Simple Tricks and Nonsense

When you watch movies, you'll see actors and you'll see stars, but you very rarely see anyone who can honestly be described as both. These individuals combine two very different sets of qualities: the nuanced thespian skills and talents that enable them to create characters who genuinely seem to live and breathe apart from the actor themselves, and the personal charisma, the indefinable "it," that makes audiences naturally gravitate toward them. In my opinion, these individuals are becoming more and more rare all the time; I don't know if they were a product of the old Hollywood system that died out in the '70s or perhaps they had a certain kind of training that's no longer much practiced, or maybe the planets just aren't properly aligned these days, but for whatever reason, the younger people in movies today simply don't have the same effortlessly larger-than-life aura about them.

We lost one of the last and greatest of these actor-stars Friday when the legendary Paul Newman succumbed at the age of 83 to the cancer he's been rumored to have been battling for some time. This is one of those Hollywood deaths that I've been expecting, but which still strikes me to the bone. I can't recall ever not knowing who Newman was; he's always been one of my mother's favorites, along with his occasional screen partner Robert Redford, and I have very dim memories of seeing The Sting with her when I was just a very small boy. (I can't recall, however, if it was on TV or if my parents took me to the theater when it was first out. It seems like we saw it in the theater, but I may be imagining that.) Newman seemed like somebody I actually knew, and it hurts to think he's gone.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Paul Newman" »

Posted by at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, they do say that Hollywood deaths always come in threes...

I just learned that singer, songwriter, and sometimes-actor Jerry Reed has died. He had a respectable career in country music, of course, including several big hits on both the country and pop charts (this was back in the 1970s when you could do that, unlike the rigidly segregated musical categories of today). But I think most of the obituaries you read are going to focus on his role as Burt Reynolds' sidekick in the Smokey and the Bandit films. I know when I heard the news, the image that flashed through my mind was of Snowman sitting behind the wheel with his loyal basset hound Fred riding shotgun.

Despite my recent affirmation of SamuraiFrog's opinion that we should do away with the term "guilty pleasure," I have to admit I'm a bit sheepish when it comes to revealing my affection for Smokey and the Bandit. People often seem to be struggling not to roll their eyes when they hear the title, and I suppose I don't blame them. After all, it's basically just a 90-minute car chase, leavened by silly sight gags and vulgar one-liners. Worse, its success was directly responsible for many of the worst crimes committed against American culture in the late '70s and early '80s, including (but not limited to), two really lame sequels; scores of bad, low-budget movies and television shows about "good ol' boys," truck drivers, CB radios, and stupid law enforcement officers; the resulting destruction of countless perfectly good (and frequently classic) automobiles; and, of course, the exponential increase in the size of Burt Reynolds' head. I always worry that admitting I'm a fan says something about me that I really don't want people to assume. And yet... and yet I just love the damn thing.

Continue reading "In Memorian: Jerry Reed" »

Posted by at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the best-known voices in the world has fallen silent. Don LaFontaine, the voiceover artist most people knew as "the movie-trailer guy," died over the weekend at the age of 68, from a collapsed lung. According to his bio, LaFontaine recorded the narration for roughly 5,000 trailers over the years, as well as countless TV ads. He even parodied himself -- and his usual catchphrase, "in a world where..." -- in episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, as well as a recent commercial for Geico Insurance.

I heard LaFontaine's deep, occasionally intimidating voice nearly every day for the five or so years I worked at that multiplex I'm always waxing nostalgic about. Every couple of hours, when the next round of shows was starting, it would boom out from the auditoriums, sometimes even after the doors were closed. He was as much a part of the atmosphere in that place as the smell of popcorn and windex. I remember I used to have this embarrassing fantasy that one day I'd hear him say my name in a trailer, something along the lines of, "From the bestselling novel by R. Jason Bennion comes a film of exquisite awesomeness..." Ah, well. C'est la vie, I suppose.

Here's a video clip that I've seen in a few places around the 'nets today, a brief bio of LaFontaine that feels like something made for an awards show (the Oscars perhaps? I haven't been able to find out...) and includes a fair amount of the man himself chatting about his life and career. It sounds very much like he was just a guy with a unique talent who stumbled into a niche that he was able to make his own. He also sounds like he was a very cool guy:

If only I'd known that he was willing to do things like voicemail intros for random strangers!

There are a lot of voiceover artists out there and I'm sure many of them, if not most of them, are very good at what they do. But I doubt we're going to hear a single voice as universally recognizable -- and recognized -- as LaFontaine's for many years.

Posted by at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There were a couple of unexpected celebrity deaths over the weekend, if you haven't heard.

The first was Bernie Mac, the comedian and actor whose humor often stemmed from the combination of his intimidating stature with a lovable heart within. I don't have too much to say about him, except that I enjoyed his performances in Ocean's 11 and Bad Santa, as well as his eponymous television sitcom. That show was only occasional, not regular, viewing at my house, but I admired it for transcending race (unlike many other sitcoms that were on at the same time and featured African-American casts) and being refreshingly un-P.C. Not to mention pretty damn funny at times. Bernie was one of those guys that simply made me smile when he turned up in something I was watching. He died Saturday at the far-too-young age of 50.

