Pushkin.

I'm Michael Schulman, and I wrote Ballad of the Oscar Streaker for The New Yorker and it's the story of the Week.

Five weeks before the two thousand and nine Oscars, I got a call from Hugh Jackman's producer.

Jackman was hosting the show and he wanted to know if I would be one of the show's writers.

Like so many things in my career, I figured somebody just made some kind of mistake.

I figured I was just a last minute addition to a huge group of talented variety show writers.

So I flew to New York City, where we went to work out of a conference room at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

When I walked in, I saw just three other guys, all my age, all of whom were hired the same week that I was.

There was no head writer.

There wasn't even a whiteboard.

It was just the four of us looking at our computer.

It was bizarrely casual.

In fact, we spent most of our time trying to figure out how much room service we could order without getting in trouble.

Hugh Jackman would come in for a couple of hours each day, telling us how great our ideas were and hugging us and letting us try on his eighteen thousand dollars plastic wolverine clause.

What I learned is that even though it's the highest rated entertainment show of the year, the Oscars is a pretty thrown together operation.

I've written for sitcoms that you've never heard of, and we got way more notes and time and money to make those shows.

So I'm never surprised when chaos ensues at the Oscars, whether it's announcing La La Land instead of Moonlight as Best Picture, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, or my very favorite, the nineteen seventy four Streaker.

Writing is hard.

Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy trying to dig all stand So it turns on a Mike made the twitles enough because a journalist friend has got in that jewel jibes.

Single story Just listen to smart people speak, conversation, film and information is the story of.

With the Oscars coming up this weekend, I figure how better to cover the awards than to dive into the best thing that's ever happened at them.

In nineteen seventy four, a man ran across the stage at the Academy Awards butt naked.

That was the last that most people heard of him.

But it turns out that was only the beginning of a much weirder story.

The guy who streaked the Oscars was a former Ronald Reagan's speech writer turned into this kind of gay liberation performance artist.

He was like the Zelig of the history of gay rights, popping up at the murder of Harvey Milk, hanging out with Robert Maplethorpe and interviewing John Waters.

He lived a life full of stunts, pranks, and pornography until one money making scheme ultimately led to his death.

Michael Shulman wrote about all this for The New Yorker.

Michael, thank you for coming on and telling us about this crazy story.

Thanks for having me.

It was nineteen seventy four, which is pretty much It's an inflection point in society, right, like the Vietnam War had ended the year earlier.

Absolutely, yeah, it was a very unstable, strange, slightly unhinged, and electric moment in American life.

And the Oscars kind of reflect that, right.

They've got like two cool hosts and two old school hosts.

They have four people hosting and one of them is David Niven.

So this is like an old school British actor.

Yes, a very dry wit.

And now to diverge the contents.

So this year's most important envelope is a very important contributor to world entertainment.

So it's the end of the Oscars night and they are about to injuries Elizabeth Tilword to give the best picture Oscar when this sort of amazing thing happens out of nowhere.

Right, So David Niven is gearing up to bring on Elizabeth Taylor and behind him, all of a sudden, a thirty something year old man runs across the stage, totally.

Nude, but he's so casual and calm about it.

He just looks like he was supposed to be there.

He kind of just seems to know where the camera is, flashes the peace sign.

He just seems so cool.

Yeah, and then he's gone.

David Niven did not exactly know what was happening at first, and you kind of see him react and figure out how to play this moment because the audience is rumbling and I'm not sure what to do.

Sort of nervous laughter.

The band plays, which is an odd reaction, like it's a parade, and everyone applauds.

It's a very odd reactor.

Yeah, weird energy and it's sort of awkward.

And then David Niven, to his credit, immediately gets the energy and focus back in the room by saying two things.

He says, first of all, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen, and so that gets people laughing.

And it was bound to happen because it was nineteen seventy four was like the year of the streaker, right, they were everywhere.

It was true, it was almost bound to happen because streaking had been such a popular fad and had gotten bigger and bigger, bigger.

It had started several months earlier with like a housewife running through the valley and then suddenly they.

Were well that's how streaking starts.

Yeah what, yeah, there was I figured it was like college kids.

