“I don’t think it was accidental,” Robert Metzler, business manager and general troubleshooter for the Oscars, told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. But given streaking’s all-time popularity peak at the time of the ’74 Oscars, and the Oscars’ perennially flop-sweated thirst for anything relevant, there are hints that the whole incident was staged.
Nude streaker trial#
He showed up for his trial - after being arrested for his Council stunt - dressed as Uncle Sam. Penis, and went naked at a couple of Los Angeles City Council meetings to protest the city’s ban on nudity at area beaches. His history with streaking predated the ’74 Oscars: As part of his activism, he’d created a suit dubbed Mr. Prior to this, he was apparently a speechwriter for future President Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign in California, and some sources have suggested he was employed as an English teacher at the time of his Oscars run. Active in the gay liberation movement - he was bisexual - and art circles, Opel’s résumé included part-time photography work for the gay newspaper the Advocate and the Hollywood Star tabloid. After dropping a “p” from his name to spare his family the fallout from his antics, Opel was an LA-area hippie, already armed with a lengthy rap sheet by the time the 1974 Academy Awards rolled around. Into this zeitgeist streaked Robert Opel. 1 Billboard hit “The Streak” eventually notched 17 weeks on the chart. Over a dozen American universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Tufts, now have a tradition of streaking, dating back to this era.” By 1974, pop music, forever society’s mirror, had its own streaker: Ray Stevens, whose No. But by the early 1970s, it had picked up to the point where, Philip Carr-Gomm, a psychotherapist, writer and author of “A Brief History of Nakedness” told the New Yorker that “over 1,500 students a mass nude run at the University of Georgia, and 1,200 at the University of Colorado. Streaking gained momentum through the 1960s, though it was largely confined to college campuses or the odd hippie-practiced bit of nudity. Crump, then a senior at what is now Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, was suspended for the remainder of the session for running naked through the city streets he would later become a congressman and the US ambassador to Chile. Stateside, the first recorded instance of the practice is by George William Crump in August 1804. English composer-turned-Quaker Solomon Eagle (né Eccles) was famous for running largely naked through the streets of London during the plague of 1665 with a chafing dish of burning coals on his head, preaching repentance. You have your Adamites, or Adamians, early Christians in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries, who steadfastly refused clothing during their religious ceremonies. Streaking, as a pastime - or artform - goes quite a ways back. Niven got his laugh, but he had no way of knowing how wrong he was.Ĭhalk drawing of Solomon Eagle by Edward Matthew Ward, 1848. The year is 1974: 33-year-old Robert Opel, looking for all the world like a fit David Crosby, streaks naked past David Niven, who was about to introduce Elizabeth Taylor.Īfter the laughter subsides, Niven lets loose with the second-most-memorialized part of the incident, this quip: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen … But isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?” It pops up every year, usually in a roundup of the craziest, most shocking Oscar moments. J.Lo responds to Oscar snub: 'I was like, ‘Ouch"'īest picture winner ‘Parasite’ to stream exclusively on Hulu Sia, Rudy Giuliani win big at this year's Razzie Awards
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