In Memoriam: Jackie Burch

It only took a century, but this year the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences finally added an award for Best Achievement in Casting. To commemorate the occasion, the Oscar ceremony did not simply enlist a couple big names to banter while presenting the inaugural award but brought out a cast member from each nominated movie to say a few words on behalf of his or her casting director. The idea’s heart was in the right place, but the words did not match the moment, too many of them to not say much of anything at all, at least not much of anything until Delroy Lindo brought it home on behalf of “Sinners.” “In ‘Sinners,’” Lindo said, “every character feels universal, distinct, fully lived in. Yet together they form something much larger: a living, breathing world. That didn’t happen by accident.” That, I literally said while pointing at the TV, was all you needed to say! Engrave that on the award! Still, on some level I understand so many futile attempts to sum it up with words because when it comes to casting, it’s right there on the screen.

The first-ever casting Oscar went to Cassandra Kulukundis for “One Battle After Another,” and in her speech, she noted her long working relationship with director Paul Thomas Anderson, serving as the casting director for all his movies dating back to 1999’s “Magnolia.” She was a casting associate on PTA’s second feature film, “Boogie Nights,” on which Christine Sheaks was credited as Casting Director. That is the movie I have always considered an exemplar of modern movie casting. Sheaks epitomized Lindo’s observation that a casting director helps to create a living, breathing world by fashioning a makeshift family of intentionally disparate personalities that all fit together. Even more, while “Boogie Nights” was filled with unconventional casting choices, those choices do not feel unconventional in retrospect as each actor so indubitably inhabits his or her role that ultimately you can’t imagine anyone else. Sheaks saw, in other words, what nobody else saw, until they saw it, which, it seems to me, is exactly the kind of visionary quality you want in a casting director.

The 98th Academy Awards not only introduced a casting award, they also finally got out of their way and put together an appropriately honorific in-memoriam montage, occasionally stopping to remember out loud Hollywood icons who had passed the previous year. They could not honor everyone aloud, of course, and when one of the names and faces that flashed up was a casting director, well, maybe the casting award was still on my mind, I found myself wanting to know more. To be honest, I am deeply ashamed that I did not know Jackie Burch’s name given her massive imprint on the movies and by extension, how many times I must have seen it throughout my life. Because if you first started watching movies in the 80s as I did and have not just one but a few favorite movies from that decade, the odds are good that Burch, who died in September at the age of 74 from endometrial cancer, was its casting director.

Burch cast “The Breakfast Club,” for God’s sake, meaning she had to cast a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse, casting to fit a mold and to break a mold at the same time, and she did it. And though you might think the same person that cast “The Breakfast Club” could not possibly have also cast “Predator” (1987), Burch did, putting together a paramilitary rescue team by intuitively understanding that she was casting a music video filtered through a beer commercial as much as a Sci-Fi/Action epic. “Road House” (1989) became a cult classic for many reasons, not least of which was Burch’s impeccably curated cast, top to bottom, from Patrick Swayze all the way down to the hapless henchman tucked under the CAT cap (John William Young), turning Jasper, MO into an R-rated, movies-for-guys-who-like movies Honalee. Burch cast “Sixteen Candles,” “Mask,” “Three Amigos!,” “Coming to America,” and “Dick Tracy.” Burch cast “Oscar,” the unfortunate Sylvester Stallone attempt at comedy in 1991, but as Burch would tell the story to the podcast Ghost of Hollywood in 2023, when director Jonathan Lynn was struggling to cast “My Cousin Vinny” a couple years later, Burch suggested Marisa Tomei whom she had cast in “Oscar”: ergo, Jackie Burch is no small way partly responsible for the greatest movie performance in history. Oh, also, Burch cast “Die Hard.”

If I might argue that “Boogie Nights” was the best cast movie of the 90s then I might argue that “Die Hard” was the best cast movie of the 80s. Rather than spend every December rehashing lame, tired arguments about whether the latter is a Christmas movie, people should dispense “Die Hard” calendars a la advent. Each day we open a door to remember all the roles that Burch got just right in ways both large and small, whether it was the 80s asshole central casting pinnacle of Hart Bochner, enlisting her “Breakfast Club” Principal Paul Gleason to play the Deputy Chief of Police as sly commentary on the LAPD, or cementing in my mind forevermore the make-believe aesthetic of German terrorists by giving Hans Buhringer his only screen credit or calling on Kip Waldo to indelibly manifest the air of a convenience store clerk made to work on Christmas Eve. Waldo’s one scene with Reginald VelJohnson as Sgt. Al Powell, in fact, goes to show that the casting was not only about getting each individual role right but ensuring the whole cast worked together. Indeed, as much as “Die Hard” might look like a star vehicle in the rearview mirror, it’s a true ensemble piece with so many performers complimenting and counterpointing one another in so many ways. More than that, “Die Hard” is a case where key performers frequently do not even share the scene or screen together, rendering the necessary chemistry as an even more dicey proposition than usual, an extra testament to Burch’s intuition.  

