Fame. He'd like to be walked on a leash and play really dirty,
kinky sex games. He's uh the guy put the cock in the peacock network.
Okay, bitch, Hey, everybody a J. Benzi here for fame
as a bitch. This is your show for September twenty seven, twenty twenty
three, Wednesday. It's the show for my free birds. Here we are
here, you go. Hope your little beaks. Here's a free show for
you guys. Cute they look look at you. How daddy's feeding the little
birdies. I say that in old seriousness. I'm very happy to do so.
As you know, I took a month off. Wanted you to miss
me, so did you. I hope you did. I'm back to stay,
but I'm staying only because I want you on that Patreon team. I
want you on the other show. You get more bang for your buck Patreon
dot com. Slash Fame is a bit by the way. We had a
bird when I was a kid. We had a minor bird named Dax and
beautiful bird. We had the cage in the dining room where we used to
eat dinner and stuff, and naturally my father taught him all Italian curse words
buff and goul ogistugats non debucco parti, which means don't worry about nothing,
just countless curse words. And ship. And my aunt Mary, my father's
sister, was very concerned because she lived with us. And Mary used to
go to Hawaii quite a bit. In fact, she went to Hawaii thirty
one times, fell in love with a Holly Kulani. I suffered through my
childhood listening to Don Hull records Tiny Bubbles and the one make you Feel Happy,
Make You Feel Fun. Whenever she started playing that song, my father
would yell upstairs, tiny bubbles, up your ass, Halford, please don't
say that. And Mary was nervous because her friend Emmlanie was coming from Hawaii
to stay for a week in the guest room in our house. Now was
it Mary and lesbian? I don't think so. I mean I used to
think so, but mister Roslie as a shoreby, that's not the case.
And Mary was in love with a man, two different men at different times.
That broke her heart and she kind of gave up and lived a life
of traveling. I mean she went everywhere Galapagos islands, islands, I mean
the tips of the world she wanted to. She fed groupers with a big
diving bell scooba diving helmet on. I mean, and Mary was a thrill
seeking crazy Africa, fell off a truck while elephant was stampeding, broke her
on. I mean, Mary was crazy. Alfred, Please don't let docs
say curses when Emilanie's here, as if Emilanie was better than us. Oh,
Mary, I would never do that. Don't worry about it. As
soon as Emilanie sat down for dinner, up your ass, up your ass
by fun gle bifun gle. And then Melanie started laughing and Mary was red
as a lobster. The funny thing with Dax was we had two phones,
one of the kitchen and one straight upstairs on a little glass tabletop for Rosalie,
Lorraine, at Mary and I because we my mother and father stopped upstairs
as well. Phone upstairs, a phone in the kitchen. Well, what
happened a lot in the course of our days was the phone would ring,
and you know, and Mary might be upstairs, my mother's downstairs. One
of them grabbed the phone and the other would say, I got it,
I got it. You know. It was like an automatic Well, the
bird picked that up, so several times people got hung up on it because
somebody who picked the phone up and the bird would yell I got it,
and the other person would hang up, and that meant the person calling just
got disconnected live phone with the bird. Jack's Dax died. We used to
put the the big black curtain over its cage at night before he went to
bed, and he would always say, bought a sana, banna, sana,
good night, good night das in the morning, you take the blanket
off by drawn, by drawing no. And one night we forgot to put
the black sheet over his cage, and apparently one of our three cats jumped
on top of the cage. Because they were very interested in him. They
used to jump on the hutch and look at the kids to get down,
Get down. We had Bidojo Badacci and Tabitha and Badacci, but Dad,
she was more of a hunter type and she must have jumped on top of
the cage and gave the bird a heart attack and they went das. Before
I begin the show, I want to say something. I said this to
my patrons weeks ago, really bothering me. It came up again in the
conversation I have with a girlfriend. It really bothers me. You know,
months ago, my good friend Drina de Niro, Robert de Niro's daughter,
lost her son to a well to fentanyl, to a fent atyl overdose.
