Archive for the ‘1970s’ Category

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Obit watch: January 9, 2020.

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

The great Buck Henry.

He was a co-writer of “The Graduate”, co-created “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, did guest stints on “Saturday Night Live” in the early days (and was the first five-timer), created “Quark”, wrote the screnplays for “Catch-22” and “The Day of the Dolphin”, co-wrote the legendary disaster “Town and Country“…man, what a career.

(Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously. It is now.)

Mike Resnick, noted SF writer. Lawrence has an excellent obit up at his site, and pretty much says everything I was going to say. I won’t say we were personal friends (I don’t think he would have passed Lawrence’s “pick me out of a police lineup” test) but he was a good and erudite guy who got me into Theodore Roosevelt and “Duck, You Sucker!” (among other things). His passing leaves the world a smaller, colder place.

Edited to add: found this, by way of Dean Bradley’s Twitter, and thought it was a nice tribute to Mr. Resnick.

Edited to add 2: Michael Swanwick on Mr. Resnick.

I had not heard of Adela Holzer before her obit showed up in the paper of record, but her story is too good to ignore. She was married to a “shipping magnate” and was an early investor in the musical “Hair”. (Depending on which account you believe, she put in $57,000 and made $2 million, or she put in $7,500 and made $115,000.) She went on to produce the notorious flop “Dude“.

In 1975, she was riding high. Then she wasn’t. By the next spring, she had produced three new Broadway flops: The Scott Joplin opera “Treemonisha” held on for almost two months, but both “Truckload” and “Me Jack, You Jill” closed in previews. She followed those with “Something Old, Something New,” starring Hans Conried and the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; it closed on opening night, Oct. 1, 1977.

Then it got worse. You may ask: how much worse can it get than having your show close on opening night? This much worse:

At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.
The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.

She served two years in prison. Ms. Holzer tried to make a comeback in the 1980s with a musical about Joseph McCarthy that never opened.

She was soon arrested again, on grand larceny charges. It was revealed that she had told numerous associates that their investments — in oil and mineral deals — had been guaranteed by the banker David Rockefeller, to whom she claimed to be secretly married. That lie was bolstered by at least one fake marriage license and by a framed silver photo of him at her bedside. It was later reported that the photo had been clipped from a magazine.

She served four years (of an eight year sentence) for that.

Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.
This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.

Noted:

Ms. Holzer’s resistance to truth telling apparently knew no boundaries. “If she told me the sun was shining, I’d go out to look — and I’d take an umbrella,” Michael Alpert, who had been her theatrical public relations representative, told Vanity Fair in 1991.

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

Obit watch: January 2, 2020.

Thursday, January 2nd, 2020

Don Larsen, pitcher for the Yankees and the only man ever to pitch a perfect game in a World Series. ESPN.

Jack “Only A Bill” Sheldon. Mark Evanier has a nice tribute up at his blog, with two funny stories about the late Mr. Sheldon (who, in addition to his “Schoolhouse Rock” work, did several appearances on the late 60’s/early 70s “Dragnet”).

Martin West. He did bit parts on a lot of stuff, including “Ironside”, “The Invaders”, and “Hill Street Blues”.

(Hattip on all three of these to Lawrence.)

For the historical record: David Stern. ESPN. Field of Schemes.

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

Obit watch: December 12, 2019.

Thursday, December 12th, 2019

Philip McKeon, who you may remember as Alice’s son Tommy on “Alice”. I had no idea he lived in Wimberly (which is a short drive from where I live), or that he was doing a radio show. (Hattip: RoadRich.)

Leonard Goldberg, noted television producer. He collaborated with Aaron Spelling on “Fantasy Island” and “Charlie’s Angels”, and went on to produce “Blue Bloods”.

I don’t watch much TV, especially network TV, but I have a feeling I should start watching “Blue Bloods”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Tatsuo Umemiya, Japanese actor. I’m not familiar with his work, but he was highly prolific in Japan: 203 credits as an actor between 1959 and 2013.

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

Obit watch: December 9, 2019.

