Invasion of the celebrities
Can it be true? Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz may be coming here in September to film a movie called . . . “Wichita.’’ Come on down, I say! Adam (Sandler), Chris (Rock), and Jennifer (Garner) are already here! Soon Wolfgang Puck will be opening up one of his cheesy celebrity mill franchises in Boston, then our lives will be complete.
Oops, I stand corrected. He already has.
Everyone thinks our new avatar as Hollywood on the Charles is a Good Thing; two thumbs up! Free-spending film types pump moolah into our economy, paying top dollar for whatever they can get their hands on. The celluloid fever is so intense that not one but two local entrepreneurs want to build film studios on the South Shore to do movie shoots and generate original programming. Can “The Real Housewives of Hingham’’ be far behind?
I say: Cut! God, I’m so sick of celebrities, their vile, walkie-talkie wielding entourages, their smoked-window, black “hybrid’’ SUVs, and their desperate, paradoxical craving for privacy and publicity in downtown Boston. Plus I can’t park! The cops walled off a whole block of Boylston Street along the Public Garden a few days ago, so Hollywood fat cats could gobble gourmet sludge from their double-wide catering troughs. What’s the matter, fellas? Boloco not good enough for you?
I remember when Boston was a 3 1/2 celebrity town. There was Peter Wolf, the former J. Geils Band guy and onetime husband of megastar Faye Dunaway. (Remember her?) There was Ms. Norway, Liv Ullmann (remember her?), who was married to hotelier Donald Saunders, and there was Lindsay Crouse, married to David Mamet, who later traded her in for a younger model named Rebecca Pidgeon. The half-celebrity was Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, who used to spend a lot of time in rehab.
Twenty-five years ago, Boston’s idea of a celebrity sighting was Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith (remember him?) lunching with a clean-cut fellow in a herringbone tweed coat at the Wursthaus in Harvard Square. The tweedy guy was Galbraith’s nominal boss, Derek Bok, quondam prexy of the World’s Greatest University. The Globe’s celebrity pages, such as they were, breathlessly reported the doings of one Martin Slobodkin, a man who was famous . . . for being written up in the Globe. I met him a few years before his death and inquired why we always used to write about him. I go to a lot of parties, he explained.
Back then, nobody bothered coming to New England to shoot films, which was fine with me. Toronto, with its worthless Canadian currency, looked enough like Boston to satisfy the makers of dozens of movies, including “The Pentagon Papers,’’ “RFK,’’ and “Boondock Saints.’’ I remember visiting Montecito, Calif., and thinking: This place looks familiar. Indeed, for millions of TV viewers, Montecito “cheated’’ for the rocky coastline of “Cabot Cove, Maine,’’ the fictional home of Jessica Fletcher, the sleuthy scribe of “Murder, She Wrote.’’
Then “celebrity creep’’ set in. Tyler got clean, Aerosmith started touring again, and the boys’ mugs popped up in the papers. Chris Cooper moved here, to his wife’s home state. I know, you’ve never heard of Cooper, but he was great in the Jason Bourne movies, “Breach,’’ and other flicks. He was the reigning local celeb - before the apotheosis of Matt and Ben, that is.
Call it a Perfect Storm (George Clooney in Gloucester!): The Cambridge homies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck rode the success of “Good Will Hunting’’ to genuine stardom; the state started handing out massive tax breaks to filmmakers, and our local sports teams caught fire. Suddenly celebs weren’t embarrassed to get paparazzi’ed in Fenway - Affleck practically lives there - and quarterbacking the New England Patriots became a glam occupation.
Put another way: Can you picture Steve Grogan or Scott Zolak dating the world’s most beautiful woman?
I suppose I have resigned myself to the celebrity invasion. If Tom and Katie (Holmes, Cruise’s less-famous wife) hit town, I’ll probably be in the front line of rubberneckers, waving my cellphone to snap a pic of Suri. Who is Suri, I hear you say? The much-photographed, 3-year-old issue of the Holmes-Cruise union.
Yes, I hate myself for knowing.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 