The kid was not a drug addict. He was nineteen years old. He
had just recently moved out from his mom's apartment in New York City, got
his own place, and he look. I don't know, maybe he was
addicted. I don't know, but I want to be careful what I say
because I think the world of Drina, and it's horrible that she lost a
child. I can't even imagine. And you know, I spoke to her,
I wrote her, I write her when whenever she's on Instagram and she
puts pictures up of her son all the time, Leandro, cute kid.
And when it happened, it was heartbreaking, obviously, and Drina wrote many,
many passages and she still does about how much she misses and loves him,
of course, but yet I'll put pictures of a tutsie and dream it
will comment. Then she laughs about how crazy he too. He looks,
So I get I get happy knowing that she can at least step away from
that grief and find happiness somewhere, even if it's a silly picture of my
dog. But I can't help but say this, and I don't want to.
You know, there's nothing about Drena, but this poor kid died because
the pill he got, whatever he asked for, contained fentyl and he died,
just found dead July two. And Drena went on the war path and
said, the people seldom that pill knew, they knew what they were giving
him, because you know, we're in a nightmare of addiction and fentyl overdoses,
and that's what killed my son. My son suffered tremendously through the pandemic,
as maybe many of your kids had. Sadly, addiction took over in
his last year and eventually killed him. Okay, being very honest about what
her boy went through. And it's horrible to even think that that can happen
to our children. But the fact is it did. And the bigger fact
is the reason why Fentinel is in this country as much as it is is
because of the southern border, because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the borders are
and all the other assholes in the Biden administration don't do a goddamn thing but
make believe the boarder is closed. They make believe every day the board is
fine. The borders closed, they say. And yet you put on TV
and you see pictures of illegal immigrants on trains coming in. You see them
walking across the Rio grand You see them walking for miles, just hell bent
on getting in the country, and they know they will get in, and
once they get in, they get everything for free. We all know that
stuff. This is not about that stuff. This is about the fact that
a man as powerful as Robert de Niro, who's in with all the Democrats,
and I mean I would, I would. I would say he's probably
top five or ten powerful liberals in Hollywood. Would you say he knows where
these drugs are coming from. He knows Fentinel's coming from down South, and
Joe Biden, the man he voted for from the party he adores, is
allowing it. Now. I'm gonna put myself in Robert DeNiro's shoes. If
I lost my grandson to a poison and a drug that comes from these fucks
across the border, I don't care where it originates in China. That's bad
enough. Don't ask me how I feel about that country, but the fact
that it gets it, that it gets into Mexico, and then these pieces
of shit walk across the border with a strap to their back, and Biden
and his friends do nothing about it. If I'm Robert DeNiro, you could
make such a big dent in this problem by opening your mouth and saying you
lost a grandson. This affected you personally. You love that little boy.
I've seen the pictures. What bothers me is a guy as powerful as Robert
DeNiro doesn't open his mouth and have a meeting with Joe Biden or go on
the record and just say it. The border has to be stronger, strengthened.
We can't live like this anymore. He's in a perfect position to make
that statement, and yet he won't because he's liberal hardcore, and he's a
Democrat hardcore, and amazingly he thinks Joe Biden is doing a great job.
And I just don't know what to say. I mean, you know,
I don't want to join as a personal friend. And I've gone out with
her, We've been buddies for a long time, real New York chick.
I really like her a lot she's a Tiger mom. But yet they have
Joe Biden on speed dial, or anybody that's powerful in the Democratic Party on
speed dial. Use that strength, use that influence, and make America see
that you're with us. Whatever. How do you vote with that? You
want that ball to shut down? Come on, man, just bothers the
shit out of me. I thought better of him. Anyhow, I wanted
to talk about another hard luck woman, another hard luck actress. I had
some really great stories last week or two. It's all some great stories in
the patron page about Susan Cabot and so many actresses from Hollywood's Golden era who
died and had problems with addiction and PTSD and rape and bulimia and drugs and
sexual problem. It just murder, addiction, so many problems, and their
careers just withered away. And alcohol two was a big one. Alcohol addiction
was a big one. And for a guy that just quit Booze, I
didn't give you guys the whole story that my patrons know how crazy it was
for me to quit Cold Turkey and what I went through. The hallucinations,
I mean, the dts, the seeing people in my room, not seeing
people. I would have been everything in my life that that person. Those
people were in my room. I was talking to a bed with nobody on
it, but I was convinced that I was talking to so and so on
my bed. It was terrifying. I'll never go through it again because I
won't drink again. So that was a big thing when it came to these
old hard luck actresses. But one person I want to talk about because somebody
one of my patrons. Hey man, you know that's a great story.
