To celebrate Driving Mr. Spacey's upcoming tenth anniversary, I'm going to share some interesting facts, rumors and fun things that have come along over that time. Such as, did you know...
Over the years, more than a few fans have accused me of doing something to Kevin's pictures. That I either make him look too old, or too fat or too skinny or that I've removed the lines from his face. That kind of thing. Except for when I use one of his pictures in some kind of fun collage or something, I have never retouched his photos. Except for one time. The picture to the right. Can you tell why?
Another picture that has managed to get an unexpected reaction is the Halloween photo I have used for the past several years on the site's entrance page. I had taken the picture of Kevin from one of his plays at the Old Vic and using a picture editing program gave him little devil horns. I liked it. So did others. And then there were the fans who were outraged that I had "demonized" Kevin Spacey. Guess which picture will be making it's annual appearance very soon?
The biggest problem with having a fan site on the Internet? People who look at it have Internet access. Back when the feedback page worked... boy, you should have seen some of things people complained about.
Kevin has been the recipient of many special awards:
Entertainment Weekly's Worst Over Acting Award - Special Ensemble Award for the entire cast of Pay It Forward.
Fifty Notable Movies of 2000 - Only one movie had a worse ranking than PIF. That was the epic Battlefield Earth.
EW critic Lisa Schwarzbaum says Pay It Forward is one of the worst movies of 2000. She says:
The year's worst feel-good movie belittled the decency of the very folks it claims ought to be "inspired." How else to explain the preachy story, the sticky script, the crayoned-in performances (Helen Hunt! Take a breath!), or the sadistic ending - an all-time low in stooping for tears. This was one time Hollywood gambled on audience stupidity and lost.
- Taken from DMS News Archives December 15, 2000 -EW DEC 22-29, 2000
Clothing Award - Kevin was nominated for the Golden Hanger Best Dressed Man Award on E!, but lost to Michael Clarke Duncan.
- Taken from DMS New Archives December 9, 2000
The site started as a 3 page web site featuring scans of things I had in scrapbooks. At one point, there were over 250 pages. That was back when the polls were working!
According to Wikipedia, The Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie used murderer John List as his inspiration for Keyser Soze.
John List was an accountant who murdered his mother, wife and teenage children on November 9, 1971 and fled to start a new life elsewhere using an assumed name. He was arrested 18 years later after a tip was called in to America's Most Wanted.
Several years ago, one of Kevin's unusual fans demanded that I remove any and all references to Benecio Del Toro from the site, claiming that BDT was trying to destroy Kevin's career out of jealousy over Kevin winning the Academy Award. Some of this was after BDT had won his own Academy Award so that was very peculiar.
Before Ordinary Decent Criminal was available in the U.S. in order to see the movie fans had to buy used videos from Ireland and have them converted to a VHS format usable in the U.S. which resulted in having to pay about $40 or more to watch the film. A few years later you could buy it on DVD at Target for $5.
Over the years fans have noticed similarities to other people. Spacey fan Fabiola noticed his resemblance to Eugene O'Neill and several fans have written to say he reminds them of Jack Benny.
Then there are pictures of Bobby Darin that look like Kevin as Jim Williams and many have noticed his uncanny resemblance to his furry fan KevieBear.
Funny story I've told many times. Since I always seem to lose my copy of The Ref, back when we used to do movie chats on a regular basis, I used to have to go to Hollywood Video and rent a copy. One time I had taken the movie up to the register and the conversation with the person behind the counter involved the clerk gushing about how funny he is and stopped when it turned out the clerk meant Denis Leary and hadn't heard of Kevin Spacey.
A confession I've made in the past but will make one more time. I thought American Beauty was one of Kevin's worst movies. I saw it several times in the theater but I always thought it was extremely over-rated. But that's not the confession. The confession is that when it first came out on VHS, only Columbia House had it and I used my CH credits to buy it for about $3 so I could sell it on ebay. I'm so ashamed.
One of Kevin's so-called fans apparently thought it would be funny to give the website email address out to some kind of writer's club or something. Out of the blue I was getting daily emails from people who either thought I was Kevin Spacey and wanted me to publish their book or thought I knew Kevin and that I could get him to publish their book. I don't know how many emails I sent to people saying I'm not Kevin Spacey, I don't know Kevin Spacey, I'm not in the publishing business. The solicitations stopped as quickly as they started. Weird.
More coming later!
© 2000 - 2010 Driving Mr. Spacey!
