Vanity Fair's Heath Ledger cover story: Is it celebrity porn?

When you read a 5,000-word magazine piece that begins by saying, "It's nine in the morning and I am in a cab threading its way through a tangle of narrow country lanes ...," you know that you're reading Vanity Fair, the last magazine left standing where writers are encouraged to let us know way too much about themselves (as in one infamous VF piece in which the female journalist quoted the person she was writing about offering a fulsome appreciation of her legs) and far too little about the actual subject of the profile.

In this case, the VF writer is Peter Biskind, a journalist and author I normally admire (he wrote "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," a marvelous dissection of 1970s Hollywood). Biskind weighs in with the latest nauseating example of media voyeurism directed at Heath Ledger, who died 18 months ago but still can't rest in peace, his last days being endlessly wormed over by media ghouls like Vanity Fair, which has put him on the cover of the magazine's new issue, betting that he can sell a boatload of copies.

After Biskind finishes his sightseeing ("I glimpse solitary cows grazing in absurdly green pastures") and offers a bizarrely ornate appreciation of Ledger's last film, Terry Gilliam's "Doctor Parnassus," describing it as being "like a pinata exploding with brightly colored gewgaws," he gets to the real matter at hand. He allows Ledger's fans to engage in unseemly fawning flattery, with Gilliam's cinematographer saying the actor was "like a young Richard Burton," before moving on to yet another excruciating excavation of the months leading up to Ledger's untimely death -- from the collapse of his marriage and the custody battle over his child to his drug use, chronic insomnia and all sorts of other gory details.

Virtually everything in the piece, even the tales of how Ledger pals Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law volunteered to help Gilliam finish "Parnassus" after Ledger's death, has been reported elsewhere. After a while, you start to focus less on Biskind's meddlesome reporting and more on Gilliam, asking yourself: Why is the filmmaker still talking endlessly about Ledger 18 months after his death? Is it just because he lost a friend and collaborator? Or is it because Gilliam knows that a Vanity Fair cover story will help him continue to beat the drums for his movie, which still hasn't found a U.S. distributor?

At the end of the piece, Gilliam says: "We were planning our future with Heath. We were going to make a million films. He was off. Nothing would've stopped him. Except death." As anyone close to Michael Jackson can attest, with Larry King having done something like 23 consecutive shows about the dead pop star, each one more tawdry than the last, apparently even death can't stop the endless parade of morbid media snoops from carving their initials in every available celebrity grave.

  

Comments

[Chika]

Completely agree. Hound them alive, hound them dead. We strip them of their humanity and reduce them to products. This way, every moneymaking potential can be scraped even in the grave. It's the new entertainment.

[john saint ryan]

I spent a year working with Heath before he hit Hollywood and he was a grand lad,he didn't personally need a lot, but his generosity was taken advantage of by many. As his celebrity grew it seemed that the 'vultures' grew also.
Vanity Fairs cover surely did the trick, from the moment I learned of Heaths death I have avoided reading the media stories, up to now. I saw the cover and it reminded me of the joy that Heath radiated. Well Biskinds' tale proved how foolish I was to think that someone might write something to celebrate the lad. He deserved a whole lot better, my heart goes out to his family and true friends.

[Matt]

This article is so dumb.Heath would not have given a flying leap if it existed, but I guess you people needed something to complain about,plus a little jealousy of another rival magazine always helps. The fact that you are writing an article complaining about another magazine that has an article about Heath, is just plain mud slinging and you are doing the very same thing you accuse VF of!!! Why not have an article 18 months after Heath has died? We still talk about James Dean,Elvis,Marilyn Monroe? What is the proper cut off date to stop talking about someone who has died? I think its about remembering Heath, not forgetting him. In the weeks following Heath's death there were many false stories printed full of gossip and out right lies,( all the junk about so called drug use, I dare you to find anything connecting Heath to drugs written while he was alive!) so now its nice to see a truthful article.The truth is never pretty. It is 18 months later and the reason people are talking now is that it was simply too hard, they have been grieving.I new Heath and this article is pretty decent, maybe not perfect, but decent and fair. If I hear that gossip about TIODP not having a US distributer again I will puke. It is gossip! Mandate Pictures based in California, you might want to ask them! Even if it doesn't, a movie CAN be successful without having the good old USA backing it! RIP Heath, my friend, I look forward to reading about you for years to come, and I was humbled to know you.

