Nowadays 68-year-old Shep Gordon loves his home in Maui and reflects on having hung out with the Dalai Lama. Before he goes on to manage the likes of Alice Cooper and Anne Murray, start a film studio, and amass a probable vast fortune and a wealth of celebrity friends, we are treated to his reminiscence of starting at the bottom. At the film’s outset, broke, high, and ramped up to deal drugs, he checks in at a Los Angeles motel. His story goes he accidentally encounters Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix after witnessing their poolside inflagrante delicto. Jimi suggests he become a talent manager and there goes Alice Cooper, in another room at the motel–why not him? (Jim Morrison also resided there but one guesses he already had representation). If you think this is breezy stuff, get ready for the rest of the film: an entertaining if swaggering biopic of a guy everyone seems to love–at least everyone interviewed here. The list of worshippers includes Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Willie Nelson, Tom Arnold (who cares), and the director of the film, Mike Myers.
If inside celebrity stories appeal to you and the machinations of music biz deals fascinate your curiosity, Supermensch is a more than decent way to kill an hour and a half. The little guy makes good, overindulges in booze and drugs and makes it even bigger. Cunning trumps talent in breaking musical acts. Convincing John Lennon and a few of his buddies including Mickey Dolenz to pose in a picture with Anne Murray to give her proper rock ‘n roll cred seems to be all she needs to vault her way to platinum sales.
It turns out Gordon also virtually invented the celebrity chef after empathizing with talented cooks’ underpaid status at the time. Just like running into Janis and Jimi, he has the luck of the gods with him once he places Emeril Lagasse and many other now famous chefs on the newly emerging Food Network. Emeril’s now-tired signature “bam” when he merely threw a little spice garnish at the end of preparing a dish was a whole lot like Cooper tossing a live chicken to his audience so they could mutilate it and rub the blood all over. Gordon wallows in his own ability to repeatedly find the right gimmick.
Then Gordon walks away from managing his chefs because he wasn’t taking any money doing it and decides he needs to retire and find his own life. All that crazy fun manipulating the public (giving them what they want?) with the various manufactured antics of Alice Cooper, or of dangerously going buck up against a corrupt black “chitlin circuit” and booking acts like Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Van Dross in white concert halls where they actually started getting paid–well it took so much out of him, he needed a rest. Even an estranged girlfriend’s extended family that he decides to support after hearing of her death, are basically strangers until he reaches out. So there’s a sadness when after a very dangerous surgery where he’s unconscious for days, he wakes up to find a paid assistant as the only one greeting him. A marriage a few years earlier to a younger woman went el foldo when, he says, she didn’t want to go to a doctor to help them conceive a child. She is not heard from in the film. Neither is Sharon Stone, one of the many and apparently more longstanding of this chronic womanizer’s girlfriends. Nor is his business partner, Joe Greenberg, who apparently had much to do with springing Alice Cooper into fame and fortune.
There’s a lot of fun to be had here but simultaneously the levity begets serious questions. Myers may be holding back from going a little deeper because there’s a helluva interesting party story being told here, but is it also because he might be fearful of what more digging might bring up? Sure, Gordon is quoted as saying fame in and of itself can never be a positive. When he survives the near-death experience, though, or talks about the Dalai Lama, the spirituality comes forth in crumbs rather than anything more substantial. I was left feeling Myers likely was too reverential to his hero to mine any subterranean stuff on his subject because the alternative that Gordon really is a supermensch in all his unblemished glory seems too hollow for this to be the whole story.
As a footnote, I wish we were given at least a little something more than a mention on Blondie or early Pink Floyd, both of whom Gordon also managed. Paying Deborah Harry and Syd Barrett more respect would have nicely washed down the gobs of Alice Cooper and Anne Murray thrust upon us as forced (and very lucky) celebrities.
3.5 School’s Out For This Worshipful Biopic (out of 5 stars)