Well it became a major college kid fad, like, you know, the entire student body of the University of Georgia had fifteen hundred and forty three people streak across campus, and then people were streaking football games.

It was infectious.

Streaking was just a thing that people did, but only for like six months, and so by the time he got to the Oscars in April nineteen seventy four, it had been going on for a couple months and people actually sort of expected that someone might try to streak the Oscars.

So when David Niven says this was almost bound to happen, that wasn't just a line like that was kind of true.

So that gets people laughing, and then he pauses a moment and then has this perfect one liner.

Probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life was by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.

Addicta well done.

Incredible, and that just gets everyone back.

And it's this perfect save.

And did people at home actually see his penis?

The cameras managed to avoid, you know, oh the sweet spot.

So yeah, that was some quick thinking.

How did this guy pull it off?

This sounds like an impossible thing.

Actually spent an Oscar's backstage once the Oscars had me like live blog or something, and I was on the wings.

It's pretty well regulated back there, Like, I don't see how it is now.

I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure the streak had them tighten the security.

But basically he got it press pass from a friend.

He came in and he sneaked backstage.

He later said that he was so nervous about all the wires he thought he was going to get electrocuted, but he waited because he wanted to wait until the final envelope.

And then when the time came, he took off his clothes and he broke through the cyclorama, you know, the psych that was part of the set, and he just ran across the stage and then he was on the other side of the stage, and he thought he was going to be apprehended by security guards, but instead the academy press people found him and brought him to the press room to do interviews.

So their immediate reaction was, let's hear more from this guy.

Yeah, we want to know more.

Who are well, that's so he never got arrested or in any trouble for this, Nope?

And who is he and why is he doing this?

So the streaker's name was Robert Opple.

He was a kind of gay man about town and sort of wild child.

He has an interesting life that led him to that moment, right, because he grows up conservative right right?

Yeah, you know, he had a very suburban, middle class family.

He was in the boy Scouts.

Not just in the Boy Scouts you report that he was an Eagle Scout, and then he did Order of the Arrow, which is like for the like one percent of people who love the Boy Scouts so much, you.

Seem to know more of the Boy Scouts than I do.

I've never touched the Boy Scouts.

But you should not touch Boy Scouts.

That's been a whole problem.

But I for my first book where I tried to learn how to be a man to raise my son, I had never done the Boy Scouts because my mom thought it was a fascist organization.

So I went and got my first badge into a sleepover with the Boy Scouts, where I learned about all this.

Wow.

So yeah, I mean he was this straight a student is overachiever, Robert ople you know, he was the student body president and all that kind of stuff.

He tried to join the Peace Corps and teach teach English in Thailand and he studied Thai and he was about to go and then the Peace Corps basically kicked him out because he was gay.

And then what year is that?

Basically that's like mid sixties, early in the mid sixties.

And then he wound up working for Reagan's gubernatorial campaign in nineteen sixty six, which was obviously a very conservative campaign, but he was fired because he was gay.

Again, there was a press leak that said that there were homosexuals in this campaign and they got rid of him.

So he was what was he doing for speech writing?

He was a really smart, like straight laced, straight and narrow kind of guy.

And then after nineteen sixty six he was transformed by the hippie movement, the sexual Revolution, and he emerged in the early seventies as this hippie, wild child, crazy man.

Do you think that's because he got kicked out of the conservative world for being gay and this was the only world that was available to him.

Yeah, I think so, because he obviously was on this conservative path and was just shut out of that world over and every end.

But also the times changed in nineteen sixty nine, there was of course Stone Wall, which really changed when it meant to be gay, and he sort of found his place in this new gay liberation movement.

What Maakeson decided to do this streaking bit at the oscars.

Well, at the time he said, it just occurred to me that it might be an educative thing to do.

You know, people shouldn't be ashamed of being nude in public.

Besides, it's a hell of a way to launch a career.

Yeah, that last part sounds like the truth.

Yeah, I mean yeah, he was a little bit of attention seeker, you know, to show up at like the Gay Liberation March is dressed as a character named mister Penis who was supposed to be a cousin of mister Peanuts.

Was it like a Penis with a monocle?

Yeah, just like a giant penis costume.

