Chris Douridas
The day job is radio. Chris Douridas presents a programme of new music at KCRW in Santa Monica and has spent decades doing the thing the industry calls tastemaking: being the person whose playlist decides which unknown record a few thousand influential listeners hear first. He has also produced soundtracks and music videos, work that has drawn Grammy nominations.
The acting is incidental, and enjoyable for precisely that reason. He is an Atoller in Waterworld, Gunner in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and a technician in The End of Violence. Three credits could hardly be further apart in tone: an enormous waterlogged blockbuster, a chainsaw sequel played as pitch-black farce, and a Wim Wenders film about surveillance and Los Angeles. The last of those is the one that fits the day job, and it is not a coincidence that a music curator ended up in a picture about who gets to watch whom.
Movies (3)
Where to start with Chris Douridas
Form your own opinion on Waterworld before borrowing anyone else's. It is a famously expensive production that plays much better than its reputation, largely because the sets and stunts are real, enormous, and genuinely wet.
The End of Violence is the interesting film, a Wim Wenders picture about surveillance culture in Los Angeles that arrived roughly twenty years ahead of its subject and does not entirely know what to do with it. Watch it for the atmosphere and the sound design rather than the plot.
Save The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 for when you are in the mood to be shouted at. It abandons the first film's grimy realism for something loud and cartoonish, and depending on your temperament that is either a betrayal or the best joke in the genre.