You did the mysteries and scandals on it, but I never heard you talk
about him on the show. And that is a woman named Yvette Vicars.
Evette was an actress, playboy playmate, and what a horrible death. Not
many people know this story, but back in twenty ten, the Los Angeles
Police Department found a mummified body in the home of the former playmate and B
movie actress Evette Vickers. A neighbor noticed letters and cobwebs and Vickers mailbox.
She went into the house and discovered a body upstairs next to a still running
space heater, and the body appeared to have been there anywhere from several months
to a year. She was eighty two years old Evette Vickers appeared in movies
like Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman an Attack of the Giant Leeches. That
movie poster read crawling horror, rising from the depths of hell to kill and
conquer. And like I said, she was also a Playboy Playmate of the
Month in July of nineteen fifty nine. She looked good man, I'm talking
knockout. She had friends, but mostly kept to herself. She was more
of an independent type spirit, and as she got older and further away from
people's memories and very far away from anybody in Hollywood, she would still get
cards and letters from all over the world requesting photographs and all sorts of fans
still wanting to be her friend. It's very sad, sad story, but
like I said, I've heard way too many times stories like this when it
comes to how some people are treated once the phone stops ringing with work.
One thing that bugs me. If she was lying dead that long, why
was her phone still connected? Why was her electricity still running to run that
heater? Who was paying her bills? Weird right, paying her bills but
not talking to her, not speaking to her for all that time while she
lay dead, weird. But if that Thinkers was a pin up girl and
did some cool and schlocky movies. You know I'm talking about some Some of
those movies and the actors in them make us laugh more than a big budget
comedy pack with box office stars. Was he to Hangover? Three? Awful?
Hang Over one, tremendous Hangover, Hangover two pretty good? The third
one terrible. I saw one of those movies the other night. It was
called Sorority Row, some shitty slash or flick with a bunch of chicks in
it. But it had Audrina part Audrina Patridge in it, and I've always
thought she's cutie, so I tuned it. Oh my god, is she
a horrible actress? Jesus Christ, So was everybody. But it was so
bad it was funny, And then I couldn't believe my eyes because of old
people. Carrie Fisher turned up in this movie. She played one of the
girls mothers. Maybe she owed somebody a favor. I noticed she didn't need
the money. I couldn't believe I saw her in this shitty movie. Now,
most people know Carrie Fisher for her role as Princess Leia and the Star
Wars films, a lot of people don't realize that her writing career spans farther
than the best selling books and novels that she wrote. Over the years,
people have described Carrie Fisher as one of the most sought after script doctors in
town. And she worked without credit on the films like Hook, Last Action
Hero, even the Star Wars prequels, and a lot more stuff. But
I'll get back to carrying a second. But let me get back to Vickers.
Is this show is going to jump back and forth. But Vickers was
a second generation jazz child. Put it that way. Her mother, her
parents were into jazz. Her father played sacks. His name is Charlie Vetter,
his mom played Her mom played piano, Maria Vettter out in Kansas City's
jazz scene. And Yvette learned to sing while she hung around those clubs as
a kid while her parents did their thing. And she came to LA studied
at UCLA and got some work in TV commercials. Her first role a little
bit of flash. She part in the movie Sunset Boulevard, all my favorite
movies. It's a quick little part, not really important to the film.
But as she is, took some classes under skills then She got married from
fifty three to fifty seven to a guy named Don Prell. He was a
bass player. Then she did some stuff like Reform School Girl, Sad Sack.
She worked with Jimmy Cagney and Short Cut to Hell. But really the
big movies weren't in her repertoire. She made b movies teen Exploitation or Horror
Flix, Juvenile Jungle, and like I said, Attack of the Fifty Foot
Woman, an Attack of the Giant Leeches. She also posed for men's magazines,
and that was a second career that really got her a lot of a
lot of notice. Russ Meyer a man who loved women, big breasted women.
