Joe Donnelly — a Pittsburgh native now living in Los Angeles — is an award-winning journalist, writer and editor. His short story, “Bonus Baby”, was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 and “50 Minutes,” written with Harry Shannon, was selected for the 2012 Best American Mystery Stories. Donnelly co-founded and co-edited Slake: Los Angeles, the best-selling, award-winning quarterly. He was the deputy editor of the LA Weekly from 2002-2008. In the 90s, Donnelly was an editor at RayGun Publishing, helming at different times the influential pop-culture magazine, Bikini, and the award-winning snowboarding magazine, Stick. During his career, Donnelly has written for numerous national and international publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The Surfer’s Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mother Jones, and many others. He’s currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Journalism at Whittier College.
From the Publisher: “During his many years writing for publications such as LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Slake, Surfer’s Journal and more, Joe Donnelly has driven to Texas with Wes Anderson, shot pool with Sean Penn, surfed with Chris Malloy, sparred (verbally) with Christian Bale, gone on a date with Carmen Electra, and listened to tall tales told by Werner Herzog. These profiles, which also include encounters with Drew Barrymore, Lou Reed, Craig Stecyk, the wolf OR7, the Z-boys and others who have indelibly stamped the cultural landscape, drill through the facade of fame to get at the core humanity behind the myth-making. This collection manages to show Los Angeles’ biggest export in a light in which it is rarely seen.”
“Donnelly writes with big-hearted, languid elegance about migrating wolves, mad criminals, surf and skate pioneers, musicians, movie stars, and mortality. Each piece charts its own course, but the overall effect is that of a freewheeling ride through a gritty southern Californian zeitgeist.”
―Luke Davies, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Lion, author of Candy, Interferon Psalms, and God of Speed“What a pleasure to ride shotgun with Joe Donnelly, a Los Angeles journalist who tells the story of a city through its artists, outlaws and other raconteurs.”
―Manohla Dargis, co-chief film critic, The New York Times“Joe Donnelly gravitates toward characters who have heart and portrays them with insight and humanity. I’ve yet to read one of his profiles without feeling that I got to know the subject and benefited from the encounter.”
―Conor Friedersdorf, staff writer, The Atlantic
Into The Wilde
Originally published as “A Romance of the Near Future,” Flaunt, December 3, 2010
Author’s note: I didn’t really want to do this piece as I didn’t know or care much about the subject. But I was freelancing and it’s hard to say no, especially when mags were slashing freelance budgets to the bone. Feet-dragging and fretting about how to gin up some professional interest, I drove down to Venice Beach where my assumptions were quickly upended. Just say yes, I guess.
Olivia Wilde, whose last name used to be Cockburn, may have chosen her stage name in honor of Oscar, but it’s also a double entendre that is betrayed by her eyes. Alert, alive. Fierce and playful. Confident. Dancing, like a ballerina or a boxer. Her eyes look like they are ready for war, peace, or just a laugh — it’s up to you, she’s down for whatever.
At first I’m thinking I want war. To explain, the drive from the eastside has been a bitch. I’m tired as fuck and missing a friend’s art show to do an interview with a fatuous, young Hollywood type (or, so I think) because of… who knows? Plus, the whitewashed, faux-boho stretch of Venice where she lives and where we’re having dinner gives me a rash. (Of course, like all good bohos, Olivia and her husband were here when it was still____ etc., etc.). To make matters worse, the restaurant is one of those overly crowded, overly clattering, celeb-heaven clusterfucks where you couldn’t slide an Olsen twin between tables.
If I sound like a hater, that’s not it. I’m just old. And it’s dark in here. And the menu is in six-point type. Oh, and did I mention that Wilde, with the cheekbones and the eyes, is happily married? To a guy named Tao (I’m not making that up) who is the son of an Italian prince (that either), with whom she eloped at eighteen, when he was twenty-seven (nor that). Okay, maybe I am a hater. But, really, given all that, where’s the fun going to come from? That’s what’s up when I arrive at the restaurant to find Wilde already drinking a glass of red wine. The waiter asks if I’d care for some wine as well. I say no and ask for a double espresso and a nonalcoholic beer.
