Judge and jury on a modern classic Sprinting for greener pastures

— Legendary film critic Pauline Kael once described the actor who, one night last week, christened the second installment of the Little Rock Film Festival, thusly: "Judge Reinhold, the young man with the old man's name, is a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Donald Duck."

"For weeks," Reinhold said that night, meaning for weeks after Kael wrote that about him in The New Yorker, after the 1982 premiere of his film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, "I was like, 'What did she mean? Is that a good thing?'"

Reinhold's willingness to tell a story that was genuinely selfdeprecating and not secretly self-congratulatory - that is, his unwillingness to do what the sitcom 30 Rock recently termed backdoor bragging - was a good thing for the audience that had gathered to hear Reinhold introduce a rare bigscreen showing of Fast Times, in which the actor played thefilm's moral-centerish role of big brother Brad.

(Perhaps theatrical screenings of the beloved, 1980s culture-capturing mall-rat movie aren't that rare after all; Reinhold shared that Universal Pictures, the film's studio, could only loan the film festival the print on a Tuesday night, since it was needed elsewhere on Monday and Wednesday nights of that week.)

Reinhold, who is married to a Little Rock native, the former Amy Miller, had done his filmintroducing homework. For the screening at the Riverdale 10, he sat in a director's chair down front and fanned studiously through a yellow legal pad to make sure he exhausted his notations of trivia and rest-of-theiceberg context.

"I reviewed the film on DVD last night for the first time in quite a while, so you would have the benefit of my recollections," he said. "But at the end of it, I said, 'Oh no.'"

He shifted in his chair to face organizers of the film festival, and pretended to try and talk them out of how they were about to raise the curtain on the week.

"What?" he pleaded with them. "You want to start the festival with the film with the least cultural relevance and go from there?"

As for his commentary, Reinhold began with the most notorious bit of Fast Times arcana - that Sean Penn never brokecharacter, insisting on being addressed by his character's name, Spicoli, on set at all times - and went from there.

He expounded on the film's musical legacy: By granting a vanity executive producer credit to a recording-industry powerhouse, the film's other producers were able to burnish the movie soundtrack with songs from Tom Petty, Jackson Browne and Stevie Nicks. They then used that charttopping assemblage as leverage in lobbying for a wider release, arguing that album sales would help recoup the cost of increased national exposure. (The gambit worked, and the film premiered on 1,500 screens instead of the 500 originally planned.)

The one that got, and stayed, away, Reinhold noted, was Bruce Springsteen. To gain rights to his music, producers courted Springsteen, to no avail, by casting his sister as a cheerleader and dressing Reinhold's character in a Springsteen T-shirt for an epilogue scene in which Brad incapacitates a convenience store robber by splashing hot coffee in his face.

Next for Reinhold is a role as a small-town friend of Kevin Costner's character in the August release Swing Vote, in which a U.S. election for president comes down, literally, to one man's decision. For that role, Reinhold offered a bit of pre-release trivia - the mullet his character sports in the film was woven into his hair at a cost, per styling session, of $3,500. "The lady that did it said, 'Celine Dion just left here, and now I'm doing a mullet?'" Reinhold recalled.

But no embarrassing haircut could ever hope to eclipse the embarrassing scene for which Reinhold will always be remembered, especially by anyone who has ever been a teenage boy. (For hazy memories, it involves Phoebe Cates, a window onto a backyard swimming pool, an unlocked bathroom door, and Phoebe Cates again.) In agreeing to be quizzed by audience members, Reinhold acknowledged he will forever be, in a way, stuck in that bathroom.

"Before you ask any questions," he said, "no, I didn't really do it. It was a simulated act, OK?"

The Little Rock Film Festival concludes today with a talk by Reinhold titled "Keep It Natural: Building a Film Industry in Arkansas," scheduled for 1 p.m. at the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce building and screenings of more than a dozen films at Little Rock's Riverdale 10. More information is available at www.lit tlerockfilmfestival.org.

Busted!

You are what you read, and we admit to occasional bouts of tabloid-itis - that tendency to view everything through the lens of US Weekly and InTouch. Mundane tasks like pumping gas or picking up after our dog cast us in a glamorous narrative: Real People - They're Just Like Stars, At Least When Stars Are Being Just Like Us!

And lately Arkansas has supplied a constant supply of tidbits-that-aren't-quite-rumors that need sort-of-proving-or-sort-ofdebunking, just like in those tabloid Rumor Buster columns.

For example: Did Chelsea Clinton once date Jake Gyllenhaal? Yes! The former first daughter and the actor who seems to be pre-engaged to Reese Witherspoon know each other through their parents and dated for a few weeks back in 1999, during Gyllenhaal's post-October Sky but pre-Donnie Darko days.

Did Mike Huckabee hang with Carrie Underwood? Yes! The former governor and Republican presidential also-ran recently Web logged that he met her at the cast party following his Saturday Night Live appearance and then went to her concert at Alltel Arena last week, where he spent more time watching the bass players than looking at her.

Did Alltel fire the Sprint salesman character from its television commercials? No! "One of the actors was replaced," confirms Alltel spokesman Wanda Young. But Michael Busch, the chipmunk-faced actor who playedthe yellow-shirted Sprint guy and one of the nemeses of Alltel spokescharacter Chad, wasn't let go; he was released from his contract at his request.

Busch "wanted to pursue other opportunities, and we wish him the very best in his career," Young says. In response to fans who'd noticed the Sprint salesman from the ads was now a bushy-haired, disheveled guy, Busch also addressed the matter on his MySpace page: "Basically, Alltel wanted to sign me (and the rest of the guys) through the end of 2008. Everyone else signed on except me. I didn't want to be known as that guy at the expense of other things I'd like to do, like TV and movies."

High Profile, Pages 50, 54 on 05/18/2008

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