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Post by safeandsound on May 5, 2019 16:12:58 GMT -8
Gordon at the Benefit Reading Of Jacqueline Susann's "Valley Of The Dolls" Benefiting LGBT Center And Alcott Center For Mental Health Services May 2019
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Post by safeandsound on May 11, 2019 15:40:34 GMT -8
www.lol-la.com/interview-gordon-thomson-talks-valley-of-the-dolls-reading-event-at-los-angeles-lgbt-centers-renberg-theatre/
Interview: Gordon Thomson Talks “Valley of the Dolls” Reading Event at Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Renberg Theatre
Gordon Thomson is a great raconteur, with stories to tell about his long career as an actor, particularly the show for which he is best known, the prime-time soap that still shapes what people think of the eighties, “Dynasty”. He can recount the final days of Rock Hudson on the set of the series and the chaste kiss between Hudson and Linda Evans that scandalized the nation in the early years of the AIDS crisis. A conversation with Gordon Thomson takes unexpected twists and turns, from discussing the opprobrium that gay actors suffered during the first decades of his career to making sure that one knows what the definition of opprobrium is.
But what Thomson is focused on currently is not the past, but his current project, a reading of the camp classic “Valley of the Dolls” at the Los Angeles LGBT Center alongside actors such as Sheryl Lee Ralph, Joan Van Ark, Wilson Cruz, Joely Fisher and celebrities like Greg Louganis and Bruce Vilanch on the third and fourth of May. Playing the role of Lyon Burke, Thomson notes that this is his second time performing the screenplay.
“We did this seventeen years ago, with almost the same cast. And it was extraordinary! It was very funnya nd a big success, and with many of the same actors back, as well as some new ones. Seventeen years is a long time, and I feel like it the ‘Valley of the Old Dolls‘,” Thomson jokes. “It’s in aid of two extremely good causes, the Alcott Center, and the LGBT Center here in Los Angeles.”
More than fifty years after the release of “Valley of the Dolls”, Thomson still marvels at the film and its enduring popularity. “It’s one of the really great, horrifically bad movies. It’s watchable because it’s so god-awful,” he explains. Thomson vividly describes his favorite scene in the movie, which features star Patty Duke in a monumentally embarrassing moment. “Patty Duke is in the middle of a really appalling song, and her beads that she’s wearing separate, one around each breast. No one thought to edit that out! She’s so earnestly trying to be Judy Garland, and yet there’s an accident that can only happen on set. You would think someone would have said excuse me, Miss Duke, the beads?”
Thomson even goes into a dissection of the film’s musical sequences, which are filled with terrible lyrics. “The other, awful, almost grisly moment is when Susan Hayward as Ethel Merman sings one of the worst things every written.” He mock-sings “I’ll Plant a Tree and Make It Grow” to emphasize the nonsensical lyrics like “I’ll try hard to meet the friends I have yet to know.” “The poor woman,” Thomson exclaims about Hayward, “She’s doing her job and they have mobiles that are floating around. It must have been one of the cheapest sets every put together for someone who was the biggest show on Broadway. It’s so bad, and it’s very funny.”
Although he can not promise what will happen at this revival of “Valley of the Dolls”, Thomson notes the gusto with which the cast performed last time, including Donna Mills, who played the Hayward role seventeen years ago, which this time is played by Sheryl Lee Ralph. Quite appropriately for a reading of “Valley of the Dolls”, Thomson exclaims, “The wigs came off!”
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