[color=red]Michael Madsen Teaches You How to be Cool
YOUR THINK YOU’RE COOL. YOU’VE GOT SUNGLASSES AND A LEATHER jacket and that silent way of nodding hello. But deep down inside, you know you’re not cool. You’re a part-time impersonation of James Dean, who wasn’t even that cool himself. In fact James Dean was kind of a wuss.
But none of this is your fault. Cool just isn’t considered important anymore. Archetypes like Steve McQueen and Robert Mitchum have been replaced by Leonardo DiCaprio and Hugh Grant. Even the word has lost its meaning, vaguely replacing “good” or implying meek acquiescence. These days everybody’s cool, everything’s cool - which really means that no one is cool.
Except Michael Madsen. Madsen, a.k.a. Mr. Blonde, the cold-blooded ex-con in Reservoir Dogs who stopped at a drive-in for a mile shake while keeping a hog-tied cop stuffed in his trunk. Madsen, whose part in Donnie Brasco was edited down to nothing because he was making Al Pacino look like a girly-man. Madsen, the only contemporary actor to be interviewed for the television documentary Steve McQueen: The King of Cool. Madsen, who even when he played the dad in Free Willy made sure you knew that he could have kicked Willy’s ass.
To find out what it takes to be cool, I paid a visit to the last cool actor in Hollywood at his beach house in Malibu. Now a 42-year-old father of five, Madsen is ready to teach you his secrets. And even though cool may be undervalued, you need to listen up. Because being cool has its rewards, its aesthetic purity, its philosophical truth. Plus, I’m pretty sure it will still score you chicks.
LESSON 1: SHUT UP
When Madsen talks, you can barely hear him. And it takes seven or eight minutes for him to say what you could say in five seconds. In between words there’s a lot of touching of your arm, tequila sipping, and Red Stripe chasing. If there was a slow-talking contest, Madsen could beat Brando.
Madsen’s father, a Chicago fireman, didn’t say much, and his grandfather was so quiet they called him Silent Sam. Following their example, Madsen moves slowly and often uses the phrase “When I’m ready.” He’s part Choctaw Indian, which has nothing to do with this lesson but also happens to be cool.
LESSON 2: LOSE THE LEATHER
It’s not that Madsen can’t wear a leather jacket; it’s just that you can’t, “When I first came to L.A. from Chicago, I wore a leather jacket and motorcycle boots because that’s what I was comfortable in - I rode Harleys,” he says. “What I saw around here was like Halloween outfits.” Madsen wears a leather jacket and Ray-Bans in a lot of his movies, but around the house he’s in a T-shirt, denim shorts, and slippers that make it pretty clear he doesn’t give a damn. “Young actors are always trying to portray some sort of masculinity, some sort of rebellious image, but it’s not real - it’s phony-baloney and it’s sad,” he says. “They need to establish their image instead of trying to do it with no foundation.” For the first time in my life, I feel very glad to be wearing khakis and an Oxford shirt.
LESSON 3: TURN THAT SMILE UPSIDE DOWN
Clowns aren’t cool. So drop the happy act. The closest Madsen ever gets to a smile is this painful, wrinkled-forehead, squinty sneer that says not so much “I’m excited” as "You’re an idiot.“
Happy people tend to forget who they are, to get caught up in their own hype. Madsen and his famous sister, Virginia, have both made it as actors, but he keeps himself in check. “I’m not really popular right now,” he says. “I’m a cult guy. I’m the guy from Reservoir Dogs, the guy from Thelma & Louise. I have a bizarre underground attraction that doesn’t translate to the big money guys. Warner Brothers isn’t going to ask me to be Batman, even though I’d be a great Batman.” Sure, if Batman somehow joined the Mafia.
