ShareThisBy DIXIE REID
Adrien Brody will always be known as the jubilant Oscar winner who swept surprised presenter Halle Berry into his arms for an honest-to-goodness Hollywood-heartthrob kiss.
And now here he is, all gangly arms and legs, happily impulsive making the rounds with director Allen Coulter to talk about the fact-meets-fiction noir film "Hollywoodland."
It also stars Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, Bob Hoskins and Robin Tunney.
Brody, 33, (who won the Oscar in 2003 for his leading-man performance in "The Pianist") plays a fictional down-on-his-luck private eye named Louis Simo who is hired to look into the 1959 suicide of real-life actor George Reeves (played by Affleck, who gained 20 pounds for the role.)
Reeves was beloved by millions of American children as TV's Superman. Even now, nearly 50 years later, some people are convinced the coroner got it wrong, that Reeves did not shoot himself.
As Simo, Brody is a gum-chewing gumshoe with a marriage on the rocks and a young son who's devastated that Superman is dead. He lives and works out of a cheap Los Angeles apartment, taking on sleazy suspicious-husband cases before Reeves' mother (Lois Smith) hires him to investigate her son's death.
"I think Simo is really clinging to his adolescence, and I, having been an adolescent at one point, knew how to play Simo very well," Brody says with a laugh. "And having overcome my adolescence, (I learned) how to express a level of self-understanding and, I don't know ..."
"Maturity," offers Coulter.
"Maturity that Simo had to gain," Brody says, nodding.
Brody grew up in New York City, where he sometimes accompanied his mother, photojournalist Sylvia Plachy, on her assignments for the Village Voice. His father, Elliot, is a retired history teacher. His movie credits include "Summer of Sam," "Liberty Heights" and Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of "King Kong."
His leading role in "The Thin Red Line" was famously cut out, something he doesn't like to talk about. He plays legendary Spanish bullfighter Manuel Rodriguez Sanchez in the upcoming film "Manolete" (no release date has been set.)
Coulter makes his feature-film directorial debut with "Hollywoodland," after years of television work, and he was happy to land Brody for the layered role of Louis Simo.
"What Adrien does so well," says Coulter, "is that he finds an angle on a character that's unexpected. He always comes at things from an unusual perspective and, therefore, the characters he plays, no matter who they are, have a dimension you don't expect. It was important to me to make Louis Simo as interesting a character as George Reeves but also different from other detectives."
"They've been done, and done well," says Brody.
While Simo was the creation of screenwriter Paul Bernbaum, Reeves was a real man whose murder, some people believe, remains unsolved 47 years later.
He was found dead from a gunshot wound in the bedroom of his Hollywood home on June 16, 1959. The Los Angeles County coroner ruled it a suicide, but two other possible scenarios play out in "Hollywoodland":
Perhaps Eddie Mannix (played by Hoskins), the powerful MGM studio executive whose wife, Toni (Lane) had a longtime, and well-known, affair with Reeves, ordered a hit on the actor. Mannix had known mob ties and once warned Reeves, "You make her cry, and you're dead."
Or maybe Reeves' girlfriend, Leonore Lemmon (Tunney), shot him, possibly by accident.
Then again, maybe it was suicide.
Reeves had a promising career in the movies, having landed roles in such big films as "Gone With the Wind" and "From Here to Eternity," when his military service in World War II interrupted. Once he donned Superman's cape _ first in the low-budget 1951 movie "Superman and the Mole-Men" and then in more than 50 episodes of the TV series "Adventures of Superman" _ the movie roles dried up. He was one of the first Hollywood actors to be typecast.
Coulter, who as a child saw some of Reeves' final "Superman" episodes, believes that "Hollywoodland" will appeal to audiences who've never heard of George Reeves.
"It's such an interesting tale about the end of an era in Hollywood, the end of the studio system and the beginning of the era of television," he says, "and the end of a certain way of life, of decorum, when men wore suits and hats."
(Dixie Reid can be reached at dreid(at)sacbee.com.)
