Downtown filmmaker Vincent Gallo would like the man who has his old phone number to stop impersonating him.
“I had a New York number for years, before ‘Buffalo 66’ even came out,” the often colorful actor/director tells Page Six. “I eventually transferred to a California area code, and the phone company gave someone my old number. When the guy would get calls that were for me, instead of telling them they had the wrong number, he’d play along and pretend to be me.”
Gallo says the impostor even set up a Gmail account with his name to further confuse people. “He screwed up a number of business deals for me and also misled girls in certain ways,” he says. “He was trying to create intimacy and would say strange things. I figured it would eventually stop, but it hasn’t.”
The last straw came, he says, when a female editor at Vice magazine called his old number to invite Gallo to a screening of “Where the Wild Things Are” at the Tribeca Grand on Thursday night, and the impostor creepily requested her photo.
“She e-mailed me very confused,” Gallo relates. “I just want him to stop.” E-mails and calls we made to the impostor were, predictably, not returned.
Gallo, who famously had a graphic sex scene with Chloe Sevigny in “The Brown Bunny,” is no stranger to controversy. After critic Roger Ebert panned the 2003 film, Gallo called him a “fat pig” and put a hex on Ebert, wishing him colon cancer.
Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, Ebert replied, “Although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr. Gallo will still have been the director of ‘The Brown Bunny’ . . . The video of my colonoscopy is more entertaining than your movie.” The two eventually reconciled.