Archive for the ‘1970s’ Category

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Obit watch: April 10, 2021.

Saturday, April 10th, 2021

James Hampton. He was “Hannibal Dobbs”, the bugler on “F-Troop” and knocked around movies and TV quite a bit: “The Rockford Files”, “Sling Blade”, “The Longest Yard” (the original)…

…and, yes, “Mannix”. (“Hardball”, season 8, episode 24, the very last episode.)

Ramsey Clark, attorney general under LBJ.

He went beyond lawyering. In 1972, with the war in Vietnam dragging on, Mr. Clark met with Communist officials in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and publicly criticized American conduct of the war. That began a pattern: In 1980, months after Iranian revolutionaries had attacked the United States Embassy in Tehran and taken Americans hostage, he went to that city with nine other Americans, in violation of a travel ban, to help resolve the crisis and participate in a conference in which he criticized the United States for having supported Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before he was deposed.
Six years later he met with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and denounced United States airstrikes against that country.
In November 1990, as the United States prepared for the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Clark, who had criticized the American deployment of forces in the gulf, consulted with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The next year he filed a complaint with the International War Crimes Tribunal accusing President George Bush of war crimes.
In 2011, he condemned NATO’s bombing campaign against Qaddafi’s government. In 2013, he said Iran had no intention of building a nuclear bomb and denounced sanctions against that country. Later, he protested lethal attacks by unmanned American drone aircraft on other nations.

Martina Batan, NYC contemporary art dealer. But there’s a bit more to the story than that.

Her brother was murdered at 14. His death devastated Ms. Batan: the case has never been solved.

When she was 53, Ms. Batan decided to kick up the dust of her past and hired a private detective to look into the 1978 murder case. The events that transpired were documented in “Missing People,” directed by David Shapiro, who followed Ms. Batan for four years. The investigation uncovered vital new information about the murder, but it also added to her despair.

Posted in 1970s, Law, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 9, 2021.

Friday, April 9th, 2021

For the historical record: Prince Philip. BBC.

Anne Beatts, one of the early SNL writers.

Ms. Beatts often wrote the parodies of TV commercials that the show used at the time, and sometimes she appeared in them. Mr. Zweibel especially remembered an absurdly overachieving housewife she played in one fake ad — the woman’s secret was a product called Speed.

Not embedded here because it is in the obit.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 370

Monday, April 5th, 2021

Military History Monday strikes again! And today I’ve got two kind of odd ones for you.

“The Small Boat Navy”, a 1968 Navy propaganda film about shallow water Navy ops in Vietnam. The odd part? This is narrated by Steve Martin Perry Mason Chief Ironside Raymond Burr.

Bonus: this is a little on the short side, and just has overlaid background music, but I wanted to include it for the odd factor. Video of test flights of the prototype two seat Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II trainer jet aircraft from the 1970s.

What’s odd about this? Two things: this is the only one of these aircraft ever built.

It was originally intended as a prototype for an A-10 trainer / all weather and night attack expansion of the A-10A Warthog, but no money was allocated for further production of the variant so it remained a one-off. Today this aircraft is on display at Edwards AFB.

Thing #2: The guy flying in the second seat is…Barry Goldwater. Yes, the Senator from Arizona.

Goldwater remained in the Arizona Air National Guard until 1967, retiring as a Command Pilot with the rank of major general. By that time, he had flown 165 different types of aircraft. As an Air Force Reserve major general, he continued piloting aircraft, to include the B-52 Stratofortress, until late in his military career.

Posted in 1970s, History, Planes, Politics, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 26, 2021.

Friday, March 26th, 2021

Bertrand Tavernier, noted French film director.

The Saturday Night Movie Group has watched “In the Electric Mist“, which is an interesting but flawed adaptation of James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (affiliate links). And I’ve seen “Coup de Torchon“, which is likewise an interesting adaptation of Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 (ditto). It seems to me, just looking at his filmography, that he was one of the more interesting French directors.

Jessica Walter. Damn.

I have never seen an episode of “Arrested Development”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group has watched quite a bit of “Archer”. We’ve also watched “Play Misty For Me”, which I think is a swell Clint Eastwood directed film.