He photographed her centerfold image and her husband did not like that she was
married to a guy, and Leonard Burns he didn't like the way her career
was going that suddenly she's a pin up. After three months he split.
Then she did Broadway one show The Gang's All Here with Melvin Douglas, E.
G. Marshall, Arthur Hill, Bert Wheeler, nice cast. That
increased their visibility. So she's thinking here I'd come Hollywood, get ready.
She was sleeping with big shots, Ralph Meeker, Jim Hutton, Timothy Hutton's
dad, Lee Marvin, one of the toughest bastards in Hollywood, and the
Italian director Franko Rossi also had some affairs with Carrie Grant, Mortzol and Howard
Hughes, who I don't think he ever didn't have sex with a girl in
Hollywood whose chest was I mean Holad went for a sea cupping better less than
see he didn't see you. You know. He made a braw for Jane
Russell, right, He concocted and came up with a bra for Jane Russell
because she was so top heavy. Loved his titster Howard us before he went
bananas and hid in the hotel and grew his nails nine inches long, and
oh what a psycho he was. Vickers also acted in a TV commercials and
shows drag Net, One Step Beyond. She made films like Beach Party and
Hudd. Hudd was a good movie, big movie, but that began to
dry up. You know, it happens in this town, happens in this
down. TV shows like Emergency, I watched that. In the late seventies,
things just were not going her way. She got work as a real
estate agent, not of fact, whenever you're in La he's looking for a
place to live and a moderately pretty woman shows you a home. You can
bet that she was once a an actress who didn't quite make it and then
went back to real estate. It's okay, there's no shame in that it
took this shot. It didn't work out, or maybe it did work out
for a while, and then it thought of the slowdown and they couldn't pay
for their their apartment or home whatever you want to call their car pa and
things. They're getting bed And when that happens to a pretty woman out here,
they normally hook up with a guy with money. But then you were
a slave to that guy, so I give him. I take my hat
off to these girls who go fuck it. I'm gonna get my own job
and make my own money. And that's what i vet Vickers did. She'd
made a song. She recorded a song called the Leechers Are Crawling all over
Me, not a catchy tune. She did that with a punk group called
Nick v Room's Tomb, and her career got goosed a little after that.
Then she appeared in the horror film in nineteen ninety called Evil Spirits with Karen
Black, the Horror Queen, and Artie Johnson. I'm Artie Johnson from laughing.
Are you guys old enough to him? A laughing Artie Johnson had arrived
this little tricycle for kids and chase Ruth Buzzy around. Another sketch. She
would have that German army helmet on and he would look through some bushes and
then turned to the camera and just say very interesting but stupid, and people
would laugh. Why do we laugh at that ship back then? How starved
were we for good comedy? Horrible? Not funny at all? Or now
I'm jumping back to Carrie Fisher. This is an event. This is a
Vickers Fisher podcast. So most people know Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia obviously,
but tremendous writers. She was one of the most sought after script doctors in
town and she worked a lot of times without credit on the films that she
worked with. She wrote for the Movie's Hook, Last Action Hero. She
even wrote some Star Wars prequels and a lot more. By the nineteen nineties,
she was one of the top script doctors in town and she was always
called in to help fix or improve movie scripts. Most films feature one or
two or maybe a handful of names in the writing credits. But these big
Hollywood blockbusters are a lot of time the work of a lot more uncredited writers
who they bring in to polish, to polish a character up, or punch
up jokes, make the dialogue better, and other story elements. The Flintstones
movie had over thirty uncredited screenwriters and it was still shit. Some scripts you
just can't fix, because some stories should not ever become movies like The Flintstones.
In fact, I watched good Will Hunting Lass Saturday for about the twenty
fifth time. I love that movie, and a lot of people don't know
just how many script doctors Harvey Weinstein brought on to make that, you know,
to make what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote into the Hollywood classic it
became. Now. I know, Kevin Smith, who made Clerks and Chasing
Amy and Dogma, he was brought in did a lot of work on it.
