Good L.A. Weekly Article on John Holmes/Wonderland Murders
Jeffry Fain
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/46/features-macdonnel.php
In Too Deep
In the summer of 1981, porn legend John Holmes stepped into an abyss
of drugs, mayhem, and murder. Meet the wife and the girlfriend he
almost took with him
by Allan MacDonell
Almost everything publicly known about porn king John Curtis Holmes is
apocryphal, anecdotal, secondhand or informed by conjecture. Except
for the cock. Thirteen inches long, as thick around as a man’s wrist,
hard on demand, coming on cue: the appendage of the pathological
braggart’s most outlandish boast — and it turns out to be true. At
once raw footage and special effect, the fabled tool appeared in
hundreds of XXX epics, creating the first — and possibly last —
superhero of the blue screen, polyester-bad private detective Johnny
Wadd.
Before Johnny Wadd, though, there was the gangly hillbilly kid from
Ohio, born in 1944, product of an impoverished childhood, a puking
drunk of a father, followed by a violent drunk of a stepfather. A
stint in the Army, hitched up to nurse Sharon Gebenini, a budding
career as a forklift operator. Holmes’ special quality, so to speak,
was discovered, in the late 1960s, by a skin photographer in a Gardena
poker club men’s room. By the time the ’70s had shifted into high,
Holmes’ monster of a penis had become the most recognizable and
marketable prop in the history of porn.
Later, as the ’80s dragged in, the Holmes hydraulics became unreliable
and the bookings dropped off. The cult fell away. The film Wonderland
focuses on a fateful two weeks during that period, at the end of which
the actor left a palm print above a blood-soaked deathbed at the
Wonderland Avenue scene of the notorious “Four on the Floor” murders
of July 1, 1981. Four people bludgeoned to death, another left for
dead. The film, directed by James Cox and starring Val Kilmer as
Holmes, approaches the slayings from multiple viewpoints and attempts
to clarify exactly what happened during that orgy of lead pipes and
skull fragments.
The gruesome murders were retribution for a home-invasion robbery, two
days earlier, of underworld kingpin Eddie Nash. On the morning of June
29, four strung-out ex-convicts had sneaked through an unlatched
sliding door into Nash’s ranch-style house in the hills above Studio
City. The door had been left unlatched for the robbers by Holmes, whom
Nash had often spoken of as a “brother.” Nash and his 300-pound
bodyguard, Gregory DeWitt Diles, were rousted out of bed at gunpoint.
A pistol went off, and Diles suffered a grazing flesh wound. Nash, the
story goes, fell to his knees at the sound of the shot and begged for
time to pray. The robbers absconded with cocaine, heroin, Quaaludes,
money, weapons and jewelry, a haul that was valued by the U.S.
Department of Justice at something like a million dollars. They left
Nash and Diles humiliated and stewing inside the house.
Eddie Nash. Real name Adel Gharib Nasrallah, an immigrant of Lebanese
— or is it Palestinian? — parentage. In 1960, Nash set up a hot-dog
stand on Hollywood Boulevard. By the late 1970s, if you were young,
happening and in L.A., you could hardly spend a night on the town
without putting money into Eddie Nash’s pocket. One count has Nash
holding 36 liquor licenses, mostly in the Hollywood area. Gays dancing
at the Paradise Ballroom. Straights doing the hustle at the Seven
Seas. Pogo-happy punk rockers at the Starwood. Interracial funk fans
at Soul’d Out. Horny loners at the Kit Kat strip clubs. The cover
charges and bar receipts all led to Eddie. If you were a doper,
chances are Nash was making some change off you there as well.
Nash had evolved into a notorious, well-rounded crime lord and
entrepreneur. The Wonderland Gang, in comparison, consisted of clumsy
dope pushers who relied on crude rip-and-run robberies of lesser
dealers to maintain their habits and inventory. Their hideout was a
much-frequented stucco party house on Wonderland Avenue, leased to Joy
Audrey Miller, a 46-year-old heroin addict and ex-wife of a Beverly
Hills lawyer. Her live-in boyfriend was Billy DeVerell, 42, also
addicted to junk. Ronald Launius — who, like DeVerell, honed his
charisma in a prison yard — was the 37-year-old alpha dog of the pack.
