Thoughts upon browsing the Brad Renfro Message Board on IMDb

This board is primarily a shrine to someone who, by many accounts, seems to have had the intelligence of a bivalve and less common sense than concrete. I mean, really. Anyone who tries to steal a yacht without first casting off the mooring cables – regardless of how stoned they may be – is a Darwin Award living on borrowed time.

On these boards one can learn, among other things, that there are those who are simply outraged, more than eight years after his death, that Mr. Renfro wasn’t memorialized at one of the Academy Award ceremonies.

In the first place, Hollywood and the Celebrity Culture are many things, but fair isn’t one of them. Neither are they notably sympathetic. Second, the reasoning the self-titled Academy of Arts & Sciences applies when distributing their accolades is, and always has been, an impenetrable mystery. (Instead of his usual excursions into paranoid fantasyland, Oliver Stone should take a crack at unraveling that one.)

Third, this guy wasn’t a James Dean or a Marilyn Monroe – apparently brilliant, self-destructive stars that appeared out of nowhere, streaked across the sky setting the cinematic landscape ablaze, only to be extinguished by early death in some kind of sentimentalized, faux Greek tragedy. In point of fact, even James Dean and Marilyn Monroe weren’t really James Dean or Marilyn Monroe – and I’m not referring to their names. Clear-sighted accuracy is something else Hollywood is not famous for.

Quite frankly, at best, Mr. Renfro appeared to be a serviceable, but mediocre actor who gave one or two better-than-average performances, and then, for whatever reasons, pretty much imploded. Whether Mr. Renfro had greater abilities than those he displayed while here among the living is something that can never be known. As has often been pointed out, the acting profession has thousands upon thousands of similar stories – they can’t all be told, regardless of the fact that the music, television and movie industries have a genius for inventing new and increasingly stupid reasons to give awards to themselves and each other.

The moribund Lindsay Lohan Saga has a great deal in common with the Brad Renfro Story. If, like Isadora Duncan, Ms. Lohan had managed to kill herself during one of her escapades, or while striking a pose, doubtless there would be a legion of chronically weepy mourners laying flowers on her tomb, and cursing the cruel, heartless – indeed evil – machine that stole all her gifts and then destroyed her without pity. This is the type of song quite a lot of people sing about Mr. Renfro, and it is pure bull. There is a big difference between respecting the dead and outright lying about them.

The 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s have become the past. The days of the Deus ex Studio are gone. The armies of skilled, talented artists, craftspeople and technicians who actually create movies – actors included – now have powerful unions. Add to that the available cadres of agents and legal practitioners that specialize just in entertainment matters. This is as it should be, and if the folks in the Executive Suite bemoan the headaches they must endure because of it, they need only look to their own behaviors over decades to see why it is so.

But it also means that if a performer, (or their parents), fortunate enough to be recognized and become a name, doesn’t protect their own interests with intelligent, wised-up, effective representation, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Furthermore, the acting profession, like any other, has no obligations to provide any particular person with a living, or to give them an award or even an acknowledgement. Many people grow up dreaming of becoming astronauts, but very few actually get off the ground. In neither case is this evidence of malice or conspiracy: there are simply so many applicants that many who may be worthy are ignored, kicked out the door or just fall through the cracks. This happens almost everywhere, and history suggests it probably has always been this way.

The movie industry can be classified in different ways, but when you scrape away the phony, academic-sounding “Arts & Sciences” nonsense you find a corporation: perhaps no better, but certainly no worse than any other given corporation. Corporations, like all organisms, digest the resources necessary to keep them alive and productive because they are hardwired that way, not because they’re altruistic, and only a fool assumes otherwise.

Also, this particular monster doesn’t go hunting its prey. Like the Gates of Hell, people choose whether to climb into its mouth, and it’s up to them to learn techniques necessary to stay in that location without being completely swallowed. Some may not be able to do so, but that happens in every highly competitive arena.

In the film All About Eve (1950), there is an exchange (at about the 56m mark) between the characters Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), a theatre critic, and the playwright Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill), that makes the point well:

AD: Every now and then some elder statesman of the theatre or cinema assures the public that actors and actresses are just plain folks, ignoring the fact that their greatest attraction to the public is their complete lack of resemblance to a normal human being…We’re a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk: we are the original displaced personalities.

BS: Well, I’ll admit there’s a screwball element in the theatre. It sticks out. Its got spotlights on it and a brass band. But it isn’t basic. It isn’t standard. If it were, the theatre couldn’t survive… the theatre is nine-tenths hard work… to be a good actor or actress…means wanting to be that more than anything else in the world… the man or woman who accepts those terms can’t be ordinary, can’t be just someone…to give so much for almost always so little.

For every Brad Renfro, there are hundreds and hundreds of others who work hard, are essentially law abiding, and put some effort into maintaining a decent enough state of health and balance so as to be equal to the demands of their craft. They represent the “nine-tenths” (or more), and they know even then that there are no guarantees.

Furthermore, addiction, and wild, reckless behavior do not definitively indicate child abuse any more than headaches definitively indicate the presence of a brain tumor. Put harshly but not inaccurately, Mr. Renfro’s fate, to abuse the quote, “lay in himself, not in the stars.”

Hollywood has lost much of its gilt-edged image – no longer does one expect to see a Carole Lombard standing on any corner, and unfortunately progress can wreak havoc on romance. One need look no farther than the transformation of the mid-18th and early 19th centuries’ clean Romanticism into the mawkish sentimentality of the Victorians to see this. The ethical and spiritual foundations of the Garden Cemetery collapsed under the tons of black crepe dripping with embalming fluid that supplanted them. It’s Mount Auburn versus Highgate - Dellamorte, Dellamore (1994) versus Edward Scissorhands (1990) – Michele Soavi versus Tim Burton – Ludwig von Beethoven versus Danny Elfman.

But we are compensated with increasingly longer lifetimes spent in greater comfort. Whether the deal is worthwhile is something each person must decide for themselves.

In the meantime, watch and talk about his movies and his life, but as far as his actual corpse in concerned, it may be more decent to let Mr. Renfro rot in peace.


XYZ