A Class Outing : It Was Back to School for Party-Goers Celebrating ‘The Freshman’ Premiere
The Scene: Thursday night’s premiere of “The Freshman,” a new comedy from Tri-Star Pictures. After a screening in Westwood, guests rode shuttle buses to the John Thomas Dye School at the top of Bel-Air for an al fresco buffet supper.
The Buzz: Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick weren’t there, but another star of the film was: Mzee, a 66-inch-long monitor lizard from Thailand. The reptile, which belongs to the second-largest lizard species on Earth, stumped around the grass on a leash and lolled in the arms of trainers Jim Brockett, Jules Sylvester and Gina Perry.
Wild Kingdom: What does a Hollywood lizard eat on the set? Catered food? “He eats whatever he wants. He’s a carnivore,” explained Sylvester blithely. (Actually, Mzee looked like more than one producer in Hollywood.)
Who Was There: At the party were producer Mike Lobell (not one of your lizard-like producers); writer/director Andrew Bergman; stars Bruno Kirby and Penelope Ann Miller; Tom Brokaw; actors Maria Conchita Alonso, William Atherton, Gary Busey, Cathy Lee Crosby, Woody Harrelson and Mimi Rogers.
Dress Code: Lightweight blazers and pantsuits. One man redefined casual trailer-park chic with his clam digger-length cutoffs, accentuated with knee-high black hose.
Entertainment: Dancing to Glenn Miller, Nat “King” Cole, Madonna and a ‘70s disco-funk medley that sounded just fine until we got to Barry Manilow singing “Copacabana.”
Chow: Pizza, pasta, tortellini, garlic bread, salads and lethal chocolate marzipan brownies provided by Parties Plus cooks, who had baked loaves of bread shaped like lizards for the occasion.
Quoted: “Oh, he’s so cute,” exclaimed one lizard-loving woman, who quickly changed her tune when Mzee flicked her face with his four-inch Jacobsen’s organ (the forked “tongue” that enables reptiles to smell). It added a new dimension to the old Hollywood sport of cheek-kissing.
Triumphs: With the dearth of good premiere party locations in Los Angeles, Tri-Star found one in the Dye School, a rolling hillside in Bel-Air that provided a view of the city lights perfect for a clement summer night.
Glitches: A lot of people made the movie and skipped the party. Why? Could it be the prospect of riding in shuttle buses is a little bit too egalitarian for Hollywood’s swells? Come on now. If we’re going to have celebrities hectoring us endlessly about environmental awareness, the least they can do is use semi-public transportation.