Pauly Shore: All O’Shore

https://lebeauleblog.com/2021/03/10/pauly-shore-all-oshore/

As has been documented here at Le Blog, Pauly Shore’s movie career was relatively brief. In 1994, the former MTV personality was starring in his third of four theatrical released. Shore envisioned a career like Tom Hanks with In the Army Now as a transition into more serious roles. In this profile from the August 1994 issue of Movieline magazine, Shore’s delusion is on full display. And he’s even more insufferable than you would imagine.

“There are a lot of reasons why it’s difficult to have a relationship in this town,” Pauly Shore tells me, sprawled across the living room sofa of his two-story, ’20s-vintage. faux-Spanish raspberryhued hacienda perched low in the Hollywood Hills. “Girls, basically, run this town because they have the pussy. Especially the hot chicks. I can meet a girl at The Rainbow. Or a stewardess on a plane. A girl at one of my shows. But every one of them, like everyone in this town, wants something. Everyone wants to make it. They figure that if they go out with me, because I know everyone, they’ll meet a bunch of different people that could kind of benefit them, get them where they want to go. I don’t trust a lot of girls out here,” he continues. “I could take a girl to a club and there could be fucking Tom Cruise, or somebody, and then she’s with him for a while and then Daniel Day-Lewis shows up and suddenly she’s with him. It’s like, nothing is good enough for any of them. I also don’t trust a lot of my friends. You don’t wanna introduce your girl to your friends because the second you stop going out with her, your friends are all over her. Or maybe they’re all over her even when you’re going out. People love to do things that are bad. It’s no fun tossing and turning in bed at four o’clock in the morning thinking that your chick’s out there getting fucked by Fabio.”

Shore utters this little morality tale as we sip herbal tea and do what he calls “some post-movie chillin’,” a reference to how we’ve met shortly after he finished making In the Army Now, a Disney summer comedy that presents Shore joining the army as a goof and winding up involved in Steven Seagalesque derring-do in a Middle Eastern desert.

If I didn’t know Shore was a bachelor-about-town from the stories he tells, I could easily discern it from his house’s interior-design scheme — the arched doorways are tricked out with whorehouse beads, the bedroom has copper walls, and the furniture is from the now destroyed Dunes Hotel in Vegas. But I haven’t dropped by just to hear his horror stories of the show-biz singles scene. I want to hear about his hoped-for transition from three years of MTV celebrity as the stoney, moronic geek of “Totally Pauly” to the stoney, moronic geek for movies like Encino Man and Son-in-Law. And stuff like whether he’s jealous of Jim Carrey, his old stand-up comedy pal, who, after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask, rakes in $7 million a movie. About his screwy upbringing as the son of comic Sammy Shore and Mitzi Shore, the latter the owner of the legendary The Comedy Store on Sunset, where little Pauly got to check out the young Robin Williams, Sam Kinison and others. About the wisdom of buying a house –even one that once served as a crash pad for deadbeats and struggling comics–on an earthquake fault line. And, amid plugs for his upcoming comedy album, about how he and Disney are talking about his directing a short movie and starring with Goldie Hawn in a Graduate-type movie.

It turns out that up close, Shore is both more ambitious and more out there than one might guess. Barefoot, in a slept-in T-shirt and baggy pants, Shore runs his palms over his buzzed scalp — a souvenir of his army movie — and continues his complaint about how tough it is to have a relationship in Hollywood. “I left this girl at my house to go to a business lunch,” he tells me, “and when I came back, she’s all pissed off because she had gone through my entire stash of videotapes of me with hot chicks fucking around. I was fucking furious, but, I mean, you’re caught on tape, you’re guilty. I turned around and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing looking through my tapes, anyway? If you don’t like it, then you gotta bail.’ I never really liked any of those chicks,” he explains of the women on the tapes in question. “I wasn’t really having sex with them. It was more like I was filming their breasts or they were just saying funny things.”

Maybe, I suggest, he should tell me about the kind of women he’s meeting these days. “Now, at a club or something, you’re just gonna meet girls that you fuck,” he replies. “You give them your number, they come over late, they blow you. You fuck them. Whatever. Girls are not gonna be attracted to me necessarily by my looks, but because I’m smart, nice, and sensitive to them. Ninety-nine percent of guys are assholes who treat women very mean.