Recently in In Memoriam Category

I've just learned that 2012 began with the passing yesterday of the legendary swordmaster Bob Anderson, who trained and/or doubled for every Hollywood swashbuckler from Errol Flynn to Orlando Bloom during his long life. Mr. Anderson was an Olympic fencer who started working in movies in the 1950s as a stunt double on Errol Flynn's Master of Ballantrae. (He was notoriously known for a time as "the man who stabbed Errol Flynn" because of a minor on-set accident.) Of somewhat more relevance to we nerdy Gen-Xers, Anderson doubled for Dave Prowse as Darth Vader during the climatic lightsaber duels in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. (He wasn't credited, but no less a source than Mark Hamill -- the guy on the other end of Vader's saber -- has reported it was so.) He also trained actors and choreographed fights for The Princess Bride, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the 1993 version of The Three Musketeers (that'd be the one with Charlie Sheen and Keifer Sutherland), the two Antonio Banderas Zorro flicks, and, of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. He even trained Lindsay Lohan, of all people, for a scene in the remake of Disney's The Parent Trap.

Anderson's work first came to my attention as a result of my mid-1990s obsession with the Highlander franchise -- he was Sean Connery's fight double in the original Highlander film, and he worked with the star of the Highlander TV series, Adrian Paul, during that show's first season. As I read up on him, I was impressed by how many of my favorite films he'd had a hand in. In a sense, he's had more influence on my cinematic tastes than any other single individual. What an amazing career this man had.

Anderson was 89 years old.

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.

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:

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:

The actor Robert Culp, who unexpectedly died a couple weeks ago at the age of 79, has long struck me as an example of an increasingly rare type of American male. Like Peter Graves, who also recently passed away, Culp always seemed to project an air of confident masculinity. Or masculine confidence, if you'd prefer. Either way, he was a good old-fashioned "man's man." Not macho, with all the arrogance, cruelty, and phoniness often implied by that term, and not misogynistic, either, but simply a man who had no hang-ups about being a man. It was a trait of his generation, I think, something as instinctive for them as breathing. And they were the last generation for whom carrying the Y chromosome would come so easily.

Now, I've got nothing against feminism per se -- I think the women's movement of the '60s and '70s was both necessary and generally resulted in positive change -- but it did make being a man considerably more complicated for those males who grew up in the aftermath, especially those of us who looked to pop culture for guidance. What the hell were we supposed to be like, anyway? The sensitive Alan Alda/Phil Donohue intellectual types that were lauded in the '70s as "the new man," or the reactionary, bodybuilding action heroes who took over the big screen in the '80s? How can we be kind and noble without being self-loathing and tortured, strong without being hypermasculinized caricatures? I'm 40 years old and I'm still trying to find the proper balance between those extremes, to figure out just what being a man is all about.

But guys like Robert Culp, Peter Graves, Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Clint Eastwood -- God, yes, Clint! -- they just seemed to come into the world already knowing. No, that's not quite right... they wouldn't have even wondered how to be a man. They simply were. And that I think is the secret of their enduring appeal, the reason why we still think they're cool even now, years after the prime of their careers and even, in many cases, their deaths. I admire men like this, and I envy them. And I'm really starting to miss them now that there are so few of them left.

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...

That's sad news about actor Andrew Koenig, the son of Star Trek's Walter Koenig. If you haven't been following the story, Andrew disappeared on February 14, after visiting friends in Vancouver. His family, friends, and fans initially hoped he was just going off the grid for a while to sort some things out, but as more details have trickled out over the past week, the grim conclusion to this story started to seem both obvious and inevitable: his father received a letter from him in which he sounded "despondent"; he'd recently dropped the lease on his LA apartment and sold or given away a lot of his possessions; he'd also turned down a couple of job offers. And Vancouver was reportedly a place where he'd been happy earlier in his life. So the discovery yesterday that he had committed suicide in one of that city's parks was not at all unexpected. But I still found it deeply sorrowful.

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.

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.

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.