Not-so-secret secret society

This is the Online column, written for The Southland Times)

Family likeness? Members of the humorous semi-secret Sons of Lee Marvin group (from left) Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and Nick Cave.

What do independent film-maker Jim Jarmusch, Godfather of Punk Iggy Pop, original Aussie emo Nick Cave and Tom Waits — the drinking man’s Billy Joel — have in common? Give up? Well, it seems they belong to a super-duper, top-secret club called The Sons of Lee Marvin, a group with an interesting requirement for entry: the person must bear a reasonably strong resemblance to late actor Lee Marvin.

Other rumoured members of the society include Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth, and Mickey Rourke, the once good-looking actor who discovered plastic surgery and promptly had his face stretched so tight it is now incapable of movement.

You know it’s truly is a super-duper, top-secret society when it doesn’t have a website.

In fact, there are just snippets of information about it scattered around the web. Wikipedia has a little mention of it in the middle of its writeup for Jarmusch, while NNDB manages to muster up one sentence and a list of seven names.

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