Tag: sean penn
Portrait Of The Actor: Sean Penn’s Scenes In Real Life (Remembered)

Portrait Of The Actor: Sean Penn’s Scenes In Real Life (Remembered)

Sean Penn sat in front of me in history class, junior year at Santa Monica High School — the school rising on a hill with a quadrangle you see in Rebel Without a Cause.

He kept turning around to talk, the blue-eyed boy with all the questions. The younger, brown-eyed girl had all the answers — at least in history class.

At 16, the existentialist devilish streak was already a mile wide. I got to know him well, coming of age.

Still, it was passing strange to see an old friend — my bittersweet first movie date — huddled in the jungle with a Mexican drug lord and ruthless killer: Joaquin Guzman Loera. “El Chapo” for short.

Sean roiled the rules and waters of the worlds I live in — politics and journalism — by his derring-do in getting a huge scoop by highly unorthodox means. His rambling style raised alarms and establishment eyebrows, but Rolling Stone magazine was the perfect place for his rough-cut writing voice.

The White House expressed disapproval in the words of chief of staff Denis McDonough: officially “appalled.”

So what? The shocking interview is best seen a radical extension of Penn’s powerful empathy for outsiders, outlaws and the dispossessed. Good for him for visiting Baghdad after George W. Bush’s dogs of war shed blood on false grounds, and for aiding the Haitians, hit by a devastating earthquake.

Penn also conducted interviews with President Raul Castro in Cuba and several conversations with his late friend, Hugo Chavez, former president of Venezuela, when few others could or would.

An immensely gifted Academy Award-winning actor, Penn is always smoldering, crossing boundaries in his work and life. Often he writes his own script.

We got a good fix on each other in class and spent many hours together, on the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, in tennis team company, or at parties at my house. Ping-Pong and piano songs were part of the clean fun. Sean once showed up with two friends, Frank and Joe, in a convertible Rolls-Royce. (My father has not forgot the tracks he once left on our lawn.) It was never boring when Sean was around.

Looking back, we had good times (not fast times) at Santa Monica High, surprisingly innocent. Sean liked to make a splash — literally, as when he jumped in the pool on the way up to accept a “most improved player” award at a boys’ tennis team party. He was making up time, since surfing was his sport before he seriously picked up a racket. I remember he once watched one of my singles matches, start to finish, sitting behind a fence with sunglasses. Another time, he carried a “Peanuts” lunch pail around campus.

Back to the first day of class, when I met him. Sean dared to speak a line that produced a hung jury silence. He declared he liked “history, track and blacks” as we went round the room. The teacher, Paul Kerry, an African-American track champion, smiled broadly to cut the tension.

I noticed Sean didn’t speak the usual Malibu dialect or write poems about waves. He played a stoned surfer dude in his first movie role — that history class cut-up, Jeff Spicoli — but that was not the lad I knew.

The way he called up to invite me out departed from the norm: “What time shall I pick you up?”

“Oh, don’t you know? We’re going to the movies tonight.”

We went, but Sean was never my boyfriend. The good girl and the bad boy were well-matched as friends. He became a budding actor, going to “cattle call” auditions, and I’d gone east for college. We kept in touch. I got a letter saying he had not been in one place for more than five minutes in the last 24 hours. I wrote a one-act play about us: “Table for Two.” His ears got red as he read it, but we — or David and Rachel — were a hit. My diaries tell the tale.

After he became famous, he remained a breeze on the phone: “What are you doing right now?” He invited me over to meet his children and see some cuts of an upcoming movie. Just like the old days, he asked me questions — this time about politics.

I could have dreamt this. Stardusted Sean parted waters, crossing a restaurant by the beach. There I was dining with my beau, the author Michael Lewis. Sean walked over to give me a warm hug. That was sweet, and it made Michael jealous, way out of character.

Depend upon it: Sean’s true talent for making scenes in the moment goes on. And he was the first boy I loved, as the song goes, for that.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Actor and activist Sean Penn, delivers a speech during the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, December 5, 2015. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe

Sean Penn Meeting, Hollywood Dreams Help Mexican Drug Lord’s Downfall

Sean Penn Meeting, Hollywood Dreams Help Mexican Drug Lord’s Downfall

By Lizbeth Diaz and Frank Jack Daniel

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A clandestine meeting that Hollywood star Sean Penn orchestrated with Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman in a jungle hideout late last year helped the Mexican government catch the world’s most-wanted drug lord, sources said.