“What do you call that, espresso and beer?” Olivia asks.
“An ulcer,” I say.
She laughs. It’s a loud, natural, good-times gal laugh. And, well, damn it, she’s already disarming. Since I can’t read the menu, I ask her if she has any recommendations. “Well, you’re not into wine, so already we’re on different pages. I don’t know if I can make any recommendations,” she teases. Wilde orders okra and avocado salad and cauliflower and something called mushroom toast.
“So, you’re a vegetarian,” I astutely ask.
“Yes.”
“How come you’re not skinnier?”
“Ha,” she snorts. “Umm, because I’m married to an Italian and every time I ask him to cook dinner, you can be a hundred- percent sure it’s going to be pasta. Anyway, there are a lot of fat vegetarians out there.”
“And angry ones, too.”
“Angry ones, too. The angriest ones are the raw foodists. You’ll never meet more anal, dogmatic people.”
So, now I’m thinking I should pay attention, this could be fun. I might even learn something. And I know what a self- involved boor I sound like saying that, but please forgive. I can only provide my context to this matter, not yours, and I’m not a faker, and the truth is, until yesterday, when I saw the screening of a movie starring Russell Crowe called The Next Three Days, in which Wilde has a cameo, I’d never seen the young lady on either a big or medium screen.
A little surfing on the small screen, though, caught me up on a few things. I find that Wilde starred in The Black Donnellys, an ill-fated TV series by Paul Haggis, who also wrote and directed The Next Three Days, not to mention In The Valley of Elah and Crash and a shitload of TV shows from Diff’rent Strokes to Walker, Texas Ranger. Wilde also had a role on the much-missed The O.C. (“My Hilary Swank year,” she jokes.), is on leave from House, and has been shooting a bunch of movies, one of them called Cowboys and Aliens and another called Tron: Legacy.
Also, I discover, Maxim magazine named her the hottest of its Hot 100 a couple years ago. And she appeared in various states of flexible undress for a GQ cover story called, “Why We’re Wild About Olivia Wilde.” Oh, and Megan Fox said she’d love to make out with her. All of which had — due to a generational slip, perhaps — eluded me.
Which is all fine and what you’d expect, but dig a little deeper, just past the glossy depths of commodification, and you come across a website for Artists for Peace and Justice, on whose board of directors sits Wilde, alongside Haggis, Ben Stiller, Dr. Bob Arnot, and Dr. Reza Nabavian. These guys are working with a saint of a man, Father Rick Frechette, who has been ministering in the slums of Haiti for more than twenty years. Father Rick, as Olivia calls him, started as a priest and saw that what the slums around Port-au-Prince, among the poorest places in the western hemisphere, really needed were doctors. So, he became a doctor, built orphanages, medical clinics, street schools, and a pediatric hospital. Folks like this still walk the earth.
With funding help from APJ, Father Rick is opening a new school for the poor in Port-au-Prince, and this is what Wilde is really excited about. “Two hundred kids, seventh grade,” she says. “It’s the first secondary school for kids in the slums of Port- au-Prince. Before, if you were lucky enough to get through the sixth grade through some free education program, there was nothing else for you.”
The school will provide two meals, clean water, medical assistance, and a safe place for kids to learn in and maybe even learn to hope for a viable future. APJ plans to expand the school through grade thirteen, and hold classes in arts education, sports, agriculture, and vocational training using local resources and labor.
“Our goal is also to encourage a sense of nationalism and pride that will stop the brain drain so people can get educated, go to med school, or any other kind of school elsewhere, but have a sense of responsibility to come back there and help their own country. That’s woven into the fabric of our curriculum.”
Wilde gets increasingly animated talking about this, waving her hands frenetically as she speaks. And they are strangely big, sturdy hands — potato-picking hands we call them in the old country. I tell her I’m afraid she’s going to swat me with one of those mitts.
“Ha,” she laughs. “I know. I’m a hand talker. I’m surprised I haven’t knocked anything over yet.”
“That’s what you get for marrying an Italian.”
Excerpted from L.A. Man by Joe Donnelly. Copyright © 2018. Excerpted by permission of Rare Bird Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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