And then after he streaks, he gets fired from his job.

He's working for the Los Angeles Unified School District as helping to figure out ways to teach English to kids who come to LA without speaking English.

They fire him for streaking.

They immediately were like, your services are no longer needed.

But he managed to hang on to his fifteen minutes of fame and suddenly everyone in Hollywood was really interested in him.

He went on the Mike Douglas Show, he did a comedy show in Philadelphia, like a stand up show where someone streaked him.

Oh so someone showed up at his event to streak him.

Yeah, but he kind of what I love about Robert ople Is that he was really funny, Like, right after this happened, he launched a sort of fake campaign for president, and this was, of course at the same time that Watergate was all going down.

He created his own party called the Nude Lib Party, and his platform was total transparency, and his campaign slogan was not just another crooked dick nice So he was like he was pure comedy, but he really also had a sincere belief that nudity should not be shameful, and that sexuality should not be shameful, and that the way to dispel the shame was to take off your clothes.

So he's living in LA and he's got a nemesis in LA.

The LA Police Chief At Davis, that's right.

I mean At Davis was a real homophobe.

You know, the police were really constantly cracking down on you know, homosexuals, and there was a wisconstant harassment in LA for the gay community there.

So not long after the Oscar streak, there was this LA City Council meeting to discuss whether they should put a ban on nudity and the public areas, and Robert Opal showed up again nude walked right up to police chief Davis held up a peace sign again and asked, is this leude?

But he went to jail for this.

Yeah, he was sentenced to four months.

He did four months in jail for taking off his clothes at the La City Council and zero for being naked to the oscars.

Four months in jail seems like a lot.

Well, don't mess with police Chief Ed Davis in nineteen seventy four.

And then he runs your city council in La right.

Yeah, when his presidential bit did not work out well, he started a writing campaign for city council.

It was sponsored by a committee called FAGS for Unseating Civic Knuckleheads.

Take the first letter of each one of those words and you get fuck.

And mostly was trying to remove Ed Davis from office.

And then while he's running, he somehow gets arrested again.

So he showed up to the Christopher Street West Parade, which is basically the gay Pride Parade from that time, dressed as mister Penis.

So there was some disagreement within the parade committee about whether they wanted this kind of thing, and the gay movement then as now really was sort of caught between conformity and assimilation.

And seeming respectable and undermining heteronormative standards.

And obviously Opel did not care about good behavior or respectability, and so he shows up as this penis character and the parade ejected him and he was handcuffed and just spent a few hours in jail.

Right, there's this rift in the gay community, like you said, exists now between do we fight for acceptability or do we let our freak flag fly?

Oh exactly.

I mean that's that's been a perennial tension within those queer rights going up through gay marriage, like do we want marriage?

Do we want to partake in the institution of marriage like everyone else?

Or is marriage to heteronormative and you know, but do we want to maintain a kind of separatism and a more radical lifestyle?

You know, I think it was it was that same kind of tension, but the mid seventies version of it.

So he's sort of famous now from the streaking and he's made the most of it.

And then he becomes the editor of a gay porn magazine in Los Angeles.

How does that go for him?

Oh?

Yeah, this magazine is called Finger.

And when I was researching this story, I was in San Francisco at the GLBT Historical Center there, and I found copies of Finger, which is very raunchy.

It's like straight up to total smut.

But there was the thing that I found in these archives that was like a total gem is that in one of these issues of Finger, he wrote an editor's letter, like a welcome letter, that was basically his manifesto of nudity.

So he said, the thrust of my messages undress.

As long as cover up is part of anyone's mental set, he or she will be diminished in his efforts to be totally self actualized.

Undressed goes far beyond simply urging one to remove the clothes from one's physical person, but that can be a start, a visual statement of innocence, an external sign of one's intent to exorcise hypocrisy.

So he's a real believer in nudity in addition to the gay.

Rights stuff, yeah, and a believer in sexuality, that human sexuality should not be shame.

He goes on in that editorial to write more about Catholicism, and I think you see some of his conservative upbringing coming through in his sense of rebellion against kind of Catholic morality.

And so he's worked.

Why is it called finger the magazine?

Why wouldn't it be is your magination?

