Simple Tricks and Nonsense

I don't know why I feel compelled to observe the deaths of celebrities the way I do. I only know that I always have, going all the way back to a couple of brief sentences I scribbled in an old pocket calendar on the day Elvis Presley died in 1977. (I was seven years old at the time.) A former girlfriend once told me she thought I was morbid for having such an interest in the passing of people I didn't even know. I see it differently, of course. No, I didn't personally know the people I write tributes for, but that doesn't mean I feel no attachment to them, no grief at the thought that they're gone, or that their lives -- or at least their work -- has had no direct effect on my own. Given my interests and obsessions, movie and television actors, novelists, screenwriters, artists, composers, and rock stars have often had more effect on me than many of my own relatives.

In any event, a lot of things got away from me in 2010, including a great many topics I wanted to blog about, and my patented celebrity obits comprise a pretty large subset of those lost blogging opportunities. That's a tremendous source of frustration for me; I feel like I've failed at some kind of calling, as pretentious and self-important as that probably sounds. But I feel what I feel, right?

To try and make up a little for my "In Memoriam" failings, I will now present a list of all the celebrities who died in 2010 that I felt worthy of mentioning. They all deserve more than a bullet point, but I'm afraid that's all I have time to give them. A handful of them did get a little more, up toward the first of the year, before the Summer Work Apocalypse got its claws into me. Those people's names are hyperlinked to the relevant posts.

And to anyone who may agree with that long-gone girl and thinks I'm being morbid, I assure you I really did feel some connection to everyone on this list, even if it was simply a sense of familiarity due to their faces being on TV all the time as I was growing up.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: 2010 Super Retrospective Edition" »

Posted by at 10:00 PM | Permalink

A number of blogs have already commented on yesteday's passing of film-music composer John Barry, aged 77, and I have little more to contribute except to note that a number of his scores rank among my all-time favorite music of any genre. (Yes, this formerly mullet-wearing rock-and-roll fan does have other musical interests, believe it or not!) Everyone seems to be focusing on Barry's work for the James Bond films, but personally I love the moody atmosphere he brought to The Black Hole and the languid romanticism of both Out of Africa and Raise the Titanic (a near-universally panned film, but a lovely soundtrack).

Barry's music was big and sentimental and it often took its time to develop a theme, making it perfectly suited for epic movies that wear their emotions on their sleeves -- sadly, a type of film that nobody seems interested in making anymore. It's therefore fitting that his last truly great work (in my admittedly biased opinion) was the soundtrack for one of the last great sentimental epics, Dances with Wolves. Oh, stop sneering. I know Dances has never been appreciated by the hipster movie-snob crowd, but for me it has always been and still remains deeply moving. It came along at just the right time in my life, I guess, to fully resonate with me on every imaginable level. And Barry's music for the film -- from the brutal staccato that accompanies the Pawnee attacks to the tender innocence of Two Socks' theme to the blood-thumping grandeur of the buffalo hunt -- is nothing short of sublime.

My favorite music from the movie, though -- my favorite Barry piece, period -- is listed on the Dances soundtrack album as "Journey to Ft. Sedgewick," comprising Lt. Dunbar's travels across the Great Plains with the grubby muleskinner Timmons early in the film. This piece evokes so much for me: an undefined yearning, a restless curiosity, wanderlust, the excitement of someplace new, the nobility of open spaces, the physical sensation of gazing upon beauty and feeling very small but in a satisfying way... I find this piece immensely uplifting, and of course it brings back a lot of memories of a long-past time in my life when Dances with Wolves was the big event and it was always the golden hour. If you want to know what I was like at the age of 21 -- what I hope I'm still like in my better moments -- it's all right here:

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink

I was just looking through my clippings file -- yes, I'm a big enough nerd that I keep a file of stuff I'd like to blog about! -- and I see quite a few items I've been meaning to comment on for a while, but haven't yet gotten around to. Here's a selection of them, briefly noted:

Continue reading "A Little Spring Cleaning" »

Posted by at 5:43 PM | Permalink

No disrespect intended, but I wasn't much of a fan of the actor Corey Haim. I was a couple years too old and had one Y chromosome too many to share the enthusiasm of the Tiger Beat demographic for him and his partner-in-crime, Corey Feldman. In fact, I can recall seeing only one of his movies, and it's the same one everyone else saw, The Lost Boys. Oh, and also a nearly forgotten but sweet little movie called Murphy's Romance, in which he played the son of Sally Field.

