Rosenthal's thinking about a perverse artifact, too. I'm here for a different reason: to figure out what happens when the dark, pathetic lives of two losers are swallowed by pop culture and morphed into an exercise in art, irony, and merchandising.Īs we walk in and out of Tenderloin bars, hoping to find some clue about Peter's whereabouts, I can't stop thinking about the merchandising of Charlie Manson T-shirts. Gibbs and Rosenthal aren't being entirely straight with me, but I suspect their lawyer has told them to convince Haskett to sign over the rights to tell his story. Which brings us to why a producer, a playwright, and a reporter are spending a sunny Saturday trekking through the Tenderloin. The actor Judge Reinhold has told Rosenthal's team that he wants to play the minor role of Tony Newton, Raymond and Peter's sometime roommate. Three different independent film projects are fighting among themselves for the right to tell the story.
And in the next year or so, the outlandish lives of Raymond and Peter may hit the big screen.
Actress Martha Plimpton keeps a picture of Raymond on her mantel. Rock stars from Faith No More and L7 to the Breeders and Possum Dixon have sampled the tapes on their albums. The two men's rants have inspired a play, written and directed by Gibbs, and an odd compendium of memorabilia - a comic book, T-shirts, a compact disc, even a Macintosh screen saver. Haskett is known to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people as Peter of the Raymond and Peter: Shut Up Little Man tapes, 15 hours of drunken rants between Haskett and his roommate, the late Raymond Huffman, that were covertly recorded by their next-door neighbors in the late '80s.įor nearly five years, the recordings have been copied and recopied and mailed all over the world, creating international celebrities of Raymond and Peter and fans as far afield as New Zealand. “What am I going to do? What am I going to say to him if we find him?” he says, running his finger down a hotel registry on Geary Street looking for Haskett's name. Gibbs is nervous because he's played a central role in creating the worldwide acclaim for the prodigious drinker: Peter J.
It's a sweltering hot Saturday, and the movie producer has been combing Skid Row streets all day looking for the hard-drinking retiree who's the subject of his latest film project.Īlong for the ride are myself and Gregg Gibbs, the Los Angeles playwright, painter, and performance artist who's writing the screenplay. Turning a corner in the Tenderloin, Henry Rosenthal takes off his sunglasses and wipes his brow.