Along with overnight guest Barbara Richardson, 22, they all died as a
direct result of knowing John Holmes and fucking with Eddie Nash.
Veteran LAPD detectives, just 12 years after Helter Skelter, claimed
they had never seen so much blood at one crime scene.
Much of the movie focuses on determining the exact nature of Holmes’
complicity in the Laurel Canyon butchery. He was indebted both to Nash
and to the Wonderland pushers. He was also the sole connection between
the two camps. Beyond dispute is that Holmes effected the entry of the
Wonderland Gang into Nash’s house, and that he later provided access
to the Wonderland house for Nash’s agents. He is assumed to have been
inside the residence to witness the murders, and to have somehow
gotten himself “wet” doing so.
There are two points of contention: Was the idea for the Nash robbery
that of the Wonderland Gang, or did Holmes first suggest it? While
inside the murder site, did Holmes, presumably under duress, actually
swing one of the lead pipes used to smash the victims into nearly
unrecognizable pulp? In Wonderland, the murder is approached from one
viewpoint after another, time after time, relentlessly, predictably,
with each rendering more explicit. There is virtually no suspense, no
dramatic tension.
And no cock. Relying on aviator shades as his signature prop, Val
Kilmer’s John Holmes could be anybody — any old hustler, any old pimp,
any old wannabe rock star who can’t remember where he pawned his
guitar last night.
The real John Holmes claimed to have had sex with 14,000 women during
his career as a professional wad. Sharon Holmes and Dawn Schiller are
among the tiny minority who were drawn into Holmes’ orbit despite the
cock. Dawn met Holmes when she was 15. He was her first love. Sharon,
married to John at the time, took Dawn in after she’d become his
mistress and allowed her to live in the couple’s home. The two women
formed a kind of mother-daughter relationship that has endured to this
day. On a recent Sunday afternoon, they sit at an outdoor table at a
Beverly Hills hotel doing publicity for Wonderland. Dawn is credited
as an associate producer on the film. Sharon is listed as an adviser.
Sharon is slight and sinewy, a tough bird with a soft center and a
smoker’s drawl. She wears a black cap to cover a skull that is fuzzy
like a freshly hatched chick’s: She has just finished chemotherapy
after a modified radical mastectomy for cancer.
“I am just a cast-iron maiden,” she says with a throaty laugh. “I’m
going to get through it, no matter what it is. I do not roll over and
play dead for anybody.”
Dawn, at 15, was a strikingly attractive woman-child, her huge green
eyes brimming over with fragile anticipation. You look at her picture,
and you want to protect her. You hope no one will latch on to her and
crush her spirit. Today, in her early 40s, Dawn wears a wide, sly
smile under those huge green eyes, still brimming with anticipation
and intelligent wonder. She has the calm assurance of someone who has
been through hell, fought her way out, and has no plans to go back.
She is finishing a book on her experiences, The Road Through
Wonderland.
“I have a daughter,” Dawn says when asked about the perils of putting
her ordeal into print. “Do I want my daughter to hear the story in my
own words? Or do I want her to hear somebody else’s version, whether I
like it or not?”
Sharon Gebenini met her husband-to-be in December of 1964, while she
was a graduate nurse working at County USC Hospital. Holmes was barely
20. Less than a year later, they were married. He found work driving a
forklift at a meatpacking plant. The couple had lived a conventional
married life in Glendale for about three years when Sharon came home
early from work one afternoon and walked in on John in the bathroom.
He had an erection, and he was measuring it. He’d already done a few
8mm film loops and photo shoots for magazines.
“He told me that this was going to be his life’s work, that this was
going to make him famous,” remembers Sharon. “I looked at him like,
What planet do you come from?”