While Bernie's death saddened me, I was genuinely stunned to hear that singer, actor, and all-round-force-of-cool Isaac Hayes had died Sunday, after being found unconscious alongside a treadmill at his home. (Heart attack while working out, perhaps?) The various tributes to him all mention his work as a songwriter and pioneer of the funk sound of the early '70s, and of course his most famous song, the wacka-liciously awesome "Theme from Shaft"; his more recent work as the voice of South Park's Chef gets name-checked as well. But when I think of Hayes, I tend to think first of his role as The Duke of New York (he's A-Number One!) in one of the greatest B-grade sci-fi action flicks of all time, John Carpenter's Escape from New York. Here he is in all his glory with Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau (who's also displaying all her glory, if you take my meaning):

I first saw Escape from New York on one of those RCA videodiscs, those things that were like movies on vinyl records, while sitting in the television section of the local appliance store where my mom worked part-time when I was a kid. The movie's premise was pretty mind-blowing to a small-town Utah kid in the early '80s -- if you haven't seen it, it's set in a dystopian near-future where the crime rate has gotten so bad, the authorities wall off Manhattan Island and turn it into a prison where the prisoners can do anything they want, so long as they don't try to leave. Hayes' Duke was essentially a third-world warlord, the strongest of the riffraff, and he cracked me up with his quasi-military outfit and his Cadillac with chandeliers mounted on the front fenders. To this day, that remains my mental archetype of low-rent decadence.

According to Hayes' LA Times obit, he'd just finished a movie called Soul Men with that other terminally cool, shaved-headed African-American Samuel L. Jackson, and, oddly enough, the late Bernie Mac. He was only days shy of his 66th birthday...

Posted by at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man, lately it's really feeling like we're at the end of an era, isn't it? We've been losing so many of the men and women whose work meant so much to me in my formative years. The latest is the visual-effects genius Stan Winston, who died last night after a seven-year fight against multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer.

You know Winston's work even if you've never heard his name. He specialized in what're called "practical effects," i.e., stuff that happens "live" on the set with the actors, notably effects that amount to very sophisticated puppets. The chromium robot skeleton that menaced Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies, the full-size T. Rex in Jurassic Park, and the little sweetheart you see in the photo above -- the queen of Ripley's nightmares in Aliens -- were all Winston's creations, full-size physical objects that came to life through the magic of hydraulics, compressed air, motors, and remote controls. He won three Oscars for the examples I named, and was nominated for several more projects, including the extra-terrestrial big-game hunter in Predator and the vicious-looking prosthetics worn by the gentle-hearted Edward Scissorhands.

In recent years, the sort of work that Winston excelled at has often been replaced by computer-generated models -- for instance, the skeletal Terminators in the latest offshoot of that franchise, the Sarah Connor Chronicles television series, are mostly CGI -- and even Stan himself has branched into the digital effects field. But for my money, CG puppets still don't have the physical presence, the mass, or the menace of the real thing. I can still vividly recall the first time I saw The Terminator as a teenage boy sitting on his best friend's living-room floor, my armpits drenched in flop sweat and stomach clenched in dread as that damned thing just kept coming, even after being blown in two by a pipe bomb. (That living room, by the way, no longer exists; my friend's house was demolished years ago. But I still remember which corner the TV was in... and in my memory, the image on the screen is of that shining, red-eyed, mechanical skull dragging its own severed torso after its prey, unyielding and unrelenting even after being dismembered...)

No less intense was the first time I saw Aliens a couple of years later: it only takes a little mental nudge and I'm on the edge of my seat in a grungy second-run house, nervously tapping my fingertips on the sticky armrests like a three-pack-a-day-er in the middle of a nicky fit from hell as Ripley, armored up in an her industrial exoskeleton, slugs it out with the monstrous Queen.

That these experiences were so visceral they still linger after 20-some years is in large part because of Stan Winston. He made the monsters real, real enough for our heroes to defeat. His death at the relatively young age of 62 -- the same age as my father -- is a tremendous loss to the movies. He still had a lot of creatures left in him, I think, and I'm sorry that we'll never have the chance to see them...

Posted by at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Catching up with the news, I see the Hollywood obituary list has been unusually long the last couple weeks. They say these things always come in threes, but there have been seven notable passings recently: a renowned actor-director, a composer, three of the men who made the original Star Trek into the classic it is, one of the funniest comedy straight men who ever lived, and a seminal blues-rock guitarist. Chances are you've all already heard about these, but I'd like to mention them anyhow...

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Super-Jumbo Edition!" »

Posted by at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I just learned from the blog of Irene Gallo, the art director for Tor Books, that the illustrative artist John Berkey has died. Irene mentions something about him being in poor health in recent years, but so far, I haven't been able to find any further details about his age or cause of death.

