In Contention

Tag: obits

  • Patricia Neal (1926 – 2010)

    The occasional indignity of being an Academy Award champ is that it gives obituaries an immediate short-cut through one’s career: a lifetime of distinguished work can be handily reduced to “culminated in an Oscar win for _________.”

    Such is the case in many pieces on the passing of Patricia Neal yesterday, albeit justifiably supplemented with observations on her troubled personal life and remarkable recovery from multiple illnesses. Indeed, as a kid obsessed with all things Roald Dahl, I was, for many years, more familiar with the woman than the actress.

    When discussing her film career, however, it’s hard not to zero straight in on her tremendous, Oscar-nabbing work in “Hud”: handily the most electric moment of an otherwise respectable career, yes, but also among the most essential, era-defining performances ever honored in the Best Actress category. (Yes, up there with greatest-win peers like Vivien Leigh and Hilary Swank, and perhaps something of an evolutionary link between them.)

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  • R.I.P. Harvey Pekar

    It’s a sad morning to wake up to the news that comics author Harvey Pekar is no longer with us.  If I was a guy like Pekar, I’d be ecstatic that a definitive work like Shari Berman and Robert Pulcini’s “American Splendor” is out there, telling my story on film as I mosey off into the great beyond.  To say nothing of a life’s work in print.  (A pair of classic Letterman appearances after the jump.)

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  • Ronald Neame (1911-2010)

    It’s inevitable, but somewhat depressing, that most of the obituaries cropping up for British filmmaker Ronald Neame, who passed away yesterday in Los Angeles aged 99, mention “The Poseidon Adventure” at the top. (And look, I’ve only gone and done it myself.)

    As a director, writer, producer and cinematographer, Neame’s résumé is considerably more scattered and interesting than that hoary slab of big-studio Velveeta — including trick-laden DP duty on “Blithe Spirit,” Oscar-nominated script work on David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” and “Great Expectations” and a good run of unflashy but considered directorial efforts.

    Second to “The Poseidon Adventure,” Neame might remain best-known for directing Maggie Smith to her Oscar-winning (and career-best) performance in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” but on the less tony end of the scale, he had a knack for peppy comedy, including two delightful capers with happily mismatched star duos, “Gambit” (Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine) and the particularly underrated “Hopscotch” (Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson).

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  • R.I.P. Dennis Hopper

    “What are they gonna say about him?  Are they gonna say he was a kind man?  He was wise man?  He had plans?  He had wisdom?”

    It’s up to those of us left to have that say, I suppose.  He’ll live forever.  Ride easy.

  • R.I.P. Lynn Redgrave

    I always thought Lynn Redgrave deserved the Oscar 12 years ago for her work in Bill Condon’s “Gods and Monsters.” Most remember her from her first nominated effort, 1966’s “Georgy Girl.” Redgrave has left this mortal coil.  I tried to find a clip of Condon’s film but this NYT Conversations snippet will do, a candid, if brief, look at the woman:

  • J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

    The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. SalingerHow eerily sad that exactly one year ago, I wrote a short piece mourning the passing of John Updike, one of my literary heroes and chief inspirations to become a writer. Today, the news has arrived that J.D. Salinger, the man joining Updike at the top of my personal pantheon, has followed him to the smoky writer’s study in the sky.

    January 27 is clearly not a lucky day for American literature.

    I first read “The Catcher in the Rye” when I was 10 years old. As banal as it is to say, and as innumerable as the people are who have said the same thing before me, it’s a book that changed my life. I suspect Holden Caulfield has served as a guide for many a curious child into the daring delights of “grown-up books,” but it wasn’t just the character or the story that held me in thrall — it was the flip, jazzy elegance of the writing itself.

    As a kid whose twin passions were reading and watching movies, Salinger taught me that a book could read like a movie, that prose could bend and bounce like verbal dialogue.

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  • End of an era

    Miramax FilmsI received my last correspondence from Miramax publicity yesterday.  Today, the company has effectively been shuttered, and it is, without question, the end of an era.

    When things were streamlined for the brand back in October, I wrote a brief remembrance.  But how ironic that, as the latest and greatest in independent cinema looks for distribution and attention in the snowy hills of Sundance, the studio that made the fest in some ways and, indeed, blazed the trail for independent cinema throughout the 1990s, finds itself closing up shop.

    It was 21 years ago that Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies and videotape” put the fest on the map, waltzing into town with no hope for securing a deal and waltzing out under the Miramax umbrella that would eventually change first the business of indie film, and soon enough, the business of awards season.  Chris Lee, in previewing the fest’s 25th anniversary last week, writes up the film’s impact at the Los Angeles Times.

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  • R.I.P. Robert B. Parker

    Robert B. ParkerThis is one of those fleeting AP reports that causes a double take, since I wasn’t aware of any illness or anything.  Apparently it’s a sudden death, natural causes kind of thing, when the universe just decides your time is up.

    I had a nice email exchange with Parker, who is most famous for his series of “Spencer” novels, roughly a year ago.  He agreed to a few questions on the western genre, the subject of my thesis at the time, and as I had already spoken to Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn and actor/filmmaker Ed Harris, I thought the author of “Appaloosa” would be a nice addition to the piece.  His perspective on the future of the genre and its evolution (the precise topic at hand) differed slightly from mine, but nevertheless was refreshing in its honesty and, most importantly, its confidence.