[Chris]

I was making my way back from Maui a few weeks ago, and I had to stop in the LA airport at 4 in the morning. After having some Starbucks, I went over to a shop and saw a bunch of magazines with Michael Jackson's face on it, and then I saw this issue of Vanity Fair with Heath Ledger on it. I picked it up, curious and a bit surprised as to why he would be making the cover of a magazine with a recent death like Michael Jackson. As I was on the plane for another five hours, I eventually started reading the article, and halfway through realized how much of a bad wrap they were giving Heath in the article. I've never really cared for Terry Gilliam, but now I really don't care for him or most others involved in his Dr. Parnassus movie. He's made it pretty clear that he just wants to advertise his movie by exploiting Heath's death, and putting down The Dark Knight. I don't remember seeing Christopher Nolan or any of the cast and crew doing this kind of stuff and talking about his personal life while promoting The Dark Knight. I'll see Terry Gilliam's movie, but only because I want to see Heath's last performance. I don't care about anything else Gilliam does in the future, he's always been a mediocre director.

I hope all of this media exploitation stops and let the poor guy rest in peace.

[Bobby]

Yes, I'm a Heath fan, so I bought the copy, hoping there would be more fabulous photos inside, like on the cover; I had read some clips from the piece, but having now read the entire article, it's particularly disgusting how Heath's supposed "friend', director Terry Gilliam, bashes Michelle Williams, in search of PR for his disjointed movie. Maybe if Gilliam would've had more money to shoot the film in the first place, Heath wouldn't have had to come to work with pneumonia in London, in winter. About Gilliam's comments, I would have to say -- what a misogynist! (and an opportunist!, not a loyal friend)

[MorganEngebretson]

agreed. i was excited when i saw the magazine because i love to read about him. i think he's fascinating. in my opinion, he was the best actor our society has ever seen and this article sucked. it just went on and on about stupid descriptions about what the writer was doing. soo disappointed.

[MorganEngebretson]

and to add to that, i TOTALLY agree with this first comment here. F this, we can talk about Heath if we want! he was a phenomenal actor and deserves to be talked about. not in a bad way, but to be remembered. why don't you QUIT B*tching about other people's magazines, they just want the same thing you do. WOW.

[Tad]

This story is an example of columnists at the LAT getting way too much leeway to write about his or her every inane pet peeve. This dribble boils down to Goldstein not liking the way Riskind writes. HL was a movie star who died young, will always be famous and written about. The barista at Starbucks made my latte wrong this morning. What a great column that would make.

[donnamatrix]

Hey, journalists at least have an excuse--they're expected to be mercenary, self-aggrandizing, and unoriginal. What's more shocking is the behavior of Ledger's friends and colleagues. Gilliam continually bad-mouths people he claims are his friends and whose help he is demanding and then gets mad when he doesn't immediately get his way (ADD much?). How he manages to EVER get a film of the ground is a mystery, unlike the so-called "Gilliam Curse," whose origins are no mystery at all.

[Faith]

Guilty as charged. I bought the magazine (for this article and the one on Sarah Palin) when I saw Ledger's picture. I, for one, am STILL shocked by his death and wanted to know how, WHY this happened...not for ghoulish reasons, but more for closure. I think there's a lot of us who feel that way which may be why VF figured that this story still had legs.

I didn't think the article was exploitative, but it did restate a lot of things that we knew already. And I agree with Goldstein that the first-person observations were trite and unnecessary. I was also shocked at Terry Gilliam's candor about Michelle Williams. It would have been in better taste if he had kept that to himself. But my understanding is that he and Ledger were very close, so for that reason maybe he felt the need to be blunt about Ledger's and Williams' relationship to set the record straight, at least in his mind.

Speaking of which, a correction needs to be made in the story because Ledger and Williams were never married.