People love talking about the real-life houses of famous or fake people, but, it turns out that people don’t really like spending money to live in them. Well, in one case, at least.
The home of Silence of the Lambs‘ Buffalo Bill is for sale, and nobody wants to buy it. Can you blame them, though? This is the exterior shell of the place where Ted Levine danced around in the moisturized skin of his victims. It’s also in an area of Pennsylvania that’s home to an allegedly haunted tunnel and a scary, rusted bridge, so maybe nobody would want to buy the thing even if a fake serial killer had never called it home, because it’s just so scary. Find a bit more detail at the Times — it’s a fascinating bit of pop culture influencing real life.
There’s also a fascinating case of pop culture influencing pop culture playing out over at Entertainment Weekly , where they’re talking about James Franco’s upcoming film The Disaster Artist, which is recreating the making-of process of Tommy Wiseau’s famously awful 2003 film, The Room. Franco apparently just finished filming a recreation of the scene you can see above, dog and all. (What would it be with out that dog, though?)
In a less comical but equally absurd case of life mimicking art is the abundance of folks running out to buy shirts similar to those worn by the recently captured El Chapo. BuzzFeed has the story, which, as you’d hope, is just a bunch of images of dudes wearing the same shirt as El Chapo. It’s kind of like the kids who buy coats modeled on video game or anime characters, only they’re buying the same shirts as a guy who is responsible for maybe 70,000 deaths.
What would you do if you saw a dude on Tinder who was wearing the same shirt as El Chapo? (What about if you saw Sean Penn on there? Whoa.) Would you swipe left or right? And how desirable do you think he’d be, generally? Forbes reports that the app, obviously, keeps tabs on who is getting swiped left and right (ha) and has tallied those numbers up to form a kind of desirability score. Would you want to know how desirable you were, if they offered to tell you? Or would you rather exist in blissful ignorance?
Us? We already know how desirable we are. Thanks to Google Analytics. Unfortunately, we aren’t desirable or popular enough to fix Hollywood’s problem with diversity, which is expertly examined over at Jezebel. Who wants to guess just how “diverse” the upcoming Academy Awards are, especially without Taraji P. Henson there to win all the awards and hand out cookies?