The Guardian

London:

New York had its Spider-Man and Gotham City its Batman. Now Hollywood has aquired its own masked crusader in the form of Rance, a shadowy figure whose true identity has become the talk of the Beverly Hills fishbowl. By day Rance (as in “rants”) earns his crust as a movie megastar. By night he dons his cloak of invisibility to write a web-log exposing an industry awash with idiot producers and bimbo actors. Except that we have only Rance’s word for this. “Suffice it to say that I know what it’s like to see your picture on the magazine rack every now and then,’’ he boasts. Rance’s messages have sparked a level of speculation that borders on the surreal. In the past few weeks, virtually every big-name actor has found themself fingered as the culprit, from Clooney and Cusack through to Affleck, Del Toro and Carrey. Long regarded as the most likely suspect, Starsky and Hutch star Owen Wilson recently went on record to protest his innocence and insist that he doesn’t even own a PC. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

The clues, of course, are in the copy. Close study of the postings suggest a man possessed of a mordant wit, but hampered by self-satisfaction and a tendency to over-write. Rance fancies Naomi Watts, found Troy “synthetic” and suffered gamely through this year’s Oscars ceremony (“all the sobbing and thanking dead grammaw watching up there in the sky all gets a bit much”). Yet despite describing the messages as “a really good way to bitch about my job”, Rance’s rants can be infuriatingly discreet. For all the catty anecdotes, he crucially refuses to name the names. It adds up to a veritable bonfire of the anonymities — teasing gossip on faceless stars written by a faceless blogger who might be a Hollywood insider but who may just as easily be a chortling impostor making mischief from a bedsit in Ohio. Inevitably, the man himself is playing coy. “How rumours started that I was an actor — and A-list no less — I have no idea,” Rance writes in his most recent message, posted last Friday. Instead, he adds, he is currently working as second mate on a whaling ship in the Indian Ocean. Rance’s blog is at http:file://captainhoof.tripod.com/blog/.