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Young Indy/World discovers Houston actor
By ANN HODGES
Sean Patrick Flanery was home in Houston Thursday, resting from his world travels, when ABC decided to put his show on hiatus.
Flanery hadn't heard the news when we met over coffee Thursday. He's here "doing nothing" for a few days, visiting his mother, Genie Flanery , and his "best friends, my old Houston friends." Then he's off to London for a few more days of fun.
Next month, he'll be working in Kenya. There are still eight more shows to do on ABC's order.
Since this time last year, Flanery has seen a lot of the world (North Carolina, Ireland, Liverpool and London in England, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Kenya). But he hasn't seen a single movie. So his first mission at home is to catch up on the movies he's missed.
He had flown in from Rome, looking like a GQ cosmopolite in a smart Italian suede shirt and vest over jeans.
"The shop owner insisted on giving it to me," he said with a sheepish smile. "The airline lost my luggage before I got to Rome, and I wore one of his shop's T-shirts on TV -- Italy's version of Arsenio Hall. I went in afterwards to get some things, and he must have given me $6,000 worth of clothes. I really felt bad about it, because I did wear his T-shirt, but I wore a vest over it. I don't even think you could see the name of his store on TV."
In Italy, everybody loves "Young Indiana Jones." Flanery is a TV idol, and "paparazzi" mob him wherever he goes.
"It's vicious over there," he said. "Italian "paparazzi" is not just photographers, like over here. If they see you walking down the street with your mom, they don't just take your picture, they write that "he's having an affair with an older woman.' They make stuff up."
Flanery has fans everywhere these days. "Young Indy's Chronicles" has hit big in Italy, Germany, Ireland, France, and Australia. It starts running in England at Christmastime.
Over here, it has put Flanery on the cover of every teen magazine on the rack, and his fan mail comes by the bushel basket.
"It's from a broad cross section," he reports. "College students, businessmen, little girls. People in college say they have groups that meet every Monday night to watch.
"I think they like it because I think they're like me," he reasons. "I have a basic knowledge of the real people in the scripts, but I always learn something new about them. It's like, "Wow, that's why Picasso did it that way' ... or ... "Gee, I didn't know that about Al Capone.' In one of our new scripts, Capone's a bartender in Chicago, and Indy's in college and working as a waiter in that place. All those little things about those people are true. George Lucas doesn't make them up."
The famous filmmaker is still writing every story in this series, though he is using other writers now to turn his engaging stories into fine TV scripts.
"I see him all the time. He's constantly popping in and out of wherever we're working," Flanery says.
"We spend a lot of time and effort making sure everything's done right. He's a perfectionist. We go back and re-shoot some things that look great to me. He wants each one to be a movie on its own. And it is -- each one's so different.
"He just loves doing this show. And we have that in common," Flanery said. "I really enjoy doing it, too. I'm excited to get up and go to work at 5 a.m.; it's such a pleasure to be working with these great directors and actors."
Flanery does all his own stunt work, and some of it is just as hard as it looks.
"The scary ones are the ones where your safety is out of your hands," he said. "I was hanging from a ninth floor balcony by my fingertips, with a harness and little bitty cable, and that didn't feel good. But Vic Armstrong, our stunt coordinator, was Harrison Ford's double in the Indy movies, and when he tells me something is safe, I'm not scared."
He still enjoys seeing the world, but he would like to unpack once in a while. He likes Prague, Czechoslovakia, so much that he's looking for an apartment to buy.
"We shoot there for about four months, so it's really more like home than anywhere now, and it's so beautiful, it's like being in Disneyland," he said.
But he still loves Houston, and even though his life has changed forever since "Young Indiana Jones" came into it, he doesn't think he's changed that much personally.
"It's probably no bigger change for me than leaving home the first time was," he said. "Or than going out to Los Angeles to be an actor, with no money. Or going to the Junior Olympics in track. Now that was a REAL milestone in my life."
He still won't play the Hollywood party game. "I wouldn't even know what to say to those people," he says.
And there's still no big romance in his life. He still likes his Houston childhood friend, the one he calls Poopa-Loop (a k a Kim), best.
"To tell you the truth, I throw myself so deep into these scripts -- we work all day, and I read and study all night, with just time out for room service," he said. This is really very hard work."
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