John would never drive a forklift again. Sharon allowed her husband to
remain in the home, to eat meals with her, to mingle their dirty
laundry — together, they were on-site managers of a courtyard
apartment complex in Glendale. But Sharon would never touch John
intimately again.
Soon after being caught out at home, Holmes met Hawaiian porn director
Bob Chinn. Chinn initially dismissed Holmes as some “scruffy-looking
guy who had this big Afro-looking hair.” Then John dropped his pants.
That evening, Chinn wrote a script outline on the back of an envelope,
and a few days later, he had shot, edited and shipped Johnny Wadd.
Despite (or perhaps because of ) Holmes’ Alfalfa physique and goofy
hangdog face, the big-dicked undercover crime fighter captured the
imagination of the porn-going public.
The detective persona also appealed to John’s own imagination. In the
early 1970s, when the production of pornographic materials was still a
felony in Los Angeles, Holmes was busted on a porn set and held on
charges of pimping and pandering.
“He called me from Ventura, wanting to be bailed out,” says Sharon. “I
didn’t have that kind of money.”
A few hours later, Holmes was driven up to the house in the car of an
LAPD vice squad officer named Tom Blake. While pursuing his crown as
the King of Porn, Holmes would carry on a highly productive parallel
career of informing on the porn industry for the LAPD vice squad.
“John enjoyed playing Dick Tracy,” recounts Blake in the excellent
1999 documentary Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes. “He loved
that role of investigating and passing information along. John was
absolute dynamite.”
Sharon became very familiar with Blake’s voice on the phone. “John was
giving him regular information, particularly on anybody that had done
him dirty.”
Enter Dawn. i
It’s 1976, and 15-year-old Dawn Schiller’s parents are divorcing.
Rather than stick it out with Mom in Florida, Dawn elects to head west
with her 14-year-old sister and her father, a Vietnam-vet hippie with
hair down past his shoulders. The family stops for a hitchhiker at the
Grand Canyon, thinking he might have a joint to share. He tells them
that he sometimes stays with a girl who lives in an apartment in
Glendale. He guesses it would be cool with her if the whole bunch of
them crash on her floor.
When the family arrives at the Glendale courtyard apartment, the
girlfriend calls the complex’s manager to ask permission. The
manager’s husband comes over to screen the guests, and Dawn Schiller
comes under the scrutiny of John Holmes.
At this time, John is 32, at the height of his XXX prowess. He has all
the work he can handle, he picks his co-stars, he is paid top dollar.
He has woven a legend around himself, wrapped so tightly in
exaggerations and half-truths that he himself cannot see through the
web of overlapping reality and fantasy. He claims to have lost his
virginity at age 8 to the Swiss maid of a rich aunt who raised him in
Paris and Florida. He awards himself various advanced degrees from
UCLA and boasts authorship of several books. The hundreds of extremely
rich women who pay for his services, to hear him tell it, form a vast,
worldwide network of privilege and power. Twelve such women, he says,
all married and with the approval of their husbands, are mothers of
children he has sired, each for a large fee.
John gives Dawn and her younger sister odd jobs around the apartments,
“showing me different ways to be creative in the garage and redoing
furniture,” says Dawn, “that kind of stuff.”
Dawn doesn’t know about Holmes’ movie career. “We related on a really
childlike level,” she says. “I didn’t know what business he was in.
He’d do silly, cute, charming things around me. He liked my innocence,
the fact that I had nothing to do with the porn industry” — an
industry which, he would later tell her, he despised. Dawn likes John
for John, but even here the penis intrudes. “He was very shy about
it,” says Dawn in the Beverly Hills sun. “He gradually showed me who
he was, that aspect of him. He was scared that I was going to be
scared of it.”
John often took Dawn and her sister on outings around town.
Occasionally they would pass a Pussycat Theater. “I would see his name
on the marquee and get paralyzed,” says Dawn. “I wouldn’t want to look
at him. One day, he pulled up to a Pussycat and said, ‘C’mon.’”
