No Mystery Where This Sleuth Is: He’s Everywhere, Baby
Comedian Mike Myers is everywhere--again in the guise of Austin Powers, the toothy, mop-topped British secret agent cryogenically preserved in a ‘60s time warp. “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” his sequel to the 1997 sleuth spoof that introduced the International Man of Mystery, opens Friday and has won Myers a publishing trifecta--the covers of Rolling Stone (“Yeah Baby, I’m Back!”), Entertainment Weekly (“Oh, Behave!”) and GQ (“The Awesome Powers of Mike Myers”).
Newsweek spreads its review of the film (“mostly the goofy, jubilant fun it ought to be”) over two psychedelic pages.
Like Virgin Atlantic airlines, First USA’s Austin Powers Titanium Visa Card and other marketers that have latched on to the new film with commercial tie-ins, GQ also is reveling in the craze. With New Line Cinema, the men’s monthly presented the world premiere of the movie Tuesday night at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles and the magazine uses the film in its first TV commercial in years. The 30-second spot shows a discothequing Powers and says: “He’s suave . . . He’s debonair . . . He’s on the cover of GQ.”
Cut to Powers: “Yeah, baby, yeah!”
The commercial pitching GQ’s June Comedy Issue, “88 Pages of Mirth, Merriment and Abject Hilarity,” is running on E!, Comedy Central, CNN, ESPN, the Fox News Channel and other cable networks.
“When you decide to do a cover, you have no idea how things are going to be when the issue comes out,” said GQ Editor in Chief Arthur Cooper. “When we decided on Mike Myers [six months ago], I had no idea he would be all over the place. Now, you certainly don’t have to explain who Mike Myers is anymore.”
Even on CNBC the other afternoon, reporter Joe Kernen paused during a rundown of the day’s stock trading to show off a bobble-headed Austin Powers doll.
Oh, yes. There’s another “Austin Powers” magazine cover. The July issue of Cats honors Dr. Evil’s pet feline, the hairless Mr. Bigglesworth (real name: Ted Nudegent), as Cat of the Year. “Cats are almost always misrepresented in Hollywood,” says Editor in Chief Jane W. Reilly.
Not Since Hannibal Lecter: Hannibal Lecter returned Tuesday in “Hannibal,” Thomas Harris’ long-awaited sequel to “The Silence of the Lambs.” Meanwhile, another serial killer, named Merec, has come to diabolical life in “Kill Me First,” a debut novel by Kate Morgenroth that has generated a buzz of its own and prompted the first critics to praise the compulsive readability of its dark story.
“Not since Hannibal Lecter has there been quite so seductively, sanely evil a killer as Merec,” Entertainment Weekly observed in its A-minus review. So evil is this guy that the thriller is set in motion with a mass slaying at a Virginia nursing home. A video of the event is left by Merec and his cohorts for the evening news, and they kidnap a grief-frozen widow for further mayhem.
“Kill Me First” explores the gray area between good and evil and looks at how the media can indulge the perverse fascination that people often have with the gruesome accident by the side of the road.
Where did this story come from?
“It’s a fair enough question,” said Morgenroth, who studied writing at Princeton with John McPhee and Toni Morrison. “At some point in a person’s life, particularly in middle age, it seems that his life is set, or he figures it’s impossible to change it. I thought this was an illusion, that there’s always a chance that something could come into the picture and whack a person into a different life and take him to an extreme.”
Sarah, the middle-aged widow, is jolted out of her sadness and acquires a strange sense of freedom among her captors. The title of the book comes from Patty Hearst, who’s quoted before the prologue: “Nobody likes to see weaknesses in themselves, to realize what can happen to persons when they’re put under stress. . . . They think they’d say, ‘Kill me first.’ ”
Though Morgenroth, 27, is much younger than Sarah, she was shaken out of her own routine by the response to her manuscript. Initially employed in the marketing department of HarperCollins, she quit her job four years ago and worked for the book publisher as a temp in order to have time to concentrate on her writing. Two literary agents she approached were uncomfortable representing such a shocking tale, but she showed her novel to HarperCollins editorial director Larry Ashmead in hopes of receiving some feedback. Instead, Ashmead offered her a two-book contract.
She said her second novel also will fit in the crime-thriller genre. As she put it, “I like to explore darker themes.”
Paul D. Colford can be reached by e-mail at paul.colford@newsday.com.