In Memoriam: Terence Stamp

If you believe, as I do, that the movie screen is predominantly a canvas for the human face then few have ever belonged up there more than Terence Stamp. His cockney baritone was distinct, he often had a supercharged presence, but above all else, he had those blue eyes illuminating the celluloid in the dark. And it’s why it made no sense that when he arrived on the scene with guns figuratively blazing in the 60s, earning an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor for his very first role in “Billy Budd” (1962), he virtually disappeared for a time in the 70s. “I remember my agent telling me,” Stamp would explain to The Guardian in 2015, “‘They are looking for a young Terence Stamp.’” Hollywood might be obsessed with age, but age is just a number, and eyes don’t lie. Young, old, middle-age, whatever, Stamp’s star might have waxed and waned in accordance with the industry’s fickle demands, but his eyes never dimmed.

 
When Stamp’s death was announced on Sunday, August 17th, at the age of 87, the film author and journalist Mark Harris took exception with the late actor’s frequent categorization in obits as “Superman” costar. “He was sexier, weirder, darker, so much more interesting than that,” Harris wrote, noting that Stamp’s career contained “Many entry points.” And, well, yeah, sure. Many entry points! And for some of us Gen-Xers, “Superman” was the entry point or “Superman II,” to be more exact, which I would half-watch with a bath towel for a cape while pretending to be the Man of Steel fighting Terence Stamp as General Zod in my basement. Still, I understood what Harris meant. Because even if Stamp’s 1999 revenge fantasy “The Limey” worked whether you knew Stamp’s back catalogue beyond “Superman” or not, it worked so much better when you had a fuller sense of the actor’s history. Because Soderbergh infused the movie with that history (underlined in how it used footage of the younger Stamp in 1967’s Ken Loach film “Poor Cow”), as much about the passage of time and Hollywood itself as revenge, a transcendent thriller as the actor’s culmination, not to mention a close-up laden celebration of his face. 

The real Stamp revelation for me, though, was in 2021, when I finally saw Stephen Frears’s “The Hit” (1984), an existential art film disguised as a thriller, which is pretty much my genre sweet spot. Stamp was Willie Parker, a one-time London gangster who testifies against his old criminal cohorts in court, transforming himself into a marked man. Indeed, a decade later a couple hitmen come for him in the Spanish villa where he’s hiding out to transport him to Paris and bring him face to face with the kingpin he put away for his score-settling execution. Stamp, though, plays with an air of stoic resignation, a man who has spent the last 10 years philosophically preparing for this very moment. When his captors briefly lose track of him, he is found not trying to get away but gazing at a waterfall, hardly bothered by the gun that gets pointed at him as if he exists on some metaphysical plain a bunch of puny bullets could never penetrate. 

Yet, when one hitman eschews waiting to off Willie in Paris and just decides to shoot him on the side of the road, all that reasoned forbearance falls away. “You can’t,” he says, as Stamp’s register switches to a pleading whine, and his heretofore impassive expression to a pitiable wince. “Not now.” Essentially, Stamp pulls the rug out from under his own performance. In the end, everyone is afraid of death. Willie turns and runs, making it just a few steps before getting shot in the back, falling to the ground, dead, of course, and the movie just moves on from him, as the world might.

In Memoriam: Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen had already been on the Hollywood scene for a decade when he figuratively burst onto it in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992’s indie cult classic “Reservoir Dogs” as Mr. Blonde, one of several code-named crooks in a jewelry heist gone wrong. In his most memorable scene, Mr. Blonde gruesomely tortures a cop with a straight razor while Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” plays in the background. It would have been a great moment for any actor, but Madsen made it indelible. He shimmies to that 70s hit, dancing like no one’s watching except for the guy whose ear he’s about to slice off, as nonchalantly as he slurps a fast-food shake, a magnetic psychopath, doing as much as anyone to establish Tarantino’s career of straddling the line between sadism and swagger.

In his obituary for Madsen, who died on July 3rd at 67 from cardiac arrest, Glenn Kenny compared him to Lee Marvin while Peter Sobczynski suggested Robert Mitchum and Alex Williams of The New York Times analogized his air as “a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone.” Yet, even if Madsen was born in Chicago rather than the Deep South, in his unmistakable cool, pompadour, and 6'0" height, I always thought of him as having something like the career the 6'0", pompadoured, unmistakably cool Elvis Presley would have wanted had he not been eternally typecast by Col. Tom Parker. Then again, despite successfully playing something other than villains both before and after “Reservoir Dogs,” in “Thelma & Louise” and “Free Willy,” Madsen wound up typecast too. “I’ve made 145 films,” he told The Malibu Times in 2009, “and the only film that anyone ever really wants to talk about is ‘Reservoir Dogs.’” Many of those 145 films, and he wound up making far more than even that, are ones you’ve never heard of, that I’ve never heard of, that he was barely in. “Some of them I’m only in for 10 minutes,” he would tell The Independent in 2016, “but they bought my name, and they bought my face to put on the DVD box with a gun.” That’s an evocatively grim diagnosis of the industry beyond the searchlights.

Despite a brief apprenticeship with John Malkovich at Steppenwolf Theatre, Madsen was a movie actor, not a stage actor, by which I mean he had a sense of presence, of how to exist on camera, of how to maximize the camera’s effect. The problem with such a style is that you tend to need a director who knows what they’re doing and when you’re trapped in direct-to-DVD dreck, you usually don’t. But it’s why he and Tarantino made such a formidable team. And if Q.T. harnessed Madsen’s cool in “Reservoir Dogs,” he turned that cool on its head a dozen years later in “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” when he deployed the actor as Budd, one-time assassin turned hard up strip club bouncer. The moment when one of the dancers, Rocket, orders Budd to clean up an overflowing toilet could have been cheap comedy, but Madsen renders it truly heartbreaking: “Ok, Rocket,” he says in the voice of a man who knows where he stands on the ladder of life, “I’ll clean it up.” You understand why Uma Thurman’s Bride might underestimate him.

Madsen was always good with Tarantino, but he might never have been better than he was in Mike Newell’s 1997 mob drama “Donnie Brasco.” He was second banana to Al Pacino and Johnny Depp – indeed, in 2004 Madsen told The Guardian that those two “got all the money” – but his role as Sonny Black was crucial. In her original NYT review, Janet Maslin compliments Madsen’s turn but, tellingly, limits that praise to one parenthetical – “(just right as an imposing new boss)” – in a way that I can only assume would have caused Madsen a wistful laugh. And though Madsen is imposing, he makes Sonny Black so much more, existing somewhere between Mr. Blonde and Budd, not the littlest fish by any means but also not the biggest fish, bitterly convinced he deserves more. Sonny Black probably didn’t, but onscreen, Michael Madsen did.

In Memoriam: James Foley

The great American Greek tragedy of real estate hucksters, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” is considered an actor’s movie, I suppose, because it originated on the stage, which is why it’s also considered a writer’s movie, written by David Mamet, and therefore bursting with unrelentingly rhythmic profanity. In adapting his play for the screen, Mamet included a new scene with a new character (named Blake, though that name is never said and he feels nameless) played by Alec Baldwin who calls out the raggedy sales force right to its faces. (Watch the scene here but, for God’s sake, remember, it’s not safe for work.) That scene was one of many ways in which director James Foley provided a stage adaptation “cinematic value,” as Glenn Kenny noted in his Decider obituary of Foley who died on May 6th at 71 from brain cancer. The acting was extraordinary, that goes without saying, and the writing next level, you know that, but Foley’s direction is so much more than functional, using the camera and camera placement to evoke how Baldwin’s character is an apex predator in a pond of all these hapless little fishes.

