Lives, Camera, Action!

Author Neal Gabler is watching a car chase on TV. It’s not an episode of “NYPD Blue” or a rerun of “Starsky and Hutch.”

It’s real. Well, it’s sort of real, and that’s Gabler’s point. Yes, it’s real and immediate to the police officers and the suspect racing through the streets of San Pedro. Any one of them could die at any moment.

But to home viewers, who are being fed an increasingly steady diet of live car chases, the scene seems less than real. To them, it’s more like entertainment, Gabler says.

“Car chases and explosions are traditional devices used by movies to attract an audience,” said Gabler, in town recently to promote his third book, “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” “Now, TV journalism has a new genre--the car chase.”

At first whiff, you might think Gabler, 48, is another in a long line of windbags huffing and puffing about the evils of American pop culture.

True, his book’s title certainly doesn’t sound like a compliment to a nation that regards “Entertainment Tonight” and “Extra” as news shows. And true, his book argues that the entertainment bug has spread like an Ebola virus through American culture, causing citizens to surrender their authentic selves for phony, cinematic ones.

“It’s one thing to say that life is like a movie,” Gabler says. “But I’m not saying that. I’m saying we’ve crossed a threshold--that life is a movie and we’re all to a greater or lesser extent performance artists in and an audience for this ongoing show.”

These are words one might expect--as a critic from Entertainment Weekly put it--from “William Bennett on bennies.”

But then there’s also this: Gabler loved the oddball comedy “The Waterboy.” There goes the analogy with Bennett, who, on any amount of pills, probably wouldn’t be amused by Adam Sandler.

“Was ‘The Waterboy’ completely idiotic and stupid? Absolutely,” said Gabler, smiling. “Did I laugh? Of course I laughed. I thought it was terrific.”

So, just where does that leave Gabler and his new book? Far from a sweeping condemnation of entertainment, Gabler focuses instead on the 19th century roots of America’s bells-and-whistles culture and also explores the consequences of such a society. Whether it’s good or bad for America is left up to the reader.

“I’m not one of these guys on a mountaintop preaching to the masses and ultimately telling them how deluded they are,” he says. “I’m down there. I love the Lewinsky scandal. I heard the Tripp tapes, I read the Starr report. To me, it’s entertainment and it’s better than anything at the movies.”

In spite of his hesitation to stomp on our entertainment culture, Gabler doesn’t waste time in challenging its excesses. The problem with an entertainment-based culture is that everything that is not public spectacle--like appeals to ideas, reason and logic--get relegated to the distant sidelines, Gabler says. One need only realize that the extensive coverage of everything from O.J. Simpson to the Clinton sex scandal leaves less time for serious issues.

“The danger is I like seriousness,” Gabler says. “I don’t want a complete diet of entertainment. I mean, I love the tabloids, but I also love the New York Times. God forbid they should ever become the same thing, which is exactly the kind of convergence going on in our culture.

“We live in a culture where everything gets converted to entertainment,” he continued. “Even railing against entertainment inevitably gets converted into entertainment. You can’t stop it. It takes over everything. And if it doesn’t get converted into entertainment, then nobody listens.”

But scaling back the entertainment culture, even a little, may be as difficult as leaving, say, “Gilligan’s Island.” Unlike civil rights, rolling back the entertainment culture is not susceptible to a social movement, Gabler argues.

Rather, any progress in moderating America’s appetite for entertainment will have to be done quietly by the individual.

“If you want to arrest the process,” Gabler says, “you buy serious books, you watch PBS for news instead of ABC, NBC or CBS, you go to an art museum. That’s how it will have to be done, if people believe that, indeed, it has to be done at all.”

Unlike his two previous, widely praised books--”An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” and “Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity”--his latest offering has found limited acclaim thus far. Among the book’s supporters are Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel and essayist Roger Rosenblatt, who called Gabler’s new effort a “fascinating, continuously enriching book.”

But most initial reviews have treated “Life the Movie” as if it too were written by Adam Sandler. A Washington Post reviewer claimed the book contained just “one original and interesting idea.” Otherwise, continued the reviewer, it was merely a synthesis of previously published works.

A reviewer from Newsday posed this question: “If life really has become a movie, as Neal Gabler theorizes in his new book, could we call Central Casting for someone to replace him?”

Gabler expected the chilly reception from the media when he began writing the book three years ago.

“I knew I’d take hits for this because who reviews books? Self-ascribed intellectuals review books. And who gets marginalized by this process? Intellectuals,” says Gabler, who lives on Long Island with his wife and two children. “What they want is for me to lower the boom [on entertainment] and I’m not going to do it.”

Gabler’s boom will remain in the upright position because, as his predilections for movie, sports and scandal show, he quite enjoys entertainment. If entertainment pleases the senses as opposed to the intellect, what’s wrong with a life devoted to the pursuit of those sensual pleasures? Gabler asks.

“I don’t think you can just reflexively dismiss that argument, as so many people do,” he says. “I don’t trust people who tell others who are happy that they really aren’t. The assumption is that these people are really just too dumb to realize they’re miserable. The Marxists used to tell people that.”

Years ago such attacks might have ruffled Gabler, but today the affable man is comfortable with criticism--both giving and receiving it. He was one of two film critics hired to fill the large shoes of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel when they left PBS in 1982.

A Chicago native and a virtual unknown at the time, Gabler was chosen from a pool of hundreds of applicants eager for a shot on the Chicago-based “Sneak Previews.” Naturally, he was thrilled with his “hometown boy makes good” rise, but was hurt to discover others weren’t. Instead of being viewed as a Rocky-like character, as he saw himself, viewers regarded him as a usurper, Gabler says.

“I was very naive then,” he says. “I should have expected it, of course, but at the time I couldn’t understand why all these people hated me. One critic at a Chicago newspaper said he wanted to heave a brick at the TV set when he saw me.”

In addition to thickening his skin, the national television exposure made it easier and ultimately more profitable to sell his first book, “Empire of Their Own.” But he rejects the notion his three-year TV stint catapulted him into the ranks of celebrity.

“Maybe a minor, minor, minor one,” he laughs.

Ideally, Gabler’s hope is that his latest book will help readers, and society, strike a better balance between entertainment and serious culture.

“It’s about finding the right proportions in a society that has no sense of proportions,” he says. “In my own small way, this book might move society a little closer to that. Like an ant moving a mountain.”