Monday, December 9th, 2019

René Auberjonois, versatile actor. He’s getting a lot of attention for his roles in Altman’s “MASH”, “Benson”, and some minor SF TV show, but he did a lot of movies and TV: “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, “Mrs. Columbo” (but oddly not “Columbo”)…the list goes on.

Caroll Spinney is also getting a lot of coverage, but noted here for the record.

Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve.

Ron Leibman, another one of those highly versatile actors in movies, television, and theater.

Finally, Winston Lawson. he was the Secret Service agent who did the advance work for Kennedy’s Texas trip, rode in the motorcade, and helped load the president onto the stretcher at Parkland.

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 4, 2019.

Wednesday, December 4th, 2019

Interesting pair of obits from the NYT:

Wayne Merry has passed away at the age of 88. Mr. Merry, Warren Harding, and George Whitmore were rock climbers:

On Nov. 12, 1958, they became the first climbers to reach the top of El Capitan after ascending the Nose, notable for a daunting overhang called the Great Roof. The climb took 45 days, spread out over about a year and a half; in each leg of the climb they would secure fixed ropes to the highest point they had reached so that they could later resume the climb with relative ease.

…

They subsisted on cheese, raisins, canned fruit and sardines. They carried water in an old paint-thinner can, and drank wine. “We trained on red wine, if anything,” Merry told The Yukon News in 2015.
They relied on improvised implements, including pitons that they fashioned from the legs of old wood stoves and tools from a hardware store that they repurposed for climbing.
“I wouldn’t hang a picture from them today, but back then we hung our lives on them,” Merry told Yukon North of Ordinary magazine in 2016.

Brad Gobright passed away last week at 31.

Mr. Gobright, a native of California, was hailed as one of the world’s best free solo climbers, a technique that uses no ropes. He set a speed record in 2017 — 2 hours 19 minutes 44 seconds — at the popular climbing route called the Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. It has since been surpassed.

Mr. Gobright died in a fall while rappelling with a climbing partner in Mexico.

In non-rock climbing related news, this is a nice tribute to Tim George. Dr. George was a pediatric neurosurgeon at Dell Children’s Hospital:

In 2006, Bill Dollahite’s son Scott was badly hurt playing football for Cedar Park High School in Waco. Doctors told him Scott was paralyzed. The family decided to move him closer to home.
“We took about a three-hour ride in the worst weather in the world … following an ambulance,” Dollahite said. In the middle of the night, the ambulance pulled into what was Brackenridge Hospital, “and here comes Dr. George.”
George was still new to Austin; Dollahite is not sure if he even had an office. Dell Children’s was under construction.
“Dr. George looked at him and goes, ‘You know, let’s not give up everything just yet. Let me take a look at this, because everything looks too perfect,’” Dollahite said. “Long story short, Scott went into Brackenridge quadriplegic. A couple of days later, he walked out. No ill effects after that. By the miracles that Dr. George did, he gave him his life back.”

Dr. George went on to take up racing as a hobby. He was competing in an endurance race at Sebring in Florida last month (as part of a team with Scott Dollahite) when he suddenly became ill, pulled into pit row, and collapsed.

I never watched “Will and Grace”, but Shelley Morrison had a long career before that show: “Laredo”, “The Flying Nun”, “240-Robert”…

NYT obit for D.C. Fontana.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 3, 2019.

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

Robert K. Massie, author, historian, and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Mr. Massie said his literary odyssey was set in motion by research he did at the New York Public Library during lunch breaks from his job as a young journalist. It was purely personal research at first: He wanted to know more about the bleeding disease of hemophilia and how he and his wife at the time, Suzanne Massie, who became a noted Russian scholar, could help their hemophiliac son, Bob.
During his research he became fascinated with perhaps the most famous childhood case of hemophilia, that of Alexei, a son of Nicholas and Alexandra. It was to help Alexei that Alexandra had summoned Grigory Rasputin, the notorious faith-healing monk who gained influence over the imperial court. Public disdain of Rasputin contributed to the Russian people’s turn against the monarchy, helping to pave the way for the revolution of 1917.
Mr. Massie wound up writing an article on hemophilia for The Saturday Evening Post, where he had taken a job in 1962. He wrote an accompanying article about Alexei and his parents, but The Post did not print it. Still, he found himself unable to abandon the family drama of the Romanovs, as the Russian dynasty was known, and he eventually quit his job to pursue the subject full time.
A decade later, “Nicholas and Alexandra” was published to acclaim. Though nearly 1,000 pages long, it sold more than 4.5 million copies and is regarded as one of the most popular historical studies ever published.