Berkey is probably best known for painting some of the very earliest pieces of promotional art associated with Star Wars -- the image above was a poster concept for the movie, which ended up instead becoming the iconic cover of the film's novelization -- but his work was pretty commonly seen on all kinds of books and posters in the late '70s and early '80s, and it was a big influence on my developing sense of aesthetics. Several of his paintings still live in my memory; when I read of his death, I instantly recalled an image of his that appeared on Navy recruitment posters throughout my high school and early college years, and also this painting,which was the cover of a National Geographic coffee-table book called Our Universe. A friend of mine owned a copy of that book; as I recall, I borrowed it several times, but about all I remember about it now was that awesome cover painting.

Berkey's work was more impressionistic than realistic, but one of the things it always conveyed was a true sense of mass. His starships and ocean-going craft and floating cities always felt huge and immensely powerful. It was a perfect style for the time of its greatest popularity, when Star Wars, with its mile-long Star Destroyers and moon-sized Death Star, set the tone for so much science fiction.

I don't recall seeing any new work from Berkey in years, and I don't know if that's because he's been ill or otherwise not working, or if his stuff just fell out of fashion. I rediscovered him a few years ago when I ran across a used art book at Sammy's, and I spent several days marveling at how many of his paintings were familiar, and how much I still like them. That Star Wars piece above, for the record, is one of my favorites out of the hundreds of Original Trilogy-related paintings produced over the years; this companion piece is, too, even if it inaccurately depicts several Corellian YT-1300 light freighters at the Battle of Yavin, rather than just the one we all know actually was there...

Posted by at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In Sunday's tribute to Charlton Heston, I mentioned something called the Big Money Movie. I think I've written about that before, but in case you didn't catch the reference, the BMM was a local movie show here in Salt Lake that aired every weekday afternoon back in the mid-70s or thereabouts. The host was a funny little guy named Bernie Calderwood; his job was to introduce the day's title and then, about midway through the show, to pull a phone number out of a rotating drum and call a lucky viewer at home. If the person answered and could tell Bernie what movie he was running or answer a trivia question or something, they won some cash (hence the "big money" part of the show's title).

As best I can recall, the selection of films was exactly what you'd expect for a mid-afternoon slot in a (then) small television market (I'd imagine we probably qualify as "mid-sized" now), i.e., anything the station could get for cheap. That meant beat-up prints of decades-old back-catalog classics and a lot of B-grade genre flicks. I saw a lot of movies on the old BMM that I still adore, but the ones that are really standing out in my memory this afternoon are the adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories that starred Vincent Price and were directed by the legendary Roger Corman.

The "Poe movies," as I think of them, are really amazing pieces of filmmaking: visually sumptuous and dripping with creepy atmosphere (if a bit sedate by modern standards) that become even more remarkable when you know the details of their creation. (Basically, they had budgets of about $1.98, but Corman cleverly "borrowed" sets, props, and costumes from A-level productions after they'd shut down for the day. Guerrilla filmmaking at its best, baby!) The films are rightly noted for their male stars, which included the always charming Price (he was in six of the seven Poe films produced by Corman) as well as Ray Milland, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone, not to mention a very young Jack Nicholson. But it was the female co-stars who drew much of my interest, even as a boy. They were, in a word, beautiful, voluptuous and powerfully feminine in a way that today's emaciated and generally plain-jane starlets simply cannot match. And one of the most memorable of these unsung heroines was the lady who appears in the photo above, Hazel Court. She appeared in three of the Poe films: The Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, and, most impressively, as a conniving and very bitchy Lenore in The Raven. (The still above, with a sleepy-looking Boris Karloff, is from The Raven.)

Hazel, unlike some of the younger actresses who appeared in these movies, was more than a pretty face and nice cleavage, though; she had real presence and was more than capable of shining alongside the Hollywood legends with whom she shared the screen. She's as much fun in The Raven as any of the "triad of terror" (Price, Karloff, and Lorre).

Hazel Court passed away last week at her home in Lake Tahoe; she was 82.

Posted by at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Ed. note: I know I'm a couple weeks late for the funeral and pretty much the entire blogosphere has already had its say on the late actor Charlton Heston, but I feel I would be highly remiss if I didn't recognize his passing here in my little corner of the InterWebs. So just imagine that it's two weeks ago and this is current news, okay?]

One of the great treasures of my childhood was the time I spent watching old movies on television with my mom. I'm thinking in particular of the days before the home video revolution, when the viewer actually had very little control over the viewing experience. If you didn't like whatever was on KSL's Big Money Movie that day, you found something else to do. And if you did like the film, you really had to pay attention and savor it because there was no telling when it might air again.

I think that's probably the biggest difference between The Way Things Used to Be and the on-demand world we now enjoy, the way we take it for granted that you can watch the same flick over and over, whenever you feel like it. When I was a kid, we just didn't have that luxury, and I honestly think movies meant more to film lovers back then because of the relative scarcity of any given title.