Still, if you had any awareness at all of pop culture in the late '80s, you had to know who he was. He was as much a part of the texture of that era as jelly bracelets and Aqua Net, a familiar and likable-enough presence hovering somewhere in my peripheral vision, if not somebody to whom I paid a lot of attention. So, being the huge bleeding heart that I am, I felt genuinely bad when I learned a couple years ago just what a wreck he'd made of himself after the Awesome '80s melted down into the Ironic '90s. Yes, I admit I was an occasional viewer of The Two Coreys, a squirm-inducing reality series that revealed the grown-up Corey Haim as a bloated, dissolute, unhappy man who barely resembled the apple-cheeked kid in the photo above. I didn't see a single episode of that show in which Haim didn't reminisce about The Lost Boys, obviously his personal high-water mark, and I found -- somewhat to my surprise -- that I had a great deal of compassion for the former teen idol whose career and life peaked before he was old enough to buy cigarettes. I've struggled enough to find my own path in life that I feel for anyone who is so visibly lost as Haim appeared to be.

When I heard the news of his death early this morning of an apparent drug overdose... well, I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Frustration, perhaps, at the pointless waste of a life. I certainly wasn't surprised. It seems an inevitable and perhaps even an appropriate outcome for this particular life. Corey Haim, like so many others who are given everything at an early age by an exploitative industry that has no conscience and then have it all cruelly snatched away again, seemed to be happy only when he had the public's attention. And nothing grabs attention like the final flicker of a burnt-out star.

Haim was 38, two years younger than me. For anyone else, I'd say he had a lot of years ahead of him; in this case, though, I think it was the years behind him that mattered most. At least to him. I may be guilty of frequent and maybe even excessive bouts of nostalgia, but -- in spite of how it sometimes appears on this blog -- I'm not spellbound by my past the way this poor slob was.

I'm sad for him and his inability to find some way to move on, but in a weird way, I think I feel even sadder for Corey Feldman, who has always been so closely equated to his costar, so interchangeable, that he reportedly felt the need to tweet that he wasn't the one who had died. (His Twitter feed appears to have evaporated; at least, I can't find it to confirm this.) I can't imagine the sorrow he must be feeling tonight. And I can't help but wonder what effect this might have on him. I hope I won't be writing another of these entries for the other Corey anytime soon...

Posted by at 10:17 PM | Permalink

Further evidence of that unsettling notion that celebrity deaths always come in threes: the completely out-of-the-blue demise of actress Brittany Murphy yesterday at the age of 32. I wasn't exactly a fan -- I've only seen one of her movies that I can recall, and my favorite role of hers was the voice of Hank Hill's dimwitted-but-sweet trailer-trash niece on the animated TV series King of the Hill -- but I always found her likable enough, and pretty in a normal, suburban kind of way. I've heard some accounts that she could be difficult to work with, which perhaps explains why she hasn't had many film roles recently after being touted as the Next Big Thing only a few years ago, but I never got that impression from her in the occasional interviews I saw. Certainly she didn't come across as one of the no-class, arrogant, boozy-floozy types that comprise Young Hollywood these days.

So far, it appears that her death was natural, if freakishly sudden. The LA Times obit is here, for any who may be interested.

Posted by at 10:11 PM | Permalink

More sad news for genre fans Of a Certain Age: Via SamuraiFrog, I've learned that writer, director, production designer, and occasional actor Dan O'Bannon has died at the still-too-young age of 63.

O'Bannon's biggest claim to fame is, quite correctly, writing the screenplay for the landmark movie Alien, from a story by himself and Ron Shusett. (It was O'Bannon's disturbing idea to have the monster gestate inside a human host, like certain wasps and other parasitical animals right here on Earth.) But he also had a hand in many other fondly remembered (if not particularly significant) sci-fi and horror films of the '70s and '80s. He wrote two of the best sequences in the animated anthology Heavy Metal -- "Soft Landing" and "B-17," both of which I discussed here -- as well as John Badham's super-helicopter movie Blue Thunder, which directly inspired the TV series Airwolf. (O'Bannon, always outspoken and quick to grumble about perceived slights, has long said that Badham dumbed down his highly political screenplay into a simplistic action flick.) He also penned a pair of cult-classic B-movies, both directed by horror icon Tobe Hooper: Lifeforce, about energy-sucking vampires from space, and the 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars. And he directed the horror spoof Return of the Living Dead, which introduced the pitiful cry of "Braaaaaiiiins..." to the zombie mythos.