The girls followed him out of the car, he signed an autograph at the
box office, and they were in. Dawn, still 15, and her sister, still
14, sat on either side of their chaperon. “We’re slumped down in our
seats, and I’m covering my face, and my sister’s covering her face.
People are walking by, trying to get John’s autograph, whispering,
‘Oh, my God. He’s here!’ My sister and I are hugely embarrassed.”
The movie starts. Dawn looks. John walks into the frame dressed in a
monk’s habit. “He opened his mouth and said something, and I
immediately cracked up. He got a little upset and jabbed me in the
ribs, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Then he started laughing, and we
had to leave.”
Soon after the Pussycat excursion, John takes Dawn on an outing,
leaving the sister behind. Although they have not yet had sex, John
has become increasingly possessive and controlling. “If I didn’t come
from school on time because I was hanging out with some friends, John
would be really angry,” she says. “He wouldn’t say anything, but he’d
snub you. You knew he was pissed.”
They drive to Zuma Beach, where John sits on the rocks, watching Dawn
swim. They both sit silently as the sun melts into the liquid horizon.
The 32-year-old man takes the 15-year-old girl’s hand and leads her to
the back of his van.
Many, many years later, the girl, all grown up, still seems in awe of
the experience. “At the time, he was very sincere,” Dawn says. “I was
very much in love with this guy, swept off my feet at 15 years old.
Look at Elizabeth Smart. She was 15. That’s a 15-year-old’s brain
space.”
When Dawn’s father abruptly left Los Angeles to return to Florida, the
vulnerable girl became more dependent on Holmes. For a while, Dawn
moved in with John’s half-brother, David, and his wife in an apartment
they shared in the court. But tensions ran high under that
arrangement. Eventually, Sharon Holmes brought the girl into the home
she shared with her husband. Sharon knew, by this time, of the
relationship between John and Dawn.
“It baffles everybody,” says Sharon of her bond with Dawn. “I hate to
see injured people or dogs, and I just adopted her. I couldn’t see her
staying outside with just a shift on. She became a daughter to me. I
needed to tell her she had a brain. She didn’t need to accept what was
going on.”
A big part of what was going on was John’s increasing infatuation with
drugs. A teetotaler before embarking on his porn adventure, Holmes had
turned to Scotch whisky at first, packing a quart of J&B in his
trademark briefcase. Next came pot. Then cocaine — as the 1970s
peaked, great piles of the white powder seemed to be everywhere you
went, especially if where you went was a porn set.
John started bringing drugs home. Just before Christmas 1979, Holmes
introduced lines of cocaine. He was always in control of the supply,
and he parceled it out very specifically to Dawn. “He wanted to be
sure I didn’t have too much, but enough for me to be with him still.
Nobody else wanted to be with him after a while.
“He brought freebase in once and had this huge premonition of how
horrible it could get. He ritualistically took me out to the street,
where we broke the pipe and swore never to bring it in.”
Despite their pledge, base pipes and a torch were soon added to the
cargo in John’s briefcase. Holmes’ base exploits eventually eclipsed
his legend for cocksmanship, as his penis became less and less
functional, on and off the set. His co-workers joked that the only way
to ensure his arrival in front of the cameras was to leave a trail of
cocaine rocks.
By 1980, Holmes had taken to stealing — from parked cars, from airport
luggage belts, from the homes of his friends — to support his habit.
He began serving as a delivery boy for the only people who still
tolerated his presence, his drug dealers. (Holmes’ daily paycheck came
in the form of marbles of rock cocaine valued at around $1,000.) He
mooched gas money. His only possessions were the clothes he wore, his
wife’s Chevy Malibu and Dawn.
Dawn started to accompany John on drug runs. She’d stay in the car
while he did his deals and based himself into stupefaction. She’d sit
sometimes for two days out in front of a dealer’s house, her only
companion a Chihuahua named Thor. She became familiar with the outside
of Eddie Nash’s house and that of the home on Wonderland Avenue. John
wouldn’t take Dawn inside either house. Not that she wanted to come
inside.