When I was a little kid, we had a Reader’s Digest Condensed book that had Nicholas and Alexandra in it. I remember being both fascinated by it and incapable of understanding it, because I was a little kid, and Russian history was just a little above my level. Not too long ago (back when I was at St. Ed’s) I read – and loved – the actual, non-condensed book.

Lawrence tipped me off to this, but I don’t have an obit to link: Dorothy Catherine Fontana, aka D.C. Fontana. She did a lot of writing for television, including “The Waltons”, “Land of the Lost”, something called “Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys”, “Babylon 5”, “Dallas”, “Logan’s Run”, “Lancer”…

…and she was also heavily involved with a minor series called “Star Trek”, as well as some of the sequels: “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Star Trek: The Animated Series”, and various spin-off products.

Edited to add: THR obit. (Hattip: RoadRich.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 24, 2019.

Sunday, November 24th, 2019

Gahan Wilson, one of the greatest cartoonists ever.

Michael J. Pollard, character actor. Among his roles: “C.W. Moss” in “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Jahn” in the “Miri” episode of “Star Trek: Original Recipe”, “Fauss” in “Little Fauss and Big Halsy”, and a lot of assorted 60s and 70s TV.

At the Actors Studio he did a scene with Marilyn Monroe, at her request. According to Ms. Ephron, when Ms. Monroe had called him up to do the scene, she said: “Hello, this is Marilyn. The girl from class.”

NYT obit for Fred Cox. (Previously.)

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

Obit watch: November 13, 2019.

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019

Zeke Bratkowski, Green Bay Packers quarterback. He didn’t quite get the level of fame he probably deserved as he spent most of his time backing up some guy named Starr.

By way of Lawrence: Charles Rogers, first round NFL draft choice (and second overall pick) in 2003.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pounder had just 36 catches for 440 yards with four touchdowns in 15 games before he left the league in 2005.

Also by way of Lawrence: Virginia Leith. Possibly an obscure figure, but some folks may remember her as “Jan” (or “Jan In the Pan”) from “The Head Brain That Wouldn’t Die”, which was (of course) a MST3K.

Interestingly, she also did guest shots on some of the better cop shows of the 1970s: “Baretta”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Barnaby Jones”. “Police Woman”.

Frank Giles, former editor of The Sunday Times of London. He may be best remembered as the man who published the Hitler diaries, though he claimed he knew they were fake and Rupert Murdoch ordered them published anyway.

Posted in 1970s, History, Media, Movies, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 11, 2019.

Monday, November 11th, 2019

pigpen51 left a very kind and much appreciated comment on the last obit watch. In that vein, someone who I feel like i should remember, but is probably just a little outside the fringes of my consciousness:

Maria Perego. She created Topo Gigio.

Ms. Perego, who worked alongside her husband, Federico Caldura, came up with the 10-inch-tall Topo Gigio in the late 1950s. Topo Gigio was a sort of cross between a puppet and a marionette; three puppeteers, hidden in a black background, moved various body parts with rods.
According to “Sundays With Sullivan: How ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ Brought Elvis, the Beatles, and Culture to America,” a 2008 book by Bernie Ilson, Mr. Sullivan saw a tape of the puppet from Italian television and booked Topo Gigio for a series of appearances on his popular Sunday-night CBS variety show. The first, the book said, was on April 14, 1963.
Ms. Perego and two other puppeteers were on hand to impart the movements, and a fourth provided Topo Gigio’s voice — but, Mr. Ilson wrote, Mr. Sullivan had not realized that someone would also have to serve as the puppet’s straight man. Mr. Sullivan, who was famously wooden on camera, stepped into that task for the initial appearance, figuring he would arrange for a professional comic to take over for later ones if the bit caught on.
“It was evident from the very first appearance, however, that the chemistry between Sullivan and Topo Gigio worked extremely well,” Mr. Ilson wrote. “The exchanges between Sullivan and the mouselike puppet revealed another side of the host, a warm and humanizing element.”
Mr. Sullivan remained in the role of sidekick for what the book says were some 50 appearances by Topo Gigio over the years. (Other sources give higher numbers.) The appearances often ended with the mouse saying, in a thick Italian accent, “Eddie, kiss me good night.”

