It's Showtime for Mapplethorpe debate
By Corinne Colbert

The upcoming Showtime film "Dirty Pictures" dramatizes the 1990 trial of Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center, accused of pandering obscenity and child pornography in an exhibition of controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. So it's ironic - or perhaps appropriate - that Matt North, BSS '94, received his copy of the script in a plain brown wrapper.

Matt North

"My manager called at 6 o'clock the night before the audition and told me I had to pick up the script myself but that the offices would be closed," North recalls. "And there it was, in a plain manila envelope on a garbage can behind the building."

Despite the short notice, North won the role of Marty Lobb, a "fiercely religious character" who headed Citizens for Community Values. North never met Lobb.

"I got the role only three weeks before they needed me on the set, so I decided to do the part using my imagination," he says. "I didn't want to deliver an impersonation."

For a struggling actor, the production was heady stuff: two weeks of filming in Toronto, Canada, alongside veteran actor James Woods ("Ghosts of Mississippi" and "The General's Daughter"). Woods plays Dennis Barrie, director of the arts center during the controversy. Actor Craig T. Nelson ("Poltergeist" and the sitcom "Coach") portrays Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis, an outspoken critic of the exhibit. Academy Award-winning screenwriter Frank Pierson directed the film, which premieres on Showtime early this summer.

"Craig and James Woods are some of the sweetest people I've ever met," North says. He even shared Thanksgiving dinner with them, bringing along his parents - Gary North, Ohio University's vice president for administration, and Marty North, an assistant dean in the Russ College of Engineering and Technology.

Many of Mapplethorpe's photos from the exhibit will be shown in the movie. When North saw them on the set, he wondered what the fray was all about.

"Maybe I'm just a scoundrel or maybe it's from having lived in San Francisco, but when I first saw the photographs I thought, ŒI don't get it - what's the big deal?'"

A Cincinnati jury agreed. Barrie and the center were acquitted on all charges months after being indicted.

Having wrapped the film, North is back pounding the pavement in Los Angeles. Since moving to California in 1994, he's appeared in 10 independent films, an episode of TV's "Nash Bridges" and other shows.

"When I look from 1994 to now, it looks good on paper, but it's still a struggle," he says.

Corinne Colbert, BSJ '87, MA '93, is an Ohio Today contributing writer.