Kenny’s obituary also reminded me just how many Foley movies I had seen and enjoyed. (I did not see his two contributions to the “Fifty Shades” series.) “After Dark, My Sweet” was an entertaining neo-noir that Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series pointed me to, and I enjoyed another Foley neo-noir “Confidence,” possibly because I saw it the way it was meant to be seen, on a weeknight on the big screen as a respite from one more long workweek. He brought great gusto to an entry in one of our most important movie genres, John Grisham-based middling thrillers, with “The Chamber” in 1996, and he directed Madonna in “Who’s That Girl” for which, like Kenny, I have a soft spot. And speaking of Madonna, he directed “At Close Range,” a sizzling crime drama in which he helped turn a scene of product placement – Chrisopher Walken saying “You want some Corn Flakes?” – into something truly terrifying, no mean feat.

I say speaking of Madonna because she was married to Sean Penn, star of “At Close Range,” and helped bring Patrick Leonard’s indelible score from another failed movie project to Foley’s instead, a score that would become the chassis for her greatest ballad, “Live to Tell.” Even more memorable than “Live to Tell,” however, and that’s saying something, is the slower instrumental version of it used over “At Close Range’s” opening credits, among the best opening credits sequences in movie history, one of my all-time favorites, at least. This sequence, in a sense, is nothing. It’s just Sean Penn driving around. But that’s the magic. “At Close Range” is set in Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic, so not the Midwest, where I grew up, but driving around on rural backroads by yourself on a hot, lonely summer night is a universal feeling. And through nothing more than aesthetic, Foley brings that feeling to life, music and mood and keeping the camera tight on Penn the whole time to evince how such aimless driving is not about what’s around you but getting lost inside your own mind. It’s the essence of a Springsteen song conjured; it’s pure cinema; it’s what only the movies can do. RIP.

In Memoriam: Al Trautwig

Al Trautwig, who died in February at 68 from complications due to cancer, was born in New York, and died in New York, and went to college at Adelphi on Long Island, and in his long career as a sportscaster, he spent much of it working for the MSG network covering the Knicks, Rangers, and Yankees. His deep voice was the kind you could imagine cutting through the harsh wilds of New York talk radio, one that left little room for equivocation, for better or worse. As a Midwesterner, however, I only knew Trautwig for his national sports coverage. He started with ABC both on Wide World of Sports and its Olympics telecasts before transitioning to NBC went the Games took up permanent residence on that network. That meant he was at ABC in the final years under industry visionary Roone Arledge. It was Arledge who recast the Olympics in the image of “Bugler’s Dream,” and it was Arledge who invented Monday Night Football. In other words, Arledge did as much as anyone to transform televised sports into spectacle and entertainment, a belief manifestly instilled in his protégé. 

Al Trautwig preparing to eat sugarcane on live TV at the 1987 Sugar Bowl.

During my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers’ brutal seven-year bowl-less streak between 2017 and 2023, I would instead watch one of their older bowl games on YouTube each December as a semi-satisfactory replacement. One of those games was the 1987 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against LSU. Trautwig was sideline reporter for that one though rather than reporting in-game news as the role typically requires, he did things like literally eat sugar, check in on the Superdome’s air conditioning system, and interview, in a manner of speaking, LSU’s live Bengal tiger mascot. It’s all corny, even stupid, but I confess, it also evoked a kind of ballyhoo that once went together with bowl games, meaningless exhibitions, after all, that also tended to have their own parades and king and queen courts. Trautwig understood the Sugar Bowl as show business as much as a gridiron showdown. A year later at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, ABC aired a feature in which Trautwig sampled pastries in the Canadian host city, contemporarily criticized by both Sports Illustrate and the Los Angeles Times. Yet, if choosing pastries over live events might technically be wrong, I remember how much that sequence appealed to me as a kid, opening my eyes to how the Olympics were intended, underline, as a celebration of the host city itself as much as the feats of strength. 

Back then, the Olympics were in limited primetime telecasts and ABC and NBC still packaged many events in heavily edited segments, treating them as stories as much as real-time athletic events. In narrating these, as he did with cross-country skiing, or the cycling road race, Trautwig brought a sense of storytelling melodrama. That approach did not work when he was tasked with traditional play-by-play duties, and even in the settings where it was more suitable, it could rub people the wrong way. For ESPN the Magazine in 2000, Tim Keown lamented that Trautwig turned the inaugural women’s triathlon at the Sydney Summer Olympics “into the Peloponnesian War.” Keown wasn’t entirely wrong, but I remember that women’s triathlon. And though I never became an Olympics agnostic, during the strange period of my life between 1996 and 2000, I sort of lost sight of them, and I will never ever forget how that women’s triathlon and the way Trautwig presented it made the Games instantly click right back into place for me. What drew me to sports, and what continues drawing me still, is competition, yes, and feats of strength, sure, but also, a sense of theater. Trautwig saw sports as theater too. Not for nothing did he appear in the Jamaican bobsled team cult classic “Cool Runnings” (1993) as himself: “Go, Jams!” RIP. 

In Memoriam: Val Kilmer

In an industry that has always sought to capitalize on trends, copy formulas, and roll stars off an assembly line, Val Kilmer was an original. He appeared in some of the most seminal Movies for Guys Who Like Movies of all time while also appearing on posters tacked to the inside of lockers of so many teenage girls of the 80s and 90s, not merely a heartthrob but a sensitive heartthrob. He had the look of a movie star, but the soul of an eccentric. He also had an immense gift for total immersion in his roles, one that too often left Hollywood more mystified than mindful of how to harness his prodigious talent and yielded a peculiar career. In the twenty-tens, he was ravaged by throat cancer, permanently altering his voice, but recovered, only to die last week at 65 from pneumonia. What rattled around in my head upon reading the news wasn’t any line of Kilmer’s, though I have written extensively on those in the past, but the Crystal Gayle song famously recorded by Johnny Cash, “We Must Believe in Magic.” “Mad is the crew bound for Alpha Centauri / Dreamers and poets and clowns.” Val Kilmer was on his own mission, one often inscrutable to the rest of us.

Kilmer’s role as Iceman in the 80s pop culture classic “Top Gun” truly put him on the map even if as a graduate of Juilliard, he didn’t want the role. Harrison Ford didn’t want the role of Han Solo either, but Han Solo, despite Ford’s own trepidation, was a good part; Iceman was something else. It was small, only about ten minutes of screen time, and more than that, it was sorta weird. The character was a scold, a square even, lecturing Tom Cruise’s aptly named Maverick for unsafe flying practices. Yet, in the image Kilmer cut, and the air he evinced, he was somehow still cool, even weird in altogether different ways, so much pen-twirling and wristwatch-fiddling. You can take the boy out of Juilliard, but you can’t take Juilliard out of the boy. Despite all that air combat maneuvering, no one in “Top Gun” goes harder than Kilmer when he smacks his gum.

As good as he was in “Top Gun,” Kilmer was more at home in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors,” which is to say he could disappear himself completely into someone else, in this case by playing debaucherous semi-poet Jim Morrison. Stone said he should have won the Oscar, but he wasn’t even nominated (absurdly, he never was), probably because unlike most musician biopics, in which the transformation from actor to subject is on full display, Kilmer’s possession of the character was so complete you couldn’t really see the performance at all. In “Tombstone” you could see the performance, though it wasn’t Kilmer’s, it was the performative nature of the famed American gunfighter and gambler Doc Holliday (“Wyatt, I am rolling,” he says on a main street that may as well be a stage) that Kilmer is playing. He physically transformed by losing significant weight to evince Holliday’s tuberculosis, but he was doing so much more than that, juxtaposing the character’s slowly withering away with nothing less than a still zealous appetite for life. He was a tragic hoot.

If Kilmer could summon the countenance of Doc Holliday, however, he could not do the same for Batman, or Bruce Wayne, whichever, both, in Joel Schumacher’s first crack at the franchise in 1995. Kilmer essentially equated the role with the Batman suit itself, meaning there was no one’s skin for him to virtually crawl into. His other 1995 epic, however, Michael Mann’s second of three masterpieces in the 90s, “Heat,” was his sweet spot. He was on the poster with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, yes, but still free to give a character actor kind of performance, moody, soulful, and strange. It’s all there the first time we see him, his character buying explosives with a phony ID, mouth agape, edgy, and a little bit spacy, and just so innately electric.

