Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

shoot, away from his dealers and hangers-on in the
mountains of New Mexico, Bowie was clean and
professional.
“I decided to not do anything or say anything
[about it],” Roeg says. “To try to adopt a manner that
if anything happened, it would shock me. You can’t
reason someone out of anything. The one thing you
can try to do is make them conceal it more, give
them a sense of love. I’m not into the guilt thing or
trying to cure anybody of our humanity. Especially in
a societal way, everybody has a sense of shame,
guilt, secret happiness, accusation or praise. There
are certain things I wouldn’t want to know about
someone anyway, even those nearest and dearest.
And I wouldn’t want them to know certain things
about me. It all goes back to this idea of exposing
yourself. You have to live with yourself first.”
Roeg and Bowie drew as much as they could from
the actor’s real life to bring Newton into focus. His
real-life bodyguard Tony Mascia, for example, plays
Newton’s bodyguard. The limousine in which Newton
cruises through the burnt-orange desert is the same
limo from Cracked Actor. Each detail fed the kind of
“He’s just playing himself” critiques that would later
be used to dismiss Madonna in her 1985 debut
Desperately Seeking Susan and Eminem in his film
debut 8 Mile. This downplays the actual work, which
both Candy Clark and Roeg attest to.
“What was really neat about Bowie was that he
always wanted to run dialogue and rehearse, which I
attribute to him being a musician,” Clark said of the