Pete Townshend Speaks Out
The Who's Pete Townshend says his life is getting back to normal after a traumatic six months. Townshend was accused of using his credit card to access a Web site containing child pornography (true, he says, but for research on an Internet campaign against child porn and for his autobiography, which details sex abuse perpetrated on him as a child) and downloading such material (untrue, and declared such by British police).
"I know I'm innocent," Townshend tells Billboard.com, "and apart from the first day when I heard the news when I was quite shaky and made quite a shaky statement I think, I've been absolutely certain that it was not about me." After accepting a caution from police, Townshend was shocked to be placed on the U.K. sex-offenders' list, albeit for a limited period and at very low status.
Due to recent events, Townshend's name is now known to a wider section of the general public than even the millions of Who fans, but he feels to an extent insulated from that scrutiny. "The people that I really care about are the people who have reached out to me in these troubles, and those are friends, fans, family and strangers who feel they know me through my work," he says.
He emphasizes that he is not smug about what has occurred. "I have been rapped on the knuckles and I don't want to appear like I don't take this thing seriously," he says. "There is a measure of the kind of rock'n'roll arrogance that I still carry in my dotage that made me think I'd have no trouble with it. I really thought of myself as a professional researcher who worked to help victims, not a guitar-smashing rock star. But the old rock star arrogance carried me into very dangerous water."
However, there's no disguising the sadness that Townshend now feels too awkward about the issue of child abuse to do anything other than continue raising funds for its treatment. "I should say no more really because I think what's actually happened here is that I have been silenced," he says. "On this issue, the issue that I was so passionate about, which was the subversion of the Internet, here I am: I can't really say a thing."
Townshend has been working on his autobiography, but the project has stalled for unrelated reasons. "I'm about a third of the way through," he offers. "I was loving it and I got to the part where I leave art school and then off I go with my guitar and I join the Who, and I started to get incredibly depressed. I started to think, 'Oh f*ck, I've got to sit here for two years writing about the Who'. So I couldn't do it. And then circumstances recently made me feel that people really need to know who I actually am, and the only way that they'll have a chance of understanding that is if I dispassionately write my life story. So I'm thinking about getting back to what I call the morning program: sitting down with a piece of paper and picking it up."
Writing about the Who may not be something Townshend is keen on, but there is the probability of one last new studio Who album, rehearsals for which had started before Who bassist John Entwistle's sudden death in June 2002. The impetus for completing the album is coming from vocalist Roger Daltrey.
"He seems to be determined to get me back into a studio and to push me to making what he would call a Who album with him," says Townshend, "and I'm in no mood really to turn away from his friendship. He's been such a fantastic support to me in my recent troubles. So we'll probably go into the studio later this year and try and [get] some material out."
Hollywood Producers Rise Again with 'Terminator 3'
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Everyone knew that HE -- "Terminator" Arnold Schwarzenegger -- would be back. But Wednesday's debut of "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" also marks the return of two producers who were once among the hottest teams in Hollywood before splitting in the 1990s.
Movies made by Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar have raked in $3 billion at box offices. Their former company, Carolco Pictures, backed the "Rambo" movies starring Sylvester Stallone and big-budget action adventures like "Total Recall" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" with Schwarzenegger.
The pair went their separate ways in the mid-1990s over differences over Carolco's future, but neither enjoyed the kind of hits they made at the former company.
Vajna started a new company that mounted films like 1996's "Evita," and Kassar took the reins of Carolco before one flop too many sent it into bankruptcy in 1995.
"We had a very good run at being able to pick the right projects during our heyday at Carolco, and we felt the team was better than either one of us alone," Vajna said. "To simplify, two heads are better than one."
Under their new film label, C2, the pair returned to the formula that made them a hit -- a non-stop action flick with an emotionless leading man who doesn't really say much but wreaks havoc and destruction everywhere he goes.
In short, they went to "Terminator," whose star Schwarzenegger uttered the now classic line, "I'll be back."
"Everytime you say, 'I'll be back,' you think of 'Terminator,"' said Kassar.
He added that Carolco's collapse was a huge disappointment personally, but it has led him to look at the movie business in a more mature way and put priorities in order.
TERMINATOR REBIRTH
Winning the rights to make "Terminator 3" proved no easy task, however. The pair bought 50 percent of the rights from their old company in a bankruptcy auction and the other 50 percent from "Terminator 2" executive producer Gale Anne Hurd.
C2 partnered with film producer Intermedia, an affiliate of German company IM Internationalmedia AG, and they auctioned distribution rights to major studios such as Warner Bros., a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc and Columbia Pictures, part of Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Schwarzenegger had to be signed to a contract, and a new director found to replace original writer/director James Cameron, who declined a chance to return. C2 hired "U-571" director Jonathan Mostow.
Published reports of the amounts paid Schwarzenegger run as high as $30 million. The movie's overall cost has been estimated between $150 million and $175 million.
The producers, however, declined to talk about the money involved because of one thing they think is a sure thing. "Terminator" movies make a lot more cash than they cost.
"Terminator" in 1984 and "Terminator 2" in 1991 raked in over $550 million at global box offices.
Moreover, the fans who have helped "Terminator" achieve cult status around the world were much younger than the producers thought, said Intermedia chief Moritz Borman.
"We did a Google search on 'T3,' and got 17,000 pages," Borman said, "before we even decided to go with the movie."
What will those young fans get from a pair of producers steeped in 1980s and 1990s action movies? "Terminator 3" has the same combination of big explosions, blasting guns, sci fi special effects and Schwarzenegger utterances that made the first two films huge hits. "I don't think the audiences' tastes have changed that much," said Vajna.
If that is the case, expect the 55-year-old action star to keep making big-budget Hollywood films, if he doesn't jump into politics. But one thing is for sure: behind the cameras will be a couple of producers named Vajna and Kassar.