There’s nothing that Sam Shepard can’t do – he’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a playwright and a movie star.
Oh, and a boozy tit. Allegedly. Sam Shepard – from films like Black Hawk Down and Baby Boom – has been arrested on suspicion of speeding and driving drunk in Illinois. And that’s more or less all there is to the story.
Except that Sam Shepard now has something else to put on his CV alongside acting, directing, being a prize-winning writer and getting arrested on suspicion of DUI – his mugshots also make him look like Gordon Ramsay‘s homeless uncle. That’s something to be proud of.
Reading through Sam Shepard’s list of accomplishments makes him sort of seem a little bit like Forrest Gump. A really angry Forrest Gump. He always seems to be involved in what’s going on – he was a drummer in a band that was on the Easy Rider soundtrack. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 play Buried Child. He wrote Paris, Texas for Wim Wenders. He’s an Oscar-nominated actor. He played the banjo on Patti Smith‘s cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit. It’s almost exactly like Forrest Gump, a film that we admittedly haven’t watched for several years and can barely remember.
However, there is one difference between Sam Shepard and Forrest Gump – where Forrest Gump ended with Forrest running everywhere as fast as he could, the last few moments of Sam Shepard’s life have seen him allegedly getting tanked up on twice the legal amount of booze and driving around as fast as possible until he was arrested for it, at which point someone took of a photo of him where his hair looked a bit mad.
What else is there to this Sam Shepard DUI story? Embarrassingly little, to be honest. The Boston Herald reports:
Police Lt. Mark Kotte says officers stopped Shepard early Saturday in the central Illinois town of Normal. Kotte says the 65-year-old Shepard was driving 16 mph over the 30 mph speed limit. Kotte says a breath test indicated Shepard?s blood-alcohol level was double the legal limit… A man who answered the jail phone said he did not know the amount of bail.
It’s like Sam Shepard is daring us to find something even vaguely interesting in this story, isn’t it? Yes, he was apparently speeding, but only slightly. Yes, he was drunk, but it’s not as if he started raging at the police about how much he hates the Jews. People care so little about Sam Shepard’s DUI arrest that nobody even bothered to ask the man who answered the phone at the jail he was kept in who he was. He even did it all in a town called Normal, for crying out loud. Sam Shepard’s fiendish, we’ll give him that.
Still, at least now he’s been arrested on suspicion of DUI, Sam Shepard can continue his slow transformation into Paris Hilton. Next thing you know, Sam Shepard will be falling out of cars in a miniskirt with no underwear on, then he’ll start hosting a reality show called Sam Shepard’s My New BFF, where he’ll audition a gaggle of clueless fame-hungry numpties to see who’ll be his best friend, all the while muttering “I co-wrote Brownsville Girl with Bob Dylan, for God’s sake. Where did my life go so very wrong?”
Well we’d watch it.