This Just In…

In a piece titled “The Movie Camera Turns on John Lennon’s Murderer,” the December issue of the British music magazine Mojo acknowledges the truth of what I’ve been saying in this blog since January 2006: The title of the film Chapter 27, starring Jared Leto as Mark David Chapman, and Lindsay Lohan as Jude, a Lennon groupie, could only have come from “Chapter 27” of my Lennon biography Nowhere Man.

Both Chapter 27 and another film about Chapman, The Killing of John Lennon, are, according to Mojo, scheduled for release in England on December 7, 2007, the day before the 27^th anniversary of Lennon’s assassination.

Crediting Nowhere Man—“Rosen’s compelling account of Lennon’s lost Dakota years”—with being the first “extended extrapolation of the uncanny numerological connections” between Lennon and his killer, deputy editor Andrew Male writes: “Following a labyrinthine series of legal ding-dongs with the Lennon estate, the book finally emerged in 2000 complete with a coda, a ‘Chapter 27’ which connects the numerological meaning of 27—‘the triple 9,’ of profound importance to John Lennon—with Chapman’s belief that killing Lennon would allow him to disappear into the unwritten chapter of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.”

The article also notes that Chapter 27 does not fully explain its title; that an online petition group has been trying to pressure movie theaters not to show the film; and that The Killing of John Lennon, an independent film written, directed, and financed by Andrew Piddington and starring Jonas Ball as Chapman, is the superior movie.

(According to recent press reports, Chapter 27 is scheduled for theatrical release in the U.S. in March 2008, and Peace Arch Entertainment, the film’s producer, has just signed an agreement with Genius Products Inc. to distribute the DVD in North America.)

Finally, the Mojo article points out that the price of Nowhere Man in the U.K. is £9.99—a triple 9 that not even I ever noticed before.

Bring on the Next Bad Numerology Movie

Jim Carrey in The Number 23, a numerology movie that fully explains its title.
Christine Loss/Courtesy of New Line Cinema

Ten days ago I called the Howard Stern Show in response to a comment that Stern’s soundman, Fred Norris (or somebody pretending to be Norris), posted here inviting me to speak on the show about the Chapter 27 boycott. The intern whom I chatted with had never heard of Chapter 27 or any boycotts. But he did say that somebody would “check it out” with Norris.

As the show has yet to return my call, I can only assume (until proven otherwise) that “Norris’s” comments about my previous two postings are forgeries. By all appearances these notes are an attempt by the publicity junkies at Boycottchapter27.org to scam their next media fix. Because it’s become increasingly clear that, aside from the boycotters themselves, the only people who care if Chapter 27 is picked up for theatrical distribution in the United States are the filmmakers, the Peace Arch Entertainment stockholders, and a handful of hardcore Jared Leto fans.

The “15 minutes” of fame allotted the boycott and the film have expired. If anybody’s still talking about Chapter 27 a few months from now, they’ll probably be saying, “The boycott was better than the movie.” Already, bloggers and critics have moved on to trashing the next numerology movie, The Number 23, which, unlike Chapter 27, at least goes to the trouble of explaining its title.

Yet, as the boycotters assume their rightful place as a footnote to the history of bad films about numbers, they refuse to see the obvious: Chapter 27 hasn’t been picked up for distribution not because of their headline-generating assault on free expression, but despite it—which is an indication of just how fatally flawed the film must be. If I were to venture a guess as to why nobody’s yet expressed a willingness to bring Chapter 27 to a theatre near you, I’d say: Probably because Lindsay Lohan’s limited to 10 minutes of screen time, and no distributor believes a mass American audience is going to shell out 11 bucks each—the current price of a ticket in Manhattan—to look at a fat Jared Leto play a despicable character, no matter how transcendent his performance might be.

Meanwhile, over at the Peace Arch Entertainment business forum, disgruntled PEA investors, as reasonable and well-mannered a group of people as you’ll find on any board in cyberspace, have been analyzing Chapter 27’s aesthetic and financial problems. Though they’re deeply disgusted by the toxic ignorance of the boycotters’ spam-like postings on their site, they think that the boycott itself is a joke that, if anything, has been helping the film—just not enough to put it over the top. And they predict that somebody will eventually pick up Chapter 27—but only after the hype dies down completely and a distributor can get it for a song. For their sake, I hope they’re right.

