The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
I’ve never met George Clooney, but I did see him “around town” several times during the spring and summer of 2007. During my first year working for the Greater Statesville Development Corporation, the predecessor of Statesville Regional Development, downtown Statesville was transformed into 1920s-era Duluth and Chicago for the filming of the extraordinarily forgettable football movie, “Leatherheads.” Despite starring three of Hollywood’s most bankable actors – Clooney, Renee Zellweger and John Krasinski – “Leatherheads” was a colossal dud, both at the box office and with critics. (You can read my own trying-to-put-a positive-spin-on-it review from 2008 below.) Many of the outdoor shots were filmed in and around Statesville, and the City Hall parking lot located right outside my office window was the staging area for the production, so it was not uncommon to see Clooney walking from one trailer to another or conferring with his director or co-stars.
I bring this up because Clooney has found himself in the news the past week for something he said during an interview with “CBS This Morning.” While not precisely controversial, the comment raised eyebrows around the world. George Clooney, the world’s three-time sexiest man, admitted to using a Flowbee to cut his own hair.
The Flowbee is a 1980s-era As-Seen-On-TV hair-care device that attaches to a vacuum cleaner. It achieved a certain social relevance as the butt of bad hair jokes during a time when bad hair was at its peak. The device uses the air flow from the vacuum to pull hair up though a spacer into a clipper, where it is cut to a consistent length and then sucked up for disposal. Despite the somewhat awkward look of the product, it is actually a pretty ingenious idea, basically replicating that part of a haircut where the barber elevates your hair with their comb and cuts the top.
The Flowbee was invented by Rick Hunts, a carpenter who originally sold it through live demonstrations at county fairs in his native Tennessee. Despite seeing its heyday more than 30 years ago – 2 million of them were sold between 1986 and 2000 – the Flowbee is still available today from Hunts’ Kerrville, Tenn., company, or it was until last week. In the days following Clooney’s interview, Google searches on “Flowbee haircut” increased a thousand-fold, the Flowbee website crashed and the Flowbee Haircut System, which sells for around $100, sold out its entire inventory. Imagine owning a business that shipped (I’m guessing) a few thousand units each year, and then one day waking up to so many orders your website crashes.
The obvious question is, can you actually achieve Clooney-like results cutting your own hair with the thing? One barber who was interviewed by “Esquire” magazine says, yes, within reason. Doug Paster, a professional stylist who cuts the hair of many celebrities, says that with practice and perhaps a little professional guidance to get them started, the average person should be able to do a respectable job of cutting their own hair with the Flowbee, although he cautions that you will probably still not look like George Clooney. That’s a bit much to expect for $98.95, plus shipping.
My review from 2008: The new movie “Leatherheads” is set in the 1920s, but in style and form actually harkens back to the romantic comedies of the 1940s and 1950s. Filmed mostly in the Carolinas, with several scenes shot right here in Statesville, it is an energetic film that combines attractive, well-known stars with a rambling script, often-witty dialog and a few moments of outright slapstick comedy.
The plot involves the early days of professional football, and the first few minutes of the film draw a stark contrast between the popular, clean-cut college game and the roughneck, low-budget professional game of the time. Dodge Connelly (Clooney), a professional player well into the downside of his career, devises an audacious plan to buy his failing team, the Duluth Bulldogs, and bring popularity and respectability to the professional game by hiring one of the top college players of the day, Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (John Krasinski) to play for him. Along the way, he runs into a newspaper reporter, Lexie Littleton (Zellweger), who is also pursuing Carter, but for a very different reason. Her paper, “The Chicago Tribune,” has sent her to look into allegations that his legendary heroics in WWI were, at best, exaggerated.
It doesn’t take a genius, or even repeated viewings of “Bull Durham,” to guess how the story develops. Dodge and Carter both fall for Lexie, who plays up to Carter (because that’s where the story is) and trades barbs with Dodge (because she can). The Bulldogs ride the star power of “The Bullet” to commercial and competitive success, along with the increased scrutiny that comes with them. Finally, Carter confesses to Lexie that the famous incident in the Argonne, in which he supposedly captured an entire German platoon single-handed, didn’t happen quite as advertised. How it did happen, however, is one of the funniest scenes in the film. “The Tribune” publishes the story and all heck breaks loose, prompting Congress to name a commissioner of football to get to the bottom of the scandal and clean up the game, in general.
The scenes filmed in Statesville are shown mostly in the middle part of the movie. The historic Vance Hotel stands in as the Ambassador Hotel in Duluth, primarily in one extended sequence involving a raid on a speakeasy and the Keystone-Cops-like chase scene that follows. A little later in the film, City Hall becomes the office of the commissioner. The interesting thing about this is that the entire scene takes place in the pouring rain, and it didn’t rain in Statesville the entire time the crew was here filming. They had to create the rain with a giant boom lift and hose.
In short, “Leatherheads” is a nice film that, like its ’50s era predecessors, achieves its primary purpose – two hours of lighthearted entertainment. One might even imagine Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in the lead roles. It is also a very, very clean film. In fact, if not for a brief scene at the end involving some very mild language, it could very well have gotten a PG or maybe even a G rating (it’s rated PG-13). The performances by Clooney and Zellweger won’t garner them any additional Oscars, but they are reliably true to their roles and to the context of the film. Krasinski, in his major motion picture debut, isn’t quite as funny as you would expect given his outstanding work on “The Office,” but holds up his end of the love triangle.