Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 11
In 2005, Joey Adler, the head of Diesel Canada located in Montreal, and Samantha Brickman, asked for my help with the founding of their organization and subsequent gala to help distressed children. Their philosophy was, Every life is precious, and every individual can make a difference. I branded their organization ONEXONE, and we launched that fall during the Toronto International Film Festival. The event was hosted by Kate Hudson, who was a friend of Samantha’s. Bono attended, as did supermodel Elle Macpherson and singer Chantal Kreviazuk, our performer.
Thanks to Samantha, I became better acquainted with Kate Hudson, while collaborating on her script for the evening. She was very sweet, super-bright, incredibly talented and well aware of her brand. More than that, she had an alchemy that was a mixture of innocence, sexuality and Hollywood glamour. She glowed.
Despite a successful launch, I soon became aware that Samantha and Joey had differing agendas and were at war. There was a falling out, Samantha left the charity she cofounded and I was torn. Samantha was my friend who introduced me to the project but I believed in the cause, and I liked producing the show. I stayed on with Joey. I lost Sam as a friend temporarily and I missed her enthusiasm, but theirs had been a partnership made in hell.
In 2006, the event grew bigger when Matt Damon agreed to host and invited Brad Pitt to attend. Brad was every inch a gracious star, not at all aloof, and willing to pose with anyone who wanted a photo. One of the live auction items was an opportunity to walk the red carpet with Brad and Matt at an Ocean’s Eleven screening. After that sold for about $100,000, Brad said, “You know what? I can walk the red carpet twice, so let’s have another auction for this.” He was fun.
To change ONEXONE from a small concert with guest stars into a major celebration of philanthropy, I suggested we should honour celebrities for their charitable work in 2007. Joey agreed.
I had already talked about her charity, the Happy Hearts Fund, with supermodel Petra Nemcova during a New York fashion week. Petra had been caught in the tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004. She had saved herself by clinging to a tree even though her pelvis was broken and she’d suffered severe internal injuries. Tragically, her fiancé, Simon Atlee, a renowned British photographer, had been swept out to sea. She told herself, I can mourn for the rest of my life, or I can pick myself up and give back. Petra then used her beauty and her fame to create the Happy Hearts Fund, dedicated to rebuilding safe schools in areas struck by natural disasters.
Petra accepted my invitation to receive an Award of Distinction. Though my friends made sly jokes about my spending so much time with this stunning Sports Illustrated model, I adored Petra as a lovely person.
THE HUG
I’d been a fan of Richard Gere ever since I saw him playing a guy who makes a lucrative living as an escort to older women in American Gigolo. I admired his style and swagger, the way he dressed and the way he looked. I also knew that he had built a second career as an activist for human rights, for ecological causes and especially for HIV/AIDS awareness. He was also a practising Buddhist. All these things made him a great ONEXONE candidate.
I got the chance to invite him when we were at the Dubai Film Festival in 2006. I took him aside at one of the festival parties and asked if he would be an honouree. Gere introduced me to his assistant and suggested that she set up a meeting for us in New York. Meanwhile, there was still a film festival going on where director Oliver Stone was receiving a lifetime achievement award.
For the award presentation, Gere and Stone, along with other VIPs and members of the jury (which included me) were driven from Dubai into the desert. En route to our venue, I saw buses filled with migrant workers who had been flown in to build Dubai’s palaces and hotels. This was disturbing: I knew how little they were paid and the terrible conditions they endured. It amounted almost to a form of slavery, and here I was in my luxury limousine.
Our destination was a stadium in the middle of which a stage floated on a man-made lake. Everything about the stadium was luxurious—even the stadium chairs were upholstered in leather. After a sumptuous dinner we were treated to a spectacular show featuring flame-throwers and galloping white Arabian horses. I was sitting next to Oliver Stone, and we both had the same reaction: “This is over-the-top crazy.”
Oliver was called down onto the floating stage to accept his award. After he hauled it back to his seat, we both stared at it, marvelling. It was a massive crystal horse’s head, conjuring up the same thought, which we expressed aloud: “The Godfather!”
