle-class white women, Kearney says, “This might be a chance for them to feel sexy in the moment, for girls to be wild. It’s sluttish behavior, and girls might be pushing the boundaries for themselves, to be like, ‘Ooo, I’m wild and crazy!’ Of course, they don’t really understand that it’s a pretty conventional climate for girls and women to be rebellious.”

Though it can be a litigious one. A Florida State University student who lifted her shirt in New Orleans sued for invasion of privacy after being featured on a “Girls Gone Wild” video. The case was settled out of court. In November, state Rep. Miguel Wise, D-Weslaco, filed a bill that would make it a crime to photograph or videotape a person in public or private without their consent and with “intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” It was referred to the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee.

We return to the wisdom of Wes. “Girls have such low self-esteem, they need guys to cheer ‘em on,” he insists.

“I don’t have low self-esteem. I just don’t feel like being a . . . “

That’s a brunette named Chanbra, who’s been encircled by several boys begging her to join the contest. One of them thrusts a cocktail into her hand.

“It’s just for fun, just for fun,” says a guy.

“I know . . .” Chanbra sounds breathless and confused.

“Just do it. Please,” says another guy.

“This is the third time I’ve been told to do it, and I’m not doing it. Sorry, y’all,” Chanbra says, and leaves.

“Well, lost cause.”

The call of the ‘Wild’

A petite young woman named Joanna bolts off the crowded stage midshow and beats a hasty retreat backstage. She pulls off her cowboy hat and sighs with what sounds like relief. She was fleeing.

“I couldn’t do that to myself,” Joanna says. “I’m not like that. I think it’s trashy. Looking at the crowd, I decided I’m not putting myself out there as a piece of meat. I’m shaking I’m so nervous.”

Why was she up there then?

She was egged on by friends, despite her protests. “I thought it was fun being part of the scene, and then it just got too far.”

Away from male taunts and chants of “Show your . . .,” Crystal Woodworth looks exhilarated. She wound up on stage flashing the crowd after all.

“I was naked! I don’t know why,” she gasps. “I can’t believe I did that because I come here a lot and I know everyone. Oh, my God.”

Woodworth was persuaded by her friends, including Kimberly Hyde, who joined her on stage.

“I’m just crazy like that,” Kimberly says. “It was a blast.”

It’s nothing new for her. She flashes her guy friends upon request.

“Wanna see?” she asks.

You know what Ernest Borgnine is looking forward to? He is looking forward to hawking DVDs on the QVC shopping channel. He is looking forward to taking calls from viewers who want to say nice things to the movie star, now 90, while they provide their MasterCard digits to buy DVDs of “McHale’s Navy,” his popular 1960s sitcom.

The attention electrifies him. He loves it. And he loves to share the love. It’s a generous, outsized love, one that tumbles and laughs and belly-shakes from his end of the phone during a recent conversation.

How he laughs. His are hearty, throaty, avuncular guffaws, rollicking animal sounds punctuating prosaic statements that don’t seem to warrant joyous noise. What the heck! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Ernest Borgnine. Instant name recognition. Instant face recognition. Like that, you could point him out in a lineup of gruff, balloon-bellied guys with a gap between their front teeth wide enough to sail the S.S. Poseidon through. Those teeth make a heck of a smile, unmistakable, downright iconic. Huge, enveloping, really goofy.

Excited, I tell co-workers I’m interviewing Borgnine, and instead of fond memories of “The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Wild Bunch” or “The Dirty Dozen,” I get reflexive chuckles and the callous but pardonable question “He’s still alive?”

This isn’t surprising. I admit, much of why I accepted the invitation to talk to the jolly actor, who’s plumping the “McHale’s Navy” DVDs, is because of his undimmed camp appeal.

A granddaddy of Hollywood character actors, Borgnine’s living ghost has never left the building. It’s hung around long enough to become legend, and legend too easily in these sniggeringly ironic times becomes a target of fun and fodder for parody.

He wasn’t asked to play himself on “The Simpsons” for his brilliant acting, but for the fumes of notoriety, the knowing wink of familiarity, for both the good films (“From Here to Eternity,” “Johnny Guitar”) and the dreadful (“Real Men Don’t Eat Gummi Bears”).

To be blunt: He was on the cartoon because the very idea of Ernest Borgnine  is funny.

How did this happen? How does a distinguished, Oscar-winning artist (for his touching performance in 1955′s “Marty”) go from movie star to free-floating punch line? What makes Ernie funny?

Derision isn’t at issue. Pop culture is not making fun of or diminishing Borgnine’s career and persona. He and I talk about this. I remind him that his unconventional looks – the pudge, the buggy eyes, that insouciant gap – and his steadfast refusal to stop working make him ripe for burlesque.

“Let ‘em have fun,” says the happy, hale actor. “Keeps you in mind, doesn’t it?”

Still, we can be mean. We are a cynical public and our searching appraisals are often made through a scrim of hopeful schadenfreude. While some camp-ready stars are vectors of their own free-falls into risible self-caricature – Joan Crawford, Ozzy Osbourne, Tammy Faye Bakker, the two Coreys – others, like Borgnine, William Shatner and Shelley Winters merely got old yet kept going, a Hollywood sin.

But Borgnine, mysteriously, has claimed a place in our hearts, like a big fuzzy teddy bear, all smiles and elbow nudges. As critic David Thomson notes, at a point in his career Borgnine made the “transition from actor to inexplicable celebrity.”

Borgnine’s one of the good ones. We know this because he probably could not pull off a reality show. He is far from the Anna Nicole abyss. He is not a loser. He still says things like “Holy mackerel!”

Is his tirelessness, his urge to crank out smaller movies and sell DVDs on cable, really such a crime? 

“I just like to work too much. That’s my problem,” Borgnine  says. “I’d do anything, I don’t care. I even do (the voice of Mermaid Man on) ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ for heaven sakes!”

He laughs that crazy laugh. When it recedes like a passing jet, he says, “I tell you, it pays.”

You do what you have to do. What you want to do. Retired athletes pitch deodorant and life insurance. Suzanne Sommers and Chuck Norris peddle exercise regimes. Borgnine makes movies. He never stopped.

“No regrets whatsoever,” he says.

Stumped, I tell him he sounds like the happiest man in the world.

“I AM the happiest man in the world,” he says. “Why shouldn’t I be? I’m recognized throughout the world. I’ve got my health. The good Lord loves me. I got a good wife. Gee whillikers, I’m sitting on top of the world!”

And then Ernest Borgnine laughs and laughs and laughs.