A little late on this, but: Ernest J. Gaines. (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Lesson Before Dying)

Laurel Griggs. Nobody should die at 13.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

70s television (and aircraft) geekery.

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

Those of us who are, shall we say, of a certain age, fondly remember “Baa Baa Black Sheep“.

By way of McThag (and thank you sir): a history of the Corsairs used in filming the show.

A total of eight Corsairs, of varied backgrounds, participated in the filming: four FG-1Ds, two F4U-7s, one F4U-1A, and one F4U-4. Five were combat veterans, two have turned hot laps at Reno, and two later became Oshkosh Grand Champions. Since the conclusion of Black Sheep in 1978, one FG-1D and one F4U-7 have been lost. Of the remaining six aircraft, four are actively flying, one is maintained in airworthy condition but not flown, and the last is awaiting restoration to airworthy condition.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, History, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 20, 2019.

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

Nick Tosches, fiction writer and biographer.

One of his most attention-getting biographies followed in 1992. It was “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” about Dean Martin.
“Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.”
For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)
“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992.
“Life is a racket,” he added. “Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.”

If everything is a racket, is anything worthwhile? Like trying to help out the poor?

Dr. Paul Polak, a former psychiatrist who became an entrepreneur and an inventor with a focus on helping the world’s poorest people create profitable small businesses, died on Oct. 10 in Denver. He was 86.

…

In an era when foreign aid is largely based on charity, Dr. Polak (pronounced POLE-ack) instead advocated training people to earn livings by selling their neighbors basic necessities like clean water, charcoal, a ride in a donkey cart or enough electricity to charge a cellphone.
Although the nonprofit companies he created did accept donations, their purpose was to help poor people make money. His target market was the 700 million people around the world surviving on less than $2 a day, and he traveled all over the world seeking them out.

…

His most successful project was in foot-powered treadle pumps to pull water out of the ground. Beginning in 1982, he sold millions for about $25 each in Bangladesh and India, he said. The company he created for the project, iDE for International Development Enterprises, now operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The cost included the mechanism, which could be built in a local welding shop, and drilling the well. Dr. Polak’s organization trained thousands of welders and drillers. The customers — small farmers — supplied the foot power and long bamboo handles for the pumps, the device resembling a crude elliptical trainer.
To sell them, Dr. Polak ran a publicity campaign: a singing, dancing Bollywood-style movie about a couple that could not marry because her father could not afford a dowry. But once he bought a pump and could grow vegetables in the dry season, when they fetch more money, love triumphed.

…

By contrast, he said, the World Bank was subsidizing expensive diesel pumps that drew enough water to cover 40 acres. They were handed out by government agents, who could be bribed, he said, and the richest landowner would thus become “a waterlord,” who could drain the aquifer supplying everyone else’s wells and then charge them for water.
“It was very destructive to social justice,” Dr. Polak said.
Another franchise company he started in India was Spring Health, which uses battery power to convert salt into chlorine. The bleach is used to disinfect local water, which is then sold door-to-door in refillable containers.
Franchisees get caps and shirts with distinctive blue raindrops, and street theater troupes help uneducated people make the connection between dirty water and diarrhea, which sickens millions of children every day and, when chronic, can leave them mentally and physically stunted.

Bill Macy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Maude’s husband. But he knocked around a bunch of other stuff too.