“John told me that people had a way of disappearing from Eddie’s, and
that you were lucky if you found their bones in the desert,” she says.
“That was John’s way of telling me he was afraid of Eddie.”
To pass the time, she would sleep. There were always blankets in the
car, in case she had to hide. Sometimes John would leave a little bit
of drugs. “It’s not a proud year of my life,” says Dawn, “but it’s
what happened.”
On the crash from coke, desperate for cash and more dope, John began
beating Dawn and forcing her to turn tricks. After she brought back
the money, he’d tell her she was dirty, then subject her to scalding
baths, scrubbing her until she was again clean enough for him.
On December 25, 1980, despite her apprehensions, Dawn found herself
inside Eddie Nash’s house. John’s Christmas present to Dawn and his
present to Eddie, it turned out, were one and the same. When Dawn
returned to Holmes after fucking Nash for money, he smacked her in the
face hard enough to pop her tooth through her lip. Nash had given them
less coke than Holmes had anticipated. Four days later, on Dawn’s 20th
birthday, he sent her back to Eddie.
In January, John went psycho on the drugs. He put Dawn in the trunk of
his car and delivered her to a woman named Michelle, who ran a brothel
out of an apartment complex in the Valley. That period is among Dawn’s
worst memories: “The two of them watched over me. I was basically
trapped in this house for a couple of weeks.”
One day Michelle was out, and John was visiting. He ordered Dawn to
draw him a bath and fetch him a cup of coffee. While getting the
coffee, she noticed that a sliding door, normally locked so as to
prevent her escape, was ajar. She left her dog behind and ran.
A stranger at a Denny’s gave Dawn enough money to call her mother in
Oregon. Mom sent her a bus ticket. “It became this big ordeal, because
John’s calling every bus station in town, telling them I’m his
daughter, a runaway.”
Following Dawn’s escape, John started calling her mother’s house, day
after day. For the first few months, Dawn wouldn’t take the phone. She
had been unable to tell her family the depth of her degradation. John
begged Dawn’s mother to tell her that he loved her. He sent pictures
of himself and of Thor to Dawn’s sister. He sent the sister five
dollars and asked her to send back a picture of Dawn.
Finally, Dawn broke down and talked to John on the phone. He
apologized. He cried. He put the dog on the line. He promised that
there would be no more prostitution and no more hitting. Dawn’s
resolve crumbled. John was sounding like the old John, the goofy,
childlike, paternal and protective John she had fallen in love with
five years before, the John she had missed and had been hoping would
return.
John told her about how he had one more deal, a big one. Once he
turned that, it would give them enough money to leave L.A. behind, to
start somewhere new, to be like they used to be in the beginning, a
family. Dawn felt herself sliding back in:
“He sounded like that original person again on the phone. He was
tapping into that strong connection that we shared originally, that
was powerful enough to carry me into the bad times, hoping through
those times that the good times would come back.”
Dawn agreed to return to L.A. John’s one last big deal was the
impending robbery of money, drugs and jewels from Eddie Nash.
She flew in to Burbank Airport, and John picked her up. He also lifted
luggage that didn’t belong to him off the conveyor belt. He was
obviously high. Dawn protested, but John grabbed her arm and walked
her to the car. He took her to a cheap motel and broke out the pipe.
They did some drugs and spent a few days together. The vibe was
painfully familiar to Dawn: “He kisses me and says, ‘Okay, baby, I’m
off. This is it. I’m going to get the big one.’ And he doesn’t come
back.”
This is where the movie Wonderland begins.
In the pre-dawn hours after the murders, John arrives at the home of
Sharon Holmes, covered in blood and claiming to have been in an
automobile accident. He wants a bath. “John has a habit,” says Sharon,
“where if he has something unpalatable to pass off, he gets into the
bathtub.”
