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Thursday, August 18, 2005

Because Actors Are Smarter Than Everyone Else

Remember Sean Penn? He’s the angry looking fellow with awesome dark glasses and an etched scowl on his Oscar-nominated face. The very-public guy who, when someone disagrees with him in a public way, sends them a letter offering “a sincere fuck you.” He was the guy who, coming upon some angry young Muslim men, said that he understands their cause, and naïvely advised them to stop shouting “death to America,” since that message might “go to the American people” and be “interpreted very literally.”

He also was reportedly flying to Iran in June to play reporter for a few months. But his byline never appeared in his host newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle.

It may have been editor Phil Bronstein’s personal epiphany that a famous person does not a good writer make. Or it may have been that Penn’s dispatches were delayed, what with Iran’s meager bandwidth being siphoned off by his Motorola “Razr” phone’s constant transmission of 640x480 photos of all the bumping parties in the trendy west side of Tehran. Paris Hilton needs to keep up-to-date, you know.

Or it may have been that he just did not write anything.

Whatever the reason that this actor’s escapades in Iran went undocumented, we shall see the fruits of the non-labor as soon as next Monday. E!’s Charlie Amter is reporting that Phil Bronstein plans on publishing Penn’s writings as a 5-part series beginning Monday. Asked to explain the long delay (Penn, after all, is on home turf now and much more notable events have occured in Iran in the intervening months) the editor said, “It’s a process you don’t want to rush into.”

It is unclear whether he was referring to the ghostwriter hiring process or the edit a Sean Penn screed into something printable process.

Posted on August 18, 2005 04:37 PM. Permalink