Well, the next gay magazine works for it's called Drummer, which I figured is some other gays slining term.

I don't know, Yeah, I don't.

Know why it is called Drummer, but Drummer was it was like the Bible of like gay s and m.

It is a leather magazine and he was writing about like the cycle sluts, which were leather men on motorcycles.

And then the magazine gets rated by nemesis Ed Davis at some point.

Right, Yes, that's right.

So the LAPD was really harassing the people a Drummer and they actually held a charity SMM slave auction, and police Chief Davis tried to prosecute the publishers on charges.

Of slavery, oh, of actual slave.

Slavery, like, oh, you're having a slave auction.

Slavery is against the law.

Did that work?

No, of course, it's it's ridiculous, but it did sort of harass the magazine out of la and they moved their operations to San Francisco.

And that's part of the reason why Robert ople himself moved to San Francisco.

In San Francisco, Robert ople would reinvent himself as an art gallery owner and connoisseur of gay photography, rubbing shoulders with Robert Maplethorpe, John Waters, even Harvey Milk until well, he rubbed shoulders with the wrong guy, which is podcast speak for murder.

But first, our advertisers want to sell you a very fine artist in leather harness.

I'm just kidding.

It's probably Meandes.

Just three years after he streaked the Oscars, Robert Opole's basically been run out of Los Angeles, and he finds a place where everyone and their hardcore porn magazines are welcome.

Yeah, if you had any means to move from wherever you were and you were gay, you went to San Francisco in the seventies.

Right absolutely, And this is where we get the explosion of the Castro.

Droves of people were coming from around the country, and gay people from around the country were coming from their little towns and going to the Castro because they knew that in San Francisco they could be themselves and have a community.

Even in the early nineties, when I was in college at the Bay Area, we would I fy the Castro and it was it was scary as hell.

It was like Pete Townsend's rough boys, gay like leather.

It just felt like everyone was looking to fuck or fight like it just scared the hell out of me.

Well so, actually, when Robert Opple got there, he found the even rougher gay neighborhood which was South of Market or Soma, which was like Castro, was where the sort of the young pretty boys were like going disco dancing.

Soma was the leather community that was like hardcore leather.

So that's where Robert ople found his place.

He moved there in nineteen seventy seven, you know, and this was of course before the AIDS epidemic.

So there was just an aspect of hedonism and possibility and the dating scene where you could actually find people to date if you were a gay man, and it was a place that was totally sexually liberated.

Yeah, you wrote in your piece about this guy Jim Stewart who approached him with this crazy line.

Oh well, so Jim Stewart was one of the leather man in Soma, and he he had an erotic photography business in his apartment and he wrote a memoir called Folsome Street Blues, where he wrote about how one day after Robert Opele arrived, he found Ople, you know, knocking on his door and Jim Stewart says, why do I think I know you have we fucked?

And Ople said, I streaked the Academy Awards.

So many ways to be known in Master District at the time.

Yeah.

But the reason that he was there seeking out Jim Stewart was because he was opening an art gallery and erotic art gallery in South of Market called Faye Way Studios, and he was looking for artists to display there.

Fay Way being a punt.

It's a pun on Faye Ray from you know, the girl from King Kong Kong movies in the thirties, the actress, but also fay f E y as in you know, limp wristed Faye Gay stereotype.

But that was right.

He was a photographer, So he is opening an art gallery that's going to show a lot of photography, I imagine, which is how he meets Robert Maplethorpe.

Yeah, I mean so.

One of the things that's so incredible about Ople's post streaking life is that he kept brushing shoulders with these other famous people from countercultural history, and one of them was was Robert Maplethorpe, who was very young and not well known at the time.

He had barely cracked California.

He was really a New York artist who was producing these homo erotic, very boundary pushing photographs, and Ople put some of his work in Faywai Studios.

Was it one of the first places that Maplethorpe was shown.

In, certainly in California?

Wow?

So Robert Ople's kind of a big deal in this scene.

Yeah.

I mean, this was like a storefront gallery, but it kind of became a hot spot where people would go.

And at the time, gay art in San Francis had mostly been shown like in restaurants, in clubs, places where people are not necessarily looking at the art.

