"Dr. Who" David Tennant felt a good career move was to become "father huh?" in the BBC production of Single Father. So he moves from science fiction to just fiction — a widower raising four kids and falling in love with his ex-wife's best friend in a world where eventually everything works out okay. It is a good life that comes with a script.
It's a shame that daughters can't (or at least definitely, positively, absolutely — and we repeat, absolutely — shouldn't) wear their father's mustache. It is a connection. It is an ode. It just makes one feel good to know about it.
When the late, great Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
First things first: I want it clearly understood that this mustache I’m wearing is my father’s mustache. I should have brought his photograph. My big brother Bernie, now dead, a physical chemist who discovered that silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain, he wore it, too.
Almost every father gives some variant of the "I love you ... I will always love and support you ... You can do anything you want ... I'll always support you in the things that make you happy" speech(es).
However, just because the speech is given doesn't mean a dad's heart is always in it. Case in point, Laurence Fishburn is apparently not currently thrilled by daughter Montana, 19, and her decision that she can spark her acting career through porn. The report of his unhappiness comes solely from his daughter, who reportedly thinks she can fix things up with little trouble. Fishburn himself hasn't yet commented publicly, immersed as he is in a summer tour for his one man show about the late supreme court justice Thurgood Marshall, a role presumably giving him plenty of practice for weighing the pros and cons of anything, even a daughter and her delusions.
Some things are so, so much better in the imagination than they can ever be in reality. Among this group — it seems most likely — will reside William Shatner [Earlier: Not Your Father's Fatuous Phrase and Dads with Movie Cameras] as featured performer in the television sitcom being created from the sweet tweets of Justin Halpern. [Earlier: Curses]
Shatner has created a television persona of lovable, completely self-centered, wackiness. Halpern created a twitter persona of his dad as a ranting, teddy bear-like curmudgeon. And now a pilot has been commissioned by CBS with the unlikely-for-TV title of "Shit My Dad Says."
Will this turn out to be more than just another vanilla sitcom? Seems unlikely. No matter how "brilliant" the concept might seem, the media, the audience, the advertisers just won't allow it to play anywhere near as good on screen as it does in your head. Alas ....
Forty-six years ago, in New York, Martin Sheen was the son. Now he'll be the father in "the show that changed [his] life so thoroughly...," an LA-production of "The Subject Was Roses."
Intriguingly, he began his showbiz career in Julian Beck and Judith Molina's Living Theatre. That (continuing) experiment was supposed to try and break down the fourth wall between drama and audience, something Sheen would probably very much like to put up again, particularly with respect to the troubles of real-life son Charlie whose act and life makes "Two and a Half Men" sound like the number of realities in which he lives.
Last year, actor Michael Douglas brought his dad an ice cream cone at the end of a show, publicly embracing father Kirk, forgiving him for whatever drawbacks he might have had as a father. [Earlier: Buy vs. Build] Now, the star of the past Wall Street is on the publicity path for the remake, releasing March.
Playing the father card — since that is a much more sympathetic public persona than old lech with young(ish) hottie — Douglas is talking of how he failed his felon son, 31, and might not be active enough to beat up the young studs who arrive on his doorstep when his six-year-old daughter is ready to step out as a swan-like teen.
From nothing something ... and something extraordinary. That is the only way to explain how it is that James Earl Jones (whose father was out of his life before he was in it) has come to play Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams (who had a strained to the point of near nothing relationship with his own father). James, voice also of (anti-father) Darth Vadar and Lion King Mustafa, among his many other roles, is in fact the father figure extraordinaire in the play that celebrates the role in grand style.
Quite the human equation: an actor without a dad plus a role written by a man without a positive relationship with his dad somehow creates the ultimate father figure. How does this sort of thing happen?
Not that unusual but worth noting: dads are all over the movies. Front and center in the main frame and coming soon to a theater near you.
Currently rolling out is "The Boys are Back," the tear-stained saga of a father who loses his wife to cancer and gains the lessons to be learned by bringing up two kids on his own. Working together for the first time are stunt father and son John and Jorel Reynolds. The two have been shooting the next "Narnia" film on location in Australia. And also currently in production is "Due Date," the tale of Robert Downey Jr. (a real-life father of one) needing to find a partner to get him home in time for the birth of his baby.
Now the dilemma for every movie going pop is whether hanging out in the dark for a couple hours of staring at the screen is going to help him escape his troubles or highlight them.