But Harvey told me himself that he had as many as fifteen script doctors
come in and add their touches to the Goodwill Hunting script. He said the
original script that Ben and Matt turned in didn't even have the love story in
it. There was no part for Mini Driver in their version. I don't
know what they were thinking. You always need a love story of some kind
of love conflict in a movie. Where would Goodwill Hunting be without Matt Damon's
attraction and love for Mini Driver? It doesn't make any sense. And Matt
and Ben got this big head that hey, we wanted the Oscar for best
Screenwriting, and Harvey was like, hold on, you're handing me a script
that was a rock and we polished it into a diamond. Okay, let's
calm down here. And when they won the Oscar in the movie had a
second wave of making money. Ben and Matt were getting real squawky. They
wanted more money than what they were paid, and they kept they kept screaming
at Harvey. They were kind of making these statements and magazine articles, and
Harvey didn't like it because, yes, the movie was now making money.
But they tend to forget that what they handed in was not what we saw
on the screen, what we fell in love with on the screen. So
I've told this story before, but one day Harvey went and met them at
the hotel they were at and handed them a million dollars in a hefty garbage
bag and threw it on the bed and said, now shut your fucking mounds.
You're not going to get one more penny out of me. That's it,
and he walked out. Love those stories. The point is this,
You may love a movie and not even know who the writer is who made
it your favorite movie. Because most, if not all, script doctors go
uncredited. They make a ship ton of money, but rarely have their names
attached, and that's fine. Sometimes they don't want their names attached because they
know the script they were handed as awful and there's not much they can do
to make it any good, so they cast a check, but they don't
want to be connected to a really shitty movie can hurt their chances down the
road. The big script doctors have included William Goldman, arguably the best screen
runner of all time, Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin who was tremendous, David
Mammitt, another tremendous writer, Akiva Goldsman, Frank Darabont, Josh Weedon.
Josh Weedon was a script doctor on a lot of films, including water World,
Speed Twister, X Men. And the call usually comes when they're making
a movie already and they shouldn't be okay, and then the script doctor faces
a number of challenges from hey, you know, this one scene doesn't work.
To Jesus, this script sucks. But the basic charge remains the same.
Connect whatever dots they already have, and it's taking whatever they're married to
and then trying to work something good in between the cracks of it. That's
what script doctors do. It's hard to find a lot of maation on the
movies that carry worked on, and that's typical. But I bumped into her
at a party when I first got to La and of course you remembered that
she and I both studied with the same acting coach, Mira Rostova, back
in Manhattan in the eighties. And during those days, Carrie was there for
my first audition for this big teacher of Mira Rostova, Russian woman stage actress
who was Montgomery Cliffs coach and helped Malon Brando for a bit. Tremendous actress,
What a great teacher. Jessica Lang, Went ALC. Baldwin, Madonna,
Richard Kylie of God, Almanda Sante, so many more. Kevin McCarthy,
he was in my class and Carrie Fisher. And when I was auditioning
Foramira, Carrie walked in and she kind of interrupted, and Oham's so sorry.
But she was there to ask my teacher, our teacher if she wanted
to go to the premiere of the second Star Wars film, and my coach,
our coach didn't want to go. And she asked me on the spot
with a carry a Fisher right there, do you like the Stars movies,
the Space movies? And I have to be honest and no, I don't
like them. Never cared for space movie star Trek. I don't like any
of that ship. And Carrie liked that I was honest, so we stayed
friendly, and after class sometimes we go out and bang around Grantwich Village and
get a cup of coffee and talk shit. But I'm walking around Manhattan with
Princess Leia and a lot of people didn't recognize her, but whenever someone did,
they go bananas. And she told me she can't go in there young
boys because she knows they all masturbate to her, so she stays away from
them as much as she can. She says, you know, I was
signing an autograph for them, but they're staring at my kids, and I'd
say, but how can you blame me? You got a great rat carry
and then she'd punched me in the arm. But she admitted to me once
that being a script doctor is a good job, but it's a job that
she didn't really look to get. And she said it began on the set
of Star Wars. Harrison Ford would rewrite his dialogue to fit in better,
and then that would fuck up Carrie's line. So she began to rewrite her
lines too, And I couldn't believe that George Lucas would allow this, but
she said it's easier as an actor to go into rewriting because you know what
would fit into your mouth dialogue wise, And I would tell George, you
can type this shit, but you can't say it. I know exactly what
she means. As performers, we know what words give us trouble and which
ones just slide effortlessly out of our mouths. When I got Bill's palsy twenty
years ago, and to this day, I have to write a certain way
because I know what words come out of my mouth with ease and which ones
give me trouble. Sometimes a word the last letter of a word and the
beginning the first letter of the next word, don't mess together in my mouth.