Samuel Hynes, literature professor, author, and WWII torpedo bomber pilot. I’ve heard that Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator is a terrific book: anyone out there care to comment?

Not an Oracle guy, but for the historical record: Mark Hurd.

Sara Danius. She was the first woman to head the Swedish Academy. The Academy gives out the literature prize, and she was behind Bob Dylan winning in 2016. She was forced out in 2018.

I note this obit here less because of interest in the literature Nobel, and more because I find that it contains a remarkably high level of editorializing for a NYT obit.

She herself was never accused of wrongdoing. But she was the public face of a global institution whose reputation had been severely damaged.
Behind the scenes, her enemies within the academy sought to protect the accused man. They resisted her attempts to bring in law enforcement and forced her out.
When she left, Ms. Danius acknowledged that her colleagues had lost confidence in her leadership. She also defiantly suggested that arrogant and anachronistic forces within the academy had invoked the institution’s traditions to deny accountability.
“Not all traditions are worth preserving,” she said.
Her abrupt departure infuriated many women — and many men as well — across Sweden, a country that prides itself on gender equality. She was widely viewed as a scapegoat.

…

The man at the center of the sex scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, was found guilty last year of raping a woman in 2011 and sentenced to two years in jail. In his appeal of the verdict, the appeals court found him guilty of raping the same woman twice and extended his sentence.
In addition, his wife, Katarina Frostenson, a poet who resigned from the academy, was accused of leaking the names of prize recipients to Mr. Arnault on at least seven occasions so that their friends could profit from bets. The two have denied all charges and said they were the objects of a witch hunt.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Geek, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 12, 2019.

Saturday, October 12th, 2019

By way of Lawrence, Robert Forster.

Yeah, he was great in “Jackie Brown”, which I still think is Tarantino’s most restrained and disciplined movie. But he did a lot of other movie and TV work to varying degrees of success. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t a “Twin Peaks” guy, so I missed him there. But he was in “Avalanche”, “Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence”, and “The Black Hole”, he did guest shots on many series (“Magnum, P.I.”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Police Story”), and he was in a few unsuccessful series (“Banyon”, “Nakia”, “Karen Sisco”).

Aleksei Leonov, Russian cosmonaut and the first man to walk in space.

What Mr. Leonov did not reveal until many years later was that he and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel I. Belyayev, who was also an Air Force pilot, were fortunate to have survived.
Mr. Leonov’s specially designed suit had unexpectedly inflated during his walk, and its bulk was preventing him from getting back inside the Voskhod.
“I knew I could not afford to panic, but time was running out,” he recalled in the book “Two Sides of the Moon” (2004), written with the astronaut David Scott, about their experiences in space.
Mr. Leonov slowly deflated the suit by releasing oxygen from it, a procedure that threatened to leave him without life support. But with the reduced bulk, he finally made it inside.
“I was drenched with sweat, my heart racing,” he remembered.
But that, he added, “was just the start of dire emergencies which almost cost us our lives.”
The oxygen pressure in the spacecraft rose to a dangerous level, introducing the prospect that a spark in the electrical system could set off a disastrous explosion or fire.
It returned to a tolerable level, but the cosmonauts never figured out the reason for the surge.
When it came time for the return to Earth, the spacecraft’s automatic rocket-firing system did not work, forcing the cosmonauts to conduct imprecise manual maneuvers during the descent that left them in deep snow and freezing temperatures in a remote Russian forest, far from their intended landing point.
It took several hours for a search party to find them and drop supplies from a helicopter, and they spent two nights in the forest, the first one inside their spacecraft and the second one in a small log cabin built by a ground rescue crew, until rescuers arrived on skis. They then took a 12-mile ski trek to a clearing, where a helicopter evacuated them.

He also survived an attempt to kill Leonid Brezhnev, but you’ll have to read the obit for that story.

Anna Quayle. The name didn’t ring any bells with me, but she was in a bunch of stuff: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Casino Royale” (the first one, with David Niven), “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off”, and the list goes on.

…died on Aug. 16, although her death was not announced by her family until early October. She was 86.
Her family did not say where she died or specify the cause. She had received a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2012.