What changes a man from dark to light(er)? "Oh boy, very simply, instant perspective of having kids," according to Johnny Depp, an actor/father appropriately called to attention today, in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, for his continuing roles as pirate captain Jack Sparrow and as a two-daddy (Jack, 7, and Lily-Rose, 10) who can't accompany his kids through Disneyland "without things getting weird."
Whereas before, for years and years, none of it ... none of it made sense to me at all. I was confused by it, didn't know what it was all about, what everything was for. Then, suddenly, when you are holding your child, I was like, 'oh, okay, I get it, I was an idiot. Sorry.'
I can't help it. When Thing get a 100 on a test or score a goal, I tell them how proud I am for them, but (truth be told) there's a little bit of me celebrating me going on as well. Fathers see themselves in their children.
And this brings us to today's guessing game: can you match the son with the famous dad, and guess their reaction to the son's success?
Son One is making his way in the movies and on the stage along the same, generally good guy path as his dad. When asked about his association with his dad, he said: "... if I change my name, then I'm going to be asked, 'Why did you feel you had to change your name?' It always comes up, but it wasn't until people started asking me a million questions that I had to sit and take stock of stuff. It is what it is."
Son Two just called his dad "cheap" on television, because he wouldn't bail him out of a $5000 personal trainer bill that the son told the trainer he would pay, just as he had paid previously. (It's not clear anyone ever told the father prior to the billing that he was on the hook.)
Son Three just earned a college scholarship for his basketball play, which may not have meant much to the family checkbook of his multi-millionaire, sky-leaping pop, but did make the son cry for its validation of his hoopsiness.
And the answers for the sons are:
Son One: Colin "son of actor Tom"Hanks, in the news for his current starring Broadway and Hollywood roles.
Son Two: Sean "son of rocker and aged roue Rod" Stewart in the news for an appearance on "Judge Jeanne."
Son Three: Jeff "son of bball icon Michael" Jordan, who takes his first turn in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, coming off the bench for Illinois.
The answers for the dads? Surely, at least two of them are proud, but only a father really knows how much of himself he sees in his kid's actions.
This week's objet d'eBay, a fake Oscar whose model was the childless Emilio Fernández Romo, is the reminder that the tube du jour is the Academy Awards. [Earlier: Movies to Be] Of course, everyone of heart is rooting for Heath Ledger's dad, Kim, to receive the award for his son's Joker performance that will eventually pass to Ledger's daughter, Matilda.
That rooting isn't quite fair to the various other nominated dads or all the fathers rooting on their children. But as is said quite often, life isn't fair. Peope see things differently as evidenced by the If it were, then more people would have been inspired for good and bad by the multi-awarded, but never Oscared 2005 dark comedy, In Memory of My Father, which would also be a wonderful name for the movie created from the angst of a woman whose dad was a CIA star (another still-to-be-made film).
Following in one's father's footsteps is an honored tradition. But sometimes it is best honored in the breach rather than observance.
Diana Clemente (as an example of a mobkid) is the owner of a Long Island car service and daughter of late Bonnano crime family street boss Anthony Spero. She has spent a lifetime publicly distancing herself from her father and his influences — and occassionally contesting reports to the contrary. She loved him, but ..."While I would not trade my father for any father in the world, I would certainly wish that ... who he was, was a little different."
Not yet able to wish his father was "a little different" is the third child-to-be of the second Dumbledore, Sir Michael Gambon. (Although it must be noted that if Gambon were different then No. 3 might not have gotten the chance to be.) His or her father, a 68-year-old actor who has been in most of the Harry Potter movies, is married to the wife with whom he shares a 44-year-old son and also is proud papa to 17-month-old Michael, courtesy of the woman who will be Three's mum as well. It sounds a bit confusing, but maybe papa is just getting better with age?
Because life is such that fathers do go up and down, but the goal is certainly to get better (smarter, nicer, more helpful) with age. And to that point, while VPOTUS candidate Joseph Biden is proud of Joe Sr., it is unlikely he wants to mimic the up and down financial trek his dad took.
Nor would the father want his son to ... because pride went (and should go) both ways. When Jr. became a senator, the father changed his job — and perhaps once again unsteadying his finances — as he went from used car salesman to realtor, just so a U.S. senator (like a poor mobkid) wouldn't have the burden of a dad who was in a money-making but distrusted profession.
As with just about everything written, you can pretty much boil all the words off by just admitting Shakespeare said it first and better.