She allows him to come in and runs the water. He is scraped, but this
can’t account for the profusion of blood. His clothing is soaked with
it. The bath water turns red. That ain’t your blood, thinks Sharon.
As John sinks down, soaking in blood, he eventually reveals that he
has just seen people killed. He tells her a little about when, where
and who. i
“These were people you knew,” said Sharon. “These were friends.”
“They were scum. They deserved everything they got.”
* * *
John returns to Dawn just after sunrise. He immediately chokes down a
handful of Valium and goes to sleep. Dawn recognizes the Wonderland
house on the news. John is having nightmares, moaning about blood. On
the TV, Dawn watches as corpses are pulled out of the house in body
bags. When John wakes up, she confronts him. John blows her off. She
asks about the bloody nightmares. He’s out of money, out of drugs.
“We watched the news a lot,” remembers Dawn. “I knew it was bad. I
stayed really quiet. I didn’t know if he was going to flare.”
Before John can formulate a plan, the LAPD kicks the door in and hauls
them away. Dawn denies recognizing photos of Eddie Nash’s house, the
Wonderland house or Eddie Nash. Dawn is released with nowhere to go
but to Sharon, whom she has not seen in more than two years.
The police install John in a luxury suite at the Bonaventure Hotel in
downtown L.A., and later at the Biltmore. The homicide cops on the
case get nowhere with him. Tom Blake, John’s longtime handler from
Vice, is brought in. John attempts to cut a deal, angling to be moved
into a witness-protection program while giving up no real
incriminating information on Nash. Dawn and Sharon are brought to the
hotel as well, for their own safety. Dawn is scared. “We were told
that Eddie’s was only one of the contracts out on John. There were all
these mysterious other people John was about to rat on. People were
afraid he was going to inform.”
But Holmes was either unwilling or incapable of telling the truth. The
police, frustrated by John’s lack of concrete information, cut him
loose. John and Dawn hit the highway, running for their lives.
This is where the movie ends.
“I’d dyed his hair black,” says Dawn. “We’d spray-painted the car.”
The fugitives headed east until they could drive no farther. They
ended up at the Fountainhead Inn, a transient hotel on Collins Avenue
in North Miami Beach. There was an X-rated motel across the street.
Holmes took work at a construction site. One night he snapped and
raised his hand to hit Dawn. She ran. She made it down to the pool in
front of the snack shop. The hotel’s manager and a group of regulars
were sitting at the snack shop eating dinner.
Dawn: “They watched him catch up to me and throw me to the ground and
pummel me, then drag me back upstairs.”
That night, John put Dawn out to work on a prostitution track by the
beach. In the morning, when Holmes had left for work, the residents of
the hotel packed Dawn up and whisked her away. She took John’s handgun
and the Chihuahua Thor, and moved in with the daughter of one of the
hotel’s residents. John made phone contact soon after and begged for
Dawn to return.
“I wanted to say yes so bad,” she says. “He was throwing that ‘I just
want to hold you and love you and be with you again, and I’m sorry.’
But I told him, ‘You promised me. You said that was the last time.’ I
couldn’t forget that anymore. And I had a safe place. I had other
people there. It wasn’t like I felt trapped to say yes anymore. A lot
of times I had felt trapped to say yes when I really wanted to leave.”
Dawn contacted her family to let them know she was safe. At the urging
of her brother, she told the police where to find John. He was
watching a Gilligan’s Island rerun when the detectives knocked. He
asked if they wanted some coffee . . .
Back in L.A., Holmes stood trial and, in late June of 1982, was
acquitted in the Wonderland murders. A grand jury had been convened to
investigate the killings, but Holmes refused to answer their
questions. He was found in contempt and jailed for 111 days — until
Eddie Nash had been found guilty on a separate drug charge and
sentenced to prison. With Nash gone, Holmes told the grand jury enough
to get away. The judge ordered his release.