It was also around this time, however, leading up to the infamous bomb “Island of Dr. Moreau,” that Kilmer’s reputation for being difficult truly took root. Was it fair? I can’t say for certain, of course, but it’s worth noting that in his 2020 memoir “I’m Your Huckleberry,” Kilmer does little to dispel this notion, mostly tapdancing around it. And though it squelched his run as a movie star, he did some of his most interesting work post-squelching, indies like “The Salton Sea,” and with prominent writer/directors like David Mamet in “Spartan” and Shane Black in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” In the latter, Kilmer gleefully played an inversion of a movie star role. That might have suggested a way forward, but instead a marked an end as he went to wander in the direct-to-DVD wilderness with occasional forays into the mainstream like the SNL movie “MacGruber,” or appearing in the latest Francis Ford Coppola self-financed joint.

That sounds like a sad career arc, but both his memoir and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s essential NYT profile of him suggest just the opposite, that getting off the main path of stardom liberated him. Indeed, in “I’m Your Huckleberry” he writes of side trips being more revealing in his life’s journey than the main voyage. If the one-man Mark Twain show to which he dedicated himself for the better part of the twenty-tens might was a curiosity to the public, to him it brought genuine fulfillment. That’s what also made it ironic that his last film appearance was the 2022 sequel to “Top Gun,” the movie he never wanted to do in the first place, side trip and main voyage becoming one. In reprising the iconic part of Iceman, Kilmer’s real-life physical ailments were written into it, meaning that rather than disappear into the role, finally, after all those years, he put himself onscreen.

In Memoriam: Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, dead at 95, was described in some obituaries as a Movie Star and in some obituaries as an Everyman, two contradictions in type that go to show how he occupied a unique place in the firmament of cinema. He was a late bloomer who emerged during the era of so-called New Hollywood, when the idea of what constituted American movies was changing and the idea of what constituted American movie stars was changing too. That’s why despite resembling a truck driver, or a doorman, as Steven Hyden put it a decade ago, Hackman still became someone on par with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. He also brought his own notorious temperamental edginess to his roles, evocative of how a movie star’s personality tends to write over a scripted part, and yet, he vanished into those roles anyway, inhabiting his characters down to the bone so that you could hardly tell it was him, achieving the supreme state of naturalism, acting as being. Consider “The Firm.” Tom Cruise is acting so hard you can practically see the sweat stains while Hackman appears not to try at all, carving a quiet, nigh impossible sympathy for his villain out of thin air. 

That is not to say Hackman did nothing. Far from it. He considered his parts, he made choices. In a 2011 interview with Michael Hainey for GQ, he mentions a seemingly throwaway moment in “The French Connection” when his crude, dogged detective Popeye Doyle makes a pass at a woman and upon being brushed off, tosses a cruller over his shoulder as a key to unlocking his character. He could take the smallest of behaviors and then build a whole person from them. It’s that sort of attention to detail that made him a third thing: an actor’s actor, admired by his most venerable of peers for commitment and technique. Of course, cinema is generally defined as a director’s medium and as the myriad stories Hackman emotionally and vocally brawling with directors on set illuminate, he was not fond of them. “I don’t think he likes directors,” Maura Tierney told The AV Club in 2014 of her “Welcome to Mooseport” costar. “I mean, he did, I believe, tell the director at some point to, uh… [Starts to laugh.] “Will you just shut the fuck up and go over there and say ‘action’ or whatever it is you do?” 

That echoes experiences described with the actor by Wes Anderson during “The Royal Tenenbaums” and David Anspaugh during “Hoosiers,” among others. But by Anspaugh’s own admission, Hackman preferred working on sets with tension and would therefore seek to deliberately create an uncomfortable environment, even if, as Anspaugh noted, the actor would not exactly apologize for it. And whether that method was fair, and whether he took direction or not, he intuitively knew what a director needed, and what a movie needed too. He could fill up the screen and blow his stack with the best, as he did in “Crimson Tide.” In playing the commander of a nuclear submarine warring with his second-in-command (Denzel Washington) he seemed just as much to be playing what he really was, an actor who was king of the action-thriller, and who was now daring his co-star to take that crown, living the part in a way Washington answered. But Hackman also knew better than anyone the value of economy on the big screen; no one effused the ancient adage less is more with such precision. 

A shot from The Conversation that is the perfect symmetry of acting and directing.

When I saw “Hoosiers” at the Music Box Theatre in 2013, Chelcie Ross, a longtime actor who cut his teeth in Chicago and who played Hackman’s semi-nemesis in that movie, spoke, and said his co-star was always revising paragraphs to sentences and sentences to words and words to nothing at all. It was an apt description of the Hackman method. In that movie, he carried the weight of his character’s volatile past in his very air just as in “The Conversation” he seemed to dig a metaphorical moat between himself and the whole world just as in “Twice in a Lifetime” he needed no words beyond mere minor affirmations in the opening dinner table scene to convey a man at once happy in the presence of his family and dissatisfied with life. In the director’s commentary for his 1997 thriller “Breakdown”, Jonathan Mostow noted how his own leading man Kurt Russell would argue for certain lines of dialogue to be cut “because I can act it.” There was never an actor who could act it better than Gene Hackman.

In Memoriam: David Lynch

My favorite David Lynch movie is “The Straight Story” (1999), maybe because it’s set in Iowa, or at least, because it starts in Iowa, which happens to be where I’m from. It begins with aerial images of a cornfield, a grain elevator, a main street, quintessential small town Iowa Chamber of Commerce stuff but quintessential small town Iowa chamber of commerce stuff with a purpose. Because it’s the next shot, craning down toward a house, and then in closer on a window, evoking how Lynch gets under that conventional surface to see what’s really under there. Lynch’s work was often classified as strange, or weird, and so much was made of “The Straight Story’s” G-rating, as if Lynch, once famously described by Mel Brooks as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” was finally just being Jimmy Stewart from Earth. But you can imagine Lynch reading a news clipping of the real-life Alvin Straight journeying 240 miles from Iowa and Wisconsin aboard a riding lawn mower to see his ailing brother and thinking, hey, that’s kinda weird. Because small town Iowans, I can tell you from experience, are a little weird and I say that with all the love in my heart. Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight embodied Midwestern stoicism, but he also hinted at the mysteries and passions humming underneath, the kind many might reflexively assume small town Iowans lack. “The Straight Story” ends not with a long conversation between the two brothers but them looking up at the stars in the sky instead and it makes me think of going home and sitting on the deck with my dad and looking up at the stars in the sky and knowing that in sometimes saying nothing you are able to still say it all. 

That ending might have been closer to Lynch than we realize. In interviews he often derided unnecessary conversation and adamantly refused to explain his movies which in their surrealist sensations often screamed out for explanations. I loved this about him. Indeed, somewhere along the way I realized that if a movie had a director’s Q&A afterwards, I never wanted to stay for it lest their explanation ruin my interpretation. Lynch, bless his heart, left it up to each and every one of us. He apparently directed a pilot episode for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” all the way back in 1984 that never saw the light of day because it was too, well, Lynch. It’s not so much the existence of this unaired pilot that intrigues me as it is Lynch being associated with “Star Trek” at all. Because if I wanted to try to describe the experience of watching Lynch movies, I might say it was the closest any of us were ever going to get to being dematerialized into pure energy in those moments between being beamed from one place to another by Scotty. What’s the “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” scene in “Mulholland Drive” if not all the b.s. of the movie business suddenly giving way to the moment when a movie emotionally teleports you to another planet? But look at me, interpreting. Lynch’s movies could baffle me, and his movies could mesmerize me, and his movies could do both at once, and a few of his movies I just plum did not like even if more often than not his movies left me with something I would never forget. Any time I sit down to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie, and I watch more of them than I should, Crispin Glover in “Wild at Heart” is not far from my mind. 

