Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

Synopsis: Shep Gordon was a conventionally raised Jewish kid from Long Island who through sheer happenstance in 1968 drifted into an L.A. motel that was the sometime home of Jim Morrison,Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Equally by chance he became the manager of Alice Cooper, then a rough and ready band from Phoenix, Arizona looking to make the big time. As it turned out Gordon had a flair for the job, Alice became the hottest act on the planet and Gordon became rich and famous, hob-nobbing with the jet-set of the day and partying hard through the 70s and 80s. Today he is a Buddhist and living in a $12 million beachside home in Maui.

Mike Myers’ portrait of his friend Shep Gordon is both a wonderfully entertaining story of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll and a touching portrait of a life extra-ordinary. Gordon’s trip from motel to mansion is one helluva ride and Myers documents it lovingly with interviews, archival material and playful re-imaginings. At one level Gordon lived the baby boomer’s dream: besides doing drugs with rock royalty, marrying a Playboy Playmate, founding a successful film production company (amongst its titles were Kiss Of The Spider Woman and Koyaanisqatsi), hanging out with Hollywood stars like Sly Stone, having a three year relationship with Sharon Stone (you’d want to make sure that you made the distinction clear), he went on to invent the concept of the celebrity chef and had the Dalai Lama for a sleepover.

All this is terrifically entertaining stuff in a gossipy sort of way (although we could have had less of Mike Douglas and Tom Arnold in this respect) but what makes Myers’ film much more than that is Gordon himself who through it all seems to have maintained a clear-eyed detachment and ethical centredness and now looks back on the highs and the lows with a good deal of sagacious humour.  

Of course it wasn’t all good times and one of the ironies to Gordon’s breathtaking success is that he never had a lasting relationship or his own family (however, he did end up unofficially adopting the grandchildren of a former girlfriend). In one of the later moments of the film his PA tears up when describing how she visited him at his hospital bedside when he was recovering from life-threatening surgery and how sad she felt that he had no-one in his life other than her to be there. It is a scene that captures the love that the man apparently engenders in all who come into contact with him but also a profound loneliness that all the money and good times in the world cannot erase.

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