O'Bannon claimed credit for about two-thirds of the Schwarzenegger-on-Mars flick Total Recall; his story is that co-writer Shusett jettisoned his final act and substituted the ridiculous mess that pissed me off back in 1990 and now just makes me roll my eyes the way you do when your harmlessly senile granny starts rambling about the little man who lives in her pantry. And, for you Lucasfilm fans out there, O'Bannon designed and animated most of the tactical computer displays in the original Star Wars film.

All of those achievements aside, though, my first thought when I heard the news of his passing was of Sergeant Pinback, the lovably hapless buffoon he played in John Carpenter's first movie, Dark Star.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Dan O'Bannon" »

Posted by at 1:33 PM | Permalink

I'm a bit chagrined at being a week late with this item, but then I still haven't written anything for Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, or Patrick Swayze, so what's a mere seven days for an actor few of my readers will probably recognize? Even so, I've gotten very tired of feeling like I'm constantly trying to catch up on things. This blog isn't really intended to deal in up-to-the-minute news, but I would like to get back to some sense of being current, for my own sanity if nothing else. Maybe in 2010.

In any event, I learned from Evanier last Friday that the actor Gene Barry had died a couple days earlier. My initial reaction was surprise; I hadn't realized he was even still with us, it'd been so long since I'd seen him in anything. This was followed by a wave of profound sadness, as Barry's was one of those familiar faces it seems I've known my entire life. I don't recall my exact age the first time I saw the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds, in which Barry starred, but I know I was very, very young. It was on the old Big Money Movie show that used to run weekday afternoons on one of my local TV stations, and I think that show was finished by the mid-70s, so I'm going to guess I was around five or six, tops. The movie made a huge, indelible impression on me, and Gene Barry's performance as Dr. Clayton Forrester was one of the many reasons why.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Gene Barry" »

Posted by at 11:47 PM | Permalink

Dear Mr. Vernon,

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make use write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain... and an athlete... and a basket case... a princess... and a criminal. Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours,
The Breakfast Club

To those of us who were teenagers in the 1980s, John Hughes was a spiritual big brother. Not a father figure with the accompanying implications of authority, because fatherhood was usually represented in his movies as benign indifference, if not outright absenteeism, and authority figures in general were foolish and petty. No, he was our buddy, the cool grown-up guy who was still close enough to us in sensibility, if not actual age, to talk to us about things that mattered without bullshitting us. In a decade filled with dumb movies populated by ersatz teens who were some corporate cigar-chomper's idea of what we were like, Hughes' flicks stood out because he knew what teens were really like. Sure, Sixteen Candles is a farcical cartoon, and Sam, Farmer Ted, and Jake Ryan are broad caricatures intended to represent different high school cliques, but they all have a spark of authenticity at their core. They're all volatile mixtures of bravado and vulnerability. Everyone in the movie is desperate to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing. Even the cool kid, Jake, is unsure of his place within his particular clique, and he's tired of the games he's forced to play by the cultural stratum in which he exists. They're all striving to fit in, to gain approval and validation, to experience something genuine instead of just going through the motions. I knew kids just like them; I was a kid just like them. We all were.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: John Hughes" »

Posted by at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It's probably very bad form to mention this under these circumstances, but I have to be honest: it's been years since I thought Dom DeLuise -- who passed away last week at the age of 75 -- was funny. I used to, a long time ago. But somewhere along the line, I guess I just sort of got tired of his brand of bumbling silliness. Probably around the time he was making all those tedious and painfully self-indulgent movies with Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham. Just thinking about his "Captain Chaos" character in The Cannonball Run is enough to make wince. Ugh.

But as I said, there was a time when I thought he was very funny indeed, and that was in the early '80s when he was one of the few comedic actors who could actually make my dad laugh. Dad's always been a tough nut to crack when it comes to comedy; it's not that he has no sense of humor at all, it's just very, very hard to push his humor buttons. The one thing that seems capable of doing it with any consistency is a good fart joke. A good fart joke -- and good ones are surprisingly rare, actually -- can reduce my father to helpless, tearful gasping on the floor.

