Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #231 Pipe Dream (2002)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen. 

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the complete filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well. 

Watching Rebecca Gayheart in James Toback’s Harvard Man for this column I couldn’t help but think about how the disgraced auteur used the movie as both a means of self-expression and an excuse to trick attractive women into being alone with him so that he could whip out his penis and masturbate furiously, followed by some manner of threat or false promise. 

In that respect Toback’s movies are criminal as well as creative enterprises. It’s damn near impossible to even think of his singularly self-indulgent, masturbatory oeuvre outside of that damning context. It’s similarly difficult to watch one of his wretched odes to self and wonder if he sexually harassed every single woman onscreen and behind it. 

The MeToo movement casts a giant shadow over the entirety of pop culture. So there has never been a worse time to watch a romantic comedy whose protagonist is a resentful and dishonest man who lies flagrantly about his background and pretends to be a revered indie film iconoclast as a means of tricking a beautiful, insecure actress who looks like Rebecca Gayheart into having sex with him.

From the perspective of 2021 that sounds like the actions of a villain rather than a hero. Two decades ago it was prohibitively difficult to get audiences to root for a liar who pretends to be a hotshot filmmaker as an excuse to impress, date, woo and/or have sex with beautiful, ambitious actresses. 

In the aftermath of MeToo and the extremely unsurprising revelation that Gayheart’s Harvard Man director was every bit the sex criminal and predator he appeared to be Pipe Dream’s premise seems not just unpalatable but immoral. 

That’s a shame, because if Pipe Dream didn’t have a conceit that’s unsavory on a Blame it on Rio/My Father the Hero level it might have been a neat little sleeper because it otherwise has a lot going for it. 

So many different posters! All of them terrible!

That’s a shame, because if Pipe Dream didn’t have a conceit that’s unsavory on a Blame it on Rio/My Father the Hero level it might have been a neat little sleeper because it otherwise has a lot going for it. 

The film’s strengths begin with independent film icon and Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan in a rare non-Hal Hartley lead role as David Kulovic, a plumber sick and tired of being invisible to his wealthy clients, just another blue collar laborer keeping society from falling apart. 

Powered by a combination of ambition, class resentment and horniness, our hero/anti-hero/villain/sex criminal decides to masquerade as hot independent filmmaker David Coppolberg (the last name being a portmanteau for those of Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, the plumber’s ultra-basic favorite filmmakers) as a way of meeting and impressing sexy actresses far more likely to be wowed by filmmakers than dudes who fix toilets. 

So the plumber with the quiet intensity steals a script written by Toni Edelman (Mary-Louise Parker), an ostensibly talented, ambitious aspiring screenwriter stuck in a dead-end job, and passes it off as his own and ropes his best friend/sidekick RJ Martling (Kevin Carroll) into his wildly unethical scheme as a casting director. 

David Coppolberg starts getting major buzz in the industry in a decidedly The Emperor’s New Clothes twist, to the point where David’s fake movie to meet women turns into a real movie with a two million budget, David in the director’s seat and Toni ghost-directing. 

At this point Pipe Dream trades in The Emperor’s New Clothes for Cyrano De Bergerac as its primary inspiration, with complete novice David acting as a glorified ventriloquist dummy through whom the movie’s real, unsung writer and director is communicating her desires and needs. 

David’s cynical plan to use lies, deceit and the abuse of power to trick an unknowing beauty into having sex with him proves disconcertingly successful when the regrettably named Marliss Funt (Gahyheart), the lead actress in the groaningly titled Pipe Dream hops into bed with her brooding director as he hoped all along. 

Like way too many romantic comedies throughout the ages, Pipe Dream makes the fatal mistake of seeing an act of criminal sociopathy like pretending to be a brilliant film director to trick an underling into sex as the eminently forgivable shenanigans of a lovable scamp. 

That Pipe Dream isn’t an absolute nightmare from the very beginning is a testament to the cerebral charm of Donovan and Parker and co-writer-director John C Walsh’s (who made a very modest splash with his debut film, 1995’s Ed’s Big Move) assured direction and intermittently clever script. 

But not even a performer as appealing as Donovan can make the film’s lead character anything other than a creep it’s impossible to root for if you’re not also some manner of degenerate. 

Late in Pipe Dream it comes out that in addition to lying about his identity for sex, our loathsome would-be hero also over-charges his customers for plumbing. I’m not sure why but I found this weirdly surprising. At the very least, I figured he was an honest laborer if a patently dishonest “artist.” 

Marliss throws herself at David but thinks better of pursuing an affair for professional reasons while Toni pines desperately for the plumber turned auteur despite him behaving deplorably at every turn. 

The harshest criticism I can give Pipe Dream is that it takes a sharp turn into Loqueesha country when a working class hero and his black sidekick fake the identity of a creative iconoclast for reasons that are supposed to be, if not noble, then at least relatable but that are actually unforgivable and wrong. 

Pipe Dream has a premise so sexist and misguided that it’s impossible to pull off. Time has not been kind to the film’s regrettable plot but its many fatal weaknesses should have been apparent even at the script stage. 

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