LESSON 4: LIVE IN THE PAST
Madsen’s house is filled with framed posters from classic cool-guy movies: Point Blank, Thunder Road, White Heat, The Magnificent Seven. There’s a Wurlitzer jukebox next to the pool table, a Dean Martin CD by the stereo, and leather-bound copies of War and Peace and Moby Dick. Don’t worry: It’s not necessary for you to actually read these books
"I’ve been compared to Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Lee Marvin, and I’m very, very flattered. They’re who I was responding to when I decided I wanted to become an actor,” Madsen says. “But that was a completely different America. I’m a man out of time and out of place.” He’s also a man with a '67 GTO and a '64 Thunderbird convertible in his garage, so don’t feel too bad for him.
LESSON 5: DROP THE POSSE
Having the Flipmode Squad trail you around might sound cool, but it just makes you the head of a small, badly run corporation. The posse syndrome has gotten so bad that some Hollywood invitations have “N.E.” printed on the bottom, for “No Entourage.” When you’re over 21, you don’t need a gang. You can define yourself.
“If you tell someone you’re a loner, automatically they think you’re lonely, but I don’t think it’s the same thing,” says Madsen. “In Hollywood, if you take any kind of personal detour, the people you thought were your friends won’t even pick up the phone to call you, because it’s not their idea of cool.” Madsen doesn’t keep many friends, because they end up disappointing him. Still, I sense that he and I are bonding. I’m going to start out our new friendship by asking him to a nice brunch.
LESSON 6: USE YOUR HANDS
Calling the plumber isn’t cool. You should know how to do your own manual labor, like the kind Madsen does on his ranch in Montana. And if you’re going to work on something, it might as well be cars. “I had a big thing for MOPARSs. I had the Roadrunner, the Super B, and the Challenger,” he says, referring to the cars he bought with the $225 a week he made working at Joe Jacob’s Chevrolet back in Chicago. “The quarter-mile drag was my big thing - I was never one of those slalom guys,” he adds. Since then, his only racing experience has been four laps at 165 mph around the Phoenix International Raceway in a Citgo Dirt Devil when he was shooting The Getaway, the remake of the super cool Steve McQueen movie. “It was more exciting to me to do those four laps than any motion picture I’ve ever done,” he says, leaning on his porch rail and looking down into the nighttime ocean. “I might be a happier man if I had embraced racing instead of acting.” Considering that he didn’t wear a harness during those four laps, he’d probably be a man in many tiny pieces, too.
LESSON 7: IMPLY VIOLENCE
Even Christmas with Mom isn’t a time to let down your guard. My grandma made this cake," says Madsen’s son Christian, “and my dad kept threatening to mess it up and spit on it.” And that’s his playful, holiday-spirit Madsen. The less playful version has done jail time, gotten into a fight at the Viper Room, and broken a casting director’s chair against a wall when asked to show more anger at an audition. And he has two pet snakes. “My father used to tell me, 'Son, don’t ever start a fight, but if someone starts one with you, make sure that you finish it,”’ Madsen says, laughing in a way that suggests you’d better laugh with him. “I really don’t think you should mess with me.” I stop laughing.
LESSON 8: GET A HOT WIFE
You don’t get a hot wife in order to impress others or stroke your ego. You get a hot wife so you can have sex with her. Madsen’s second wife, DeAnna, was once married to Brian Setzer, but other than that she seems perfect. Her long blond hair, slim waist, ankle tattoo, and big breasts are wonderfully L.A. Madsen met her shortly after she became a neighbor of his friend the actor Elias Koteas. If you’re going to bother having friends, make sure they’re useful ones.
“He called me to tell me about this girl washing her car across the street, so I came over,” Madsen recalls. “It was like that scene in Cool Hand Luke when all the prisoners are looking at the girl washing the car.” There’s just one flaw in this story: Instead of scrubbing down a muscle car, DeAnna was soaping up a Chevy Suburban. But at least it takes a long time to clean a Suburban.
As DeAnna yells at Madsen to quit talking to me so she can serve dinner, I take the opportunity to ask her what makes her husband so cool. She boils the whole thing down to a simple phrase: “Patience with tension.” When you’re that hot, you don’t have to talk a lot.
LESSON 9: BE SENSITIVE
That Fonzie crap of putting on a front in public while hopping on the therapy couch with Mr. and Mrs. C isn’t cool. It only leads to episodes about appreciating classical music and being sensitive to the needs of deaf people.