Guzman, the infamous boss of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was arrested in northwestern Mexico on Friday morning and sent back to the prison he broke out of in July through a mile-long tunnel that led straight into his cell. It was his second prison break.

To avoid a repeat of that humiliation, Mexico’s government says it aims to hand Guzman over to U.S. justice as soon as possible.

Penn’s rare access to Guzman in October was assisted by Mexican actress Kate del Castillo. They were driven some of the way to the hideout by Guzman’s son, who the Hollywood star says was waved on by soldiers when they apparently recognized him.

Another leg of the day-long trip through central Mexico to meet Guzman was on a light aircraft allegedly fitted with equipment to evade radar detection, Penn said in a story published in Rolling Stone magazine on Saturday.

Penn said in the article that he was sure the Mexican government and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration were tracking him.

Senior Mexican government sources said they were indeed aware of the October meeting and monitored his movements.

That helped lead troops days later to a ranch where Guzman was staying, one of the sources said. Mexican forces used helicopter gunships to attack Guzman’s ranch during a siege that lasted days.

The kingpin narrowly escaped, with what he told Del Castillo was a minor leg injury, but the raid in the northern state of Durango was a major breakthrough in the manhunt.

Guzman was finally recaptured on Friday in the northern city of Los Mochis after a showdown fit for the silver screen.

In a pre-dawn attack by Mexican marines who killed five of his henchmen, the portly capo survived by squeezing through a secret tunnel into the city’s grimy storm drains, only to pop out of a manhole near a Pollo Feliz restaurant hours later.

Leaving a mud-caked automatic rifle behind, he hijacked two cars before police blocked the highway as he sped out of town. Once detained, they held him at a seedy motel until backup arrived.

Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez on Friday said that the drug boss’s yearning for movie fame had helped bring him down.

‘BIGGEST BLOCKBUSTER’

Penn’s seven-hour encounter with Guzman came about after Guzman became interested in making a biopic when he was inundated with requests from U.S. movie studios following his 2014 capture, the film star said.

In Los Mochis, the farming town where Guzman’s freedom ended, local resident Arturo Liera, 27, said he may have hoped to make a film with Penn.

“A film of that magnitude with such a big star, narrated by him and with Hollywood actors could have been the biggest blockbuster ever, more than ‘Star Wars,'” Liera said.

In the article, Penn said the conversation over tequila and food turned to profit margins in the movie world. The trafficker was “unimpressed” and thought oil was a better prospect.

Guzman’s lawyer did approach Del Castillo about the possibility of making a film, but the project was dropped in favor of a magazine interview, Penn said. He clarified that he only met Guzman for the magazine piece.

In the Sinaloan state capital of Culiacan, where many revere Guzman as a folk hero, some were surprised to hear that he was looking to have a biopic made about his life.

“Vanity kills, and more so in his case,” said Exiquiel Delgado, 60, who owns a souvenir kiosk near Culiacan’s cathedral. “A man with money but little culture loses his way.”

INTERVIEW

Penn’s encounter was made possible because Guzman struck up an unlikely friendship with Del Castillo, who played a Mexican drug queen in a well-known TV soap. The saga adds a new twist to the long and larger-than-life career of Guzman, whose nickname “Chapo” means “Shorty.”

Penn unsuccessfully tried to set up a formal follow-up interview. Instead, as Mexican security forces closed in on Guzman, Penn and Del Castillo persuaded him to film a 17-minute tape answering prewritten questions and ship them the footage.

The video clips show the drug lord in a colorful shirt at a different hideout, musing about his contribution to the narcotics trade. Rolling Stone called it the drug lord’s first interview outside an interrogation.

“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats,” he told Penn during their encounter.

A senior Obama administration official told television news shows on Sunday morning that Guzman’s boasting about his heroin empire in the interview was “maddening.”

“One thing I will tell you is that this braggadocious action about how much heroin he sends around the world, including the United States, is maddening,” White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“We see a heroin epidemic, an opioid addiction epidemic, in this country,” McDonough said. “We’re going to stay on top of this with our Mexican counterparts until we get that back in the box. But El Chapo’s behind bars – that’s where he should stay.”

McDonough would not comment on any repercussions for Penn.

(Additional reporting by Dave Graham, Anahi Rama and Jesus Bustamente in Los Mochis, Michael O’Boyle in Culiacan and Simon Gardner and Ana Isabel Martinez in Mexico City; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel and Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Kieran Murray and Cynthia Osterman)

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is escorted by soldiers during a presentation at the hangar belonging to the office of the Attorney General in Mexico City, Mexico January 8, 2016. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido