Screen With Envy? It's All Just An Act For The Boz

So Brian Bozworth's first (and perhaps not last) movie is coming to town. "Stone Cold" will be released to theaters around the country next week.

I wouldn't miss it for the world.

"Stone Cold" will be viewed here, for better or for worse, as it will nowhere else in creation. Seattle and Brian Bozworth go back a ways. We have a history.

Violent, passionate, adoring, derisive, contemptuous - you might say it is at best checkered. What more can you ask from one individual's impact upon one city?

Impact. That was the first word applied to him here. Brian Bozworth - The Boz - was going to be an "impact" player as a rookie linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.

He was going to be, as coach Chuck Knox predicted, a "thumper."

In a few short seasons, massive shoulders debilitated, his football thumping days over, he departed to labor anew in a more gentle medium whose last highly regarded Thumper was a rabbit.

Do you remember when Brian Bozworth first came to Seattle?

If so, you will probably never forget it.

We won him in the lottery of a supplemental college draft. He was outrageous, but he was ours and we loved him. He announced he didn't want to play before a minor media market like Seattle, and we hated him.

It was all a negotiating ploy. He signed for $11 million, and we drew him gratefully to our collective civic bosom.

Parties were thrown all over town. Not with him; for him. Because of him. Baffert's Restaurant (now defunct) threw a bash and gave out T-shirts emblazoned "Baffert's Loves The BOZ."

Now Bill Baffert is gone; so is The Boz. I still have the T-shirt, which I can no longer wear. It is emotionally dated and politically incorrect.

I remember being caught up in the mass silliness. I called up Gene Juarez, asking him if he knew how to do a Boz haircut. He researched it for a couple of hours and gave me one in the morning, grooved blue and green side stripes included.

As I walked back to The Times, cars slowed, horns beeped, drivers waved at the tonsorial comedy.

However improbable, we had a hero.

Then he wrote a book ("The Boz"), announcing on the front cover that it was the "Confessions of a Modern Anti-Hero." He was no literary giant, but his book shot up to No. 2 on The New York Times' list of bestsellers.

He stopped talking to the local press - but granted an interview to Rolling Stone.

We wondered what was wrong with him. We wondered, worse, what was wrong with us.

It turns out we need not have wondered at all. An article by John Taylor in a recent issue of New York magazine spells out that it was all a grand-scheme marketing plan devised by Gary Wichard, Bozworth's agent.

It was never intended for Bozworth to play football for more than a few years, anyway. Football was supposed to be the rowdy doorstep to Bozworth's eventual dream home in Hollywood.

"Wichard's plan," wrote Taylor, "had called for Bozworth, who had never intended to play football for more than four or five years, to knock off a movie between his second and third seasons in the pros. While this was a rather naive goal, it did mean that Wichard had already been reading scripts by the time Bozworth was forced to retire."

And do you remember the Right Guard commercial? That was part of the plan, too.

"I turned down a huge commercial with a cereal company," Wichard told Taylor, "because I didn't want Brian to look like just a hard-core hulk, holding his head, slopping up some cereal. He wasn't going to be seen that way."

Instead, in the Right Guard commercial, no reference to football or any other kind of athletics was made. Bozworth appeared as a wry gentleman in a wing collar and British morning coat.

"No locker rooms or snapping towels or big bullies," Wichard said.

"Stone Cold" is based on the experiences of an undercover cop who joins a Southern motorcycle gang to infiltrate its criminal activities.

Taylor wrote:

"The original story scared the hell out of me," Bozworth says, sounding surprisingly prudish. "It was so disgustingly dark and trashy and bleak."

Supposedly, a number of the more gross scenes were cut to soothe Bozworth's legendary sensitivities.

I haven't seen an advance screening of "Stone Cold." As far as I know, no one has. Will it get decent reviews? Odds are it will not.

Its producers describe the movie as: ". . . a tough, gritty, violent film . . . this kind of movie is not designed to get good reviews."

Poor Brian. At some point or another in his professional life, somebody ought to be able to write something the morning after that he can put in a scrapbook, instead of merely taking to the bank.

He apparently has taken his acting seriously.

"I would never fake a line," he told New York magazine.

He didn't fake too many backfields, either.

John Hinterberger's column appears Wednesdays in the Scene section of the Times and his restaurant and food columns appear in Sunday's Pacific magazine and Friday's Tempo.