As distinct and vital as every casting choice was, though, none were as distinct and vital as the top line choices of Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman. Both set a template for hero and villain, respectively, that spawned a thousand pale imitators, such culturally indelible turns that it can be hard to remember just how out-of-the-box it was to choose the guy from “Moonlighting” and a stage-trained thespian who had never acted in a movie in the first place. To that point, Burch has said that director John McTiernan wanted to cast Robert Duvall as Sgt. Al Powell. If it sounds like the most natural choice in the world, casting someone like Robert Duvall in the part of a police sergeant in a movie like “Die Hard,” it also sounds inconceivable, if only because we have seen the movie and consequently seen VelJohnson in the role. That, it goes without saying, was not a luxury Burch was afforded when she was casting it. She had the foresight to see what the rest of could only see in hindsight. 

Crime 101

It turns out that “Crime 101” is not a title generated by AI but a strained pun referring to a Los Angeles jewel thief, Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), pulling heists near US 101 to provide himself a convenient escape route. He’s pulling one as director Bart Layton’s crime-thriller begins, and doing so all on his own, establishing a lone wolf air. The investigating detective, Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), is convinced this robbery fits a pattern, one tying to both the 101 and a conspicuous lack of violence, only to be told by his superior to back off because reopening closed cases would wreak havoc on the department’s clearance rate. That marks Lou as something of a lone wolf too, though that’s not to say he and Mike are quite mirror images. There is a comical match cut in which we see the dapper Mike exiting a door and then a rumpled, just-awakened Lou plodding through his bathroom door, eventually sitting on the toilet while brushing his teeth and reading about the latest jewel heist on his phone. 

“Crime 101,” though, adapted by Layton from Don Winslow’s novella of the same name, is not merely abut a cop and a robber but also a claims adjuster, Sharon, who does not come between the cop and the robber but instead becomes intertwined with them. I know, I know, a claims adjuster? But this is a glamorous claims adjuster, working for a high-end insurance firm and played by Halle Berry with a trove of statement jewelry. Then again, glamorous though she may be, we meet her botching a big meeting with a rich doofus (Tate Donovan, firmly in his rich doofus era) and the sleep app on her phone constantly taunts her for failing to get a good night’s rest. The latter is the germ of a good idea also briefly evoked in the schlub-like Lou taking up yoga that needed more follow through or to be dropped altogether given how Layton never quite decides if he is being sincere about the idea of wellness or sending it up. 

Sharon might excel at reading people in her job, but she can’t quite read herself, stuck as a 53-year-old woman partner in an ageist, sexist firm with nowhere else to go. That is why when Mike seeks Sharon’s help in ripping off her place of employment, she is intrigued, evoking such drastic measures as the only means to security for a woman of a certain age, a plot point undergirded by Berry’s own career struggles with Hollywood ageism. This inside job could double as Sharon’s unlikely One Last Job, in other words, just as Mike is hoping to make it his One Last Job too, frequently referring to a financial number he has in mind that will set him up for life. He references this number in conversations with Maya, his kinda, sorta girlfriend, a truly thankless role into which Monica Barbaro at least manages to breathe some bright life. Mostly Maya is there to spotlight Mike’s emotional emptiness, and while Hemsworth fatally cannot make the turn to real emotion when that is eventually required, as if he has dug himself too big a stoical hole, he brilliantly plays a blank slate, emotions just bouncing right off him, sort of channeling, I swear to God, Kylie Sven Opossum in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” (“Can you give me some kind of signal once in a while,” you can imagine Maya saying to him, “just so I know any of this is getting through to you?”) 

In seeking to leave the criminal world behind, Mike is forced to break contact with his longtime fence (Nick Nolte), who enlists a younger and much more reckless thief, Ormon (Barry Keoghan), to take Mike’s scores and to take down Mike too. The part of Ormon is just a standard-issue antagonist, there to muck everything up and create some action scenes, but Keoghan’s malevolently kooky performance is also “Crime 101’s” most thrilling element. Keoghan takes his character repeating his dad’s mantra, “You have to break some eggs,” noticeably absent the part about also making an omelet, and running with it, playing the whole part like a guy running down the supermarket aisle of life, taking eggs from their cartons, breaking them, and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. His jewel store robbery that goes wrong without entirely going wrong is weirdly, hilariously exhilarating.

