Why this page was even started: We got the note from Matt Perry which appears at the bottom of this page in our Guest Book in March of '97, and since Matt is a good friend, we decided to pull his leg (figuratively speaking) with Bruce Weber's famous Valentine's Day picture of Ryan. The response was so overwhelming that we have now given Ryan Phillippe his own page:
We've mentioned previously that we have an international audience. Now EuroSeek™ has made it official. After only being listed with Euroseek™ for nine weeks,
As we noted on our main page, Christopher Masterson came in first (by one vote!) over his brother Danny as your favorite star here, but we received so many write-ins for Ben Affleck, Ryan Phillippe and others that we had to re-set the survey counter to include them. If you want to vote for for yourfavorite actor here, go to the bottom of this page and click on the plea to the Muse to take you "Home" (ours, not yours!), then scroll down to the survey panel and recast your vote. (Note: 18 June 1999: RYAN is currently the most popular star on our web site, followed (in a tie) by Ben Affleck and Ben Silverstone.)
You may have missed the news: Reese and Ryan got married. There were no details at all published about the wedding, and our efforts to get some info have been thwarted by Reese's re-arrangement of her professional support team: she is now represented by C.A.A. (not I.C.M.), and no longer employs her former manager, so we can't get you news from that source, either. One thing which we have learned is that, despite stating earlier that the baby will be sur-named "Phillippe," Resse will continue to act under her own name as "Witherspoon," which is not at all uncommon in the entertainment Industry.
The biggest Reese news (aside from the wedding and the Phillippe baby) is her OUTSTANDING performance in Election. We would have a glowing review of Election and LOTS of pictures from it, but Paramount Classics Pictures recently screwed our On-Line Reviewer royally, and he has refused to review any Paramount films in the forseeable future. Still, he has said that Reese's performance is worthy of award consideration (Foreign Press Association and A.M.PA.S. members, please take note!)
We usually show the names of the photographers whose pictures we post here (e.g., Gerardo Somoza, whose picture of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe is in the current issue of US Magazine). Aside from legal reasons, there is a very good reason to list the names of the photographers: they earn their money with their cameras. If you see a picture here that you like, jot down the name of the photographer and write or e-mail your favorite news- or fan magazine and ask for more of that photographer's work.
Those photographers who don't work for the studios are often paparazzi or are professional portraitists, some of whom have good working relationships with the stars you like. By promoting the work of these photographers, you are encouraging your favorite magazines to buy more of their work, which encourages the photographers to build better relationships with your favorite celebrities and get those "special" shots that everyone loves so much. Bruce Weber, who took the famous "Valentine" photo of Ryan for Interview magazine, which they were gracious enough to allow us to reproduce further down this page, takes marvelous shots of Ryan, and many of the pictures of him floating around the Internet are by Bruce Weber, who usually goes uncredited. That's not right. 'Nuff said.
So many of you fans of Ryan have been writing in for him, that we have re-set our "Favorite Star" survey to include Ryan, so when you are done here and have signed the Guestbook, ask the Muse to take you to our main page and cast your vote. (Only one vote per visitor, please; the software is set up to reject multiple votes, and we have enough grief maintaining this place as it is without people screwing up the survey page, too!)
By the way, as we state on our main page, "Private" Guestbook messages are password protected, so only we read the secret messages that people have been leaving, thinking that Ryan or Ben or whomever will read them. Rest assured, the stars whom you adore can't read the "Private" Guestbook messages, so if you want to confess your love, you'll have to do it openly. (BLUSH.)
OKAY, PHILLIPPE FANS, LISTEN UP: we are an unofficial site and we don't get paid anything by either Ryan Phillippe, or Ben or Casey Affleck, or Christopher or Danny Masterson, or Christian Bale, or any of their "people," nor do we get paid by any of the movie studios or television networks whose films and shows we promote. We run our website as a FREE public service for you, our visitors, and we hope to keep things that way. Unfortunately, that means that we cannot afford to buy a new scanner for transparencies (i.e., those stacks of wonderful COLOR pictures which we have piled up here, gathering dust) or a new video card to grab frames of your fave from movies or television shows, or a new high-speed modem so that we can update our web site constantly, instead of every other week or so, etc., etc.
