Artist on Artist: Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson

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Oh, what a difference a weekend makes. News broke on Friday that Wes Anderson was video taping an interview with Owen Wilson for MySpace, to promote The Darjeeling Limited. It was to be Wilson’s first interview since his apparent suicide attempt this summer. The clip wasn’t scheduled to debut until midnight that night, so there was plenty of time to speculate as to what it all meant, and especially whether or not the two old friends would broach the topic of Wilson’s health and sobriety. Jumping the gun just a tad, Nikki Finke ran with the headline, “Hey, Barbara & Diane: You’re Obsolete. Owen Tells All Post-Meltdown To MySpace.” In the post, she pointed to what she described as “a really angry article about this on ABC News,” in which the network that owns Barbara Walters, who in turn owns the patent on teary celebrity confession, kvetches about changing paradigms. We’ll have to take Nikki’s word on that — the story no longer exists at the link in her story.

But of course, Wilson didn’t tell all at all.

The actual clip is essentially content-free; not only does Wilson not reveal anything personal, but the director and star have little new of interest to say about the film that they’re trying to sell. Even as a publicity stunt, it seems to forget what it ostensibly was ginned up to promote. Wilson actually spends much of the clip interviewing Anderson, and on that end, the biggest revelation is that the director apparently went to India without getting the recommended vaccinations.

Finke hasn’t followed up on her misleading post, unless you count some off-handed speculation in her box-office recap that the interview helped “speed up” Darjeeling’s box office take from Friday to Saturday, “despite reviews which said the interview was boring.” If by “reviews” Finke is referring to the response of actual kids on MySpace, then that’s kind of an understatement. The five-minute video has been viewed almost 350,000 times since being posted at midnight Saturday morning, and has garnered just 550 comments. Most of these seem to be spam, porn, or porn spam; many of the few actual comments from genuine humans call the clip out for being a publicity stunt. “Your video sucks and sounds rehearsed,” writes one commenter. “Waste of time!!”

I can’t say I disagree. I’m all for subverting the publicity machine (if that’s even how you could describe one corporate hand flogging the other like this), this was just self-indulgence teased as dirt. Darjeeling deserves better.