"Shattered" Brinkley Takes Stand in Divorce Trial
Dealing with the fallout of her husband’s betrayal didn’t feel like a death to just Christie Brinkley, it felt like one to her friends, too.
The erstwhile cover girl took the stand during the second day of testimony in her public divorce trial from philandering architect Peter Cook Thursday, testifying as to her confrontation with Cook and subsequent reaction after learning of his affair with an 18-year-old staffer.
“I just said to Peter, ’How could you?’ ” she said on the stand, making her testimony all the more poignant by choosing that moment to look at Cook head-on for the first time in the two-day trial.
Brinkley further testified that she learned of her husband’s affair with Diana Bianchi from the teen’s police officer stepfather, Brian Platt. He had informed Brinkley of her husband’s infidelity moments before she was to speak at a local schoolan incident she referred to as “the day my world was completely shattered.”
“I turned to look at Peter,” she said. “His face was so tense…He was saying, ’No.’ I thought, ’Oh my god. It’s true. He did it.’ I knew from his face. It explained the feelings I’d been trying not to feel.”
When she further confronted Cook with the man’s claims, Brinkley said he asked her, “You’re not going to believe that man over me, are you?”
Brinkley said the couple’s now 10-year-old son was with them at the time and that she “saw little Jack’s face looking at his dad, the man and me. I thought, I am going to pass out.”
At that point, she asked Cook to take her home so as not to break down in public. After they arrived, she quickly left again on her own.
“I was just in shock,” she said. “I just started driving away from my perfect life. I thought I had the picket fence. We were happy.”
In addition to the shock of it all, Brinkley said her initial reaction was “to get to the bottom of this. I need to know.”
Prior to Brinkley taking the stand at Central Islip Supreme Court, her close friend and Today entertainment correspondent Jill Rappaport testified to Brinkley’s depressed state following the June 25, 2006, argument that led to the disintegration of the couple’s marriage.
Rappaport said she found Brinkley pulled over on the side of a public road.
“When I got there, Christie was lying on the ground huddled over with her hands on her knees. I thought she had died,” Rappaport said. “She was sobbing…almost catatonic. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and she said, ’Can you believe this? Please tell me this is a nightmare.’ “
Later, Brinkley also addressed Cook’s witness stand confession that he spent $3,000 per month on pay Internet porn sites during their 10-year marriage.
“I found conversations of him trying to lure girls, saying he would take them shopping, saying he would pay them if he could see their face.
“I felt really stupid. Why didn’t I know? Why wasn’t I aware of this? I felt humiliated. I felt shattered. I just felt grief-stricken.”
Brinkley said she confronted Cook about her findings and “he said it was an abberation, something he was only into now because of the guys in the office.”
During a recess, Cook belittled Brinkley’s tearful testimony, “Shrek was more believable,” he quipped, per Newsday.
Roughly 30 witnesses are expected to take the stand in the case, which will run about four weeks.
The first day of testimony yesterday featured Brinkley’s daughter with Billy Joel, Alexa Ray Joel, as well as Bianchi and Cook, who did his fair share of bawling during his time on the stand.
Fear Itself: Spooked
This is what is fun about anthology shows, and why I can never understand why they never do better in the ratings. As much as people bitch about and resist taking a chance on long-form new serialized programs like the ’05-’06 trinity of Invasion, Surface and Threshold, you would think they would embrace a series where each episode truly stands alone. With a show like this, your investment into it won’t be impacted in any way if the network pulls the plug after only thirteen episodes, or even just four.
And yet, anthology shows tend to struggle even more than heavily serialized fare. In fact, Fear Itself got its ass handed to it by Swingtown in the head-to-head premieres last week. The big question is, with the “not-so-good” nature of the premiere, how many people came back to see this much improved second episode, and how many will stick around for Daniel Knaupf’s outstanding episode next week? While last week was a poorly written and acted “monster of the week” boobfest, this time we got a well constructed good old-fashioned haunting.
I liked the set-up to get us into this haunting. Eric Roberts played a police officer stripped of his badge for essentially killing a suspect to get more information out of him. Then we cut to years later and now he’s a private investigator, spending his time taking pictures of cheating spouses and extorting his clients when he gets the chance to. With the background established, he was hired to watch a house overnight so that he might catch a cheating husband, and the client (Cynthia Watros) even suggested he go to the abandoned house across the street to set up as he wouldn’t be bothered there.