In order to buy all of that neat hardware so that we can upgrade our page, we have caved in and gone commercial. That's right, folks, after almost two-and-a-half years without ANY ads on our web page, we have placed a few selected advertisements here and there within the actual text of our pages. These, unlike those annoying "pop-up" advertisements, are selected by us because we think that they offer goods and services of interest to you. If you "click through" to the businesses which we advertise (and especially if you BUY something), THEY will pay us -- not much, but we hope that if enough of you click through (and hopefully shop online) we will earn enough to buy the equipment that we want in order to upgrade these pages, add more color pics, video and audio clips, etc. If you like our web site, please patronize the businesses which we advertise here so that we can improve our pages.
Remember, the ads which actually appear in the text of our pages are placed there by us, not by Geocities or anyone else, and we have selected which ads go where as part of our own twisted design aesthetics. Clicking through to those ads helps us to help keep you informed of your favorite performers and the movies, plays, and television shows in which they appear. Please patronize these advertisers. (Or else send us lots and lots of money so that we don't need to accept advertisements.)
We recently recruited helpers from California to Québec to Kensington to Queensland (or maybe it was New South Wales) and took out a substantial loan to make some major hardware upgrades for our real work and in part so that we could keep upgrading this site (you may have some noticed some pages being updated several times a day!).
What did we ask in return? That you sign nice notes in our Guestbook (and thank you to the 300+ people who have) and that you click through to the advertisers whom we feature here so that we could earn enough money for this site to pay for itself.
Having earned less than US $5.00 because so few of you "clicked through" to our advertisers (and only one of you actually BOUGHT anything, we note), now that we have hit the Yahoo/Geocities 11 Megabyte wall, we have been faced with a decision: dig deeper into our pockets and lease more web space from Yahoo/Geocities, or add just enough files to take us to the 11 Megabyte limit and then stop updating this page.
(We COULD, of course, move everything lock, stock, and barrel to Fortune City and gain an extra nine megabytes of disk space, but our attitude is: if you don't care, why should we? We could also move some of our larger files to other servers, but that would make our page load even more slowly than it already does, and we have no intention of contributing to "the heat death of the universe.")
This is The Jaundiced Eye PRODUCTIONS Home Page -- we actually use our computers and video equipment and cameras to MAKE things, believe it or not -- and while this place has been "a hoot and a holler" to run, if you visitors don't care enough about it to let it even pay for its own upkeep, why should we divert our valuable time and resources from PAYING work to keep upgrading this site?
SO, The Muse With the Jaundiced Eye HERSELF has decreed that while His Nibs, The Grand Panjandrum, can finish filling up the 11 Megabytes of web space we have (probably for The Thirteenth Floor review, a final update to our "That '70s Show" page, Lion's Gate's Christian Bale flick, Metroland, and possibly something on Touchstone's upcoming The Thirteenth Warrior (which is only natural, since it is based upon Beowulf, and The Grand Panjandrum likes alliteration, with which Beowulf is fantastically and fulsomely filled), there will be no additional updates after the 11 Megabytes of server space is filled up. Decreasing the sizes of some of our larger photographs (which has already begun here on Ben and Casey Affleck's fan page), will gain us a little more space, and we may do some occasional updates after that, but, by and large people:
So that our loyal visitors are not left totally high and dry, we have added links on our main page to several other sites on the Internet which also devote themselves to pictures, at least, of young actors, and one or two have mirror sites for young actresses as well, for you fans of Jennifer Tilly, Reese Witherspoon, etc.
8 March 1999: Reese Witherspoon announced last week that she and (now) fiance Ryan Phillippe were expecting a baby in the early Autumn -- about nine months after our film reviewer called Reese's manager and asked whether or not Reese was pregnant. Whether she was or not at the time, she certainly seemed to like the idea! In any case, our reviewer is taking credit for inspiring her and Ryan to create what most people expect to be (knock wood!) one of the most beautiful babies in the world.
15 December 1998: "More, More, MORE!" -- We are very gratified by the number of people who have visited and would like more information about Christopher and Danny Masterson, Ryan Phillippe, and others, but, please bear in mind, as we say elsewhere, Jaundiced Eye's Home Page is a FREE site and we are NOT being paid to supply this information. Except for the single datum that Chris and Danny Masterson are indeed brothers (which Christopher personally told us), we have also received NO OTHER co-operation, information, pictures, or anything else from Christopher or Danny or Ryan Phillippe or their agents, managers, publicists, etc. -- we have had to ferret out each and every scrap of information on them that we have posted, and each page here represents well over 100 hours of our research time and on-line work; that's several thousand dollars of time, effort and bandwidth that we are "donating" to you, our visitors, and the stars we all like so much.
