Makeup

I have some vague memory of seeing John Holmes in a porn movie;  the memory is of some old beatup man wearing makeup.  I just did a search of the web for JH photos and found only a couple. The pictures looked nothing really close to this memory; but then again were of a younger man.   Apparently he died of aids and continued making porn even after he knew he was infected, so maybe that's the man I saw.  Well, I should say freak I saw; as that is sort of what the memory is of... Some sideshow freak, this one with an anomaly not fit for a normal sideshow.

I woke up the other morning, with a piece of a song in my head;  the only line I could actually remember was just like an old time movie...  I knew I should've remembered more of the song. When I found a moment I used google to find the song.  There it was:  Gordon Lightfoot.

The night before last, I was changing channels and stumbled on Wonderland.  Perhaps it was the music that made me keep watching.  But I barely noticed the music until the end, when the titles rolled to the beat of Gordon Lightfoot singing If you could read my mind.

I waited for the credits to roll to the songs (always last for some reason...) and then noticed all the songs I'd been hearing.

Val Kilmer played John Holmes.  For some reason I was thinking, that's not the way I remember him.  For some reason I thought the performance would've been better if he was wearing eye makeup.  Mascara could've rolled down his cheeks with the blood.

I suppose I could do a little investigative work and find out more about this story, but the story in this movie seems, to me at least, to be enough.   The man is dead now and whatever judgements you might feel compelled to make are really of little consequence.  But there was something about the story and about the man that makes my skin crawl.  Presumably a much more realistic version of the fantasy played out in Boogie Nights.

I liked it; one of the better pictures I've seen in a while.

I should add that in my little search for JH on the web, I was informed that If you could read my mind was JH's favorite song, and that he sang it to his girlfriend on a regular basis.