I had been working at the Cobblestone 9 movie theater for about five months when “Lost Highway” was released. It was too arty for a multiplex, frankly, and therefore relegated to theater one, like a room, to quote Elaine Benes, “where they bring in POWs to show them propaganda films.” Even so, a few of the other concessionists and I would time our breaks to go up to theater one and leave our bodies for a few minutes by watching the scene where Robert Blake goes up to Bill Pullman at the party and tells Pullman to call him at his home where, sure enough, Blake answers the phone despite being right there in front of Pullman, as evocative of Lynch’s delightful, demented interdimensionality as anything. That was the movie, that was the scene, that made me want to go and find out what David Lynch was all about. In fact, upon learning he died yesterday at the age of 78, I was surprised that when I got home, I didn’t get a phone call from Lynch saying hey from wherever or whatever is on the other side. He wouldn’t have told me what it was like, of course. I’d have to wait and figure that out for myself. 

Watch the scene from “Lost Highway” here

In Memoriam: Jim Abrahams

I wasn’t more than 8 years old, and it was a late spring / early summer central Iowa evening spent entirely under a tornado watch, meaning I was allowed to stay up late in case we had to hurry to the basement to seek shelter. My parents must have been staying abreast of the situation via radio, or maybe the tiny monochrome TV we also owned, because the color television in the living room was tuned to HBO which was showing “Airplane!” (1980). I had never seen it, and though I don’t remember anything specifically from watching it that night, I still remember the overall experience, how my parents probably put it on to calm me down. It’s hard to worry about twisters dropping from the sky when you can’t stop laughing. Over 30 years later, during the early days of the first global pandemic of my lifetime, I had a similar experience in stumbling upon “Hot Shots!” (1991) on some television channel one evening and hearing a joke I didn’t remember. “Interesting perfume,” remarks Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen) to Ramada Thompson (Valeria Golino). “It’s Vicks,” Ramada replies. “I have a cold.” For a few seconds, the world was brighter.

“Hot Shots!” was co-written and directed by Jim Abrahams who co-wrote and co-directed “Airplane!,” the first letter of his last name doubling as the middle letter of the so-called Team ZAZ acronym – (David) Zucker, Abrahams, and (Jerry) Zucker. The trio grew up together in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 60s, early 70s where they formed a sketch comedy show called Kentucky Fried Theater. Though the era was turbulent, they eschewed commentary for generating laughs. KFT received a rave from George Hesselberg of the Badger Herald independent student newspaper and in speaking recently with the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Hesselberg noted, “(W)hat I was the most impressed with is how serious they were about being funny. The ‘seriousness’ was everywhere at that time, the antiwar feelings and all. There was a big hole in the humor blanket — and here are these guys being very serious about being funny.” That observation evokes the most celebrated punchline in “Airplane!”: “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”

That seriousness about being funny is what set “Airplane!” apart as the funniest American movie of the 80s. Unlike the chaos of a movie like “Animal House” (1978), as Janet Maslin noted in her contemporary New York Times review, “Airplane!” had “a steadier comic attitude.” “The film’s sense of humor is distinctly predatory,” Adam Nayman wrote in honor of its 40th anniversary, “sizing up every possible element in the frame—the actors, the sets, the music, even the subtitles—and treating their basic integrity as either momentarily or wholly expendable in the service of a joke.” The great revelation of “Airplane!,” though, was to task its actors with playing serious rather than silly. Almost no one is on the joke. (The exception is Stephen Stucker essentially playing the movie’s own peanut gallery as a person.) When I caught up years later with “Airport,” the 1970 disaster movie from which “Airplane!” cribs its conclusion, I was surprised how in its way, the latter did it better. “Good luck, we’re all counting on you,” Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen) enters the cockpit to say at an especially dramatic moment, calling back to an earlier line, his posture and voice oblivious to the airliner rattling and rocking, simultaneously the greatest release valve and the greatest send-up of a release valve in screenwriting history. That’s impressive. 

After “Airplane!,” ZAZ dabbled in television with the cop show spoof “Police Squad!” that despite being unceremoniously cancelled after only six episodes still paved the way for the other funniest American movie of the 80s, “The Naked Gun – From the Files of Police Squad!” Nielsen reprised his role from the small screen as the immortal Lt. Frank Drebin, becoming an unconventional movie star along the way, his impeccable stone face a stand-in for the last sane man, in a manner of speaking, in a world gone to cats and dogs, which is why the Nothing to see here sequence endures, the This is fine meme before the This is fine meme, before memes themselves. What’s more, as a testament to its own unflagging creativity, a movie which begins as a police procedural spoof improbably morphs not only into a preeminent baseball movie spoof but the preeminent baseball movie by virtue of nothing more than one extended sequence on the diamond, taking all the game’s stuffy regimented pageantry and running it through the shredder, epitomized in Lt. Drebin mangling The Star-Spangled Banner.

 

ZAZ would eventually split, amicably, not acrimoniously, and in 1991 both David Zucker’s “Naked Gun” sequel and Jim Abrahams’s “Hot Shots!” took their turn at the top of the box office. A spoof of “Top Gun,” and all manner of movies in-between, the latter could feel a little closer to the trio’s 1977 sketch comedy debut “Kentucky Fried Movie” than the true narrative subversions of “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun” but it was funny, occasionally even truly inventive (one could mount a contrarian case that despite “Terminator 2” and “Point Break” the best action scene of 1991 is the funeral scene in “Hot Shots!” – I mean this) and more than anything, perhaps, Abrahams deserved immense credit for turning leading man Charlie Sheen’s unchanging facial expression and monotone into the perfect vehicle for ludicrous wordplay and deadpan punchlines. The inevitable follow-up, “Hot Shots! Part Deux” (1993) was, aside from the Great Expectations joke, perhaps best for the accompanying half-hour mockumentary, “A Filmmaker’s Apology,” in which Abrahams spoofed Eleanor Coppola’s “Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” about the turbulent making of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” “We had access to too much money, too many extras, too much manpower,” Abrahams says at the start, tongue firmly in cheek even if it might double as a clarion call on behalf of filmmakers who have access to no money, no extras, and no manpower. 

I don’t think Abrahams was ridiculing Coppola, just gently lampooning him and his tendency toward self-mythology even while innately pointing out there were a couple different ways to make a movie. Fittingly, both “Apocalypse Now” and “Airplane!” were both eventually deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the National Preservation Board and selected for preservation within the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress, two sides of the same coin. “Apocalypse Now” was about the horrors and horrifying riddles of existence and in its own way, so was “Airplane!” and so was “The Naked Gun” too which is what I thought of when Abrahams died last week at the age of 80. Near the end, Ricardo Montalban’s villain dies when he falls to the cement below, run over by a bus, and then a steamroller, and then stomped all over once more for good measure by a marching band. Watching all this from above, Capt. Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) is moved to tears. “That’s so horrible,” he says to Drebin. “My father went the same way.”

In Memoriam: John Ashton

Whatever its shortcomings, Ben Affleck’s feature directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone” (2007) exuded a distinct sense of place, maybe not a surprise given that its setting was his hometown of Boston. It exuded that place through its shrewd location work but also through the people populating those locations. Affleck has said he would utilize people who were literally already in those locations as non-professional extras to round out his well-chosen professional cast, whether it was his brother Casey, also a Boston native, or Oscar-nominee Amy Ryan, a New York native who nevertheless sounded and felt like she hailed from Beantown. And then there was John Ashton, who was a little bit in-between. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, but was raised in Connecticut, and studied theater arts at USC. Indeed, while Ashton became famous for a smorgasbord of solid supporting work across a wide spectrum of both television and film, including perhaps most famously in the 1984 action/comedy blockbuster “Beverly Hills Cop” and its first two sequels, he got his start on the stage. 