True, during the big closing sequence in which Ormon sneaks his way into a hotel suite through a kitchen, you half expect to see him watching what is tantamount to the same scene from “Heat” on his smartphone as he does so, like an instruction manual, evoking the blatant and myriad parallels to Michael Mann’s 1995 ur-Los Angeles crime text. Surprisingly, however, “Crime 101” does not spiritually evoke “Heat” in the end so much as a noir version of another southern California epic, Lawrence Kasdan’s striving-to-be-great but just so-so “Grand Canyon” (1991) about the lives of disparate Los Angelenos intersecting. In “Crime 101,” three disparate Los Angelenos converge to get a leg up.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Slap Shot (1977)

Part of it is undoubtedly the era in which “Slap Shot” was filmed, but there is a distinct grainy tinge to the cinematography that both embodies the harsh nature of an American northeast winter and captures the mood of the fictional rust belt city of Charlestown, Pennsylvania where both its steel mill and beloved minor league hockey team the Chiefs are on the verge of folding. The fur coat that Paul Newman’s character sports might be a relic of the era, but it also might be necessary given the weather, and in his way, the actor manages to pull the look off while also looking like he might have just grabbed it out of a lost and found for warmth. Improbably, that coat speaks to the impressive dual tones of comedy and commentary in director George Roy Hill’s cult classic. Indeed, through the prism of time, “Slap Shot” has the feel of something like a revisionist sports movie, taking the piss out of so many sentimentalized underdog stories in the way so many later-era westerns critiqued their predecessors. Except, “Slap Shot” came before almost all of them, suggesting the reverse, that after seeing such a bare-knuckle black comedy, so many sports movies were prompted to shine it on. 1989’s “Major League” was not without its own ribald comedy, but if you compare them side-by-side, it is as polished and slick as “Slap Shot” is unvarnished and blunt.

Newman stars as Reggie Dunlop, player and coach of the Chiefs, who given their precarious state, spurs ticket sales by encouraging his players to focus on dropping their gloves and throwing down as much as putting the puck in the goal. If it bleeds, etc. “Slap Shot” does not satirize the sport’s violence so much as lay it wide open for all to see, its rough and tumble aesthetic and raggedy narrative making it feel as if the movie itself is a half-second away from flying off the rails as much as its out-of-control on-ice fights. Its collection of what might discreetly be deemed colorful characters, like The Hanson Brothers triumvirate based on the real-life Carlson Brothers, do not so much separate the men from the boys as they do demonstrate how the line between men and boys is virtually non-existent. Newman has said that Dunlop was his favorite character he ever played, and it feels that way, free, loose, gleeful, giving a performance approximating leaving the toilet seat up or peeing outdoors. 

That freedom, it turns out, correlated to exacting research. Writer Nancy Dowd’s brother, Ned, played minor league hockey, tape recorded conversations of his teammates and then gave those tapes to his sister who wrote the coarse attitudes and severe language right into her screenplay, fashioning nothing less than an x-ray of boys will be boys hockey culture. That came to mind in the wake of the post-USA Men’s Hockey Gold Medal locker room brou-ha-ha. Before the recent Winter Olympics began, I rewatched “Miracle,” Disney’s 2004 retelling of Team USA’s so-called Miracle on Ice upset of the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid. 1980 was three years after 1977, of course, which would suggest that its real-life hockey playing characters would have not been too far off from the hockey-playing characters of “Slap Shot,” though instead, every rough edge is smoothed out if not entirely glossed over. I do not mean to besmirch “Miracle,” a movie I quite like and that is good at what it does, but simply to point out how it takes immense care to ensure that everything you see in “Slap Shot” stays, well, in a manner of speaking, in the locker room.

Pitch Meeting: Death Doula

When I read that Nicole Kidman, her eminence, was training to become a death doula, I knew what I had to do: pitch a fake movie. It’s a pitch that goes like this: The economy of Svenborgia, the country only rich people know about, has taken a turn for the worst, and rather than rallying to the cause, the relatively few citizens flee this proverbial sinking ship, causing the Sovereign Prince (Billy Nighy) and Prime Minister (Colman Domingo) to enlist Nicole Kidman (Nicole Kidman) to serve as the Death Doula to an entire nation as it peacefully but lugubriously transitions to dissolution.

Dead Man’s Wire

“Dead Man’s Wire” does not tell the real-life story of Tony Kiritsis so much as the real-life act that made Tony Kiritsis famous, or infamous – that is, in February 1977, he took hostage the son of the mortgage broker he accused of ripping him off. Working from a screenplay by Austin Kolodny, director Gus Van Sant tells the this incident from beginning to end as Tony (Bill Skarsgård) shows up at the Meridian Mortgage building and promptly wires a shotgun to the back of the head of Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) before ferrying him to his booby-trapped apartment where he winds up in an intentional standoff with the police outside, demand both $5 million and an apology from Richard’s father, M.L. (Al Pacino), for having swindled him. He never gets that apology, not even when he takes a phone call with the elder Hall, a deliberately disinterested Pacino talking to him like he’s talking to an aggrieved customer on the customer service line, an effectively bleak reminder that the fine print trumps all ethics and morals.