Dom DeLuise gets off a good fart joke -- as well as a belch joke and a number of other gags based on general slovenliness -- in Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I, where he played a flatulent, venal, gluttonous, horny, petulant, and incredibly bored Roman Emperor. I knew it was a good joke because Dad insisted on rewinding the film -- this wasn't too long after we discovered the wonders of home video -- about a dozen times, until he was, as I described, helpless and gasping on the living room floor with tears rolling down his cheeks. I suspect we probably wore out that particular groove of the RCA videodisc we'd rented from Sharon's TV and Appliance down the street. Mom and I had stopped laughing on about the fifth viewing, but Dad was having so much fun it seemed churlish to tell him to let the damn thing resume playing.

Looking around the 'net, I've seen many stories about what a nice guy Dom was, and I'm pleased to hear that. He was apparently loved by everyone who was fortunate enough to meet him, and you can't ask much more of a life than that. Even though I personally outgrew his schtick, I always liked him, and I cherish the memory he gave me of my dad, clicking that rewind button over and over and over, and laughing just as uproariously at Dom breaking wind and scratching himself with the imperial scepter every single time. Thanks for that, Dom...

Posted by at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Mark Evanier lists those who were not included in this year's "in memoriam" video at the Oscars:

Patrick McGoohan was in some pretty good movies and George Carlin was in more than you might think...but neither was included. Nor was Eartha Kitt. Nor was composer Neal Hefti. Nor were Harvey Korman, Earle Hagen, Mel Ferrer, Alexander Courage, John Phillip Law, Irving Brecher, George Furth, Beverly Garland or Guy McElwaine. There were several studio execs and one publicist included but not Bernie Brillstein.

But the startling omission, of course, was Don LaFontaine, who not only became a superstar of movie trailers but also served as the announcer of the Oscars several years.

I noticed LaFontaine's absence myself and thought that was deeply weird; I honestly did not remember that many of the others Mark mentions had died in '08. I wonder why people get left out of these things? I imagine there are time constraints that prevent the listing of everybody who passes on during any given year, but what determines whether someone is worthy of inclusion? It can't be because the missing stars aren't big enough. Lots of people would know Patrick McGoohan, George Carlin, and Harvey Korman, surely...

Posted by at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For anyone who was annoyed with the way the "in memoriam" montage was handled on this year's Oscar broadcast, here it is as it should've been done on TV, with no annoying cutaways or zooms:

I thought it was nice they included Vampira, who was hardly a big star outside of cult-film circles but was beloved by those who like that sort of thing.

Posted by at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It is one of the great injustices of Hollywood history that Ricardo Montalban -- who passed away last week at the age of 88 -- never became a big star. Oh sure, he worked pretty steadily from the 1940s through the '80s and continued to make appearances or voiceovers in various things right on up to the present (according to IMDB, he did an episode of Family Guy just last year). Just about everyone knew his name and silky voice, and we all loved him. But looking through his filmography, it appears that he was rarely the lead, the hero. Even in Fantasy Island, the late-70s/early-80s television series for which most people probably remember him these days, he got only a few minutes of screentime per episode. He functioned on that show very much like Rod Serling in the old Twilight Zones: all he did was set up the plot for that week's episode, maybe pop back in midway through to provide some encouragement or vital information, and then he summed up the moral of the story at the end. The real stars of that show were the rotating assortment of has-beens and B-listers who were actually doing things in the stories.

And yet... he always seemed like a big star, didn't he? He just had that air about him, a larger-than-life quality that came from his apparently effortless elegance, his good looks, and a masculinity that was unapologetic but never cruel or bullying, as traditionally macho types can so often become. You can seen what I'm talking about in that photo up at the top, which comes from one of the many ads he did for Chrysler in the '70s. (If you're of a certain age, you will, of course, instantly recognize the term "Corinthian leather," even though there's really no such thing; sorry, kids, it was all just an exercise in marketing.) Montalban exuded the old-fashioned, magnetic charisma of the Golden Age of Hollywood: like Clark Gable or Errol Flynn, he appealed equally to women and men, and probably for the same reasons. He radiated strength and mystery, but wasn't threatening to we lesser mortals. He was quite simply, employing a word that I can't imagine a man of Montalban's generation comfortably using, cool.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Ricardo Montalban" »

Posted by at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Girlfriend just called me at home to ask if I'd heard the news: Forrest J. Ackerman, the original and possibly greatest fanboy of us all, died yesterday at the age of 92.

I imagine a lot of my readers probably have no idea who old Forry is, but to those of us who travel in certain rarefied circles, the man is a legend. He founded the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland way back in 1958; it was, so far as I know, the first professional publication devoted exclusively to genre movies. He was a writer and editor, and a literary agent for such giants of science-fiction literature as Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, and Hugo Gernsback (for whom the distinguished Hugo Awards are named). Forry was the first to publish a short story by some kid named Ray Bradbury. And he is credited with coining the term "sci fi," much to the chagrin of a certain strain of too-serious-for-their-own-good fans who think this contraction of "science fiction" too undignified and childish.