The New York Times obituary for Ashton, who died last week at the age of 76, noted that he earned his audition for “Beverly Hills Cop” on the strength of a production of Sam Shephard’s “True West” at the South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, CA in 1981 with Ed Harris. (When I read that, I decided that I saw Ashton as Austin and Harris as Lee, but turns out, it was the other way around, and I’d like to think my misread is a testament to each man’s versatility.) There were stories at the time of “Gone Baby Gone’s” release that Affleck had cast Ashton because of how much the director loved “Midnight Run,” another 80s comedy in which Ashton played key comic support, and that’s no doubt true. But I also wonder what Affleck knew of that 1981 “True West” production given that he cast Harris and Ashton as a pair of police detectives, Remy Broussard and Nick Poole, respectively.

The screenplay describes Poole as the good cop in their relationship, but that is not quite how it comes through on screen; it’s more like Irritable Cop / Irritable Cop. Broussard and Poole are forced to work with a pair of younger private detectives, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), hired by the family of a missing child to provide further support and the four investigators meet for the first time at a diner. As the PIs enter, Ashton has Poole take a sip of his iced tea and lean back against the wall, sizing up Patrick as he approaches, posture belying an attitude of, “This fucking guy.” But that is not the best or most important part.

It has been almost 20 years, so while I will not give it away completely, I will observe that Broussard and Poole are involved in the child’s disappearance, albeit in an altruistic if misguided kind of way. They don’t want Patrick and Angie involved, but they can’t say they don’t want Patrick and Angie involved, obviously, and they certainly can’t say it to us, the audience, lest they ruin the surprise. But when Patrick says he might be able to contribute information regarding a shady character in the life of the missing child’s mother, Poole replies, “How’s that?” And as he asks it, Ashton does the most remarkable thing by folding his hands in front of his face as he says it.

There is an air of annoyance in Ashton’s voice, but it’s so much more. It’s in that bit of physicality with his hands, the aggression with which he folds them, putting them in front of his mouth not just in an attempt to conceal his annoyance but to conceal his rage, his realizing this nosy guy has the ability to ruin this whole thing and that what he most wants to do is punch him in the face and can’t. In one gesture, Ashton tells you what is happening without telling you what is happening at all.

Watch the scene here.

In Memoriam: James Earl Jones

Darth Vader’s introduction in “Star Wars” is so iconic that you hardly need me to provide a detailed explanation, but for the purposes of this post, let us say that it’s wordless. It’s a moment rendered entirely through aesthetic – costume, music, and the how the camera angle remains low to make him larger than life as he processes through the alley of fallen rebels. But that means when he finally does speak, his speaking voice has a lot to live up to. And it has even more to live up to given what he’s doing when he breaks his brief silence – that is, lifting a hapless rebel clean up off the ground by his throat. “Where are those transmissions you intercepted?” the Sith Lord demands, speaking of the plans for the vaunted Death Star. “What have you done with those plans?!” It’s the last word – “plans!” – which really resonates, figuratively splattering against the wall the way he splatters the hapless rebel against the wall after he snaps his throat. The voice, by the grace of James Earl Jones, meets the moment. As it does throughout the movie. My favorite line (reading) comes later, during the big Imperial morning meeting, the one where Admiral Motti is crowing about how the Death Star is the greatest thing since green milk and Vader says, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Jones enunciates every word. Listen to it and you can practically see the bass notes moving on the speaker; he’s scaring you with elocution. That’s not easy.

When we talk about about seminal voices of the silver screen, who are we talking about? We’re talking about Humphrey Bogart delivering dry witticisms, of course, and we’re talking about Jean Harlow sassing everyone in sight, sure, and we’re talking about James Earl Jones saying, well, anything as Darth Vader. “No disintegrations!” he booms so suddenly at the bounty hunter in “The Empire Strikes Back” that it becomes the improbable vocal equivalent of Marty McFly strumming the first note on Doc’s giant amp and getting blown backwards. That’s what makes it at least partly astounding that for those first two “Star Wars” movies, at least, Jones did not even get a credit. But then, that was his own request. By his estimation, he worked no more than a couple hours on the first movie, brought in during post-production when the voice of English actor David Prowse, who was inside the Darth Vader costume, did not, unfortunately, meet all those moments. And Jones, ever noble, knew that Prowse was the one who sweated it out day after day inside that costume. Even so. I mean no disrespect to Prowse, whose own relationship to the role proved bitter and complicated over time, but as crucial as his own physical work was in bringing Darth Vader to life, Jones is living proof how much difference a voice can make. His voice fills up that costume, creates a character more machine than man. You see him – you see him – because of Jones. And when his face is revealed in “Return of the Jedi,” through no fault of Sebastian Shaw, the English actor chosen to be the one under the helmet, it’s inevitably disappointing. There was no way, none whatsoever, that Darth Vader could live up to the way James Earl Jones made him look in each one of our minds.

Jones, though, was not just Darth Vader. The Mississippi native was an immensely talented and versatile actor who got his start in the theatre, speaking to how he could physically live a role too. I never saw him on the stage, but My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, an avid theatergoer, did in London’s West End in “Driving Miss Daisy” circa 2011 and will testify to his brilliance. I can only imagine how his voice might have resonated in person. Despite the context surrounding his famed sermon in “Field of Dreams,” a black man praising a long prejudiced sport, his baritone rendered the game’s myth tangible. His voice could lend gravity to middling 90s thrillers, provide dignity to corporations in various commercials, and honor the Olympic Games. Reader, I confess, in that miserable Olympics-less summer of 2020 when the Tokyo games were postponed, I must have watched and/or listened to the monologue Jones delivered for NBC’s prelude to the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics opening ceremony a hundred times. His concluding intonation to “let the games begin” was perfect. Unadorned, he just said the words, bearing witness to their meaning, and showcasing just how much spine-tingling power his natural, unembellished voice could imbue. Much as the voice of Bob Sheppard was still used to introduce Derek Jeter even after the longtime New York Yankees announcer passed, Jones should have been grandfathered in for American television to say “let the games begin” for eternity.

 

The voice of Jones was so potent that it could swing both ways. Much as “The Lion King” enlisted his one-of-a-kind verbal command to animate Musafa, or various Tom Clancy screen adaptations recruited him to inject authority as the CIA deputy director of intelligence, Phil Alden Robinson’s comic thriller “Sneakers” called upon Jones to project gravitas as the NSA director of operations. His character was forced to work with and then mollify a motley team of hackers making increasingly kooky demands for covert services rendered, like one essentially asking the US Government to buy the world a Coke, leaving Jones’s character dumbfounded, enraged, but grudgingly acquiescent. If it had been any other actor in the role, the moment would have been funny, but because it was Jones, it was funny and profound. You’ll never understand authority better than when one of the most authoritative actors loses all sense of it.

James Earl Jones died on Monday. He was 93. 

In Memoriam: Shelley Duvall

There was a lot in the Shelley Duvall story, much of which she talked about herself, some of which she didn’t want to talk about at all, and so I’ll let her own words, or lack of them, on all those matters speak for themselves. I just want to think about her and her work. I want to think about how she was so impossibly idiosyncratic and ethereal, so unique in her appearance, and her voice, and her air, that there was no one like Shelley Duvall, and that in all those Robert Altman movies she was giving performances that no one on this planet and probably the next few planets over could have given. I want to think about how she didn’t so much steal “Annie Hall” with one of those lines that I sometimes say to myself apropos of nothing as just leave an indelible imprint right in the middle of a movie chock full of indelible moments. I want to think about how my younger sister was for a time in her life obsessed with Faerie Tale Theatre and how a lasting memory of myriad family vacations is my sister in the backseat next to me, pretending to host Faerie Tale Theatre and saying, over and over, “Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall.” But over the years here at Cinema Romantico a tradition has emerged in that we honor the newly fallen of one our personal favorites, “Roxanne” (1987), by commemorating their work in it. 