Nash served only a fraction of his sentence. Nearly 20 years later, in
2001, he pled guilty to a laundry list of racketeering counts,
including the Wonderland murders, and was sentenced to just over three
years, of which he served approximately one year.
In 1982, Holmes came out of jail a free man, in a sense — off dope,
for the first time in years. But the cock remained his only resource,
and it took him back to porn. A former business partner, Bill Amerson,
of whose two children Holmes was a godparent, set up a production
company and brought Holmes in as an executive. For a while, he was
relatively drug free, halfway reliable, but the old patterns soon
resurfaced. Holmes, Amerson contends, embezzled something like a
quarter-million dollars from him.
(Sharon Holmes is not surprised: “The moral [of Wonderland] for me is
your choices and what you do with them. You dig down deep and find
something. And John didn’t have anything to dig down and find anymore.
That’s why he went back to the porn business. That’s why he went back
to stealing.”)
After Florida, Dawn reunited with her father in Thailand, where he ran
a hotel. She spent seven years in Southeast Asia, far beyond the reach
of Holmes, where she earned high-school and college degrees. She came
back to the United States in 1988. “I remember coming back in the late
part of February, intent on finding John to tell him, ‘Look. I turned
out better than you.’” Instead, she read in a newspaper that Holmes,
age 44, lay dying of AIDS in Room 101A of the Veteran’s Administration
Hospital on Sepulveda. “I felt bad he was sick,” she says. “I was
going to go to the hospital. I was all ready to. But I didn’t have the
nerve.”
After a press screening of Wonderland, a CNN journalist crept out of
the projection room saying, “I feel like I need a shower.” And indeed,
watching the movie is like being dunked in someone’s dirty bath water
— John Holmes’, say, on the night of the murders — over and over
again, for an hour and a half. You walk out of the theater thinking,
What was the point of all this? Did anyone learn anything? Was anyone
changed for the better? Not Holmes, anyway. Despite his complicity in
so much death, and even after testing positive for HIV, he continued
working in the XXX industry, knowingly exposing at least three
blue-screen actresses to the virus.
When Dawn Schiller, sitting over coffee at a Beverly Hills hotel,
tells of Holmes’ nasty depths, of the repeated pimping and beatings,
she also manages to communicate something of the flawed, destructive
humanity of the guy. “My memories are that I loved him,” she says. “I
want to say that. I loved him. I don’t want to say that that wasn’t
real, or that that wasn’t okay. I want to say that it was real, and
that it was good. The times that I despised him and feared him are the
last times that I remember with him, but they aren’t the only times.
Right now, today, I remember the whole. He lost the battle. He saw it
coming with the breaking of the pipe, all the way back then. He tried
to stop the freight train.”
Sharon nods. “It was like putting a piece of chewing gum on the
tracks,” she says.
Kris Baker
"Jeffry Fain" <J...@jft.com> wrote in message
news:3fa572a6...@news.chartertn.net...
>
>
> http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/46/features-macdonnel.php
Thanks, Jeffry.
We saw the film (Wonderland) last week. Interesting,
with good acting. But...the director's quick-cuts and
pseudo-documentary style kept us from getting into
the story. When the final version of the murders is
portrayed, it goes by so quickly, you don't know
what you've seen.
> After a press screening of Wonderland, a CNN journalist
> crept out of the projection room saying, “I feel like I
> need a shower.”
Yup. But that's exactly what these people were.
Kris
Jeffry Fain
<kris....@prodigyy.net> wrote:
>
>"Jeffry Fain" <J...@jft.com> wrote in message
>news:3fa572a6...@news.chartertn.net...
>>
>>
>> http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/46/features-macdonnel.php
>
>Thanks, Jeffry.
>
> We saw the film (Wonderland) last week. Interesting,
> with good acting. But...the director's quick-cuts and
> pseudo-documentary style kept us from getting into
> the story.
I agree. Great acting, especially by Lisa Kudrow, but unless you know
something about the Murders and people involved,the movie would leave
you wanting to know more about the story.