Soon after I returned from Dubai, I met Gere in his New York office, as he had suggested. He was welcoming in every way, even giving me a signed copy of his book of Tibetan photographs. We talked about ONEXONE and he agreed to accept our award. He had one condition.
I held my breath: A private jet?
“I want the award to be presented to me by Shilpa Shetty.”
Who is Shilpa Shetty? I had the feeling Gere thought his request would be controversial, but I replied, “Absolutely, I love that idea.”
On my return to Toronto, everyone at ONEXONE asked the same question: Who is Shilpa Shetty?
As I would learn, she was a Bollywood star who had joined with Gere in his HIV/AIDS awareness work. Their cooperation led to an India-wide scandal. Gere is a hugger. While on stage in New Delhi, where he and Shilpa were teaching safe sex to truckers, Gere had given her a bend-over-backward hug topped off by a kiss. This public display had caused a firestorm—literally. Indian fundamentalists had burned Shilpa’s posters.
After ONEXONE flew Shilpa Shetty and her mother to Toronto, I dropped by the Royal York Hotel to give her the script. Even wearing UGGs and sweatpants, Shilpa was ravishing. Later that evening, when she presented Gere’s award, they hugged and kissed again. This time, the audience cheered with approval.
For the 2007 ONEXONE gala, Matt Damon again invited a buddy, Ben Affleck this time, to cohost. This time I wanted to take the event to another level: I sold a network on the idea of airing a 90-minute special to be shot at Toronto’s newly opened opera house, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. As I envisioned it, we would have a glamorous dinner on stage, followed by speeches and a concert, which I would direct from a camera truck. Thanks to Matt Damon’s drawing power, we were able to attract Venezuelan bombshell Shakira and Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean.
The Four Seasons Centre, designed by Jack Diamond, was a magnificent, modern, musical palace. The opera’s first artistic director, Richard Bradshaw (who tragically died not long after it opened), had spent months with acousticians fine-tuning the hall so that if, say, Ben Heppner were singing on stage, he wouldn’t need a mike.
For our gala, Wyclef moved in his huge orchestra. When my wife and a couple of friends joined me for a rehearsal, the music was so loud we were sure the lighting fixtures would fall, chairs would explode, eardrums would bleed. I could imagine Bradshaw in his grave with his hands over his ears, as Shakira and Wyclef rocked his palace. I was concerned. Those running the opera house were concerned too. “Oh my God, this will not do!”
I could barely understand Wyclef’s heavy Haitian patois. I tried to tell him, “You don’t need to have the volume up that loud in this place.”
He would agree, then run through a sound check with Shakira that was just as loud as before. Wyclef told me his Haitian version of “You know what you need to do, so let me do what I need to do.”
On the night of the concert, Wyclef and Shakira performed “Hips Don’t Lie,” in which Shakira, a tiny bundle of energy, moved her body as if it were connected by elastic bands. Wyclef did one song that lasted almost an hour, which threatened to tear the place apart, but he had the audience on its feet, dancing. My crew and I were in the camera truck: even with the volume turned down the sound was still off the dial. I guess having 1,200 people inside, sucking up vibrations, must have helped, because Wyclef provided a great show, and we weren’t sued for damages.
Once again, behind the scenes, there was a battle brewing unknown to me. Things were going too well. After the enormously successful gala concluded, things boiled over. Joey, who was obsessive about control, became extraordinarily concerned about the ownership of the television special, which I had produced. The terms had been spelled out in a contract she approved: the television show was owned, title and copyright, by the ONEXONE Foundation. Joey couldn’t understand that. Nor could she understand that the TV show was a one-shot deal, with no marketability outside of Canada.
By the night of the show, Joey wasn’t talking to me, without my knowing why. She’d gone silent, while I was busy with practicalities. Days later, she accused me of stealing it, as if this were something I would own and could sell for millions. Lawyers were involved, and Joey insisted, “I want final cut.” Her minions, with whom she surrounded herself, were like a Greek chorus supporting her. Who steals a television show? Did they think I was planning to sell DVDs from my trunk? Oy.