We have commemorated Fred Willard that way, and Michael J. Pollard too, both eccentric actors playing eccentrics in “Roxanne” and embodying a movie set in a ski town that is full of eccentrics, including the Cyrano-like fire chief C.D. Bales (Steve Martin). But in playing Dixie, owner of the diner where everyone congregates, Duvall proves the mama bear of the whole slightly off-center town, playing the most level-headed of the bunch, including C.D. It’s a trip getting to see Duvall be the calm counterpoint to the wild comic energy of her co-star, all visually summarized in the brief scene where Dixie sports C.D.’s fire chief ballcap. He might have been in charge of the fire department, but she put out the fires.

Duvall died on Thursday. She was 75. 

In Memoriam: Bill Cobbs

Not knowing the backstory of actor Bill Cobbs, I was moved to learn it in various obituaries from The Associated Press to Vulture when he died on June 24th at the age of 90. He had no formal training as an actor, serving for eight years in the Air Force as a radar technician before returning to his hometown of Cleveland and selling cars. That is when a customer asked if he might be interested in acting in a play. I keep trying to picture this encounter. As ingratiating as he was intimidating, I imagine Cobbs made for the perfect car salesman, winning you over, unwilling to let you walk away. Did the customer ask if he wanted to act before or after being handed the keys to his or her new Pontiac Bonneville? He got his start on the Cleveland stage, including at the famed Karamu House under the direction of then-artistic director Reuben Silver, a guiding light of the city's theater scene and whose backstory I enjoyed learning about as much as Cobbs. Eventually, Cobbs would leave for New York, working odd jobs while gradually carving out a career as a true working actor, one that Variety noted included almost 200 movie and TV credits. If you came of age as I did in the 80s and 90s, you saw him over and over. He was not a That Guy; given his 6'1" height, his voice, his presence, once you knew Bill Cobbs, you never forgot him. When I tuned into The Michael Richards Show for at least one episode in the fall of 2000, well, it was dreadful, but I nevertheless thought, “Alright! Bill Cobbs is in this!” His presence was always a blessing.

Cobbs said in a 2004 interview quoted in most of the obits, and that you can listen to in full on YouTube, that he saw acting as a way to express the human condition in a moment when the Civil Rights movement was at its apex. As the years went by, Cobbs remained true to that vision. He was the conscience of Mario Van Peebles’s “New Jack City,” but the indignant conscience, willing to take matters into his own hands when the law proves inadequate to setting things right, infusing the conclusion with what the movie’s screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper deemed a “Biblical heft.” In my favorite John Sayles movie, “Sunshine State,” he was a living, breathing monument to a swath of Black history that had literally been wiped off the face of the earth. Of course, no one can choose nor predict their legacy. One of Cobbs’s myriad credits was in “Air Bud” as the coach of a basketball team starring a golden retriever. This half-remembered comedy was resurrected in recent years by social media, turning the moment in which the character played by Cobbs points out there is no rule saying a dog can’t play basketball into a go-to meme for our topsy-turvy present. When the hallowed Supreme Court dispenses its patented latter day witches brew of yo-yoing textualism horse hockey and sanctified cum sinuous legalese in order to say what the law is in so far as whatever they need the law to be in the name of their own shadowy motives at any given time, there comes the “Air Bud” meme again. 

I have been wondering what Cobbs would have made of “Air Bud,” of all things, resonating with social media-addled youth, but then, I’m not sure I have to wonder. In that same 2004 interview, he said that “Art is somewhat of a prayer, isn’t it?” He tied this into what he called “a sense of giving,” but I couldn’t help thinking of it as the way of the working actor, those with small roles on the peripheries of movies and one-shot appearances on so many television dramas and sitcoms. You show up, give your performance, say a prayer for it and whatever it might become and let it go, and move on to the next one. 

In Memoriam: Robert Towne

If Robert Towne had only written “Chinatown,” his legacy would have been immense. Just as “Citizen Kane” has essentially settled in cultural discourse as quote-unquote The Greatest Movie of All-Time so, too, has Towne’s script for “Chinatown” settled as quote-unquote The Greatest Screenplay Ever Written. His resume, though, was richer than one movie. He wrote other staples of 70s cinema like “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo,” and though his forays behind the camera were uneven, I have deep fondness for his labors of love “Personal Best” and “Without Limits,” both evincing Towne’s predilection for physical pursuits. It is something of a curiosity, however, that many of Towne’s mightiest achievements to the form did not officially bear his name. 

Like so many in Hollywood, Towne got his start with Roger Corman, no doubt learning in the filmmaking impresario’s dirt cheap world how to write and revise on the fly, a skill that became useful in his frequent and famous work as a script doctor. He reworked the screenplays for landmarks like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather.” He was still providing his services in the 90s, the decade of so many great action-thrillers, contributing to perhaps the best of the bunch, “Crimson Tide.” And though he officially wrote “Mission: Impossible II,” in a way he still functioned as a script doctor, tasked by director John Woo with slaloming the story around preconceived, set-in-stone action scenes. Towne noticeably ripped off the plot of “Notorious,” the Alfred Hitchcock thriller written by Ben Hecht, the greatest script doctor of the Golden Age, and I always liked thinking that Towne intended it as a cheeky homage. 

In the end, though, it all comes back to “Chinatown.” Tightly plotted, impeccably structured, richly layered, and witty as hell (“I take a long lunch hour – all day sometimes”), it uses the framework of a hard-boiled noir to open up into something so much more massive and mythic. It is about a P.I. (Jack Nicholson) haunted by a past mistake and not doomed to relive it, crucially, but actively recreating it on an even grander scale, his emergent moral code and unlikely romanticism proving no match for an imposing aristocrat (John Huston) who seeks to control the water of Los Angeles to own the future. Its famed twist is shocking but not merely for shock value, evoking a quasi-royal hereditary line in the darkest way. It is a movie infused with a deep cynicism, maybe born of the preeminent political scandal of its time – namely, Watergate – or maybe born of nothing more than the eternal human condition as national events occurring during the writing of this obituary can attest. 

That ending, however, was not Towne’s but rather a product of director Roman Polanski’s rewrite, making it so the wrong people are alive at the end rather than the other way around. In essence, Polanski doctored the script of the industry’s foremost script doctor, an incredible irony that in interviews over the years Towne seemed both to have made peace with and not made peace with at all. He envisioned “Chinatown” as a Los Angeles-set trilogy, and though the sequel, “The Two Jakes,” came to pass in 1990, it had a troubled production and proved a disappointment. The third movie never happened, though in the final weeks of Towne’s life, there were industry stories of a prequel being in development at Netflix. All this, the Polanski rewrites, the ensuing projects and their struggles, seemed to echo that end of “Chinatown,” the one with the unforgettable closing line, the difficulty (impossibility) of letting go. 

Robert Towne died on July 1st, 2024. He was 89.

In Memoriam: Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland was too recognizable to be a That Guy. You can’t have starred in “M*A*S*H” and “The Hunger Games” with all manner of memorable movies in-between and be considered a That Guy. A Canadian, he helped carry the Olympic flag at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver; the world knew Donald Sutherland. And yet, he had an air reminiscent of a That Guy, nonetheless. Maybe it’s that he was never nominated for an Academy Award, an absurdity, only receiving a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2017 at age 82. Maybe it’s because despite his distinct bearing, the lanky 6’4” frame, long face, expressive eyes, and unmistakable baritone, he was also a chameleon. Maybe it’s because as he got older and received fewer leading roles, he still never stopped working, and ever the consummate professional, picked up so many paychecks with an idiosyncratic pulse. Sutherland, in fact, worked so hard for so long that I have never known a movie world without him. Until now, that is, because Donald Sutherland died on Thursday June 20, 2024, at the age of 88.