So, there is from the acclaimed bard (if unhappy father) WS that,
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
and both "Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong" as well as "It is a wise father that knows his own child."
Up on the theatrical stage go men trying to work things out with their fathers or shake, rattle and roll their way into their childrens' hearts like the dancing dads of Norwich. Not that they don't take a chance doing so. As one targetted kiddo admitted, "I'm nervous because if he makes a mistake it will embarrass me and I won't show my face, but it is good to have him here because I can stick with him."
Braving the footlights to gain some insight into his own dad is Hollywood Square John Davidson, who has penned a theatrical meditation on his paternal/paternee relationship that he is bringing first to the college to which his father steered him.
And also living out a bit of his own life as curtains are drawn and shuttered is JD Nelson, who first got to live the part in his own life when his daughter was married in Indianapolis earlier this year, and just got to the lead in "Father of the Bride," (like the movie, but different) when the adaptation strutted across a Georgia stage.
'Tis better to be a father on stage or in real life? It probably depends on which of the parts you play and which of the stages you are at.
A blah, blah, yadda, blather report comes (surprisingly) from the BBC News to the effect that more and more fathers wouldn't recommend their children follow their business footsteps.
But they should.
If for no other reason than to give the public more office tower and courtroom dramadies. Perhaps CNBC could finally buck up its ratings with a "reality show" starring The Redstones. "Tune in next week" for the next mindbending episode of a mercurial, undying father vs. determined and very much estranged daughter. Or would you rather come home to a Tivoed The Murdochs, where an old cuss visionary father plays real-life King Lear, shuffling and re-shuffling the children's portfolio until, eventually, they begin to overcome his position. [Earlier: Plenty Peso Papi]
Not that every dramatic family has to end unhappily. Consider the Stewarts, father Patrick worked so often and hard that son Daniel had it imprinted on him that he had to keep quiet growing up because dad was always learning his lines.
This week's objet d'eBay is something of a stone soup. You can bring almost toss almost anything father-related into one's thoughts on this signed, first edition of father of three sons John Irving's breakthrough novel, "The World According to Garp."
Irving's fourth is the one where his fears and loves themes coalesced in the tale &mash; growing no doubt out of his never learning who is father was — of the son who was the physical product of an unusual mum and a man rendered incapable of anything except fathering and the emotional product of almost everything fearful one can face as a boy, man and dad.
The movie featured actor and kid's book author John Lithgow, son of a scholar who presented Shakespeare festivals and father of actor Ian.
Some lunatic threatened to shoot a 10-year-old because of his father. It's hard to believe the shadow of a philandering politician leak so far into darkness, but Louis Sarkozy, youngest of three sons of French prez and new (?) bridegroom Nikolas, is relatively safe as police nabbed two 20-somethings who "acted out of stupidity," according to arresting officers.
Also struggling with his father's shadows and darkness is Omar (son of terrorist) Bin Laden, "an ambassador of peace," under the impression, according to his talk with the Associated Press that "...a truce between the West and al-Qaida is possible, " despite his dad's declarations to the contrary.
Why Omar struggles to emerge is anyone's guess. He's a successful businessman, thanks to the Bin Laden connections and billions germinated from grandfather Mohammed Bin Laden but only creates hilarity and doubt with every public action and pronouncement — Paris to Dakar horse race, anyone?
Maybe (although it's probably not something fanatics would cotton to) Omar could take a lesson from the life of Drew Barrymore, whose iconic grandfather created crossfiring snyapses in the head of his son/her father John Drew Barrymore. Having survived an early difficult relationship with dad, Drew lived a life completely of her own and managed to escape both the darkness (more or less) and his shadow, while still be able to wish upon his death, "He was a cool cat. Please smile when you think of him."
One of "Two and a Half Men," Jon Cryer, doesn't know how his television son will develop. In a recent interview he suggested it all depended on how the producer's son — presumably the inspiration for the Jake character — grows and the challenges he offers his father.
Nor, like fathers everywhere, does he fully understand what planet his son comes from. As he admits, "Oh I will avoid those same pitfalls ... but you can't and they sneak up and bite you, no matter what. My son just gave me my first ... I was telling him ""You can't play the video games, you can't have the ice cream until you do the chores"" and he said, ""Whatever."" I went ""Oh my God!"" that was my first 'whatever' at 7. I felt like I should have written it down like on the [growth] chart — my first friggin 'whatever' of a long list of 'whatevers.'"
