Separating the Artist From the Human: 4 Great Artists, 4 Questionable Humans

by Jim Kopetz

Where do we draw the line between human being and artist? Right fucking here...

1. Roman Polanski - Artistic genius who has created such great works as Replusion, Rosemary's Baby, Knife in the Water, The Ghost Writer, etc. His private life has also been of much speculation. He drugged and had sex with a young girl. The French have always been ahead of the times sexually, but that doesn't excuse the man. A great director but a sexual deviant of a human being.

2. Walter Brennan - My favorite character actor of all time. His roles in Rio Bravo, To Have and Have Not, My Darling Clementine, Bad Day at Black Rock, etc. are some of the greatest of all time. Walter's iconic voice was born out of the chemical warfare used during WWI. But as a human being he was a racist tyrant. He reportedly laughed when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the same with Bobby Kennedy. He was consumed by the Red-Scare, and it made him a terrible man. But a great fucking actor.

3. Woody Allen - The Great Auteur of the past four decades, he married his adopted daughter. His movies have always been obsessed with bizarre love triangles, but his own life is one for the books. But we all know this. And we all still love Woody Allen.

4. John Wayne - aka Marion Robert Morrison, was one hell of an actor. In real life he was a piece of shit. The Green Berets is John Wayne incarnate, and it is shameful. He made some of my favorite movies of all time, Rio Bravo, The Searchers, The Shootist, etc. But he was a racist bastard.