The latest Project Greenlight...

...is of interest to me, because I have met a few of the participants, namely the Gulager family. I used to be an assistant manager at The Nuart theatre in Los Angeles and occasionally we would be visited by Clu Gulager and his family and friends.

Clu Gulager, for those of you who don't know, is a character actor and has had major parts on such films as "The Last Picture Show", "The Killers" (the remake done in the sixties by Don Seigel), "Return Of The Living Dead", and "Tapeheads". You can look him up on imdb. In short, he is my favorite kind of celebrity in LA, the kind I recognize from seventies television.

Since "Tapeheads" he has done a few low budget horror films but mostly has been working with his family on obscure, art films that he would write, direct, star in and cast his family and friends in. He supported himself by his residuals and teaching acting classes. This is where it gets interesting.

The films were very bizarre, mostly unfinished and usually involved a lot of gore and sex. They have titles like "F#@%&ing Tulsa" and "The Woman Who Would Be Jesus". This is while his actress wife Miriam was diagnosed with a brain tumor and lost sight in her right eye (when I first met them, she wore an eyepatch). I believe she died last year. I can't imagine how they managed her last days, as they took out all of their social security and savings to try to make their films. I remember Clu and his wife as being very nice and little Addams Family-ish.

John, Clu's son, has been selected to be the director on Project Greenlight this year, and, with all of the other problems that are kind of traditional for this show (script needs work, no money, etc.), he has been insisting on casting his brother, his father, his wife (who I also met at a special event at Los Angeles' Union Station, when I was managing properties for film, TV, and special events; she was one of the "cater-waiters"), and his god daughter. When Dimension asks him for any kind of communication on what he sees the film as being, he is painfully shy and awkward. He only speaks up when the subject is casting. He needs to pick his battles.

I know this because that's what one of the producers say in the clips from next week's episode and I pay attention to that sort of thing.

The moral? Maybe one should leave one's family out of one's art. Clu has clearly influenced his son to such an extent that he is shooting himself in the foot right out of the gate, to mix unrelated metaphors. Which is something I like to do.