Gus Van Sant: To DUI For
With precious few hours until we kick off for our Christmas vacation, we never expected that the Celebrity DUI Gods would send down yet another drunk-driving mugshot for our amusement, but they've just delivered the gift of this Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Gerry, the Kurt Cobain one) photo through their chosen vessels at The Smoking Gun. The Portland Mercury's Blogtown PDX fleshes out the arrest story with a police official's description of Van Sant, who was driving his Porsche SUV without his headlights on and burned some rubber at a red light: "He had glassy, watery, red eyes, slurred speech, and smelled strongly of alcohol." Unfortunately for the director, recent Drunken Famous Person Mugshot Hall of Fame inductee Rip Torn's playful jailhouse modeling session set the bar impossibly high for his peers, making Van Sant's effort seem all the more uninspired and dour. If there's one lesson Torn has taught us, it's to reclaim one's boozy dignity by having some fun with a potentially embarrassing situation.