So to have a gallery that was dedicated to erotic, rough gay art was pretty brown breaking.

Okay.

So he's on one extreme of this gay rights movement in San Francisco, But there's a whole other part of the gay rights movement in San Francisco, which is like the Harvey Milk part, which is Harvey Milk's wearing the three piece suit and he's running for the word of supervisors in San Francisco.

What does ople think of Harvey Milk at that point?

You know, it's really interesting because I saw Harvey Milk is almost like a mirror image of Robert Opple, Like they sort of had parallel past.

They had both started out in you know, sort of conservative politics and then sort of became these wild child hippies and then wound up in San Francisco.

But whereas Opel was opening an erotic art gallery, Harvey Milk cut his hair, got his suit, ran for political office, and he was projecting a much more again like respectable image of gay culture and gay gay influence.

But Robert ope was really into Harvey Milk.

And there's this one story where he actually walked into Milk's campaign office, which was at Harvey Milk's camera shop in the Castro, and he offered a campaign poster that he had created, and it was a picture of a woman with an exposed breast and she was piercing her left breast with a pin that said Harvey Milk for Supervisor, and he kind of left it there, like, in case you need it, here's an idea for a campaign poster.

And of course that is absolutely the opposite of what they wanted to project.

You know, it was just pushing that boundary, pushing that envelope.

That's not what the Milk campaign was doing.

They were appealing to like the labor unions and trying to expand their voting base beyond just the gay men and the castro And that's how he eventually won.

And then not long afterwards, of course, Dan White, one of the other council members, assassinates Harvey Milk after he wins.

Dan White was this former policeman, very clean cut guy, conservative, representing a very conservative, whitebread district in San Francisco.

He was elected in the same election as Harvey Milk, and they were colleagues and there's a sort of long tangled history to how Dan White got to this point.

But then he showed up at city Hall, climbed in through a window with a gun and assassinated the mayor, George Moscone and Harveney Milk right in city Hall, and Diane Feinstein, who was their colleague, had to come out and tell the press the murderer is Dan White.

I mean, there's video of this.

It is jaw dropping, and this really, I mean upsets everyone in San Francisco, especially in the gay community, but it really motivates Robert ople Oh yeah.

Immediately there were all sorts of conspiracy theories swirling and you know, how could this have happened or the cops in on it.

There was a lot of suspicion, and rightly so, because the San Francisco Police Department was constantly, you know, cracking down, rating gay bars and you know, taking people into the park and clubbing them with nightstcks.

So there was just a lot of tension.

And the murder of Harvey Milk, who was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the whole country and really the mascot of this community.

I mean, that just it just blew everything wide open.

And even more so when Dan White was put on trial and given a relatively slap on the wrists.

If the gay community was devastated before because of the assassinations, the verdict is really what turned that into complete rage.

And so there was a night called the White Knight Riots where the entire castor community just was ripping up cars, setting things on fire, and the SFPD reacted by raiding gay bars, beating people.

It's a legendary night in the gay rights movement?

What does Opel do?

So he was very involved.

He appeared at a benefit for some of the protesters who've been arrested, and he was on one hand telling friends that he was going to write a play about what really happened to Harvey Milk, And he started developing this plan for something he was going to do a kind of performance art piece where he was going to go to the Gay Freedom Day Parade and stage a pseudo event called the Execution of Dan White.

He had a friend who looked just like Dan White.

So the idea is they would dress someone ups Dan White and that Opel would appear as a leather man and publicly execute him.

There was actually a poster for this event at the parade that said, what would happen if a queer gay homosexual per cocksucker faggot shot and killed an ex cop?

Would he get away with murder?

And he does this performance and it makes the evening news?

Right, Yeah, So at the Gay Parade that year nineteen seventy nine United Nations, Plaza and Ople introduced himself as the character Gay Justice like in an allegory, and then he quote unquote executed this lookalike of Dan White and.

Do you get in trouble for this?

They immediately got death threats at his gallery.

The organizes of the parade strongly advised him against doing it, but he did it anyway, so it did upset people.

So then, and this was maybe the most surprising part of your very surprising piece.

Robert Ople gets a girlfriend.

