At last it can be revealed – the Under Siege star was prepared to go to extreme lengths to ensure he got to Washington
As promised last week, this column brings you a tale of Steven Seagal so barking that even those accustomed to his idiosyncrasies may find themselves surprised. Thanks to someone who almost certainly counts as Lost in Showbiz's most eminent reader, I have in my hand an old issue of leftwing critical journal the Baffler. Therein, like the heart of a mysterious lotus flower, lies an account of what was arguably the Under Siege legend's most bonkers move.
To wit, it is claimed he planned a Senate run. Not planned a Senate run like all kinds of American public figures plan one – which is to say, mulled it over in the shower, called a couple of people, then did nothing very much about it. No, back in 1992, Seagal took the plunge and appointed a campaign manager. This man duly hired 16 full-time staff who conducted polling so extensive and recherche that a significant body of it focused on the precise length of ponytail for Seagal that would play best with voters.
Before we get into the mindblowing coiffure numbers, Lost in Showbiz reminds the casual Seagal fan that the action legend has always been political, and in diverse ways. There are, for instance, those regular heavy hints of some unspecified former involvement with the sinister forces of America's military-industrial complex. In interview after interview down the years, Seagal has raised the spectre of something akin to special-forces experience, only for the gambit to end in tantalising ellipsis. Asked a few months ago whether his movie Above the Law was autobiographical, he replied: "Well, I'm not going to get into that. But I will say it was based on a true story that had to do with the Iran-Contra scandal, which never really came out …"
The upshot is always that Something Happened back in Seagal's non-famous past – something he can't talk about, maybe for your safety as much as his.
Of course, his most overtly political work is the priceless On Deadly Ground. At the time it was made, Seagal had just come off the mainstream triumph of Under Siege, and wielded more influence in Hollywood than he ever had done, or ever would again. What did he do? He insisted on directing and starring in a crazy environmental action movie in which he leads the Eskimo fight against Big Oil, explored his spiritual dimension, and ended a bar fight with a major speech asking: "What does it take to change the essence of a man?"
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Nothing short of viewing it could give you a true idea of the self-sabotaging awesomeness of On Deadly Ground, but you should know that among countless gems, there is an epilogue in which a fringe-jacketed Seagal character delivers a speech about environmental damage at the Alaska State Capitol and some Native Americans beatify him or something.
Interviewed last year, Seagal described that speech as "exactly what Al Gore did 18 years later that he got an Academy award and a Nobel peace prize for".
Well, almost exactly.
"I was a little ahead of my time," Seagal went on. "But I think that for mankind, that's probably the most important work I've done."
And so to the story of this Senate run, which is apparently told to the Baffler by a lobbyist called Ryan Branaugh. Having run only one unsuccessful Senate campaign before, Branaugh is called by Seagal and agrees to work for him after the actor immediately wires him $50,000 "travelling expenses" and flies him to LA, where Branaugh recalls being "met by bimbos with the biggest tits that side of the Rockies wavin' signs sayin' 'I'M RYAN'S'." (Which, if Lost in Showbiz recalls, was the precise technique Al Gore used to secure the campaign services of Donna Brazile.)
And so it begins. Seagal assures him he is deadly serious about winning in California, they agree he'll run as a "different kind of Republican – an environmentally committed one". Office space is taken, those 16 staff are hired, and they plan to tie the then-forthcoming On Deadly Ground into a 1994 Senate campaign. That lunatic epilogue? "Pretty close to what would've been in the stump speech that Steven would've been giving."
But it's the details of their polling that are most priceless. "Steven wanted me to concentrate on appearance, first and foremost," recalls Branaugh. "He said: 'Issues are OK. I've got nothing against them. But what the voters really give two shits about is whether I should or should not have a ponytail in the Senate. I could be Warren Beatty and say that the bureaucratic infrastructure is what they care about, but I'm a realist."
And so it was that voters were shown various of photos of Seagal – one from Under Siege, without the ponytail, and then a series retouched with four different lengths of ponytail. "Women, by and large, wanted a longish ponytail. The younger ones, up to about the 35-40 age group, wanted a long one, the kind that would really flop around and keep the flies off his back. Older than 40, they went for one about as long as what he usually has. Men over 50 didn't want a ponytail at all, generally. Gay guys split down the middle between a very short ponytail; – one that you could just put a rubber band around – and about a five-inch ponytail. Straight guys went for about a four-inch ponytail." Ethnicity-wise, "the cut-off for Hispanic men as far as no ponytail goes was 40 instead of 50".
Heartbreakingly, though, Seagal had to kill the bid when he discovered the primary would also be contested by Michael Huffington, who had pledged to spend three times what Seagal was willing to put up.
For the record, though, they had calculated that a four-inch ponytail was electorally optimal.
With only the Baffler to go on, Lost in Showbiz has to ask: can this truly have happened? It's certainly not beyond the realms, in a country where Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of the eighth-largest economy in the world, and wrestler Jesse Ventura made governor of Minnesota (you do have to take your hat off to Predator alumni – Lost in Showbiz has genuinely seen an internal US defense department video in which Carl Weathers explains how to arm a Patriot missile). Either way, ask yourself if you can see even a rumour a thousandth as majestic as this attach itself to Jason Statham. Truly, it was the pictures that got small.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/lostinshowbiz/2013/mar/21/steven-seagal-senator-ahead-ponytail
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