I had no quarrel with her wanting to see the final cut. The show was about the foundation, and when I wrote it, I made sure Joey had a starring role. Visually, it looked glamorous and beautiful. All our stars had praised her charity. The TV special was her fabulous vehicle that would take ONEXONE from a tent to the big time. She just didn’t realize it. I was now thinking I should have exited stage left with Samantha Brickman two years earlier.
Joey was tight-lipped when she came to the editing room. I ran the show for her and she managed to say, “Fine.” It was ready to air, but by this time Joey had caused so much friction that the network was nervous about running it without her signed approval and was holding back the last production payment. This was so ironic. During our three-year relationship, Joey had talked endlessly about integrity, how important it was and how some people had none. Now this.
While all this was going on, my mentor, Dusty Cohl, had been in failing health. One day, I brought him to the camera truck while we were shooting. He met Joey and afterwards he warned me, with his usual acuity, “Be careful, kid. That woman’s desire for glory will collide with her desire to give back, and you’ll be caught in the middle.”
Months later, just before Christmas, I went to see Dusty at the Princess Margaret Hospital, where he was being treated for colon cancer. As we chatted, I told him the whole story, along with my concern about whether the show would air. Dusty said, “Okay, kid,” and then he did this Dusty thing. He called Ivan Fecan, head of the network, whom he knew very well, and he said, “This is a dying man’s request. Please make sure that Barry’s protected here.”
It was Dusty to the rescue once again, with almost his last breath. Though I had been sitting beside him when he made the call, I still didn’t know if I would get paid.
I was in bed at 11:30 on Christmas Eve when the phone rang. My wife said, “It’s Dusty.”
He asked, “Did you get the cheque, kid?”
“Yes I did.”
“Come down and show me.”
“Dusty, it’s 11:30 p.m.”
“Come and talk to me.”
I put my coat on over my pyjamas. I drove to the hospital, and I managed to slip past the security guard.
Dusty said, “Show me the cheque.”
I showed him.
He nodded. “Good.”
I resigned from ONEXONE. In my letter to the board, I said, in effect, “I wish you success. I’m proud of the work we did together. I need to go.”
Matt Damon also left eventually. Though ONEXONE still carries on in some quieter form, in my view, it went from being the star attraction gala at the film festival to one last glorious climax with the Four Seasons show. It never had a gala on that same scale again.
DUSTY: EXIT STAGE LEFT
Dusty Cohl died on January 11, 2008. He was seventy-eight. One of my first phone calls was to Ivan Fecan. In reply, he told me, “You and I will always be friends.” And we are.
In his gentle, dynamic, outrageous way, Dusty had changed the face of entertainment in Toronto, which meant he had reinvented the city itself.
Tributes poured in.
Movie director Ted Kotcheff, who first met Dusty when they were kids at Camp Naivelt, recalled that Dusty had been expelled from this mostly Jewish Communist summer camp for allegedly being a Trotskyite: “He was amusing and totally adorable, the most lovable man I’d ever met. And he was exactly like that decades later when we reconnected.”
Wayne Clarkson, a former TIFF director, said, “Quite simply, Dusty put Toronto on the showbiz map.”
Helga Stephenson, another former TIFF director, remarked, “Dusty took the boring out of being Canadian. And he took care of a lot of people.”
Attorney Edward Greenspan, a great friend of Dusty’s, added, “He was an original—unorthodox, free-thinking, genuine, creative, eccentric.”
Piers Handling, a TIFF festival CEO recalled, “The key point about Dusty was that he set a tone for this festival that set it apart from all the others. If European festivals were stuffy black-tie affairs, Toronto was going to be the opposite—irreverent. With his cowboy hat and T-shirts, he made a fashion statement, announcing who and what we were—rebels.”
Bill Marshall, a festival founder with Dusty, said, “There would be no festival without Dusty. Going to Cannes with Dusty was like going with Princess Diana.”