I have to change the dialogue completely so it suits me better and I
could speak more freely. Yeah, it's a little Painley asked, not the
end of the world, but whatever. But George Lucas liked the uncredited dialogue
revisions that Carrie Fisher did on the set of Star Wars because he asked her
to write an episode of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and then Lucas asked
her to punch up the Star Wars prequels, and eventually she provided some rewrites
on the Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.
I bet she didn't know that. Oh and by the way, I'll
get back to a vet vicar who's just had to get off at this eg
for a few minutes before I forget. But after carry Fisher overdose and wrote
a book called post Guards from the Edge, which was all about how she
had to move in with her mom, Debbie Reynolds and after the overdose,
and it was a best seller. It was a great book. Then she
went on to adapt the book into a movie that starred Mel Streep as her
Shirley McClain as her mom, and Dennis Quay nominated for two Academy Awards,
three Golden Globes, and based on that seven Spielberg came calling and he loved
her writing so much he asked her to rewrite tinker Bell's dialogue and the movie
Hook, and whenever Tinkerbell interacted with another character, she was asked and paid
to rewrite entire scenes. Carrie was uncredited for writing or rewriting comedic dialogue for
Julia Roberts Tinkerbell character and the Hook. Screenwriter Jim Hart said to Spielberg,
you know, Steven tends to use writers like paintbrushers. He wants this writer
for that, this writer for this. And the joke was that everybody in
town who had Steven's facts number was writing for that movie. But whatever Carrie
wrote on the movie Hook launched her into this career of doing uncredited writing gigs
all around town. She said she enjoyed working with Steven Spielberg on Hoop because
it was just nice being treated with a different kind of respect then certainly it
would be as an actor, but she didn't seem to like the project a
lot. And she told a friend of hers that she took another rewriting job
just to get off of that one. It comes to Merry go Round.
So it went from Hook to Sister Act to Lethal Weapon three, to The
River Wild to Kyote Ugly to Kate and Leopold to Mister or missus Smith,
and then she became known as a script doctor who could flesh out of female
characters and add some really great humor and fixed dull dialogue exchanges. And Carrie's
mantra was make the women smarter and the love scenes better. Sounds easy,
but it's not easy at all to grab someone else's work and make changes.
My buddy Neil Gumpel has done that quite a bit, and it's hard,
but he's good at that. You got to respect the original tone or the
dialect of the original and then try to rewrite it according to what it already
is. It's not easy. And then Carrie punched up the wedding singer Whoopie
Goldberg, beg go to work on Sister Act to whoopify the dialogue. Then
would be hired to punch up Made in America, which was a critical failure
but made a lot of money internationally. And get this on the film Outbreak.
Carry was one of the one of a couple of screenwriters brought on board
to help improve the screenplay. It was reported at a time that she was
being paid a hundred thousand dollars a week for her work. You imagine one
hundred grand a week, and that's nothing. By the way, it got
to a point where script would be questionable and some scared shit executive would give
it to Carry along with a million dollars check and say here, and then
once she worked, he would say, Okay, the script is fortified.
Now we gave it vitamins. It needed the woman's touch, so I gave
it to carry Fisher. And believe it or not, that makes some people
at the studio breathe easier throwing money at this enormous behemoth, because then if
the movie sucks, they could say, it's not our fault. We gave
it to the best in the business. That's how much money is floating around.
But then, just as fast as script doctoring fell on her lap,
she quit doing it in the early aughts, just stopped. She stopped because
the old guard in Hollywood was giving way to the new guard, and the
new guard or a bunch of pussies, and now it's all changed. Now
in order to get a rewrite job, you got to submit your notes for
your ideas on how to fix the script. So they get all the notes
from all different writers, they keep the notes, and then they don't hire
you. That's known as free work, and that's bullshit. And that's the
way Carry saw it too, and good for her, and that's a big
reason why so many movies come in in five or six nowadays. Maybe if
Carrie was still around and she would call it to punch things up, you
might see more sevens and eights, because God knows we need it. I
don't think people realize how much the movie industry has changed for the worst for
two major reasons. And God help me if you're gonna get mad at me.