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

Obit watch: October 8, 2019.

Wednesday, October 9th, 2019

Marshall Efron, public television personality of the early 70s.

I’d heard the name, but really didn’t have any association with him: I was very young when “The Great American Dream Machine” was on the air, and I wasn’t much older when “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School” came around the first time. (The latter was supposedly re-run frequently, but I’ve never seen an episode.)

By the time “Dream Machine” appeared, Mr. Efron had also begun acting in movies, including the first feature by a young director named George Lucas, the science fiction thriller “THX 1138” (1971). He would continue to act and do voice work in films and television throughout his career. His voice credits included the series “The Smurfs” and “The Biskitts” in the 1980s and the animated films “Ice Age: The Meltdown” (2006) and “Horton Hears a Who!” (2008).

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

Obit watch: October 7, 2019.

Monday, October 7th, 2019

Ginger Baker, noted drummer.

Both as a member of the ensemble and as a soloist, Mr. Baker captivated audiences and earned the respect of his fellow percussionists with playing that was, as Neil Peart, the drummer with the band Rush, once said, “extrovert, primal and inventive.” Mr. Baker, Mr. Peart added, “set the bar for what rock drumming could be.”

Random thought: could Mr. Baker play “YYZ”?

Mr. Baker’s appearance behind the drum kit — flaming red hair, flailing arms, eyes bulging with enthusiasm or shut tight in concentration — made an indelible impression. So, unfortunately, did his well-publicized drug problems and his volatile personality.
Mr. Baker, who by his own count quit heroin 29 times, was candid about his drug and alcohol abuse in his autobiography, “Hellraiser,” published in Britain in 2009.

Got to give it to the man: he was persistent.

He was also, by all accounts, not a very likable man. Journalists who interviewed him tended to find him uncooperative at best, confrontational at worst. The hostility between Mr. Baker and Mr. Bruce, which sometimes led to onstage altercations, was the stuff of rock legend. The 2012 documentary “Beware of Mr. Baker” — the title is taken from a sign outside the house in South Africa where he was living at the time — begins with footage of Mr. Baker physically attacking the film’s director, Jay Bulger.

Lawrence put “Beware of Mr. Baker” on our big movie list. We actually want to watch this, but man! That is a hard movie to find: the DVD and Blu-Ray are “unavailable” from Amazon, and they do list it under “Prime Video” but it’s currently “unavailable” there as well. The movie’s website is apparently now owned by a domain squatter who uses it to advertise casinos, and we haven’t been able to check Netflix or Hulu (not being subscribers to either one).

Rip Taylor, comedian and game show guy.

Mr. Taylor was often confused with the character actor Rip Torn, who died in July.

This.

I kind of got overtaken by stuff over the weekend, so here’s your historical record obit for Diahann Carroll. Little mentioned in her obits, but well known to us common sewers connoisseurs: she was also in “The Star Wars Holiday Special“.

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

Obit watch: special all Mannix edition, September 24, 2019.

Tuesday, September 24th, 2019

Jan Merlin.

In a painful year in England and Ireland in which he served as a “movable prop” and received no screen credit, Merlin donned masks and heavy makeup to portray several characters and substitute for Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and others in John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). He then wrote a 2001 novel, Shooting Montezuma, based on that experience.

He did a fair amount of other movie work, including “The Oscar” and “The Hindenburg”. He also did a lot of TV, including ‘The F.B.I”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “Mission: Impossible”, and, of course, “Mannix” (“A Chance at the Roses“).

Sid Haig. He was in Rob Zombie’s movies, but before those, he was a prolific character actor. He shows up in a couple of Tarrantino films, some blacksploitation stuff, “THX 1138”, and a lot of 70s TV: he was a regular on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”, “Get Smart”, “Mission: Impossible”, and, of course, “Mannix” (“Deja Vu“).

Cool story, bro:

The movie was apparently something called “High on the Hog“, which Lawrence pointed out also stars Robert Z’Dar and the legendary Joe Estevez.

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

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