Playing Second Fiddle To A Superstar

Paul Hasegawa-Overacker is the kind of guy everyone wants at a party. A surfer dude at heart, he is down to earth and just goofy enough.

But for a period of about five years – the five years he was boyfriend to art world superstar Cindy Sherman – no one cared if he was there or not. He went from being the host of his own popular cable TV show and an artist in his own right to living in the shadows of the quintessential New York it-girl.

“In my mind, she was the top of the heap,” revealed H-O, in town earlier this month for a screening of his doc, Guest of Cindy Sherman. “It didn’t get more exciting than Cindy.”

But at one of countless celeb-studded dinners where his role was simply to be Sherman’s “plus one,” he hit rock bottom. The organizers sat Sherman at the head table and, after he got their attention, ushered H-O to a spot off to the side with a place card that read, “Guest of Cindy Sherman.”

He mines feelings of anxiety and anonymity in his film (co-directed by Tom Donahue) commiserating with Elton John’s boyfriend, David Furnish, and at one point joking, “What happened to that guy who married Madonna? He was a really good director!”

But GOCS is not just a self-portrait or a relationship journal. It’s also a sophisticated and multi-layered view of the art world and one few of us ever see.

H-O first met Sherman in the ’90s while hosting his TV show, Gallery Beat – what an art tour might look like if your guides were Wayne and Garth of Wayne’s World.

“I played the everyman. I didn’t exactly dumb myself down. I was just who I was,” he mused. “I’m a guy from California. I’m a surfer…It was like a normal gallery experience where you’re just kind of scratching your head going, “What’s going on?”

Still, it would be wrong to consider H-O a simpleton. His love for art and artists is unmistakable on film and in person. But so is his contempt for phony people and the money-making side of things.

“In fact, we were satirizing a lot of the art experience because we felt like…there was a lot of bullshit,” he says.

Sherman had seen Gallery Beat and was a fan. So when H-O ran into her at an opening, he charmed her into giving him an exclusive interview.

The notoriously press-shy artist, who normally controls every aspect of her image in highly-staged photographs, let her guard down. And although she was involved in the making of GOCS, cutting scenes she didn’t like, she washed her hands of it afterwards, apologizing to her friends for involving them in the film.

“There’s a lot of curiosity about Cindy and we really just portray her as the person she is, which is a very nice, normal person who doesn’t have any airs about her,” H-O observed. “But, it was tough…because there was more personal information there than she would ever feel comfortable with.”

After five years of immersing himself in the film, H-O just wants to move on. He’s working on a mockumentary with Weeds actor Meital Dohan and plans to carry on the Gallery Beat tradition with a web-based show.

But perhaps closest to his heart: a feature film about what artists have to do to make a living and do their art at the same time.