There were, however, three pictures that you could count on seeing pretty regularly, because they always aired at least once a year, usually around holidays: The Wizard of Oz, Ben-Hur, and The Ten Commandments. As it happened, my mom loved all three of them, and, in the case of the two Heston films, could even recall seeing them on the big screen when they were new. (Somewhere down in the Bennion Archives, I have the Ben-Hur souvenir program that she bought in the lobby of the late, lamented Villa Theatre way back in 1959.) Squashing these epic movies down into the confines of a 24-inch TV screen robbed them of much of their grandeur, of course, but I didn't fully understand that at the time. I thought they were neat, partly because watching them was an annual tradition, partly because my mom was so enthusiastic about them and my early tastes were heavily influenced by hers, but mostly because I liked Charlton Heston, who died April 5th at the age of 84.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Charlton Heston" »

Posted by at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The fraternity of actors who are forever identified with a particular, memorable line is a small one, and I often wonder how the members of that exclusive club feel about being so strongly associated with a single sentence uttered in the course of a single job. Did Bogie ever get tired of people shouting, "here's lookin' at you, kid!" from across the street? Did Brando cringe whenever some two-bit impressionist would "make somebody an offer they can't refuse?" And has even The Governator gotten tired of "I'll be back?" (Probably not, in the latter case.)

This question is on my mind because I'm wondering what Roy Scheider -- who died yesterday at the age of 75 after a long struggle with cancer -- would say about the fact that every obituary I've read today has referenced his famous dead-pan quip from Jaws: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

I hope he'd be amused by it, and maybe even proud. Jaws still holds up today, 33 years after its release, as a terrific adventure film -- it's not a horror movie, despite what most people think -- due in no small part to Scheider's contribution. His character, Chief Brody, is the Everyman, the non-expert, the guy the audience identifies with, because he doesn't know anything and he's terrified, just like we would be in the same situation. It makes the movie much more believable than it would be if Brody was some kind of uber-competent cartoon character, and that ultimately makes the film more effective in squeezing our adrenal glands.

Continue reading "Roy Scheider" »

Posted by at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of movie posters, I just read on PosterWire.com that the artist John Alvin has died. There's a more detailed article here. He was only 59.

Alvin was the man behind many of the best-remembered one-sheet designs of the '70s and '80s, including Young Frankenstein, Empire of the Sun, The Lost Boys, The Color Purple, and Gremlins. His posters for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Blade Runner are iconic.

As I've mentioned before, I started collecting one-sheets when I was working as an usher and later a projectionist for the local multiplex. Alvin was in full bloom during that period, and many of the posters he designed for movies we ran found their way into my Archives.

If you click over to this fan site, you're sure to recognize much more of his work than what I've linked to here. Alvin's style wasn't as recognizable as Drew Struzan's, but it also didn't suffer from the predictable quality of Struzan's work. (It's always fairly easy to tell which publicity still Struzan has copied a facial expression or a pose from, even though he does magical things with the image.) Alvin's images were frequently more graphical than portrait-like, using silhouettes instead of clear faces, for example, and clean patches of color with no detail in them. It was distinctive. And it was beautiful in its own regards.

Movie posters have always excited me, stirred my imagination, whetted my appetite for the cinematic experience to come, and reminded me of the good times I've had in the dark. Alvin's posters were especially good at accomplishing those tasks. I'll miss the work he may have done in the future.

Posted by at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And in other news, the death last month of actor Heath Ledger has been ruled an accidental overdose of several prescription medications. A statement from his family indicates that none of the drugs were taken in excess; rather, it was a fatal combination of ordinary meds taken at ordinary dosages. While I'm happy that this talented young man didn't commit the ultimate stupidity -- suicide and/or death by street drugs -- there is nevertheless something small and ignominious about this kind of thing.

As I've said before, what a damn shame.

Posted by at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I have to be honest, when I heard Heath Ledger had died of a drug overdose, my automatic assumption was that it was either (a) a deliberate suicide, or (b) a sordid Belushi-esque adventure with an illegal street high. Now it's looking more and more like it was merely an accident with prescription meds, and somehow that's even more pathetic than the thought of him nodding off forever with a needle in his arm. At least that would've been a "cool" death, "cool" in the sense of "the stupid and miserable thing that celebrities do, but at least he'll live on in infamy as a warning to others." Just mixing the wrong meds or taking one too many Seconal tabs, though... that's mundane, isn't it? I don't know... my feelings about that don't make a lot of sense even to me. I guess I'm hoping that I can sort them out by burning a few more electrons on the subject. Hope I'm not boring you all.

In any event, Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre made a few remarks that I find worth repeating:

It's not uncommon for us to feel more connected with famous people. We identify them with the characters they play and it's only natural that we think that a little bit of them comes out in each performance. So based on his movies, I liked Heath Ledger. Maybe he was an asshole, maybe he was a very nice man. Maybe he was the most humble actor to ever walk the face of this earth. I don't know, but I do know that Heath showed promise and that's enough. Promise cut down in its prime is truly tragic. And now in his absence, I am forced to imagine what could have been.

As I said the other day, I think Heath Ledger might have been one of the greats, in time. It's the same thing I thought when River Phoenix died, that he could've been so much and won't ever get the chance to do anything more than what he's already done. That's almost unutterably sad. I feel bad when one of the old-timers I've loved my entire life passes on, but at least they had their runs. The young ones, though... their deaths just suck.