But the first reason is this Harvey Weinstein, who knew the secret sauce
is gone, and with him went a metric ton of great dialogue and great
casting choices and great producers. He knew who to put together. That's the
secret sauce, and Carry's gone, and with her went any number of ideas
to punch up women's dialogue and make love scenes better and have women treated better
at a time in Hollywood they needed more than anything. Boy this Hollywood Miscarrie
Fisher. They may not miss Harvey Weinstein openly, but the people in the
movie business know that those two people, one in prison, one dead,
are a big reason why movies are not what they used to be, particularly
for women. Anyhow, a little more event Vickers on the way out,
See I did this, say in and out little snakey here, snakey there.
They tried to. You know, if you do something every day,
you gotta try new things. What can I tell you? So what have
I brought up in the last two weeks with respect to Summony, these hard
luck actresses in Hollywood. The common thread that had attached all of them is
two things, mainly two evil things, mental illness and alcohol abuse. And
Yvette Vickers suffered from both, and it became more and more obvious when she
would show up to an autograph convention smelling a booze and sometimes being snappy with
her fans. You know, when I did Celebrity Fit Club and I worked
with Teena, You others and Aaron Morran, Willie Willie Aames, Dustin Diamond,
people who had hit TV series that came and went, and beyond that,
I mean, Willy Ames got work a lot, but beyond that,
Aaron Morran, teena others, and Dustin Diamond never really got big work anymore.
I'm not sure what they did with their money, but I know Aeron
Moran didn't really have money anym more. After Happy Days and Joni Loves Shachi,
she was on her ass to be quite frank, and she was drinking
a lot. Those reality shows they leave the liquor out all night. I
never touched it on those shows. I know exactly what they try to do.
Aaron couldn't stop herself from touching it. But more important, I remember
how one day she needed to get off and work an autograph convention and she
couldn't get off because we were busy filming, and she got bananas because she
was trying to tell everybody, and she ended up really yelling that that is
her livelihood. She depends on these autograph conventions to get money. Said,
I mean, she was drunk, and she was also very belligerent about needing
to go to this autograph. You don't realize how much money I make.
I need this for my life. It was like, oh my god,
let her go, just let her go. They let her go because she
was having a conniption fit. So what happens to these people in Hollywood who
just don't have anything else to fall on and don't have any of the job
they do? But if that Thinkers was bright and intelligent. But then she
became very paramentive about people stalking her and you know, talking about her behind
her back. And this all began when she became very overweight and began to
lose her looks. She also became very delusional after she was no longer invited
to film festivals that tended to be an ego boost for a lot of actors
and actresses who had been forgotten from Hollywood, and she would tell people she
owns property and places that she didn't. At one point, she thought a
casting agent was doing her harm, and her friends knew that wasn't true,
and then she began cutting important people out of her life because she thought they
were trying to harm her. This is where friends should have stepped in and
put her in a goddamn mental health facility. Maybe they tried. I don't
have the whole story, but it's a shame because it wasn't always that way
event. Victors was a stone cold knockout in her day. In fact,
her Playboy pictorial was so ahead of its time that you Hefner thought he might
have to reshoot it for fear he was going to get in trouble. Back
then, nineteen fifty nine, Playboy had only been around for six years.
And Victor's pictorial, I've seen the picture. She's it's beautiful. She's very
sexy. She's lying face down on the couch. All you see is her
perfect ass. It's hard to believe that would frighten you Hefter, but it
did. And at her peak with the Attack of the fifty foot Woman in
Attack of the Leeches. At her peak, she lived in Beverly Hills and
Benedict Canyon, very prestigious part of Beverly Hills, and she was once a
very vibrant presence in that community. People would see her singing and dancing.