Toronto Star movie critic Ron Base, also speaking of Cannes, remembered, “Dusty would plunk himself down, and before you knew it, the most amazing assortment of people joined him—movie stars, directors, journalists, starlets, a movable feast.”
Movie critic Roger Ebert, recalled, “One day in 1977, when I was a stranger at the Cannes Film Festival, I was crossing the famous terrace of the Carlton Hotel, when I was summoned by name to the table of a man with a black beard, wearing blue jeans, a Dudley Do-Right T-shirt and a black cowboy hat studded with stars and pins. How did he know who I was? He knew who everybody was. One way you knew you were a friend was when Dusty honoured you with a Dusty Pin, a silver hat with a star on it. Rule was, wear it at film festivals. At Cannes and Sundance, even on years Dusty wasn’t there, I spotted them on studio heads Michael Barker and Harvey Weinstein and half the members of the North American press corps. When Dusty took a year off from Cannes, the Carlton Hotel purchased a full-page ad in a festival daily, showing only a cowboy hat and a cigar, with the caption, ‘We miss you.’”
On February 15, 2008, Eddie Greenspan and I coproduced a memorial for Dusty at the Elgin Theatre. It was awash in Schwartz’s smoked meat and Crown Royal, Dusty’s sustenance, along with music and speeches. In my video tribute, friends and admirers shared their memories.
“Dusty could speak to street-sweepers and kings.”
“He gave out more cigars and poured more Crown Royal than the Bronfmans.”
“He told it as it was, and as it should be.”
“He defined ‘come as you are.’”
“We all participated in the magic he created.”
“Everything was first-rate with Dusty, including Dusty.”
Together, Eddie and I tearfully wrote the main eulogy entitled, DUSTY COHL: EXIT STAGE LEFT, which I delivered.
In vintage Hollywood style, Dusty didn’t go to see you, you went to see him. You never needed an elevator to find him. The unassuming impresario took his meetings on park benches, in diners, and occasionally perched like a Dalai Lama on that huge rock in Yorkville. Many wondered what he did for a living and some even accused him of being a socialist. If that was true, he was the only socialist I knew that asked me for upgrade coupons on Air Canada . . .
I once asked Dusty if he ever imagined that the Toronto International Film Festival he helped create would grow to be the world’s biggest, and his response was classic: ‘No. Let’s go get lunch.’
In the last decade of his life, Dusty declared that he had played out his role of the creator. He would dedicate every minute of his time to helping those he loved to succeed . . . In between those ‘projects’ as he called them, he meticulously scheduled time with his friends during the week and his granddaughters on the weekend. His ability to power breakfast, lunch and dinner was simply unmatched by even Hollywood standards . . . You kind of wish people like Dusty would live forever and then when you replay the memories, you realize they do.
Dusty Cohl and Barry Avrich at the Floating Film Festival, 1998
from the personal collection
It’s been eight years since Dusty’s death, and I still haven’t accepted the fact that this fantastic guy is no longer with us. With me.
Chapter Eleven
MORE BOLDFACE:
NAME DROPPING FOR THE LOVE OF IT
I WILL LICK YOUR SHOE
My friendship with Samantha Brickman had gone into hiatus after she was essentialy pushed out of ONEXONE and I had stayed on. I wanted to repair the damage. In 2008, I invited her for a drink, during which I told her, “Samantha, I know you’re upset with me, but I have a special drink to serve you. It’s called Redemption.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been hired to produce a major fundraiser next year for Richard Branson’s charity foundation, Virgin Unite. Why don’t you coproduce with me?”
So that’s what we did. Samantha’s friend Kate Hudson came in. Petra Nemcova came in, and, of course, we had Richard Branson. He was sensational and unforgettable.
The president of American Express was eager to meet him. I said, “Richard, would you do me a favour and say hello to the president of American Express?”
“She’s one of our sponsors?”
“Right.”
Branson walked over to Denise, got down on his hands and knees, then licked her shoe. Literally. She loved it.