But most of all, Forry is known for collecting stuff. To every fan with a basement full of cherished memorabilia, Forry is our spiritual godfather. He spent his entire life amassing books, magazines, posters, original art, movie props and costumes -- anything and everything that had to do with his beloved horror, sci fi, and fantasy genres. His collection at one time reportedly comprised 300,00 pieces, and was valued in the mid-1960s at $10 million in today's money.

Some people, maybe even most people who had a collection like that would treat it as a mere investment, keep it to themselves, and worry constantly about its worth and safety. Forry, however, and to his great credit, was always happy to share it with whomever was interested. I've heard that all you had to do was show up at his California home, the "Ackermansion," on a Saturday morning, and he would greet you at the door in Bela Lugosi's Dracula cape and take you on the grand tour. Anne and I talked several times of making our own pilgrimage to the Ackermansion but just never got around to it.

Sadly, Forry's collection is mostly gone now, sold off a little at a time over the past decade to cover medical and legal expenses. It's a damn shame. To paraphrase Indiana Jones, all that stuff belonged in a museum as a monument to one man's life and passion, and to a big chunk of Hollywood and publishing history. C'est la vie, I suppose. (For the record, I'm proud to own a small piece of Forry's collection, a few American Cinematographer magazines I purchased off eBay a while back when I heard he was liquidating his stash.)

I never had the opportunity to meet Forrest Ackerman, and that is something I will long regret. He was, by all accounts, one of the truly good guys of this world. And probably of several others, too, given his life's pursuits. His LA Times obit is here; an older piece containing more information about his collection is here.

Rest in peace, Dr. Acula...

Posted by at 3:23 PM | Permalink

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 (1)

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

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

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

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 (8)

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (1)

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 (5)

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

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.

Posted by at 12:57 PM | Permalink

The actor John Vernon has has died at the age of 72. You may not recognize the name, but you'll know the face as soon as you click that link. As all the obituaries are noting, he had a long film career and appeared in some very well-known flicks, including Dirty Harry and The Outlaw Josey Wales, so you've no doubt caught him in something. According to Mark Evanier, he even did some voice work in cartoons, playing the superheroes Iron-Man and The Sub-Mariner in the '60s, and more recently performing multiple characters in the Pinky and the Brain shorts. But the role for which he's going to be remembered, the one mentioned in most of the headlines I've seen, is Dean Wormer in Animal House.

One of my favorite comedies, Animal House was a true Hollywood success story, a low-budget mess of a movie with modest ambitions and a largely unknown cast. It became a monster hit largely because of its own audacity, and the willingness of everyone involved to wallow in crassness. (It didn't hurt that it was genuinely funny.) The film made John Belushi a big-screen star, launched Kevin Bacon's career, and established a template that would be used by many successful comedies over the next ten years. There are elements of Animal House in Caddyshack, the Revenge of the Nerds movies, the Police Academy series, and even in Ghostbusters, and none is more recognizable than the killjoy authority figure prototyped by Vernon's Dean Wormer. The thing that sets Wormer apart from the characters that followed, however, was a streak of genuine sadism -- Wormer wasn't simply a snobby, by-the-book servant of The Establishment. He genuinely enjoyed repressing, bullying, and crushing those who didn't live up to his image of "the right kind of people." Vernon played the role to the hilt, using a smug expression and gleefully sarcastic delivery to create a truly hateful human being. Wormer's come-uppance is one of the most satisfying resolutions ever put on film.

I have no idea what Vernon was like in Real Life -- I don't recall ever seeing him interviewed -- but nine times out of ten it seems like the nastiest characters are portrayed by the nicest people. I'd like to imagine that John Vernon prototyped that role as well...

Posted by at 1:34 PM | Permalink

I just heard that actor Jerry Orbach died yesterday of prostate cancer. Damn shame, on so many levels. He was only 69, just a few years older than my mom, and his cancer was apparently discovered too late for treatment.

He was one of our finest character actors, a familiar face that has been appearing in stage, television, and film work for years. He appeared in 42nd Street and Chicago on Broadway, was the voice of Lumiere in Disney's Beauty and the Beast (the film, not the stage musical), and starred in TV's Law and Order for twelve years. Despite all these roles, however, my first thought on hearing the news was that Baby's dad from Dirty Dancing was gone.