Oh, and so do idiots who picket funerals because they think their religious beliefs (read: bigotry against all things homosexual, including a straight actor who just happened to play a gay man in a high-profile movie) gives them license to behave like disrespectful asshats. That's real Christian behavior, guys...

Posted by at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The news is flashing across the blogosphere at just under the speed of light, so you may have already heard: the actor Heath Ledger was found dead this afternoon in a Manhattan apartment, apparently of a drug overdose. He was only 28.

It's a sad and cliche'd end for a talented young man who I think had the potential to be one of the greats. I remember seeing him in a short-lived TV series called Roar way back in the early '90s -- I think I was one of about six people who actually watched that one -- and thinking "this kid has some presence, he's going to go somewhere." He was brilliant in Brokeback Mountain, in which he completely submerged himself into a character of few words who expresses everything physically, a difficult performance that few actors would even attempt. And based on the trailers I've seen for The Dark Knight, the upcoming sequel to Batman Begins, there's a good chance that his take on The Joker is going to eclipse even the immortal Jack Nicholson's version.

You know, there are some celebs that you expect this sort of thing from, and some you don't. Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan could OD tomorrow and I wouldn't feel at all surprised. Sad for their wasted lives perhaps, but not surprised. This one, though, coming out of the blue like this... wow. Like the death of River Phoenix fifteen years ago -- god, has it really been so long? -- this news has hit me like a hard fist to the stomach because I didn't realize until just this moment how much I really liked and respected the kid.

What a damn shame...

Posted by at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, crap... I just read that Floyd Red Crow Westerman, the Native American actor who played all the "wise old Indian man" roles over the past couple of decades, died earlier this week, too. He was 71.

Floyd is probably best known for playing Ten Bears, the kindly village elder in Dances With Wolves (still a great damn movie, and I won't hear any dissenting opinions just because Costner has fallen out of favor), but he really did turn up anywhere a similar type of role appeared: notably in the films Thunderheart, The Doors, and Hidalgo, and on television in Northern Exposure, Buffalo Girls, Dharma and Greg, and even The X Files. I used to joke that he had basically taken over all the parts that used to be played by Chief Dan George back in the '70s, but I think Westerman maybe had more of a presence than George did; he always radiated gentle wisdom and a warm, wry sense of humor, whereas George was often more taciturn and unknowable. I predict Westerman is going to be the popular image of an Indian sage for years to come.

Interestingly, the article I linked to above says he was a musician as well, and considered that his primary vocation. I didn't know that.

I write a lot of little obituaries for celebrities whose work has affected me in some way, but many of them are not necessarily people I ever had a desire to meet. Floyd Westerman is one of the ones I wish I had known.

Posted by at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a sad note on which to begin the week: Lois Maxwell, the elegant lady who bantered with three iterations of James Bond over a period of 22 years and 14 films, died over the weekend. She was 80. The LA Times obit is here.

Maxwell, who played the ever-hopeful Miss Moneypenny alongside Sean Connery, George Lazenby, and Roger Moore, was replaced by a younger actress for Timothy Dalton's first outing as 007 in The Living Daylights. Maxwell was 58 at the time, and I, for one, have always seen the change as something of an injustice. After all, Desmond Llewelyn played Q until he was quite elderly. Surely it wouldn't have been too far-fetched for M to have an older executive secretary for a few more installments in the series? Rather than recast her with someone younger, wouldn't it have been more interesting to change how Moneypenny relates to Bond as Maxwell aged, to make her more of a mothering presence than an object of flirtation? (Or, for that matter, why not be really daring and do both?) Sadly, the producers of the Bond series have rarely shown any true daring in the 40-plus-year history of the franchise, mostly preferring to stick to rote formula.

Nevertheless, I think it's telling that Maxwell's face is the one that immediately comes to mind when you hear the name "Moneypenny." No doubt that can be attributed, in part, to the fact that she played the character for so long and in so many entries in the series. By contrast, her two successors, Caroline Bliss and Samantha Bond (ironic name, eh?), have played Penny in only two and four films, respectively. But I think you can also argue that Maxwell stands out because of a something you don't see much anymore, an old-fashioned strain of genuine class. No disrespect to Bliss or Bond, but Maxwell simply had that civilized, grown-up, cocktails-and-jazz sort of quality that defined the movie stars of the early Cold War era. You just knew that if Moneypenny smoked (I can't recall if she did so in any of her Bond movies, but I could be wrong), she would keep her cigarettes in an enameled wooden box and light them with a crystal desk lighter. No crumpled paper packs or disposable Bics pulled from the bottom of a cluttered purse for her. And if you could manage to seduce her, the sex would be anything but casual, even if there were no strings attached.

Maybe Maxwell's interpretation of Moneypenny is passe now -- Bond himself has been reinvented for the 21st Century, and he doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to the character JFK was reputed to have enjoyed -- but her version will always be, for me, the definitive and classic one, just as Connery remains, in my mind, the one true 007. Even if Daniel Craig was damn good...