In fact, we are frankly getting so irritated at the number of actors, their "people," and their fans who EXPECT us to do all of this free work, that we are very seriously considering not providing any further updates in 1999 on actors who haven't co-operated with us unless they are in a movie, television show, play, etc. for which we receive pix or info from some other source, such as the production company. Many of the people for whom we have fan pages here pay publicists thousands of dollars a year to do what we have been doing for free for over two years, and those publicists, in turn, very rarely co-operate with us, even though we are often doing their jobs for them!
We may know, love, or admire many of the people for whom we have fan pages, but we aren't stupid, and we do have lives of our own to lead. The information on this site doesn't just appear out of nowhere -- we have to find it (and sometimes pay for it) and then create the HTML computer code for it, and then post it; that represents time and money that we can't spend on people who actually PAY us, or it represents our leisure time -- the time WE would like to spend watching shows and films with our favorite actors and actresses, but which we devote instead to working here.
The least we expect is a little bit of co-operation or gratitude; if we don't get either, and people (mostly visitors here) "cop an attitude," as if we are supposed to be slaving away here (sometimes twelve person-hours a day), it really irritates us . . . A LOT . . . and we reserve the right to say, "No more!"
The Little Boy Blue sound track is now available. Its site has some interesting montages of pix from the film.
Playing By Heart: The final release title of what was called Dancing About Architecture, is Playing By Heart, which the people at Disney and Miramax seem to love . . . well, at least they've always disliked "Dancing About Architecture," which, strange as it sounds, is a title which makes perfect sense to anyone who has seen the movie, . . . WHICH WE HAVE. It is terrific!!! Aside from the new title, which we can never remember, our biggest complaint about the film is that Miramax (foolishly, we think) set it up for 1998 Oscar® eligibility, just as people are talking about Shakespeare in Love for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and Michael Mouse was pouring hundreds of thousands (if not millions of dollars into promoting Shakespeaare in Love.. We think the Mouse is (once again) gypping Ryan and his fans -- this time not by butchering a good movie (as happened to 54), but by putting an outstanding movie in hopeless opposition to another outstanding movie. They may both be Miramax releases, but I am certain that the casts, crews, and creative personnel of Shakespeare in Love and Playing By Heart would prefer not having had to compete with each other.
Even without press kit in hand, our in-house reviewer, Christian Leopold Shea (who is EXTREMELY touchy about not getting promotional materials about films, as his regular readers know), sez (and we quote, by his kind permission):
(His review was be extremely positive. In either case, his comments are ©1999 by Christian Leopold Shea, all rights reserved, blah, blah, yes he does sue people.)
Other Jaundiced locations with Ryan info are the Shea-man's reviews of White Squall, which he loved, and 54, whose review has to be read to be believed, in which Ryan plays Shane O'Shea. Co-starring with Ryan in 54, by the way is his friend Breckin Meyer, for whom we are developing a separate page. And WE shall soon be adding more OFFICIAL pix from Dancing About Architecture, which had a title too cool for Disney to leave unchanged.
Apropos of 54, we also refer you to our page which sets the record . . . uh . . . "straight" about a lot of performers, including the eternally cool Ryan.
Courtesy of our correspondent Lenny, we present you with TWO links for Ryan (the first of which seems to be broken as of 23 September):
Visit the Ryan Phillippe Fan Page!
from which we have extracted this gem for
Comment from Matthew Perry:
Name: Matt Perry Website: Referred by: Word of Mouth From: Four Rivers Province Time: 1997-03-17 12:39:00 Comments: Looks great! Not enough nudity
I called Matthew and told him that nude pix are not exactly Geocities-kosher. (But we know some great links for Liv Tyler!) In the alternative, we herewith post a Bruce Weber pic of Ryan Phillippe which we have borrowed from our correspondents at Y.M.S.. It may not make Matt happy, but it has pleased thousands of you so far! We can do this, by the way, because the nice people at Interview magazine are allowing us to feature this picture in Smoochers.