Yeah he does.

You thought that was the most surprising part, huh, I mean it did so okay.

So this was this woman, Camille O'Grady.

She is like a super punk and she had come from New York where she was in a punk band.

She knew Robert Mayplethorpe and also dated him, so she had so gay boyfriends.

So Camilla Griddy ended up in San Francisco.

She got there at the end of nineteen seventy eight.

Maplethorpe had told her to look up Robert Ople, so she goes to the gallery.

They have this like four hour mind meld, and soon they're dating and they're kind of tied at the hip, and Camille actually moved into the back of Fewai Studios, which I had a little apartment, and they're basically living together and all of.

This is happening.

So quickly.

This is only a couple years after the streaking, right.

Yeah, this is nineteen seventy nine, so five years after the streak.

And they make a little movie together called Fuck You Santa Claus, which did that win in the Oscars?

No, but they do have a nominee this year called My Year of Dix.

So I feel like maybe Robert Oplethorpe's you know, long influence has been felt.

And he's interviewing like John Waters and Divine for this proposed cable station that he's trying to create, and he decides he decides to fund that by selling drugs.

Right, I mean, first of all, I love that he was, of course in the same meal you as John Waters and Divine.

Of course, why wouldn't he be.

He just loved that sort of down a dirty camp, be outrageous.

John Waters overra is is opel, very charming, delightful.

Every foot all the footage I've seen of him, he's funny.

He just had so much spark and energy and conviction.

He had political conviction behind all this stuff, but he always sort of laced it with humor, with outrageous rivaled humor.

And he's selling drugs.

Is this new there is.

He's been doing this whole time.

The people who knew him seemed to think that he started selling drugs to kind of fund his activities.

He was selling PCP or angel dust and Opa would take it himself and he would sort of run through the streets naked a little bit of a throwback to his streaking days.

And Kamil, his new girlfriend, Camille Grady, was very much a against this whole thing.

She was very worried about him.

She would videotape him while he was on PCP and then show him the next day to say like look you and the night like curled up in a ball, weep it like this is not cool.

And so what happened on this night of July eighth, nineteen seventy nine.

So this was two weeks after the execution of Dan White.

This all happened within three weeks.

Oh yeah, So July eighth, nineteen seventy nine, O'Grady went out to a club called the Plunge and Opah was not feeling well, so he was back at the gallery.

So Camille was with a friend called Anthony Rogers who his nickname was Harmodius.

And so Camille and Harmodius are at this club and she was very into sort of spiritualism, and she said she had a premonition and she said, Anthony, we've got to go back to the house.

They get back around nine pm to Feway Galleries and while they're there, there's a buzzer that rings at the front door.

They go to the door and income these two really rough locking guys and one of them pulls out a handgun, the other has a sort of shotgun, and they demand money and they demand drugs, and one of them puts the muzzle of the shotgun right on Camille's neck and says, give us the money or I'll kill her, and Opel unwisely fought back.

He said, you'll have to kill us all there's no money, and then he keeps saying get out of my space.

And that's just the kind of guy he is.

He was not taking any shit from anyone, and.

He's not afraid of David Nivin.

He's not gonna be afraid of these guys.

Well, I mean he should be, because David Niven isn't going to kill you except with his dry wit.

So like the first guy with the shotgun says, I'll blow your head off, and he fired a warning shot up in the ceiling.

Opel says, get out, get out.

He says, you're gonna have to shoot me.

And meanwhile Camille and Harmodious Anthony Rodgers were tied up in the back and they hear a shot and then they hear a thud, and that is the murder of Robert ople the two gunmen, they leave, Camille and Harmodius untie themselves, go out into the gallery and see Robert Opole a bleeding from above his eye and taking his last breaths.

How big a story was this murder when it.

Happened, It was really big in the gay press.

So in the Bay Area Reporter there it was front page news.

And part of what happened immediately after the murder is that the gay community thought that this was somehow a big plot and that it was a political assassination essentially, because remember it had happened two weeks after his performance art about Dan White in the Gay parade.

And you know, Milk had just been killed.

Milk had just been killed, the mayor had just been killed.