Posted by at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few of the things that've grabbed my attention in the last couple days:

Continue reading "Drive-By Blogging 4: Return of the Blog" »

Posted by at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Believe it or not, the primary focus of my fanboy energies throughout most of the 1990s was not the Star Wars saga. Really. I know it's hard to accept, but it really wasn't. It wasn't even Star Trek, despite all the various TV spin-offs running at that time. No, for the better part of the final decade of the 20th Century, I was seriously preoccupied by a fictional universe called Highlander.

Highlander is tough to explain to the uninitiated. It has a fairly bizarre premise to begin with, and its cause isn't helped by the fact that all the different properties that fall under the Highlander brand tend to contradict each other, or at the very least don't share the same continuity. I'm not going to go into all that in this entry -- I'll explore that topic some other time -- but what you need to know (if you don't already) is that the entire franchise originated with a 1986 movie and was revisited in a television series by the same name that ran from 1992 through 1998.

When Highlander: The Series ceased production in '98, The Girlfriend and I were sufficiently wrapped up in the whole scene that we flew to LA to attend a big farewell convention dedicated to the show. It was an exciting event -- the entire regular cast was in attendance, as well as a lot of the more prominent guest stars, and, of course, fans from all over the country.

Continue reading "Bill Panzer: That Guy in the Elevator" »

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Bob Clark, the director of one of my favorite holiday movies, A Christmas Story, was killed today in a car accident, along with his 22-year-old son Ariel. Their sedan was struck by a sport utility vehicle being driven by an unlicensed idiot who sustained only minor injuries. The idiot is expected to be booked on suspicion of driving under the influence and gross vehicular manslaughter. I hope they throw away the key.

The LA Times has the details of the accident and a brief obit here.

Continue reading "Bob Clark" »

Posted by at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just learned of the death of a Hollywood great you've probably never heard of, but whose contribution to classic cinema cannot be underestimated. Peter Ellenshaw was a special-effects master whose specialty was a now-defunct art called "matte painting."

Continue reading "Peter Ellenshaw" »

Posted by at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just learned that Mike Evans, the first actor to play Archie Bunker's neighbor and occasional antagonist Lionel Jefferson on All in the Family (there were two Lionels, you know), died a couple weeks ago at the age of 57. As with so many others I eulogize around here, it was the damned cancer that got him. What a shame -- 57 isn't very old, and I'm sure he had lots of living left to do.

Continue reading "Long-Delayed Tributes to the Departed" »

Posted by at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, this sucks: character actor Bruno Kirby has died of leukemia at the tender age of 57. Way too young for someone who still had so much to offer.

Continue reading "Bruno Kirby" »

Posted by at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today Lileks applies his usual mixture of insight and off-beat perspective to the late Barnard Hughes. As he always seems to do, he says something I wish I'd thought of for my own write-up on the man:

...He had been 70 years old for the last forty years of his life, it seemed. Perhaps he was cast as an old man long before he was old, and it stuck. Died at the age of 91, which meant he spent half a century as a septugenarian. Happens to some guys. Wilford Brimley, for example, got 15 years shaved off his life at some point; he was a middle-aged guy in “The China Syndrome,” and then he was an Old Coot (with a faint note of Old Fart) with nothing in between except an improbable role as a heavy in “The Firm.” If he ever got an Oscar he’d have to split it with his moustache, which does most of the work.

He also sums up Mickey Spillane, the low-brow mystery/crime writer who died this week, in a single, dead-on-target paragraph. It's worth a look...

Posted by at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've never seen Sayanora, the film for which Red Buttons won his Oscar in 1958, so I can't say anything about that. In fact, as I've tried to think of a signature Buttons role to hang this tribute on, I find I can't think of him in any specific part or film. He's simply one of the many familiar faces that I grew up recognizing on television and in movies, like Barnard Hughes. However, unlike Hughes, who stands out in my mind because of specific characters (or at least a specific character type) that he played, Buttons was always just... Red Buttons.

Continue reading "Red Buttons" »

Posted by at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was saddened to learn this morning that the veteran actor Barnard Hughes has died at the age of 90. He had a long career, stretching back to an uncredited role in a 1954 movie I've never heard of, Playgirl, but most people will recognize him from his more recent work playing various crusty old men with soft hearts.

Continue reading "Barnard Hughes" »

Posted by at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Character actor Paul Gleason, who died over the weekend at the age of 67, spent much of his career playing obnoxious, arrogant jerks who are destined for a come-uppance in the final reel. There was, for example, his character in Die Hard, Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson, who swaggers onto the scene and promptly makes a bad situation much, much worse. But, as every obituary on the 'net is noting, Gleason will be remembered for playing one specific jerk, Principal Richard Vernon in the exemplary Brat-Pack flick The Breakfast Club.

Continue reading "Paul Gleason" »

Posted by at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ah, man, it just keeps getting worse. I was following some links related to Phil Brown's death and stumbled across a little blurb that mentioned that William Hootkins -- a.k.a. Red Six, a.k.a. Porkins, a.k.a., "the fat X-wing pilot" in the original Star Wars -- died way back in October of last year. Another cancer victim, he was 58. At this point, I'm wondering how many cast members from the original trilogy are gone. I know Shelagh Fraser (Aunt Beru) passed on awhile ago, and of course Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) and Sir Alec Guiness (the original Obi-Wan, a.k.a. "Old Ben," Kenobi) have both been gone for several years. I may have to do some research on this subject...

