Raising Money from Nicholas Cage Will Be Harder Than You Think
When Kitty (my mother, for those of you just joining us) is out on the prowl, she thinks she sees celebrities out in the wild among us regular folk. Some of her sightings are more plausible than others:
“I once saw Mick Jagger walking out of a Baby Gap. He looked terrific!”
“Did I tell you about the time I saw Booger from Revenge of Nerds eating a gyro in Greek Town in Detroit? I wanted an autograph but I couldn’t remember his real name.”
Kitty once reported standing behind Senator Joe Liberman in the check-out line at Safeway while on a vacation to Washington, DC. He was buying artichoke hearts and Lay’s potato chips. “Ohhh!...salty and salty. What do you think he was making for dinner?”
Sidenote
My sister once slow danced with Al Pacino, which is a solid celebrity encounter. She was 20, he was in his late 50s, and my father was surprisingly cool about it. Has your sister ever slow danced with a celebrity? Tell us about it in the chat!
To my knowledge, my sister has never danced in Nicholas Cage’s meaty arms, and my mother has never run into him shopping for baby clothes, eating Greek food, or buying groceries.
Nevertheless, Kitty believes in her heart of hearts that Nicholas Cage would be happy to make a charitable gift if I would just ask him already.
I’m not so sure. Let’s investigate.
We can all agree that Nicholas Cage is sort of a kooky guy, right?
But even if he’s not your cup of tea, you could probably find something he’s been in that you’d like. (Put your hand down. I’ll answer for you: It’s Moonstruck. You loved him in Moonstruck. It was before he got his teeth fixed but after he started shouting all of his lines. Scream it with me, you guys: “I LOST MY HAND! I LOST MY BRIDE!”)
What likely put Cage on Kitty’s fundraising radar are reports that he’s famously bad with money. Doom scroll to your heart’s content through all the things he squandered his fortune on: lavish homes, a dinosaur skull, pigmy heads, old comic books, etc. He eventually owed the IRS a bundle and, voila, he’s steak tartare in the tabloid meat grinder.
For all the crap he buys, Nicholas Cage is actually a pretty charitable guy. He’s won UN awards for humanitarian work, he’s donated money to rehabilitate child soldiers, and he gives to charities supporting the unhoused. Respect.
I’m reasonably familiar with some of his charitable giving from the early 2000s because I lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. At the time, he was already a favorite (adopted) son of New Orleans. Nicholas Cage sightings were constant around town: eating oysters at Cooter Brown’s, buying rounds of drinks at The Columns, shirtless on Bourbon Street on Saturday night, but on time for service at St Louis Cathedral Sunday morning. News of his $1 million gift to support Katrina relief efforts, flood victims, and rebuilding the city was certainly welcome, but hardly surprising.
After all, New Orleans was his home, too.
But what happens when you make a very large (very public) philanthropic gift, you have a reputation for poor impulse control, and there are more organizations, people, and causes that need funding than there are donors to support them?
Everyone comes knocking.
Fundraising friends of mine in New Orleans tell me that right after Katrina, every fundraiser, nonprofit, and charity went to Cage asking for a gift. And he said yes to everything and everybody. If people saw him around town eating, drinking, partying, or going for coffee after church, they’d ask him for a gift. And he always said yes.
His handlers, however, would trail behind him and cancel the verbal pledges he made. Not because they were jerks or he was insincere in his charitable intentions; he simply didn’t have the money to help as much, as deeply, or as often as he wanted to. The man who infiltrated Alcatraz with Sean Connery one year and fought off a plane-full of convicts the next year needed, in real life, protection from well-intentioned fundraisers (like Kitty) who were asking him to give what he imagined he had. And he said yes every time.
This part of his reputation deserves more play than it gets. He always said “yes,” even when he shouldn’t have. And I like him a little bit more for it.
Sidenote
My sister-in-law (same lady who told me about Navy call signs) recommended I watch Depp vs. Heard—a Netflix documentary about the celebrity defamation lawsuit between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. It’s super upsetting, but there’s a fascinating moment when Heard gets grilled about the nuances of philanthropic accounting terminology.
In Episode 2 (starting at 37:17) Depp’s attorney cross-examines Heard about an unfulfilled $7 million charitable gift commitment. Their exchange hinges on the difference between what Heard calls her “pledge” (a commitment to pay) and what Depp’s attorney calls a “donation” (an actual financial transaction).
The frustrating part is that both sides are correct: Heard booked and “pledged” $7 million to charity (which she was paying out over multiple years for tax reasons) but, technically, it was not yet a fully realized “donation.” Heard eventually concedes that she uses the two terms synonymously.
The whole exchange was meant to call into question Heard’s character. As in, she’s somebody who makes promises she doesn’t keep. Which is some pretty thin apple sauce if you ask me. Heard clearly understands how big gifts work, she just couldn’t explain it. Like a lot of people.
So, Kitty and I find ourselves—and I’m sorry to do this, brothers and sisters—in an unfortunate Face Off.
She’s right to sense that Nicholas Cage is an excellent prospect for a gift. He seems like a guy who wants to be asked, albeit one who needs shielding from his own charitable instincts.
But raising money from Nicholas Cage would mean wading waist-deep into a swamp of my own expectations and intentions around him and his celebrity: what I think he should give versus what he can actually give versus what I want him to give versus why he should give versus what the tabloids report about his giving. There’s already too much baggage there to know what to do with. Which means I have more thinking, planning, and homework to do about what the right ask looks like for a guy who wants to say yes. After all, it’s my job to ensure he says yes to the right thing for both of us.
In all honesty, if Nicholas Cage was in front of me right now, I’d probably just thank him for the million bucks he gave New Orleans 20 years ago when me and my then-girlfriend/now-wife lived in the city and we sometimes caught a glimpse of him living his bizarre life around town.
Then I’d ask him if he knows the guy who played Booger in Revenge of the Nerds and if he could get my mom an autograph.
I’d want it to read: “To Kitty: My real name is Curtis Armstrong. Next time say hello. It’s always nice to meet a fan. XOXO, Booger.”
Your dad once stood in line behind Richard Thomas (John Boy from the Waltons) at a coney (a hot dog stand for you non Michiganders). I cannot speak to his philanthropic bent, but you could write to him. He seems like a nice guy.
unfortunately, i’ve never had a celebrity citing and since i AM the older sister, my siblings have also never witnessed me slow dance with a famous person of any kind 😔when i was younger—with more prominent bangs—people told me i looked like Malia Weisman from A Series of Unfortunate Events but i think that has since changed.