    I dug back through my old emails to see if I could find our exchange, and there it was.  One excerpt was particularly indicative of the man, as far as I could gauge him from afar and electronically…

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  • R.I.P. Éric Rohmer

    Eric RohmerIt is with great sadness that I read of the passing of Éric Rohmer, a titan of French cinema who remained creatively active almost to the end of his 89-year life.

    Boasting arguably the mellowest, most droll filmography of his New Wave brethren, the esteemed writer-director (and former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma) delighted in the literary and sociological possibilities of dialogue — he’s largely responsible for the “talky” tag that clings to French art film today, but that’s a virtue rather than a debit.

    Few writers in film could define a character through the patterns and concerns of their speech as precisely as Rohmer, his sphere of influence extending from Woody Allen to any number of figures in current American indie cinema.

    If you’re as keen on his work as I am, of course, you don’t need to be told this. If you haven’t yet made his acquaintance, begin with any of his Six Moral Tales (the most well-known of which, “My Night at Maud’s,” garnered him his lone Oscar nomination for writing), which mine rich humor and psychological insight from a series of anecdotal narratives.

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  • R.I.P. Brittany Murphy

    I’ve been waiting most of the morning someone other than TMZ to post a report.  Here’ the LA Times.  Anyway, what do you say about someone who dies at 32?  All sadness.  And the timing, just before the holidays, a week after SNL spoofed her out of nowhere.  What do you say?

  • R.I.P. Al Martino

    Your moment of movie infamy:

  • R.I.P. Patrick Swayze

    I got the AP alert on my iPhone while I was out this afternoon and my heart sank.  Patrick Swayze is gone. For most it was “Dirty Dancing.”  For some it was “Point Break.”  Still others, “Ghost.”  For me, the man was epitomized in the bad-assery of “Road House” and that’s how I choose to remember him.  But I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pay this ode to two of our fallen entertainers:

  • R.I.P. Don Hewitt

    CBS is reporting that “60 Minutes” creator and cornerstone of CBS News Don Hewitt has died after being diagnosed with a small, contained tumor earlier in the year.  He was 86.  The news comes one month and two days after Hewitt’s long-time colleague, Walter Cronkite, passed away at 92.

    Hewitt spear-headed the most successful television news show of all time in “60 Minutes,” and has been portrayed in film by Grant Heslov (George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.”) and Philip Baker Hall (Michael Mann’s “The Insider.”)  Hewitt came under fire, as dramatized by Mann’s film, when he caved into corporate interests by refusing to air a segment in which former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on malfeasance practices at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company.  But that, however damaging, is certainly not his legacy.

    Hewitt was one of the titans who ushered in an age of televised news content, but his passing, along with Cronkite’s, continues to sound the bell of a forgotten or, at least, diminished period of high respect for the profession.

  • R.I.P. Les Paul

    A break from our regularly scheduled programming.  For the music fans.  Slash will be bummed.

    Gibson-Les Paul

  • R.I.P. John Hughes

    Stolen from us, a true staple of the 1980s cinema, “Mr. Mom,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Weird Science,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” “Home Alone,” the great “Christmas Vacation” and, of course, a personal favorite I’ll defend to the ends of the earth,” “The Breakfast Club.”  Dead at 59 from a sudden heart attack.

    Saturday, March 24,1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois, 60062. Dear Mr. Vernon, We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.

    Hughes got an entire generation.  That’s an artistic commodity, no matter how you slice it.  He will be missed.

  • R.I.P. Budd Schulberg

    I just came back from one of the most expertly written films of the year (Guillermo Arriaga’s “The Burning Plain”) to the sad news that one of the great screenwriters of our time, Budd Schulberg, has passed on from this mortal coil.  At 95 years old, he seemed to get everything you can possibly get from life.  He is perhaps best known and remembered for “On the Waterfront,” for which he won an Oscar and gave us the immortal line: “I coulda had class.  I coulda been a contenda.  I coulda been somebody.” He will be missed.

  • R.I.P. Walter Cronkite

    It’s difficult to put words to this one.  Those more adept at such things will surely write the glowing appreciations the man deserves in the coming weeks.  But nevertheless, the most trusted man in America is gone.  And personally speaking, it’s quite ironic considering just today I finished a rewrite of a script largely about the death of journalism.  Anyway, given the upcoming anniversary (though more on that Monday), I can think of no better clip than this:

  • Probably deserved worse

    I’m back after a week of non-Internet, non-TV, book-diving and screenwriting beachy goodness, and one of the stories I’m coming home to today is former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s death.  I don’t want to be too much of a dick here, especially in the wake of similar sniping from others surrounding Michael Jackson’s untimely exit, but isn’t it always guys like McNamara who end up going peacefully in their sleep?  The Meyer Lanskys of the world.  The ones too smart to go down before their natural expiration date like their fellow hooligans.  Here’s hoping your conscience didn’t get in the way of that long, healthy life, Mr. McNamara.  Whatever the case, sleep well.  At least Errol Morris got you on the record.