And she appeared in every damn thing at some point, too: “Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “Banacek”, “McCloud”, “The F.B.I.”. “Cannon”, “Mission: Impossible”…

…and she did a guest shot on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, in the episode “Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger”. Really, that’s the title, and if it comes up in reruns, you should seek it out (assuming you have a taste for black comedy). She’s basically playing a live action Mallory Archer: a social climbing woman who’s obsessed with her grandson attending the right pre-school. (“If it wasn’t for me, he’d be eating yams and watching ‘Jerry Springer'”.)

…and, yes! She was a “Mannix” three-timer. (“The Danford File”, season 6, episode 24. “Moving Target”, season 5, episode 18. “Who Is Sylvia?”, season 3, episode 19.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: March 16, 2021.

Tuesday, March 16th, 2021

Yaphet Kotto.

Man, what a career. “Alien”, “Live and Let Die”, “Raid on Entebbe” (he was Idi Amin), and tons of TV work. Including the good “Hawaii 5-0″…

…and “Mannix” (“Death in a Minor Key”, season 2, episode 18. He plays a jazz musician who is dating Peggy, and gets arrested and extradited to a Southern town. Mannix goes down to help him out. We watched this episode recently, and while I haven’t seen all of “Mannix”, I think I’d put this one in the top ten. Without going into spoilers, it goes in some surprising directions.)

…and, of course, one of my favorite roles: Lt. Al Giardello on “Homicide: Life on the Street”. (He also crossed over to “Law and Order”. And he made an unaccredited appearance on “The Wire” as a different character.)

Thing I did not know: that there were two TV movies based on Edna Buchanan’s true crime books (affiliate link), in which he apparently has a starring role.

I hear good things about “Badge of the Assassin”, a TV movie that you can find (for the moment) on the ‘Tube, in which he co-stars with Jimmy Woods.

Edited to add: NYT obit, which was not up when I originally posted.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 14, 2021.

Sunday, February 14th, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit for Lynn Stalmaster, Hollywood casting director.

Nicknamed “The Master Caster,” Stalmaster has more than 400 casting credits listed on IMDb, with the too-many highlights to mention including I Want to Live! (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Harold and Maude (1971), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Onion Field (1979), Tootsie (1982), Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and Battlefield Earth (2000).

…

For John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), Stalmaster set up a casting call at a Georgia elementary school and found Billy Redden to play the quirky youngster in the movie’s famous banjo scene. And he suggested that Ned Beatty (making his film debut) play one of the businessmen who takes that fateful canoe trip down the river.
Stalmaster also was instrumental in the career of William Shatner (Judgment at Nuremberg); discovered LeVar Burton, then a sophomore at USC, for the landmark ABC miniseries Roots; cast country singer Mac Davis to play a pro quarterback in North Dallas Forty (1979); and insisted that eventual Oscar nominee Sam Shepard portray Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff (“It’s the only time I thought the film couldn’t be made without one specific actor,” he once said). He cast more than 100 roles for that movie alone.

He also was responsible for getting Dustin Hoffman into “The Graduate”, Christoper Reeve into “Superman”, and John Travolta into “Welcome Back, Kotter” among almost 400 credits in both movies and TV. He was the first casting director in history to receive an Academy Award.

Brayden Smith. He was a recent five-time “Jeopardy” champion:

Mr. Smith, she said, had achieved a lifelong dream by winning “Jeopardy!” as a contestant on some of the final shows hosted by Mr. Trebek before Mr. Trebek died in November at age 80 after a battle with cancer.

He was only 24.

He graduated last year from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with a degree in economics and had planned to become a lawyer in the federal government. He had recently served as an intern at the Cato Institute in Washington, researching criminal justice reform.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 2, 2021.

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021

Hal Holbrook. He was 95, but still, this stinks. THR. Variety.

Mr. Holbrook never claimed to be a Twain scholar; indeed, he said, he had read only a little of Twain’s work as a young man. He said the idea of doing a staged reading of Twain’s work came from Edward A. Wright, his mentor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. And Mr. Wright would have been the first to acknowledge that the idea had actually originated with Twain himself — or rather Samuel Clemens, who had adopted Mark Twain as something of a stage name and who did readings of his work for years.
Mr. Holbrook was finishing his senior year as a drama major in 1947 when Mr. Wright talked him into adding Twain to a production that Mr. Holbrook and his wife, Ruby, were planning called “Great Personalities,” in which they would portray, among others, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Mr. Holbrook had doubts at first. “Ed, I think this Mark Twain thing is pretty corny,” he recalled telling Mr. Wright after the first rehearsals. “I don’t think it’s funny.”