Continue reading "Jerry Orbach" »

Posted by at 6:30 PM | Permalink

They say that celebrity deaths always come in clusters of three. I have no idea why this would be so, but it certainly does seem that way if you follow the Hollywood obituaries. A former girlfriend once called me morbid because I follow them. All I could tell her by way of explanation was that the deaths of people who've done work I care about matter to me. True, I may not know these people on any kind of genuine personal level, but I feel like I do know at least an aspect of them through their work, and I mourn the fact that there will be no new work from them once they are gone.

Few celebrity deaths, however, matter more to me than the one I learned about late this evening: Christopher Reeve, the man who was Superman for the children of my generation, died Sunday of heart failure, following a cardiac arrest and resulting coma the previous day. This one really hurts, kids...

Continue reading "Christoper Reeve" »

Posted by at 2:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So far, all of the tributes I've seen for Rodney Dangerfield, who died yesterday at the age of 82, have made use of his famous "I get no respect" line to paint Rodney's comic persona as an everyman loser, a guy who was constantly putting himself down. The words "self-deprecating" have occured in so many of these pieces that I'm starting to think there's some kind of contractual obligation involved with their usage.

However, I would argue that "self-deprecating loser" isn't how most people of my generation experienced Rodney Dangerfield. Maybe that description was true of his stand-up act, but We who came of age in the '80s first encountered his bug-eyed visage in the movies, specifically in two movies: Caddyshack and Back to School. He played a similar character in both, a fun-loving but unbelievably obnoxious guy with money to burn.

Continue reading "Rodney Dangerfield" »

Posted by at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Another icon of the silver screen has taken her final bow. This time, it's Janet Leigh, a fine actress who will forever be remembered for a single scene in one of Alfred Hitchcock's best-remembered films, Psycho. Leigh died on Sunday after a year-long illness, age 77.

Continue reading "Janet Leigh" »

Posted by at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Another great Hollywood artist, composer Elmer Bernstein, has passed away at the age of 82. Bernstein probably isn't too well known to folks my age. His themes aren't as flashy as those of John Williams, and he was never attached to any big genre flicks like Jerry Goldsmith. Nevertheless, he contributed to a number of important classic films, including The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape. He also wrote the jaunty incidental music for Ghostbusters, without which Bill Murray's antics wouldn't be nearly as funny...

Posted by at 10:08 AM | Permalink

I'm a few days late in writing about this, but nevertheless I must note the passing of a Hollywood icon, the actress Fay Wray, who died this past Sunday at the age of 96.

Continue reading "Fay Wray" »

Posted by at 3:38 PM | Permalink

Given the huge amount of behind-the-scenes material now available to even the most casual movie fans in the form of DVD supplements and cable-TV programming, it saddens me to note how little of it pays tribute to film music. Music is one of the most underappreciated elements of quality filmmaking; while everyone oohs and ahhs over the latest visual spectacle to emerge from the special effects shops, only the most hard-core cinephile gives any thought at all to a movie's score.

Continue reading "Jerry Goldsmith" »

Posted by at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was planning to write this morning about one of the more eccentric aspects of living in Utah, namely the way Utahns celebrate Independence Day on July 3rd if the 4th falls on a Sunday (except, of course, for the rebellious "in-Utah-but-not-of-Utah" towns of Park City and Moab, which stubbornly insist on holding their festivities on the actual declared holiday). However, I've just read something on the 'net that is far more important to me personally than all that theologically-inspired scheduling nonsense: the great Marlon Brando has died.

Continue reading "Brando" »

Posted by at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In addition to the rocket launch I mentioned in the last post, there is also sad news on the 'net today. One of the faces I grew up with, the terrific Tony Randall, has passed away. Randall is best known for playing neat-freak Felix Unger on the TV version of The Odd Couple, and it's mostly from this show that I know him. I fondly remember watching TOC with my folks. Randall inhabited the role so successfully that when I saw the original Odd Couple film in later years, I had a hard time accepting Jack Lemmon in the role. I recently saw a few re-runs of TOC and was disapppointed to find that they don't play as well now as I remember them -- this is always a problem with seeing something that you loved as a kid, and if you don't believe me, just try sitting through an episode of Gilligan's Island these days -- but Randall was still funny.

Continue reading "Tony Randall" »

Posted by at 2:23 PM | Permalink