And just like that, we got the character into the haunted house. From there, I really enjoyed the twist of the house he was set up in, giving him visions of events occurring in the house he was watching; visions for him alone, as his partner (Larry Gilliard Jr.) who was set up down the street in a van never experienced any of it. The effects on the spectral manifestations were spot on, and the tension was very well handled. About the only thing I would have appreciated more was a true sense of danger for Roberts’ character.
All in all, though, the hauntings seemed to be more about addressing the sins of his youth as channeled through his adult behavior. Of course we were going to tap back into the incident that got him removed from the force, but even more compelling for me was the ultimate sin committed as a result of a childhood accident. In a way, his emotional and psychological issues emanate almost completely as a result of what his father forced him to do.
Good horror pulls us into the psyche of our victim and a good haunting is as much psychological as it is just violence and gore (see last week’s “The Sacrifice” for just such a lack of depth). “Spooked” gave us disturbing images, from Roberts’ father jamming bullets into his gums to the ever-changing images on the wall, and a complex back story connecting all of the disparate elements by the end. But it was the personal connection to those images by both Roberts and Watros that made them all the more compelling.
Again, the only thing that could have made it more “scary” would be if the specters came across as true threats to Roberts. As it was, they appeared to simply be there to show him things he didn’t want to remember, freak him out a bit and think about what kind of a person he was. The real and physical dangers came only from the encounters between real people within the episode.
The potential in the story is such that it could have been made a lot more intense and exciting by increasing the threat factor from the hauntings themselves and doing more with Gilliard’s character. As it was, his role was essentially to sit in the van and say to Roberts, “Nope, I don’t see anything.” I get that it was Roberts who was the target of the hauntings, but to pull his partner and friend into the danger, even if he remained skeptical to the whole thing, would have increased the tension and the stakes tremendously for the already embattled Roberts.
In the end, though, we got a typically satisfying horror short story conclusion. Lessons were learned, in some cases, but as is often the case, these lessons are learned too little too late and we must pay for the mistakes we’ve made in life. And as we pay for those mistakes, we in turn corrupt the next generation of innocents, so the cycle can continue. Maybe I’m over-analyzing things, but I’ve read a lot of horror stories and novels, and seen a lot of horror shows and movies and I just found this to be a wholly satisfying experience of the genre.
Amber Tamblyn cast in The Unusuals
The star of CBS’s drama Joan of Arcadia is coming back to television.
Amber Tamblyn, pictured right with Ugly Betty’s America Ferrara, has just signed to star in ABC’s pilot The Unusuals. The show, a one-hour dramedy, is set in a Manhattan and will feature Tamblyn as a police officer whose choice of profession has made her the black sheep of her wealthy family. Tamblyn will play Casey Shraeger, a newly transferred homicide detective who learns that her fellow officers have quirks and secrets.
TV Squad reported last week that Lost’s Harold Perrineau will be joining The Unusuals as well. The former castaway plays a detective who never takes off his bullet proof vest because he’s terrified of being shot. Perrineau and Tamblyn are joined by Monique Curnen whose credits include The Dark Knight and Adam Goldberg from HBO’s Entourage.
You can see Amber Tamblyn in theatres soon; she’s back for a second installment of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Shortened “Southland Tales” Debuts At AFI Fest
Shortened “Southland Tales” Debuts At AFI Fest
On a rather quiet Friday night in Hollywood, the seemingly lone movie event took place at Arclight Cinemas for a showing of Southland Tales.
The film’s stars, including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne Johnson and Cheri Oteri, showed up at the Hollywood spot for the AFI Fest screening presented by Audi.
The movie, which was shortened after poor reviews in Cannes, is told to be: “An ensemble piece set in the futuristic landscape of Los Angeles on July 4, 2008, as it stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. Boxer Santaros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is an action star who’s stricken with amnesia. His life intertwines with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), an adult film star developing her own reality television project, and Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott), a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy.”
You can catch Southland tales in theaters when it is released nationally on November 14, 2007.
In the meantime, enjoy the pictures from last night’s screening of “Southland Tales” (November 2).