…

Mr. Holbrook began developing his one-man show in 1952, the year Ms. Holbrook gave birth to their first child, Victoria. He soon looked the part, with a wig to match Twain’s unruly mop, a walrus mustache and a rumpled white linen suit, the kind Twain himself wore onstage. From his grandfather, Mr. Holbrook got an old penknife, which he used to cut the ends off the three cigars he smoked during a performance (though he was not sure whether Twain ever smoked onstage). He sought out people who claimed to have seen and heard Twain, who died in 1910, and listened to their recollections.
He had more or less perfected the role by 1954, the year he began a one-man show titled “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.
Two years later he took his Twain to television, performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show.” In the meantime he had landed a steady job in 1954 on the TV soap opera “The Brighter Day,” on which he played a recovering alcoholic.
The stint lasted until 1959, when, tiring of roles he no longer cared about, he opened in “Mark Twain Tonight!” at the Off Broadway 41st Street Theater.By then the metamorphosis was complete. With his shambling gait, Missouri drawl, sly glances and exquisite timing, Hal Holbrook had, for all intents and purposes, become Mark Twain.
“After watching and listening to him for five minutes,” Arthur Gelb wrote in The New York Times, “it is impossible to doubt that he is Mark Twain, or that Twain must have been one of the most enchanting men ever to go on a lecture tour.”

This is not intended as a shot at Mr. Holbrook, but I do wonder how much of our popular conception of Mark Twain is shaped by Holbrook’s performances.

Mr. Holbrook’s many film roles tended to be small ones, although there were exceptions. One was as the anonymous informant Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film adaptation of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate cover-up. (Deep Throat was later revealed to have been W. Mark Felt, a top F.B.I. official.) Another big movie role was in “The Firm” (1993), based on John Grisham’s corporate whodunit, in which Mr. Holbrook played the stop-at-nothing head of a Memphis law firm.

Another film role that he doesn’t seem to be getting much credit for: “Lt. Briggs” in “Magnum Force”.

Mr. Holbrook had a long and fruitful run as an actor. He was the shadowy patriot Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976); an achingly grandfatherly character in “Into the Wild” (2007), for which he received an Oscar nomination; and the influential Republican Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012).
He played the 16th president himself, on television, in Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln,” a 1974 mini-series. The performance earned him an Emmy Award, one of five he won for his acting in television movies and mini-series; the others included “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (1970), his protagonist resembling John F. Kennedy, and “Pueblo” (1973) in which he played the commander of a Navy intelligence boat seized by North Korea in 1968.

I caught a few episodes of “The Senator” back when RetroTV was airing in Austin, and I thought it held up well. The whole series is on DVD (affiliate link) and it looks like there are full episodes on the ‘Tube.

Harlan Ellison was particularly fond of these episodes (it was a two-parter).

He didn’t do a lot of ’70s detective shows, but, oddly, he did some in the 21st century: “NCIS”, “Bones”, and the bad “Hawaii 5-0”, among other credits.

In other news: Jamie Tarses, prominent TV executive.

Dustin “Screech” Diamond.

Finally, Jack Palladino, who the NYT calls a “hard-charging private investigator”.

Mr. Palladino was placed on life support after sustaining a severe head injury on Jan. 28 in what the San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin, called “a brutal attack” in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Two people were arrested in the attack and booked at the San Francisco County Jail on charges that include attempted robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and elder abuse.

What makes this interesting is: he worked for the Clintons. Specifically, Bill:

During the 1992 presidential campaign, he was hired by the Clinton campaign after Gennifer Flowers released tapes of phone calls with Mr. Clinton to back up her claim that they had had an affair.
Mr. Palladino embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”
“Every acquaintance, employer and past lover should be located and interviewed,” Mr. Palladino wrote. “She is now a shining icon — telling lies that so far have proved all benefit and no cost — for any other opportunist who may be considering making Clinton a target.”

He also did work for R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein.