That moment, though, also demonstrates the tendency of “Dead Man’s Wire” to work best in flourishes and isolated moments than overall. Tony virtually invites the spectacle that crops up around him, talking on the phone with a local radio dee jay, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), throughout the standoff, while cub reporter Linda Page (Myha'la) follows him to his apartment complex and begins broadcasting much to the delight of her bloodthirsty producer back at the studio. These are interesting threads, but Van Sant never entirely pulls them, both these stories petering out. If Tony craves the spectacle more than he rejects it, Van Sant gets that across best in the sequence when he drives Richard home, scored to pop music of the era as myriad police cars crawl along behind, a precursor to the white bronco the L.A. freeway and a reminder that such sensationalism has always been in our American DNA.

Skarsgård is tremendous as Kiritsis, profane, polite, and self-pitying. What’s less clear, however, is what Van Sant wants us to make of this man, broadly speaking. Though chunks of “Dead Man’s Wire” are filtered through the prism of television news, sending the story to a wider audience, we never really see that wider audience and so, are never quite sure if he’s being made out as the American hero he claims to be or if that’s mere delusion. And though Skarsgård’s air hints at delusion, that is never clarified either, the conclusion in which the ensuing trial finds him not guilty by insanity still leaving it up in the air. By sticking just to the incident itself and never doing much to reveal who he Tony outside this context, “Dead Man’s Wire” comes to feel deliberately, diabolically evasive, not so much refusing to judge its character as leaving it open to interpretation so that every viewer can retrofit Kirtsis’s act for their own personal thesis.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Apollo 13 (1995)

Director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer secured the production rights to Jim Lovell’s book about his 1970 Apollo 13 mission, “Lost Moon,” before it had even been published and you can understand their enthusiasm. Triumph can make for good drama, but the twisted truth is that failure frequently makes for even better drama. And the Apollo 13 mission, as a line in Howard’s 1995 movie says, was considered NASA’s most successful failure, one in which the third mission to the moon transformed into a mission to return to earth when an unexpected explosion aboard the service module disabled its electrical and life support systems. That explosion is what accounts for the famous real-life line, “Houston, we have a problem,” one spurring “Apollo 13” the movie’s best moment. Once Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) advises mission control of a serious complication, chaos ensues as the three astronauts and the whole terrestrial NASA gang attempt to ascertain that complication. Eventually, Lovell notices oxygen is leaking aboard the spacecraft, engendering an eerie calm that Howard and his Oscar-nominated editors Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley create from almost nothing but faces, close-ups and medium shots as everyone registers the problem, giving way to controlled pandemonium as they then get to work solving it. It evokes the immense craft of “Apollo 13,” direction, editing, music, and writing harmonizing to maximize drama but also to effectively streamline a non-stop flow of information and terminology through whip-smart similes and clever dramatizations.

Given that Lovell and his two other crew members, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), are forced to minimize power aboard their spacecraft and wait on instructions from mission control, it can sometimes feel as if “Apollo 13’s” heart is situated more on earth than it is up in space. Indeed, Howard proves much more adept at conveying straightforward problem-solving than the encroaching isolation in space. Hanks’s preternatural calm as Lovell is convincing, though not necessarily interesting, and Haise and Swigert remain underdeveloped, a brief moment of tension between the two feeling a paint by numbers for such an intense situation. The similar preternatural calm of Ed Harris as flight director Gene Kranzen hits harder as does the angst that Gary Sinise quietly carries in his performance as Ken Mattingly, the crew member forced by Lovell to bow out when he is exposed to measles (which he never contracts).

Much was made of “Apollo 13’s” technical accuracy and it is on full display, often infusing the finished product with the feel of a docudrama, albeit a stirring one. But that emphasis on precise detail over complicated emotion is also what hinders it. Apart from Lovell’s wife and family watching from back home in Houston, “Apollo 13’s” one other subplot involves America’s waning interest in moon landings, evoked in a live broadcast from the spacecraft before things go wrong that the networks drop in the middle to show something else. No one tells the astronauts, which may or may not have been true, but either way, goes to show how the movie itself never wrestles with this flagging interest in any real way. Howard clearly wants to reignite our nation’s passion for space beyond a mere space race, but by never much broadening his viewpoint beyond the mission itself, “Apollo 13” never suggests why America might have become apathetic in the first place, as if afraid of introducing pesky politics. And if the argument is that the thrill of going to space is the end unto itself, Howard’s style is not the kind to illustrate the wonder of spaceflight, more suited to the drama of returning home.

keira knightley contemplates the hideous lonely emptiness of existence