As for Me
This blog, now in its 14^th month, has been an interesting, and at times creatively rewarding, experiment—my first serious foray into cyberspace. I started it because I believed that Chapter 27’s writer/director Jarrett Schaefer had ripped off my title and possibly my concept from the Chapman section of my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man.

Beatles expert Roberto Ponce, one of Latin America’s foremost cultural critics, agreed that this was most likely the case. In a story about the film, “Mark Chapman, el Asesino de Lennon,” (Mark Chapman, the Assassin of Lennon) which ran in the December 9, 2005 issue of the prestigious Spanish-language newsweekly Proceso, Ponce, quoting extensively from Nowhere Man, explained how Chapter 27 is a metaphor for the murder—that Chapman wanted to write Chapter 27 of The Catcher in the Rye in Lennon’s blood—and how the number 9 and all its multiples numerologically connected Chapman to Lennon.

Then, in a story that ran in the New York Post, and was picked up by the Associated Press, on January 20, 2006, “Ono Tries to Halt Filming of Movie About Lennon’s Killer,” the writers Mandy Stadtmiller and Mary Huhn referenced Nowhere Man to explain the movie’s title. Why? Because Nowhere Man is the only book that fully explains it.

Disappointingly, Schaefer was either too amateurish or too ignorant to fully explain the meaning of Chapter 27—he completely ignored both the numerology angle and the metaphor of writing the missing chapter of The Catcher in the Rye in Lennon’s blood. All he did was “borrow” an obscure title to graft onto a film that has little to do with Chapter 27. Had he fully explained the title, and shown how it numerologically connected Lennon to Chapman, I suspect Chapter 27 would be a more interesting movie.

Of course, everything I’ve written here is little more than educated guesswork—I’ve not yet seen the film. (I only feel as if I had.) Like everybody else who’s interested, I’ll see it when it’s released, in whatever form it’s released in. Then, as promised, I’ll post my review. For now, however, I’m going to take a little vacation from blogging and go someplace tropical. We’ll see where things stand when I get back.

A Gift to a Dying Movie

I thought that I heard him laughing.
Detail from photo in Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, Quick American Archives 2002. ©AP/Wide World Photos

Anybody who’s been reading this blog knows that I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to figure out how a seemingly clueless organization like Boycottchapter27.org engineered a PR coup that was the equivalent of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight pulling off The Great Train Robbery. How were they able to inject into a high-profile gossip column, with impeccable timing, news of their boycott and then have that story flashed around the world in a variety of languages?

• I suggested that they were a well-financed creation of Chapter 27’s producers, Peace Arch Entertainment.
  

• I suggested that they were evil PR geniuses who’d formed a maverick agency and were drumming up business with an ugly but effective postmodern publicity stunt.
  

• I suggested that they were a group of George Bush-style, ex-frat-boy publicity-hounds—who were fond of saying: “You’re either for the boycott or you’re for murder.”
  

But in my reverie, I’d overlooked the primary rule of solving any mystery: The simplest, most obvious answer is usually the right one. It’s now pretty obvious that Boycottchapter27.org is as misguided and naive as they appear to be. Ignoring the well-documented history of what happens when somebody tries to censor or repress in any way an “offensive” movie or other work of art, they handed executive producer John Flock a gift on a silver platter: a nasty, ongoing, headline-generating boycott for a movie of questionable quality that from the very beginning was in deep trouble with critics and fans and that has still not been picked up for theatrical distribution in the U.S. Flock, of course, accepted the gift graciously…and allowed his real public relations specialists to do what they’ve been doing so remarkably well for the past year: They put Chapter 27 back in the news, long after it should have died a natural death.