Continue reading "William Hootkins, Too?" »

Posted by at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Oh, man, the news about Andreas Katsulas was sad, but this is downright depressing: Phil Brown, the actor who played Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen, has also died. He was 89.

Continue reading "Phil Brown" »

Posted by at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, this is a bummer: Peter David is reporting that Andreas Katsulas has died of cancer at the age of 59. Katsulas is one of those terrific character actors whose name you probably don't know, but whose face ought to be instantly familiar. He's done dozens of film and TV roles over the years, usually playing a heavy of some kind. Genre fans will remember him as Ambassador G'Kar on the cult-fave series Babylon 5, as well as the recurring character of Romulan Commander Tomalak on Star Trek: The Next Generation, while more mainstream movie-goers know him as the dastardly One-Armed Man in the Harrison Ford version of The Fugitive.

I wasn't a regular viewer of B5, but I caught it frequently enough to be impressed by Katsulas' talent. The character he played was a reptillian alien, requiring him to all but bury his distinctive features under make-up appliances, but his great power as an actor shone through all the latex, making G'Kar, curiously, one of the most sympathetic and emotional characters on the series. The character was tragic, filled with frustration and rage at the fate of his species but essentially noble and haunted by the things circumstance forced him to do. Katsulas was utterly convincing in the part, and that's saying something; not many actors are that good in extensive make-up, and most aren't any good at all.

I haven't found much in the way of official obituaries for him, but his B5 co-star Bill Mumy has a brief, fond note on his website, and Peter David's wife Kathleen tells a heartwarming tale that I think explains what kind of man he must've been as well as anything could.

Posted by at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By now, I'm sure everybody has probably heard about the death of actor Pat Morita over Thanksgiving weekend. The standard obits all highlight his role as the noble sensei Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, which I guess is appropriate since that film was such a huge pop-cultural landmark, especially for anyone who came of age during the '80s. (Come on, admit it: all of us '80s-kids experimented with Daniel-san's flying crane kick, didn't we? Or at least fanatasized about using it against those jerks who mocked us in gym class. Or am I revealing way too much about my own pathetic history?)

Oddly enough, however, the roles that come to my mind when I think of Morita are all smaller and more obscure.

Continue reading "Wax Off" »

Posted by at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The news is over a week old now, but I'd still like to acknowledge the recent death of Moustapha Akkad. He was the producer of the Halloween movies, the man who made certain that "the boogeyman," Michael Myers, kept coming back time and time again, long after the character's creator had moved on to other projects and the series itself had become something of a joke. Some would say that's nothing worthy of commemorating -- heaven knows I've done plenty of my own grumbling about endless strings of sequels that diminish the strengths and reputations of their original films with each new entry in the series -- but if it wasn't for Akkad's periodic trips back to Myers' well, I very possibly would not have met one of my best friends.

Continue reading "A Movie Producer, Slasher Flicks, and a Good Friendship" »

Posted by at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

All the standard obituaries for Brock Peters, the imposing actor who died yesterday at the age of 78, are emphasizing his role as Tom Robinson in the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird. But for me, he'll always be the voice of Darth Vader.

Continue reading "Brock Peters" »

Posted by at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Boy, this one is sad: Joe Ranft, part of the creative team at the computer animation film company Pixar, died yesterday in a horrific accident (he was a passenger in a car that went off a Southern California cliff into the ocean). He was only 45.

Most people have probably never heard of Ranft unless they're major animation buffs, but he was a big-time force behind four of Pixar's amazing raft of hits -- Toy Story and its sequel, A Bug's Life, and Monsters, Inc. all benefitted from his writing talents. He also provided character voices for several other Pixar films, most notably Heimlich, the overweight and food-obsessed caterpillar, in A Bug's Life. If you've watched the DVD supplements on any of those films, you'll likely recognize his face.

In addition, a check of his filmography reveals that he had a hand in several other significant animated films of recent years, including Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Disney's Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and the film that, as much as anything, is responsible for the modern renaissance of film animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. I myself am not a big fan of animated movies, but looking over this list I realize that I am a fan of most everything Joe Ranft worked on. What a bummer...

If you're interested in reading more, The Hollywood Reporter obituary is here, and the blog Cartoon Brew has rememberances and links to other relevant material here.

Posted by at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It may surprise some of my friends and loyal readers to learn that one of my favorite movies is... Smokey and the Bandit. Yes, I am talking about that 1977 ode to redneck tomfoolery and car-crashes, and yes, I know the movie is horrible in about nine hundred different ways -- not least of which is that it can be seen as the direct progenitor of the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard feature -- but, general stupidity and misbegotten descendents aside, SATB is one of the few movies guaranteed to bring me up when I've had a really rotten day. Burt Reynolds was a charming lead before he became overly fond of his own face, Sally Field was (and still is) a genuine cutie, the jokes are clever enough in an amiable, poke-you-in-the-ribs sort of way, and Jackie Gleason... well, what can I say about Jackie Gleason? The man was a friggin' genius. Nobody has ever done impotent, spluttering exasperation better than him, and the interplay between Gleason's Buford T. Justice and his idiotic son Junior never fails to crack me up.