But near the end of her life she began to act what do I always
say, crazier than a shit house rat, right, and that will also
be on the final exam. One day, but she would see a car
parked on the street and say, I think they're stocking me. They're stocking
me. She got very paranoid, and people in the canyon typically cold water
Benedict Laurel. They valued their privacy and they left her alone until the very
end. And the very end was A neighbor was walking her dog up the
street and noticed some yellowing envelopes and cobwebs outside of the vet vicar's home.
Now, this woman had just lost a friend that Easter, and she felt
like doing something good. And even though a vet vicar's phone was still in
service, which I find weird, and there were no suspicious smells coming from
her home, the woman had a hunch that something was wrong. A small,
reddish brown, two story house had fallen into disrepair, a lot of
overgrown grass and vegetation. Some old wood was holding up part of her door
frame. The front door had a panel broken. Duct tape was all around
it. Never a good signed. Too much duct tape, Someone's losing to
mind. Rusty umbrellas hung out on the tiny upstairs balcony. The shingles on
the house for pauling apart. So this woman walks up to the front door
and calls inside the house several times and heard the phone ring, and after
looking through the windows, and seeing nothing because of obstructions, she pushed open
the door and went inside, and then she found the mummified remains of Yvette
Vicars. The cause of death, they say, was a heart attack,
and she'd been dead for nearly a year, the last time she'd been seen
or heard from by neighbors and her few remaining friends nearly a year. You
know, a lot of neighbors in that part of town, up in the
hills, they a bad rap for not checking in on people, and nobody
had checked out on event Vickers before this woman had the courage to find her.
And the people who live up there are not inconsiderate people, but they
do keep to themselves. But event Vickers was a recluse by her own choice.
But when something like that happens on your own block, you start second
guessing yourselves. What are you living like that for? Why are you not
reaching out to your neighbors. These are long time neighbors, and they do
respect each other's privacy, But there is such a thing as respecting your privacy
too much that you don't know what your neighbor has been for a year.
And it took one person to see cobwebs on the mailbox and yellow pieces of
mail and newspapers on the front door. I forget how we ended this story
and misreason scandals, but I would love to know who was paying the phone
bill, who was paying the electric bill? Why was the heat lamp the
heat are still on and why was the phone still ringing? And why would
light still on? It's so creepy and no one's ever found out. And
the person who paid those bills never wanted any kind of publicity. Why would
they? They weren't checking them on her either, very said said Stative Affairs
about two dead women, Carrie Fisher and Event Vickers. One had massive fame,
big time jobs awards, born from Hollywood Royalty, Eddie Fisher. Debbie
Reynolds's parents had a ball, drugs, sex, alcohol, married a game
in still kept on trudging. Love their mothers so much they died days apart.
Debbie Reynolds quit living. What was it a week after Carrie Dyke.
That's how close they were. You get your get a chance, do all
you can to see everything that Carrie Fisher put together. When it comes to
a woman in show and her book and the movie Postcards from the Edge,
What a life she let I feel very fortunate and lucky to have known her.
The fact that she interrupted my audition that day, I can't say it
changed my life, but Carrie was the one who convinced Mirror to keep me
and to take me on. Mirror was on the fence. I did two
different monologues. It had full of Rain and American Buffalo with Alpaccino and Carrie
right alongside me the second time, and she said, Mirror, take a
minute. He's good, and she did, and that boosted my confidence to
a whole of the level. I tell her a lot, and the Hollywood
community owed that Vickers more than they gave, said said, ending in a
sad state of affairs. That's Hollywood. Some people dieing their way up,
some people dying the way down, and some you don't even know we're dead.
I'm a J Benza. That was your free show for my free birds
one day, September twenty seven, twenty twenty three. Two more free shows
this week. How do you like me? Now? Figure around next week?
October's gonna be good for you, guys. Good month of October.
You got Halloween, maybe some scary special some scary scary stories about people and
how that could be good Vincent price. What do you think, Bell Legosi,
Cloris Karlov I'm like God. To listen is endless. I'll talk to
you soon, Thank you for listening. Fame as a Bitch is an AJ
Benza Workhouse Connect production featuring the endless wisdom, insightful commentary, and sometimes fucked
up perspective of a J Benza. Executive producer Mike Agavino