Demonstrating practicality and passion in equal measure, Sutherland majored in both engineering and drama at the University of Toronto, though the latter eventually won out, graduating and going to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before dropping out and deciding to learn by doing. He cut his teeth on the stage, and then in television, and then found his way to Hollywood. As chance would have it, I watched one of his first credited roles in 1968’s heist movie “The Split” for the first time this year. Though it was meant to showcase Jim Brown, he was upstaged by Sutherland’s quietly charismatic menace. “Although his role is not major,” wrote Renata Adler in her New York Times review, “Donald Sutherland is remarkable.” He stood out, too, in “The Dirty Dozen,” despite playing, in his own amusing words, “one of the bottom six.” That role led to his breakthrough in Robert Altman’s Oscar-winning black comedy “M*A*S*H” at the dawn of the 70s. If it foreshadowed his many counterculture roles, like “Animal House” and the weird, half-awful, half-awesome “Steelyard Blues,” Sutherland proved versatile, equally at home in thrillers like “Klute,” in horror like “Don’t Look Now,” and in traditional drama like “Ordinary People.”

Sutherland could steal a scene, as he did in “Space Cowboys” as one of four geriatric astronauts alongside Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and James Garner. In a scene on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, their hierarchy is established with how they are seated, but if Sutherland gets third chair, in his bawdy yet twinkly countenance, he emerges as first banana. He could steal a whole movie as he did with Oliver Stone’s “JFK” playing the mystery man X enlisted to deliver one epic mid-movie monologue. Sutherland had a gift for infusing his eyes, his whole face, really, with this sly good humor suggesting someone sitting on a secret he was weighing whether or not to share and this gift never manifested more than as X, spinning a conspiracy theory as campfire story. But he wasn’t just a scene stealer. In “Klute,” his square detective’s eyes are captivated by Jane Fonda’s call girl in every shot but in a way that always seems to refract the focus back on her. He did the same years later in “Pride & Prejudice” but with a paternal bent when his Mr. Benet consents for his daughter Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) to be married. Fonda won her first Oscar for that role, and Knightley received her first Oscar nomination for hers, and I like thinking of Sutherland as their Tenzing Norgay.

Sutherland’s catalogue was so extensive and varied that I really think you could ask ten different people for their favorite Sutherland performance and get ten different answers. I’ve always retained a special fondness for his turn in Robert Towne’s “Without Limits” (1998) as Bill Bowerman, the titanic Oregon track and field coach (and Nike co-founder). It’s a biopic of the running prodigy of Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup), and though there are numerous characters, it’s spiritually a two-hander between coach and athlete. Sutherland plays Bowerman as a gently commanding old oak and Crudup plays Prefontaine as a cocky little shit and set as it is at the end of the 60s going into the 70s, there is an undercurrent of change, or attempts at change, made plain in their constant sparring. Coach tends to always know best in movies like these, but here coach’s council lets his charge down when Prefontaine loses at the Munich Olympics. Their hashing out that race is the movie’s best scene.

“If I’d gone out faster, I might not have gotten boxed.” 

“And you blame me?” 

“Do you blame yourself? 

“That’s a constant, Pre.”

And when Sutherland says that line, he chuckles, he smiles, he infuses it with this bemused weariness of a thousand condemnations pointed right back at himself. Indeed, then Sutherland does the most incredible thing – before saying his next line, he looks away and to his right...

Well, you can see it all in there, can’t you? You can see him going over every defeat, embarrassment, failure, loss, and regret and what’s more you can see him blaming himself for all of it all over again. It’s the vision of a whole life summoned in a split-second.

In Memoriam: Jeannette Charles

We originally published this post on September 20th, 2022 in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death at the age of 96. We republish it today to memorialize the British actress Jeannette Charles who died on June 2nd. She was also 96, one of those little ostensible coincidences that make me believe in a higher power more than any academic study of the divine.

Britain’s longest serving Monarch Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary) died last Thursday September 20th, 2022 at the age of 96 and was laid to rest yesterday in Windsor Castle. The state funeral at Westminster Abbey was as ornate as a title like Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith would lead you to expect, right down to Lord Chamberlain’s wand. Indeed, while I’m sure there was a real person in there, somewhere, behind Heading up the Commonwealth and Defending the Faith, Her Majesty The Queen was a symbol, first and foremost. “The institution of hereditary kingship is irrational and impractical,” Rebecca Mead made clear in The New Yorker, “sustained in the present era only through a willful combination of public pageantry and concealed mystery.” It’s why even if Claire Foy and Olivia Colman both won Emmys for playing the Queen and even if Helen Mirren won an Oscar for playing “The Queen” too, the most indelible portrayal of Her Majesty remains, of course, as everyone knows, Jeannette Charles in “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” 

Her role, really, is to be the butt of the joke, over and over, laying siege to her indispensable courtliness, but I don’t mean this as an insult to the Britons. Why the scene in which she winds up, uh, under Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) on the banquet table just goes to show why Elizabeth wanted to not televise her 1953 coronation in the first place...who knew what could go wrong?! More than that, though, by not really having a role beyond The Queen Becomes Victim Of Hijinks, she remains a mystery while being shuffled through an array of ridiculous Yank-styled pageantry, all of which Charles, who made a career out of her resemblance to Elizabeth II, plays with a proper Buster Keaton-ish stone face. I mean, the scene in the Abbey in Season 1 of “The Crown” when Foy and Matt Smith as Philip spar over Phil’s having to kneel is all well and good when it comes to demonstrating the weight of the Royal image, but nothing cuts to the heart of the all-important and endless Royal ceremoniousness tedium than Charles in “The Naked Gun” being handed a hot dog at Angel Stadium in the ballpark frank version of a bucket brigade, matter-of-factly regarding it as the Queen might have some commemorative Fountain of Youth dish towels bestowed upon her by the Mayor of St. Augustine, Florida, and just sending the damn thing on down the line. 

In Memoriam: Bill Walton

(Optional Musical Accompaniment to This Post.)

During an Oregon / Washington Pac-12 Basketball game on ESPN in 2019, color commentator Bill Walton claimed to have been in “Ghostbusters,” causing confounded play-by-play man Dave Pasch to wonder what character Walton had played in Ivan Reitman’s 1984 comedy. But Walton did not play a character, though he very much was in the movie, it turned out, not just telling tall tales, glimpsed briefly and serendipitously in the background of a closing credit shot as himself. That is how the Hall of Fame basketball player is billed in virtually every movie in which he appears on IMDb, from “Ghostbusters” to “Forget Paris” to “Celtic Pride” to “He Got Game” to “Uncle Drew”: as Bill Walton. After all, who on earth could Bill Walton have played other than himself? If Bill Walton played Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark would still come through as the Free Spirit of San Diego, less concerned with the possibility of drinking hot blood than covering himself in dirt from Temecula*. 

Bill Walton in the background of Ghostbusters, grinning like he’s calling Cal / Stanford in the Pac-12 Tournament quarterfinals. 

Bill Walton was a basketball player, first, though perhaps not foremost, a winner of two NCAA titles with UCLA and two NBA titles, one with Portland, one with Boston, revolutionizing the position of center with his agility and dexterity and forecasting a slew of so-called NBA unicorns to come. In truth, Walton as a basketball player is mostly lost to me. Though I must have seen him play in his final years with the Boston Celtics in the mid-80s, I have no memory of it, learning about him more from David Halberstam’s essential “The Breaks of the Game” and in back issues of Sports Illustrated. The latter deemed his performance in the 1973 NCAA Championship Game where he scored 44 points by sinking 21 of 22 shots and snaring 13 rebounds as a slight case of being superhuman. That single missed shot always felt to me less unfortunate than cosmically fitting, a winking nod to human fallibility. Indeed, Walton’s body would prove fallible too as he struggled to stay healthy in his professional career amid problems with his back, hands, feet, ankles, what have you got.

