KEY POINTS:
David Hasselhoff has the unusual distinction of having played second fiddle to cutting edge technology in two hit TV shows.
In Knight Rider he drove a computerised talking car that was wittier and more intelligent than he was. And in Baywatch, ostensibly a drama about Californian lifeguards but in reality a marketing campaign showcasing the dramatic possibilities of cosmetic surgery, he was almost literally overshadowed by his female co-stars' physical attributes.
Hasselhoff may have spent a decade hovering on the fringes of the action to allow the camera unobstructed access to the real stars of the show - the gravity-defying bazookas deployed by Pamela Anderson and co - but he was shrewd enough to have secured a major piece of the action.
By the time the show folded, money was the least of his worries.
Having embraced the core principle of the entertainment industry - merit is irrelevant; all that matters is how it plays at the box office - and reaped the reward, he set about changing his image from cheesy to cool.
Given his soap star looks and bland screen presence, the odds were against him picking up a lead role in a weighty TV series or graduating to the big screen.
Rather than try to shed his image as a cartoon character in human form and reinvent himself as, say, a character actor in gritty little arthouse movies, Hasselhoff grasped that it was possible have it both ways: he could cash in on the profile he'd gained from being in these lightweight but immensely popular shows even as he distanced himself from them.
All it required was a little self-deprecation, a willingness to make fun of his screen persona, and a knowing smirk to signal that he knew it was trash all along. And why not? After all, the joke was on the audience: while they'd spent an hour a week for 11 years in thrall to an array of fake breasts, he'd accumulated US$100 million.
By simultaneously revelling in and undercutting his image, Hasselhoff proved he could do irony with the hippest post-modernist. In the process he transformed himself into a pop cultural icon: the Hoff, the self-proclaimed King of the Internet.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "there are no second acts in American lives." That might have been true once but doesn't apply in this age of full-blown celebrity culture when you can be famous for being famous or even for having been famous. In fact Fitzgerald's dictum has never really applied to Hollywood. Right from the silent movies days, many stars' careers have been two-act dramas: first the rise, then the fall.
As society has become more tolerant, as the pace of life has quickened, as movies have become more expensive and studios more risk-averse, these personal dramas have become more drawn-out, extending over three, four or even five acts. But the narrative hasn't changed, nor have the causes of the inevitable fall: too much of everything that can turn a person's head.
Recently Hasselhoff did what quite a few New Zealanders do every weekend: he attempted to eat a hamburger while drunk. This unlovely spectacle was videotaped by his teenage daughter and the footage gained instant worldwide release via the internet and became Exhibit A in a custody dispute. Unless rolling around on the floor half-naked trying to manoeuvre a burger past one's vomit-flecked lips can be re-packaged as a performance art piece or post-modern irony, the curtain may have gone up on the third and final act in Hasselhoff's career.
There's an obvious comparison with Alec Baldwin, another fading star embroiled in a custody dispute. Even in Hollywood where "bitter custody battle" is a tautology the Baldwin-Kim Basinger feud has assumed mythical proportions, so it was unbelievably foolish of Baldwin to leave a phone message blasting his 11-year-old daughter Ireland as a "rude, thoughtless little pig".
If New Zealand is a great place to bring up children, the opposite could be said of Hollywood. While little Ireland and Taylor Ann Hasselhoff will have to put up with embarrassment as their fathers stumble querulously into the twilight of their careers, they can console themselves with the knowledge it could have been much worse: their fathers could have been A-listers.
The bigger the star, the harder the fall, the greater the collateral damage. Take Christian Brando who spent 10 years in jail for gunning down his half-sister's lover, or said half-sister Cheyenne dead by her own hand at 25.
Then there was Lana Turner's daughter Cheryl Crane who stabbed her mother's gangster/gigolo boyfriend to death having been spooked by overhearing a snatch of their sado-masochistic pillow-talk. No wonder there's no business like show business.