In his work for the Clinton campaign, Mr. Palladino’s staff scoured Arkansas and beyond, collecting disparaging accounts from Ms. Flowers’s ex-boyfriends, employers and others who claimed to know her, accounts that the campaign then disseminated to the news media.
By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by Mr. Palladino to brand her as a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 29, 2021.

Friday, January 29th, 2021

Cicely Tyson. THR. Variety.

In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious Black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned Black people. She urged Black colleagues to do the same, and often went without work. She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral, and insisted that African-Americans, even if poor or downtrodden, should be portrayed with dignity.
Her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”
At 93, she won an honorary Oscar, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020.

So she was a “G” short of an EGOT, but picked up the “P” to make her a PEOT.

For many Americans, Ms. Tyson was an idol of the Black Is Beautiful movement, regal in an African turban and caftan, her face gracing the covers of Ebony, Essence and Jet magazines. She was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a runner, a meditator and, from 1981 to 1989, the wife of the jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis. Since the ’60s she had inspired Black American women to embrace their own standards of beauty — including helping to popularize the Afro.
“She’s our Meryl Streep,” Vanessa Williams told Essence in 2013. “She was the person you wanted to be like in terms of an actress, in terms of the roles she got and how serious she took her craft. She still is.”

…

In January 2021, when she was 96, her memoir, “Just as I Am,” appeared, and in a pre-publication interview with The New York Times Magazine, she was asked if she had any advice for the young.
“It’s simple,” she said. “I try always to be true to myself. I learned from my mom: ‘Don’t lie ever, no matter how bad it is. Don’t lie to me ever, OK? You will be happier that you told the truth.’ That has stayed with me, and it will stay with me for as long as I’m lucky enough to be here.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 28, 2021.

Thursday, January 28th, 2021

Cloris Leachman.

…between 1972 and 2011 she was nominated for 22 Primetime Emmys and won eight.

(Of course, she won an Oscar as best supporting actress for “The Last Picture Show”. Interestingly, she beat Ellen Burstyn who was also nominated for the same film.)

A number of those Emmys were for dramatic work, including her performance as a woman who finds herself pregnant at 40 in the made-for-TV movie “A Brand New Life” (1973). But comedy was her forte.
She was nominated four times and won twice for her performance on the hit CBS sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as Phyllis Lindstrom, the scatterbrained landlady of Mary Richards, the plucky TV news producer played by Ms. Moore. She went on to play the same role from 1975 to 1977 on the spinoff series “Phyllis,” for which she received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe.

Although her focus for the rest of her career was on television, she also had some memorable movie roles, notably under Mel Brooks’s direction. In his beloved horror spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974) she was the sinister Transylvanian housekeeper Frau Blücher, the very mention of whose name was enough to terrify any horse within earshot. She played similarly intimidating women in Mr. Brooks’s “High Anxiety” (1977) and “History of the World, Part I” (1981). She also co-starred with Harvey Korman in Mr. Brooks’s short-lived sitcom “The Nutt House” (1989).

And, yes! She did do a “Mannix”! (“The Need of a Friend“, season 2, episode 9.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 27, 2021.

Wednesday, January 27th, 2021

Bruce Kirby, another one of those knock-around actors who was in just about every 1970’s detective show except that one.

Most notably, he was Sgt. Kramer in “Columbo”. He also had several guest shots on “The Rockford Files”, and appeared on “Banacek” and “McCloud” among many other credits. (He was also the police captain on “Holmes and Yoyo”.) And his credits go all the way back to “Car 54, Where Are You?”

NYT obit for Gregory Sierra.

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Obit watch: January 24, 2021.

Sunday, January 24th, 2021

Gregory Sierra, knock-around actor.

He did some theater work, but was mostly a TV and movie actor. He was “Julio”, Fred’s sidekick on “Sanford and Son”, Carlos “El Puerco” Valdez (the guy who kidnapped Jessica) on “Soap”, and “Chano”, one of the detectives in the early seasons of “Barney Miller”. He also did a lot of guest appearances, including nearly every major detective show of the 1970s (except that one): “Police Story”, “Banacek”, “Hawaii 5-0” (the good one), “Columbo”, “McCloud”, “Mission: Impossible”, and the list goes on. He was also Lieutenant Rodriguez in the early episodes of “Miami Vice” (that character got killed off and was replaced by Edward James Olmos’s “Martin Castillo”).

