Henry Pollard: Vampire Hunter

In April 2009, halfway through the first season of Starz's short-lived but fondly remembered Party Down, an episode aired in which waiter and "retired" actor Henry Pollard (Adam Scott) runs into Michael (Breckin Meyer), an old friend from acting class who's now an up-and-coming movie star. Michael has been signed to play Edgar Allan Poe in a big-budget film that imagines the 19th-century author as a vampire hunter. And since there's plenty of bloodsucker butt to kick, Poe has a sidekick, young Abraham Lincoln, a part for which Michael thinks Henry would be perfect.

However, Henry can't even manage to land an audition with the film's foul-mouthed producer (J.K. Simmons, equally funny and terrifying), and in the second and final season of Party Down we discover that Channing Tatum ended up getting the part.

Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was published in March 2010, the month before Party Down imagined Tatum as a Nosferatu-killing Great Emancipator. I have no idea who first came up with the idea of our 16th president moonlighting as Van Helsing, or if it even matters, but in that 2009 episode of Party Down Breckin Meyer sounds like he's imitating Matthew McConaughey's laid-back Texan twang. Well, guess who's costarring with Channing Tatum in Steven Soderbergh's male-stripper comedy, Magic Mike, opening this Friday? Alright alright alright ...



Benjamin Walker, who previously played our nation's seventh president in the Broadway musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, takes on the lead role in Twentieth Century Fox's big-screen adaptation of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which opened last Friday to a mixed reception from both critics and audiences. I bet Henry Pollard wouldn't have landed an audition for that film either, but at least Adam Scott will get to wear a Lincoln-like beard in Fox's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, directed by and starring Ben Stiller and set for release in December 2013. (For what it's worth, John Cusack played a serial-killer-hunting Edgar Allan Poe earlier this year in The Raven.)

If the Lincoln movie left you cold* but you're still in the mood for a 3-D hunt of imaginary creatures, Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton star in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, hitting theaters next January. And if you're the kind of person who thinks President Obama is a socialist, please call off your witch hunt and hibernate until March 2014. That's when Disney will release Maleficent, a remake of Sleeping Beauty starring Angelina Jolie and produced by Joe Roth, who's already given us the Tim Burton-directed Alice in Wonderland remake and Snow White and the Huntsman, plus he has Sam Raimi's Oz: The Great and Powerful waiting in the wings for a March 2013 release.

Fairy-tale movies are the new superhero movies. Except Hollywood is still making superhero movies. Once upon a time Hollywood made other kinds of movies, but then an evil financial wizard conjured up a recession that helped kill the home video market, making millions of dollars in yearly revenue vanish into thin air and forcing Hollywood to concentrate its remaining production capital on 3-D gimmickry and "presold" stories and characters that audiences already know and love.

But, in all honesty, if an evil wizard were to take away the powers of speech and texting from moviegoers once they've paid for their tickets and taken their seats, I probably wouldn't care so much about what kinds of movies Hollywood makes. Where are you when we need you most, Voldemort?

* But if you're a vampire you were cold to begin with, right?

the realistic and the impossible

Back in June I saw a postcard in a bookstore that had Che Guevara's face on the front—one of those painted reprints of Alberto Korda's famous photo of the Cuban revolutionary, to be exact—and the slogan "Let's be realistic: try the impossible!" underneath. Close by was Spain Rodriguez's graphic novel Che: A Graphic Biography (2008); last fall Publishers Weekly deemed it "for the most part unalloyed hagiography, which can seem more like something produced by revolutionary committee than an artist."

Six years ago Lawrence Osborne wrote about Che worship in the New York Observer and attempted to set the record straight:

Of course, it was Che's role in the Cuban Revolution that turned him into the poster boy we all know. But it was a quixotic participation in many ways. Che was known inside the revolution as a strict disciplinarian, ready to sign death warrants and mete out sundry brutalities. And yet, for all that, he was spectacularly ineffective. From 1961 to 1965, Che was Cuba's Minister for Industries; before that, from 1959 to 1961, he was the head of the national bank. Both stints ended in farce. A Cuban expedition to Congo to prop up the anti-Mobutu forces fighting there ended similarly.

Che, in fact, failed at anything requiring real ability and perseverance. He was a charismatic dilettante, like most professional revolutionaries, but in between he lived the activist high life: the Bandung-generation Third World conference circuit, dramatic speeches at the United Nations, clandestine peregrinations from country to country, murky deals, love affairs and connections in high places. None of it amounted to anything, however. In the end, Che had to foment real revolutions or nothing.

While attempting to spur a revolution in Bolivia in 1967, Guevara was captured by that country's military on October 8 and executed the next day.

In January I saw Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-hour biopic Che, starring Benicio Del Toro. As Soderbergh told the Chicago Sun-Times, he split the story into two films—part one is subtitled "The Argentine," part two is "Guerrilla"—because "one, you didn't understand why [Guevara] thought he would succeed in Bolivia if you didn't see what happened in Cuba. And two, you had to go back to Cuba to answer the question: How did he become the Che that is the guy on the T-shirts?"

Del Toro isn't the only movie star in the film, but he's the only one who has a lead role, and it's interesting to see how Soderbergh, one of the most intelligent and unpredictable filmmakers around, uses other famous faces.

I recognized Julia Ormond in the first part of Che as an American journalist interviewing Guevara, but I’m not sure if that will be the case for every viewer, mostly because it's been over a dozen years since she had a lead role in a high-profile American movie—1995's Sabrina. Besides, you hear Ormond's voice several times in Che before you see her face, but since she’s using an American accent I didn’t recognize her voice. (Ormond also had roles in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008.)

Guevara was a world-famous figure by the time he made his trip to Bolivia. A celebrity, even. When he arrived people wanted to shake his hand; they were awed by his presence as well as the myth that surrounded him. But he was afraid most peasants would be suspicious of a foreigner trying to rally them to revolution, even though he was an Argentinean who was able to rally Cubans to revolt against Batista’s government nine years earlier. (In Bolivia he was worried about being labeled a Cuban, which he was by that point, of course.) He was a stranger in both countries, if not exactly a stranger in a strange land. His fame turned him into an outsider once again.

When Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon show up in part two of Che for brief cameos, it has a jarring effect—you lose focus of what’s happening in the story at those particular moments as you stop and say to yourself, "Is that who I think it is?" just as Guevara’s revolution lost focus in Bolivia due to his celebrity status. It’s a canny move by Soderbergh that parallels the on-screen action.