There's another funny father-and-son team in the movie, too, which most people tend to forget about: Big and Little Enos Burdette, played by Pat McCormick and Paul Williams, respectively. If you'll recall, these are the two guys who hire the Bandit to make his famous beer-run to Texarkana. Well, I learned today that the "big" half of this team, Pat McCormick, passed away over the weekend at the age of 78.

Continue reading "Big Enos" »

Posted by at 3:17 PM | Permalink

Jimmy Doohan died this morning at the age of 85. It's hardly a shock -- he's been suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and made his final public appearance slightly under a year ago -- but it still hurts. My beloved Scotty has beamed off to whatever adventure awaits us all beyond this life, and another piece of my childhood is gone. I'm fighting back tears as I type this at an all-too-public computer.

Continue reading "The Word is Given..." »

Posted by at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well, here we go again... two more fine character actors that none of my readers will recognize by name have passed away. Oddly, both John Fiedler and Paul Winchell, who died within 24 hours of each other, are best known for working on the same projects, specifically Disney's "Winnie the Pooh" films. Winchell, who died Friday at the age of 86, was the voice of Tigger from 1968 until 1999, and it was he who coined Tigger's memorable catch-phrase "ta-ta for now!"

Meanwhile, Fiedler, who was 80 when he left us on Saturday, continued to play Pooh's gentle little buddy Piglet right up to this year's entry in the long-running franchise, Pooh's Heffalump Movie.

Continue reading "A Sad Day at Pooh Corner..." »

Posted by at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, now, this sucks -- I just learned that one of my favorite character actors, Lane Smith, has died.

He's one of those guys whose name you probably don't recognize, but you'd know his face instantly; he did a lot of movies in the '70s and '80s that qualify as minor classics, including Rooster Cogburn, Network, Prince of the City, Frances, Places in the Heart, and one of the most incredibly jingoistic and far-fetched (yet entertaining) movies to emerge from the Reagan Era, Red Dawn. More recently, he's appeared in lighter fare such as My Cousin Vinny, The Mighty Ducks, and Son-in-Law, which has the dubious distinction of being the only Pauly Shore movie that is remotely watchable.

Fans of genre TV will remember Smith as Nathan Bates, the power-hungry industrialist who collaborated with the alien Visitors in V: The Series, as well as the Elvis-obsessed editor Perry White in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Also, all the obituaries I've scanned note that Smith played Nixon in a TV miniseries called The Final Days, which I'm sorry to say I've never seen. (Personally, I tend to picture him in the opening credits of V, parked behind a big desk with an oily smile, an ugly suit, and a cigar the size of a car muffler.)

The best obituary I've found indicates that he died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. I mention this little factoid only because I've had some personal experience with ALS, and my ears tend to prick up when I hear of someone being afflicted with it. Trust me, it's not a pretty way to go, and it breaks my heart that this talented man had to face such a miserable end.

For the record, he was 69 years old, only a few years older than my parents and way too damn young for this...

Posted by at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Mr. Jordan has been busy lately -- the latest person to wander into his presence is Ossie Davis, a wonderful stage-and-screen actor and all-round impressive human being who died last week at the age of 87.

I can't remember for sure when I first became aware of Mr. Davis -- he worked so steadily throughout his long life that it seems like he's just always been there, somewhere -- but I think I connected his name to his face when he co-starred in a short-lived TV series called B.L. Stryker. Stryker was a would-be comeback vehicle for Burt Reynolds, a rather unremarkable detective series in the Magnum/Rockford Files mode. It didn't go anywhere, obviously, but it did lead to a longer-term job for both Ossie and Burt, the amiable sitcom Evening Shade, which I remember watching pretty regularly in the early '90s (although I'll be damned if I can remember much of what it was about).

The thing I liked about Ossie Davis was that he always seemed to radiate warmth and dignity, no matter how minor or ridiculous the project. Case in point is one of his final films, Bubba-Ho-Tep, a bizarre cross-breeding of horror, comedy and social commentary in which Davis played a character who claimed he was John F. Kennedy, despite the fact that he was obviously still alive. And black. When questioned on these points by his fellow retirement-home inhabitant, Elvis Presley (who also is still alive, by the way, at least in this filmic universe), "Jack" explains that the assasination was faked and the CIA dyed him black before dumping him in the worst, most anonymous old-folks' home in Texas. Pretty silly stuff -- and this is even before the ancient Egyptian mummy shows up and begins to feed on the souls of the old folks! -- but Davis plays Jack as, well, presidential. It's a wonderful performance in a movie that many actors wouldn't have taken at all seriously. I think that says all you need to know about the sort of man Davis was... however, if you would like to know more about the remarkable life of a remarkable man, check out Roger Ebert's fine eulogy.