The boycott was a five-star success—for Peace Arch Entertainment. Even Yoko Ono loved it. Apparently forgetting that she’d coached Sean Lennon’s (former) BFF Lindsay Lohan in her role as Jude, a Lennon groupie who befriends Jared Leto’s Chapman a few days before the murder (Lohan says Ono gave her “the confidence” she needed to play the part), the reigning Queen of Media Manipulation told Entertainment Weekly, of the two thousand people who’d signed the boycott petition, “It’s very sweet of them. John would have thought so, too.”

Ono—whose spokesman, Elliot Mintz, is also on Paris Hilton’s payroll—understands perfectly well that all publicity is good, free publicity is better, and free, sympathetic publicity is best of all. She knows that two thousand people, in the scheme of things, is a miniscule number, and if the boycott accomplished anything, it probably made 200,000 people who couldn’t have cared less about the movie very curious to see it. And if John Lennon is paying attention somewhere, I think he’s laughing his balls off at the sheer absurdity of it all. (I’m finding it pretty funny myself, and I haven’t even seen the movie yet. Note to John Flock: Please send screener. Maybe I can help.)

The Howard Stern Show

One thing that did surprise me about the boycott was a comment that a reader posted about my last piece, “What Are They Going to Do for an Encore, Burn the Book?” That the comment was typical of the ridicule and innuendo that people associated with Boycottchapter27.org tend to post in response to anybody who disagrees with them wasn’t surprising. That it came from Fred Norris—who I later learned is a soundman and on-air personality on The Howard Stern Show—was astonishing.

Stern, whom I’ve listened to enough to respect and occasionally admire, is a veritable free-speech martyr, and it’s mind-boggling that anyone who works on the show and makes his living pushing the bounds of “good taste” could support a boycott that’s trying to repress a legitimate artistic endeavor, no matter how offensive he might find it. Norris, apparently, has learned little about the concept of free expression in the 28 years he’s been with Stern, and it makes me wonder if he’s ever read the Boycott Chapter 27 blog, which, last time I looked, seems to have transformed itself into an educational site, burying their hate speech under piles of academic verbiage that nobody’s ever going to read.

Correction

I’d said in response to Norris’s derisive comments about Nowhere Man that the book was a bestseller in four countries and three languages. Actually, it’s five countries; I’d forgotten that we’d killed in Colombia, too. (For the record, Fred, the other countries are the U.S., England, Mexico, and Japan. And though it sold out in Chile as well, there weren’t enough copies in print for it to technically qualify as a bestseller.)

A Final Word (I Hope) on the Boycott

People attempt to repress or censor works of art out of hate, fear, ignorance—and a deep-seated belief that they alone have been divinely anointed to judge the quality and intent of works that, more often than not, they haven’t seen. But these boycotts always fail, because their instigators ignore one of the most fundamental laws of human nature: The best way to get people to look at something is to tell them they can’t look.

And Now a Relevant Word from My Wife

My wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, blogs for Vanity Fair. Today she posted the following on their Oscar site, Little Gold Men:

Jackie Earle Haley’s Monster Performance

Quick plea: If you haven’t done so already, go see Little Children. Though I went for the reliable and wonderful Best-Actress-nominated Kate Winslet (who should get a special award for her willingness to forgo any discernible makeup), I was particularly moved by Jackie Earle Haley, nominated for Best Supporting Actor. In contrast to the somewhat cartoonish men (husband, lover) in the life of Winslet’s character, Sarah, Haley portrays neighborhood pedophile Ronnie as a complex, perplexing man, whose conflicting feelings and urges emanate from the large blue eyes in his cavernous face. Some of the best art shows us the humanity of people that society often deems monsters, and, though it’s extremely unlikely Haley will win the Oscar—what with Eddie Murphy’s perfect, pumped-up Dreamgirls performance—his portrayal of a tormented sex offender who loves his devoted mother and tries to pursue a “normal” life puts him in the Charlize Theron/Kevin Bacon/Jared Leto line of commendable, risk-taking actors. This film refuses to be predictable and pat in other ways as well; note the diverse reactions to a pedophile in the midst of a family-oriented suburban neighborhood. It also pulls the rug out from under us just as we’re about to—hey, just go see the movie.