Madsen doesn’t hide what he feels. He cries at the end of Shane. And he has written two books of poetry, the first with a foreword by Dennis Hopper and the second with one by Quentin Tarantino. If that doesn’t strike like you as cool, remember: Bruce Springsteen writes in verse, as does Lemmy from Motörhead. So feel free to emote; just don’t go on and on about it like you’re Oscar Wilde. “I’ve been writing things for a long time on scraps of paper or matchbooks or hotel stationery,” Madsen says. “I can’t sit down and write endlessly, because I don’t have the discipline for it.”
It’s best to write about manly stuff. Madsen has written poems about getting caught going through his grandfather’s drawer of pocketknives, and a place in L.A. where they massacre ducks. I’m going to start with a poem about how I want to have sex with Madsen’s wife
LESSON 10: DON’T CARE
Rebelling is for punks, and punks don’t age well, as VH-1 has gone out of its way to prove by giving Johnny Rotten airtime. Not caring is much cooler - it implies an acceptance of the immutable forces that surround you.
When Madsen’s TV series, Vengeance Unlimited, was canceled by ABC, Madsen gave his disappointed crew a T-shirt with a photograph of himself giving the finger to the network. During that photo shoot, even though fans were flanking him with video cameras, he took a leak on a rock 15 feet away. And in The Getaway, Madsen calculated that he’d get a McQueen-style reaction out of Alec Baldwin by exposing himself in the middle of the shot, which worked perfectly for the director but angered Baldwin. Even bad career decisions, like turning down the lead in Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, don’t cause Madsen any regret, although they no doubt keep his agent up at night. When I ask if he has any new projects he’d like to plug as long as I’m doing this article, he knocks back another tequila. “Nope,” he says. “I’m unemployed and going broke.”
COMMENCEMENT
So what are you going to do with this knowledge? If you’re smart, you will immediately forget it. Because the life of a cool guy isn’t happy, and it requires a fair amount of physical labor. Still, there’s something about being cool that’s very tempting, that reaches you on a visceral level and won’t let you rest until you have fully mastered all of these lessons. It’s probably the hot wife.
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haha oh shit, exept for the “'lose the posse”’ and “get a hot wife” this is all me, big up Michael Mad 8)
ooooh signur! ;D
appena ho tempo me la leggo tutta!!
Baby Madsen
;D
Sembro io ;D
a parte il punto della "hot wife"
Grande Silvia!
Ma non è lo stesso vestito di Mia wallace, Jackie Brown e Elle Driver??
;D ;D ;D
I LOVE THIS MAN!
[size=30](come un uomo può amare un’altro uomo senza chiedere un passaggio dall’altro lato)[/size]
SIAMO TUTTI AMICI DI MICHAEL MADSEN! ;D ;D ;D
http://friendsofcannabis.com/friends/michael_madsen.htm
" He is also known for his affair with “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss."
Coooosa?
Non lo sapevo…
Michael…ma che mi combini?
:-</E>
Michael Madsen e figli ;D
Nella foto ne mancano 2!! :o
[quote=“Sylvia”]
Michael Madsen e figli ;D
Nella foto ne mancano 2!! :o
[/quote]
Già. Io e mio fratello eravamo ai provini per la prossima fig… ehm partner cinematografica di papà;D
[size=60]…poi mi sono svegliato baciando il comodino…[/size]
Sembrerebbe una foto segnaletica…
:o
Voi lo sapevate che Madsen fa una particina in quel “filmone” ( ;D) di Scary Movie 4?
;D ;D ;D
Gran belle foto :o
Ottima scelta ;D 
;D ;D ;D ;D
La Miss sa apprezzare le foto di qualità!!!
;D ;D ;D ;D
;D ;D ;D ;D
;D ;D ;D ;D
;D ;D ;D ;D
Molte, molte altre coming soon…
Silviaaaaaaaaaa! ti adoro :- :-
;D ;D