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Dec 18,2005 - Dec 25,2005 |
Portraying porn star John Holmes
Val Kilmer indulges in excesses in James Cox's true-life murder mystery Wonderland
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2003-10-26
Playing real-life anti-heroes is becoming a habit for one-time heartthrob Val Kilmer. First there was Jim Morrison in The Doors, then came Doc Holliday in Tombstone, artist Willem DeKooning in Pollock, the voice of Moses in Prince of Egypt, crazy Colonel John Henry Patterson in The Ghost and the Darkness, the title character in Billy the Kid, and Ray Levoi in Thunderheart.
Now in James Cox's Wonderland, 43-year-old Kilmer portrays porn legend John Holmes who, along with his teenage girlfriend Dawn Schiller (Kate Bosworth) gets involved in a quadruple homicide that happens in a house on Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon neighbourhood of Los Angeles in 1981.
During the '60s and '70s, Holmes was a prominent actor in the adult industry known for his prodigious endowment, but by 1978 he became so hooked to cocaine he was unable to function in porn films anymore. However, to support his growing drug habit, he started working for a drug dealer who went by the name of Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian). This "job" was not enough to pay Eddie for all the dope he was doing, so he made a desperate plan to rob Nash's home, which boasted cash and jewelry worth more than $250,000. Nash figures out that Holmes is behind the crime, and forces him to finger his accomplices, including Billy (Tim Blake Nelson), David (Dylan McDermott) and Ron (Josh Lucas).
Tandem talked to Kilmer when he was in Toronto recently.
Did you have to watch a lot of John Holmes movies to play Holmes?
"I didn't, but there is a very good documentary called Wad that I watched, and had all these wonderful silly interviews that he did and I mean he's such a character, he's out of his mind, he was literally driven mad, I think, by his cocaine addiction. If you watch six interviews in a row, he tells four different stories of about how he got started in pornography. It's just for whatever entertains him in the room. And then very early on I met Dawn Schiller and Sharon Holmes [played in the film by Lisa Kudrow], who never divorced him even though I guess he got really high and married someone else in Las Vegas. I talked to them quite a bit and then pieced together things that were important to the story."
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