The cops were raiding people like San Francisco was having a Milt debt and so everyone was very conspiracy minded, and in a way rightly so, like crazy things were happening, absolutely mind bending things were happening.

And so the gay community saw the killing of Robert ople as this couldn't have just been a stick up for drugs like this had to have been a political assassination.

Who were these guys?

These guys turned out to be.

Maurice Keenan was the man who actually shot Robert ople and then Robert Kelly was his accomplice.

I don't want to be murdered by a Maurice.

I want a much tougher I want a much tougher name.

I'm a murderer, you know.

One of the things that I found out a lot about but really didn't have room in the story for was just sort of their background and what led them to this moment.

They basically Maurice was absolutely on a crazy drug Binch.

He was on just a paranoid frenzy that had lasted days that it came out the day before he had shot his own dealer because he thought that he was, you know, working for the man.

Maurice Keenan was tried in the early eighties and he was sentenced to death and he spent many years on death row, and then years later, in an appeal, his sentence was downgraded to life in prison.

And is he still alive on death threat?

He's in prison in California somewhere.

I wrote him a letter in prison.

He never responded.

So you not only wrote this story about the Oscar Streaker, you also wrote a whole book about the Oscars called Oscar Wars.

What would you say is your craziest Oscar story?

You know?

I have been there covering it when the Envelope makes up happened with Muna Longland.

I was there for the slap last year, and.

Oh you were there for the slap?

I was there.

Yeah, I saw it happen from the cheap seats up in the balcony.

I saw it happen live on TV.

And I remember being shocked at the audience reaction and the fact that the audience was so eager to keep this show going and pretend it didn't happen.

What was the feeling in the.

Theater, Absolute bewilderment.

A lot of people ever pretended it was no big deal.

No, no, people were just it was like it was just shocked, you know what it felt like it felt like when you're in a bar and a very violent brawl breaks out, or two people are yelling in a restaurant or something like, you know something where you're in a public place, there's this element of like danger and unpredictability.

And some people even there thought that it might have been, you know, a comedic bit.

I didn't because as soon as I heard him say, get my wife's same out your fucking mouth, I thought, well, you can't say that on TV.

And he sounds extremely angry.

I can hear this all the way in the balcony.

I could hear him yelling, and I was like, this man just had a moment.

But you know, it's funny to bring it back to the Streaker.

I mean, Dasher's always has an element of unpredictability because you don't know who's gonna win.

But then there are these moments that are just in their own echelon of absolute crazy, unpredictable things.

And you know, I think the slab is up there with the Streak, with sashing little feather, you know, declining the award from Irelon Brando, the envelope mix up.

You know, these things that just happened, they become the story of the Evening.

Michael Schulman, you wrote the Ballad of the Oscar Streaker for The New Yorker.

Thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you for having me.

This is really fun.

So who knows, maybe this year there'll be another streaker or a slapper or someone to meet.

The Oscar is a tiny bit interesting to give us something to actually talk about the next day.

But let's be honest, most years the Oscars suck.

It's like a sports event where instead of watching the game, someone just shows up on screen and announces a winner.

Worse, the mood in the place is awful.

You start out with a bunch of nervous people and then halfway through it's just a bunch of pissed off people who didn't win their awards and don't want to be there.

But you know what, there is something I actually look forward to every Oscar's Night, and that's reserving a table at a restaurant in Los Angeles that's normally totally booked.

At the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein?

Maybe he'll take a naper poke around one.

Our show Today was produced by Molibard and Nisha Benkutt.

It was edited by Lydia Jan Kott.

Our engineer is Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer is Catherine Shira Dao.

And our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton and a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Alasnik.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Joel Stein and this is the story of the week.

Do you think if you'd been in San Francisco during this time, you would have been involved in any of this?

God, I would love just I think a day in nineteen seventy nine San Francisco in the castro.

I don't think I would be involved in like the leather scene.

I don't think I can I really have the stomach for that.

But maybe I would have been a castro boy.

Who knows?

You know, after only having talked to you for about an hour and a half, I can tell you that you would have been in none of this.

I like disco.

I've been I've gone in disco danced.

Oh my god, that's I've gone and disco, dance.

Loved, I would have thrived in the disco age.

Thrived