Poison Penn makes a comeback

Sean Penn's now notorious attack on Rupert Murdoch signals the jubilant return of Hollywood's least favourite Bad Boy. ROGER CLARKE reports

SEAN PENN is up to his old tricks again. Well, something like his old tricks.

Once he used merely to bop scavenging paparazzi in New York bars, now he's writing hate mail to Rupert Murdoch over the use of a private jet (copies of which were dispatched to Fox executives and to "God Almighty"). At the same time, he says he's quit acting for good. Everyone is asking: has Sean Penn finally gone completely bonkers? Back in the Eighties he could always be relied upon as a malcontent. He was the bratpacker's brat-packer, the barfly's barfly, the man who made drinking buddies like Nicolas Cage look like mewling milksops. The apotheosis of his brawling days came in 1987, when he did 60 days in an LA jail for attacking an extra on a film set. His speciality, for some bizarre caveman reason, was to brain people using chunks of rock. Finally, 1991 saw him "quit acting for good" for the first time: in this case to write and direct a couple of movies and up the ante on his drinking binges even further. He admitted later to an effort to drink himself "into oblivion" over his relationship with Robin Wright now his wife - who temporarily left him at that time. When he later roared back to do some of his finest prizewinning and most hungry acting roles (Carlito's Way, Dead Man Walking), he appeared to have mellowed, maybe because he'd become a father. In fact the old pugnacious Penn never went away and has been in evidence for some months now, though no one really noticed. After several fisticuff-free years, last August he allegedly attacked a man who had been videotaping him, laying into the feckless individual with, yes, a rock. It now turns out that Penn had been intrusively taped in some of his last moments with his terminally ill father; it's hard not to have sympathy for him in this case. Soon after his father's funeral, Penn began work on a Woody Allen film in October. Reports quickly began to emerge that he was out of control, clashing badly with Allen ("I don't like directors mostly I think they're a bunch of whiny people"). He regularly wouldn't turn up for work, claiming to be sick. Allen's producer Jean Doumanian stepped in and sent Penn a letter threatening a lawsuit. Penn reluctantly appeared for his scenes. Allen, usually so adored by his actors, must have been scalded by the experience. He started skipping work days too. WHEN the film wrapped, Penn was immediately thrown into doing what he hates most - publicising movies. Not one, but two. Instead of jawing about acting, he characteristically threw a press conference to attack the LA High Court for attempting to send Black Panther Elmer Pratt back to jail. He even wheeled out best buddy Marlon Brando for the gawping hacks. This was high drama, politics and race. It was also another message that he was fed up with Hollywood and all its works. But he still had a job to do. Terrence Malick's spectacular comeback movie The Thin Red Line and an adaptation of David Rabe's stage play HurlyBurly (Penn starred in the stage version 10 years ago, which John Malkovitch called the best stage acting he'd ever seen) both needed PR in December. But far from promoting the movies (he told one interviewer he hadn't even seen The Thin Red Line) he used interviews in the US media to air his grudges against directors, studios and producers. This on Oliver Stone, for example, who directed him in the box- office bomb U-Turn: "You should have called {U-Turn} Dr Doolittle because being able to communicate with the director was like talking to a pig." He was only marginally kinder to his fellow actors, but nevertheless decreed that this was "a bad time for acting" and that actors are all "frauds". Then there is that, by now notorious, petulant-sounding attack on Fox in early January. Penn wanted use of a private studio jet to fly him to a Thin Red Line screening in Houston, Texas. He was on a tight schedule because he was publicising two big films, he'd taken a reduced fee for acting in The Thin Red Line and couldn't see why he should pay towards its publicity drive by booking his own plane ticket. Since the HurlyBurly studio was prepared to foot half the private jet bill to PR their film in Texas, the request was perhaps reasonable. But Fox turned him down. Penn exploded, claiming that the jet would have cost Fox only $6,000 rather than the $40,000 the guffawing studio bosses were claiming. This $6,000, raged Penn in his open letter to the studio head honchos, was "Mr Murdoch's pool heating expenses". It was "the equivalent to the fair market price of one hair on Mr Rupert Murdoch's formidable ass". The Murdoch camp's predictable response - to depict Penn as a phoney low-rent rebel chasing star treatment - drew vehement ripostes from the likes of actor William Baldwin last week. In an unpublished letter to the New York Times, Baldwin angrily denied that Penn was a "perk pig" and insisted that Penn remained the one shining actor who truly defied corporate Hollywood and would always be punished for it. So Penn's reputation remains if anything enhanced with his fellow actors (though it's pretty certain many directors and certain studios won't employ him too soon after his recent outbursts). Penn is not going bonkers: he's merely acting in character. We've just forgotten what a tortured character that really is, and how it encompasses a certain level of madness anyhow. "You have to go mad at certain points," he once observed. "You do have to embrace a certain quota of that madness or else you become a flatliner." After all, Hollywood always used to have mad, bad boys in the early days - Robert Mitchum springs to mind - but the modern corporate film business can't stomach the type any more. Since we now know that Penn is one of the best actors in Hollywood, unlike in the Eighties when he last misbehaved, his immoderate behaviour (as a tortured artist rather than the odious brat of yesteryear) makes a little more sense. Especially if that behaviour involves the painful backside tweezering of a media mogul called Rupert.

Copyright 1999
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