Walton was not just a revolutionary where basketball was concerned. He conscientiously objected to playing on the 1972 Summer Olympics American Basketball team in protest of the Vietnam War, was friends with the radical sports activist Jack Scott (which is how Walton became slightly entangled in the Patty Hearst saga), and became the face of anti-war dissent at UCLA, even getting arrested for occupying a campus administration building. Eventually, in the later years of his sportscasting career, he would settle in the public imagination as a loveable bohemian in tie-dye and sunglasses flashing courtside peace symbols. It was safer and easier to think of him that way, after all, than as a full-bore radical, but flashes of his leftist belief system would still occasionally emerge. 

I first got to know Walton through that second act sportscasting career after his chronic injuries forced him to retire from playing the game. Irreverent and unmerciful, he was tailor-made for the role. What I remember most about Shaquille O’Neal setting the NCAA Tournament record for blocks in a game in 1992 is less Shaq’s 11 rejections than Walton not praising his fellow big man but excoriating him for blocking the shots out of bounds rather than keeping them in play to provide his team a chance in transition. That kind of contrarianism was not just limited to his analysis but his whole broadcasting style, eschewing the medium’s preferred concise sentences for extravagant run-ons instead, and dropping myriad cultural and literary references that frequently left his announcing partners scratching their heads. He once quoted Lewis Carroll from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by deeming an NBA playoff series as curiouser and curiouser, a line I have only ever been able to hear in Walton’s voice ever after. 

If Walton’s wrecked body forced him out of basketball, it eventually forced him out of broadcasting too, leading to a mind-bending dark period in his life where, as he wrote in his autobiography, the pain was so unyielding and unbearable that life was virtually unlivable, often leaving him lying on the floor for days at a time, contemplating suicide. A 2009 spine surgery, though, saved his life by ending his suffering. In returning to television by broadcasting Pac-12 college basketball games for ESPN, it wasn’t that a new Bill Walton emerged so much as he ceased playing the role of a sports commentator and just started commentating as himself. He did not expound on the games in front of him so much as he effused good vibrations, a little like being in the company of Alec Baldwin’s character on “Friends” if that character had been a Deadhead. Walton always espoused a hippie ethos, but it took on a whole new context in the wake of his physical salvation, transforming each game he called into a two-hour fount of loquacious gratitude. 

Though Walton seemed generally beloved by the end of his life, this style of commentary had its detractors, criticizing him for focusing as much on flights of fancy as on the game and the players. There was some truth in this, but it’s also true that people who talk about sports for a living tend to live in a “small, constricted world” to quote Defector’s Ray Ratto talking about the glorious time in 2021 when Walton predicted five teams would advance to the Final Four. Walton’s worldview was always bigger than predictions, statistics, and takes, and post-spinal surgery, it became infinite. To him, each and every basketball game was a celebration of life, and in his later years, each and every broadcast of a basketball game was too. 

Bill Walton died on Monday May 27, 2024, from cancer. He was 71 but will live forever among the California stars. 

*Maybe this has no place in someone else’s obituary, but given his wandering tendencies, I think Walton would have wanted me to tell it: That is, I once slept overnight in my car in Temecula. The next morning at dawn I drove to Oceanside, parked near the beach, and watched the surfers do their thing in a grey, overcast Pacific while I drank a cup of gas station coffee. It is one of my happiest memories. Maybe there really was something about the dirt in Temecula.

In Memoriam: Carl Weathers

Carl Weathers was born in New Orleans in 1948 and grew up in the Crescent City before making his way to California, attending Long Beach Poly High, and then Long Beach City College, and then transferring to San Diego State on a football scholarship. His senior year, the team clinched an undefeated season by beating Boston University in what for most of its existence had been known as the Junior Rose Bowl before being rechristened the Pasadena Bowl. College football bowl games and movies, that’s sort of the unlikely nexus of my oft-incongruous interests, and few people have ever occupied that space more than Carl Weathers. “He was a serious drama student even when he was a football player,” Weathers’s SDSU teammate Donnie Rea told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. “All he did in the shower was recite Shakespeare and sing his next part in the play.” Weathers was drafted by the Oakland Raiders but never made it in the NFL, criticized by his coach John Madden for not being tough enough, maybe because Weathers had a thespian’s sensitivity, or maybe because as Weathers himself alluded to, he wasn’t interested in the grind, just didn’t care about football the same way he did about acting. Either way, professional football’s loss was art’s sizable gain. 

After several appearances in Blaxploitation movies and familiar television shows of the mid-1970s, Weathers received his career-making break in John G. Avildsen’s “Rocky” (1976) by playing heavyweight champion Apollo Creed who gives a Philadelphia underdog Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) a title shot. And if Rocky made Stallone’s mealy-mouthed mumbling famous, it made Weathers’s charismatic baritone famous too. “Apollo Creed versus the I-talian Stallion,” he says, chuckling to himself as he does, one of those movie lines I sometimes say to myself apropos of nothing. “Now that sounds like a damn monster movie.”

The character could merely have been a heel, but Weathers often talked of marrying the cerebral with the physical, and as Apollo, he saw where the lines between athlete and businessman collided, foreshadowing the eras of Jordan and LeBron. Weathers became as integral to the “Rocky” franchise as Stallone, so much so that in what one might credibly contend is the best movie of the whole series, Ryan Coogler’s “Creed” (2015), Weathers goes a long way toward making it count by having created such an indelible, authoritative presence that he hovers over the whole movie without appearing once; you hear the name Creed and instinctively, you see Carl Weathers.

After Apollo was sacrificed in “Rocky IV” (1985) so that Rocky could win the Cold War, Weathers appeared in the box office hit “Predator” (1987), an ostensible Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that still came across like a true ensemble because of co-stars like Weathers. Their handshake turned epic arm-wrestling match turned modern social media meme worked so well because Weathers could fill the frame as fully and electrically as Arnold. The latter had to win that moment because his name came first on the poster, but the two men emerged from that movie like Creed and Balboa – as equals. Weathers got his own movie the following year in 1988 with “Action Jackson,” though it failed commercially and creatively, and when it did, Hollywood eschewed giving him another title shot. Box office hits, to quote Alec Baldwin, provide “an all-access pass that lasts for five years. And, if the movies you make don’t make money in that period, your pass expires.” Weathers, though, barely even got a year, just one movie, and it does not feel like a stretch to suggest that Weathers being black meant the terms and conditions of his pass were inhibited. 

Whoever else in Hollywood might have forgotten about him, his “Action Jackson” producer Bernie Brillstein did not, and it was Brillstein who Weathers credited for getting his role in “Happy Gilmore” (1996). Weathers always had comedy chops, as his spot-on Rev Jesse Jackson impression for Saturday Night Live during the 1988 Democratic primaries attested, and in playing the gruff mentor to Adam Sandler’s infantile hockey player turned golfing pro, Weathers bloomed anew in playing funny. He was never funnier, though, than he was spoofing himself in the cult aughts television show “Arrested Development” as a cheapskate, an actor for whom the greatest thrill in life is not nailing a scene but pocketing his daily per diem, firmly in the pantheon of actors playing themselves. Speaking to Vulture in 2013, show creator Mitch Hurwitz said it was Weathers who proposed this idea, cutting off Hurwitz’s predictable pitches for “Rocky” parodies at the pass, a confession that kind of underlines how the industry never saw Weathers with the same clarity as he saw himself.

I always hoped Weathers, who died Thursday February 1, 2024, at the age of 76, would star in one last big project, and even cheekily dreamt one up, though as a few friends reminded me, one-time “Star Wars” fan turned wearied agnostic, he starred in the recent Disney+ TV series “The Mandalorian.” If I grew up knowing Weathers as Apollo Creed, a whole new generation has grown up knowing Weathers as Greef Karga, ultimately making him an actor who left a mark not in one era but two, which I hoped warmed his heart as much as it does mine.