Bash Compactor: Susan Sarandon Loves Balls, Hates Twitter

The wily Susan Sarandon wears many hats: Oscar-winning actress, outspoken
political activist, ping pong aficionado and… proponent of Twitter
ambivalence? “I’m just trying to be in my life and not talk about it, so
Twitter is like the antithesis of that for me,” she told me at an after-party
for a Brooklyn Academy of Music
retrospective that puts 13 films of hers back on the big screen—aptly titled
“The Susan Sarandon Picture Show.”

But fear not, tweetards: there
was one use for which the stage doyenne thought Twitter especially
germane—declaring one’s non-heterosexuality. “When I come out,” she quipped,
“I’ll use Twitter.” Before the rumors have Sarandon engaging in lesbian
courtships of Martha Stewart, Oprah, and Chely Wright, I asked her if she’d been experimenting: “Not at
all.”

With that matter settled,
we turned to the BAM retrospective that had launched just hours before. She’d
already done two question-and-answer sessions, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Any
hard questions from the peanut gallery? “There’s no such thing as a hard
question,” she said, pausing for a moment, “I don’t think.”

The soiree began at 10:30
at SPiN, the black light-lit
basement rec room-cum-bar in which Sarandon is a part owner. It brought out a
motley crew of pong-playing, Brooklyn-Lager-swilling twentysomethings, actress Jessica
Alba, documentarian Morgan
Spurlock and, most confusingly,
jukebox-dimer Joan Jett.

A bit balder than in his Supersize
Me days, though still sporting his
signature handlebar mustache, Spurlock chatted me up about his latest project, The
Greatest Movie Ever Sold. The film,
a documentary about the role of product placement, marketing and advertising in
movies, was, interesting enough, entirely paid for by product placement.
McDonald’s declined to take part.

“The whole idea is, we want
to create a documentary blockbuster,” he said. “A doc-buster. You need a fast
food partner in order to get toys in Happy Meals… Think how popular these
documentary toys could have been. Those documentary action figures, those
would’ve been huge.”

Moving on to a different
type of brand synergy, I told Sarandon that I thought SPiN, with tonight’s open
bar on Brooklyn Lager, might be a prime place for a celebrity beer pong
tournament. “No!” she snapped at me. “We tried beer pong here once. It’s so
messy and not interesting.”