His movie credits include “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” and, interestingly, “The Other Side of the Wind“.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 17, 2021.

Sunday, January 17th, 2021

Phil Spector. This is another one of those where I don’t have much to say, really: everyone knows the story (and if you don’t, it is recapped in the obit).

Sylvain Sylvain, of the New York Dolls.

Peter Mark Richman, actor. He had a long list of credits, including soap operas and a long list of 70’s cop/detective shows…

…including “Mannix”. (“Walk With a Dead Man”, season 3, episode 15.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 13, 2021.

Wednesday, January 13th, 2021

Adolfo Quiñones, street dancer. He was in “Breakin'” and “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, among other credits.

I got a whole bunch of stuff from Lawrence and other folks, so let’s start:

Sheldon Adelson, casino and resort hotel owner, and major donor to the Republican Party and conservative politicians in Israel.

John Riley. He was on “General Hospital” and also did a lot of appearances on non-“Mannix” 1970s detective series.

Jessica Campbell. She was “Tammy Metzler” in “Election”, and was only 38.

Lawrence sent over a report of the death of Julie Strain, “scream queen”, B-movie actress, and Penthouse Pet of the Year (1993). The site admits that she was mistakenly reported dead last year, so I would take this with a lick of salt (though they claim confirmation from multiple sources).

She was in a lot of Andy Sidaris films. (If you’re not familiar with those, and you like MST3K, you are missing a treat.)

Strain was also very much associated with fantasy comic book magazine Heavy Metal, where she was a frequent cover model, and eventually the wife of publisher (and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator) Kevin Eastman. Her image was that of the confident, assertive glamazon—at 6’1’’ plus heels she towered over many of her male co-stars. In fact, she essentially became the de facto face of Heavy Metal in 2000 when she contributed both the voice and likeness of protagonist Julie in the film Heavy Metal 2000 and its videogame spinoff Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2.

Among her other movie credits was “Exterminator City”, which Lawrence will tell you (at the drop of a hat) is the worst movie he’s ever seen. Here’s a clip from the movie which does not feature Ms. Strain, just for illumination:

As Lawrence will tell you (again) that’s the best scene in the movie.

Finally, Diana Millay, actress most famous for “Dark Shadows”.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 12, 2021.

Tuesday, January 12th, 2021

Pat Loud, the mother in the 1970s reality show, “An American Family”. I touched on this at greater length when Bill Loud, her husband, passed away in 2018.

I’ve been holding this for a few days: Jim Bob Moffett. He was a prominent oil and mining magnate, and a large donor to UT.

He also made a whole lot of people angry back in the early 1990s when one of his companies planned a development in Southwest Austin.

Environmentalists argued that Moffett’s development would wash building materials, dirt and pollutants that accompany everyday human life into the aquifer, ultimately fouling the springs. Rather than treat the situation as a political dispute in which both sides had legitimate interests — an approach that many activists said had led them to compromise too easily — activists framed the issue as cruel business interests threatening Austin’s most beloved civic feature.
The fight culminated in a City Council meeting June 7, 1990. It is widely considered the high point of Austin civic participation: 17 hours of songs, poems, threats and pleas persuaded a glassy-eyed City Council that had seemed likely to approve the proposal to unanimously reject it. From that decision rose the Save Our Springs Coalition (now the SOS Alliance) and landmark rules that limit development in that portion of Austin.

Posted in 1970s, Austin, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 4, 2021.

Monday, January 4th, 2021

It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.

Tanya Roberts has died at the age of 65. She was, of course, “Sheena: Queen of the Jungle”, Donna’s mother on “That ’70s Show”, and one of Charlie’s Angels (for the final season). She was also the Bond girl, Stacey Sutton, in “A View to a Kill”, the movie that caused me to punch out of the Bond franchise.

Edited to add: Lawrence sent me a link from TMZ that claims Ms. Roberts is still alive. However, I don’t trust TMZ any further than I can sling a piano, and THR has not retracted their story yet. I will try to keep an eye on this one.

Lawrence sent over obits for Floyd Little, noted running back, and Paul Westphal, noted basketball player and coach.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

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