Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: October 12, 2021.

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021

Bob Herron, stuntman. He was 97.

His career began in the 1950s working on “Winchester ’73” and “The Flame and the Arrow.” He would work steadily over the years on across TV and film. One of his earliest film credits was as an actor was “Four Guns to the Border,” directed by Richard Carlson. In TV, he worked on hundreds of shows including “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Rockford Files,” “The A-Team” and Kojak.” In film, he also worked on “Pale Rider,” “The Goonies,” “Rocky” and “Earthquake.” With over 342 credits to his name including “Airwolf,” “The Green Hornet” and “Stagecoach,” much of his work went uncredited.

Other work included “L.A. Confidential”, “Diamonds Are Forever”, “Bearcats!”…and “Mannix”! (“Deadfall: Part 2”, season 1, episode 18. “Eight to Five, It’s a Miracle”, season 1, episode 21.)

Ruthie Tompson, Disney animator. She was 111.

Over time, she worked on nearly every one of Disney’s animated features, from “Snow White” to “The Rescuers,” released in 1977.

…

Ms. Tompson joined Disney as an inker and painter. She later trained her eye on the thousands of drawings that make up an animated feature, checking them for continuity of color and line. Still later, as a member of the studio’s scene planning department, she devised exacting ways for its film cameras to bring those flat, static drawings to vivid animated life.
“She made the fantasies come real,” John Canemaker, an Oscar-winning animator and a historian of animation, said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “The whole setup then was predigital, so everything was paper, camera, film and paint.”
Among the totemic films into which Ms. Tompson helped breathe life are “Pinocchio” (1940), “Fantasia” (1940) and “Dumbo” (1941), along with countless animated shorts, including the anti-Nazi cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” which won a 1943 Academy Award.
In 2000, Ms. Tompson was named a Disney Legend, an honor bestowed by the Walt Disney Company for outstanding contributions. (Previous recipients include Fred MacMurray, Julie Andrews and Angela Lansbury; later recipients include Elton John and Tim Conway.)

…

In 1948, she was promoted to the dual role of animation checker and scene planner. As an animation checker, she scrutinized the artists’ work to see, among other things, that characters literally kept their heads: In the animators’ haste, different parts of a character’s body, often done as separate drawings, might fail to align.
The scene planner was tasked with working out the intricate counterpoint between the finished setups and the cameras that photographed them: which camera angles should be used, how fast characters should move relative to their backgrounds, and the like.
“She really had to know all the mechanics of making the image work on the screen as the director, the layout person and the animator preferred: how to make Peter Pan walk, or fly, in the specified time,” Mr. Canemaker explained. “What she did ended up on the screen — whether you see her hand or not — because of the way she supported the directors’ vision.”
In 1952, Ms. Tompson became one of the first women admitted to the International Photographers Union, an arm of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees representing camera operators. She retired in 1975 as the supervisor of Disney’s scene planning department.

Iohan Gueorguiev. I had not heard of him previously, but he had a popular YouTube channel.

Mr. Gueorguiev made his name overcoming challenges hurled at his body and spirit. He was a star in the world of “bikepacking,” long-distance bike travel conducted off main roads. Calling himself the Bike Wanderer, he stood out for his Beatnik-like romanticism about the open road, in contrast to the competitiveness of many bike jocks and gear heads.
Though Mr. Gueorguiev’s exact movements could be hard to pin down, it seems clear he spent from April 2014 to March 2020 biking from the Canadian Arctic Circle to its South American antipode, the icy mountains and valleys of Patagonia. It was not a straight path. Mr. Gueorguiev occasionally flew back to Canada to earn money planting trees, he said. While biking, he would get sidetracked by serendipitous encounters and eccentric trails.

…

He shot his videos with a simple GoPro camera charged by a portable solar panel. He would sometimes position the camera at a distance, making it appear as if he traveled with a cinematographer. He earned about $3,000 a month through the funding website Patreon and received bikepacking sponsorships, enabling him to exchange the basic touring bike he started with for one with fat tires designed for riding off-road.
However much Mr. Gueorguiev tried to cast the obstacles he encountered as part of a grand adventure, his videos showed genuine hardships. Headwinds on desert plains required him to take long breaks sheltered behind rocks and make a campsite in a stray shipping container, which itself shook from powerful gusts. He would go as long as 30 days without seeing a fellow cyclist and, when biking was not feasible, could wait two days on the road to get picked up as a hitchhiker.

…

With the onset of the pandemic, Mr. Gueorguiev found himself stuck in Canada, unable to cross borders because of travel restrictions. His videos grew shorter, and he ceased appearing onscreen as an enthusiastic narrator of his own experiences. Abiding by social distancing guidance, he avoided his habitual short stays at the homes of new friends he had met on the road. In his online journal, he described biking in the cold for days on end and spending nights without indoor heating.
“I had big expectations for the Farewell Canyon,” he wrote about a scenic area in British Columbia a few days before he died, “but it was very empty, gloomy and void of all traffic.”

…

Mr. Gueorguiev (generally pronounced gyor-ghee-ev) died on Aug. 19 in Cranbrook, British Columbia, where he had been using the home of friends as a base for travel during the pandemic. He was 33.
The cause was suicide, said Matthew Bardeen, a friend who was helping to oversee Mr. Gueorguiev’s affairs. His death was announced on biking websites late last month.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources. The Canada Suicide Prevention Service. La prévention du suicide et le soutien.

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

Obit watch: October 11, 2021.

Monday, October 11th, 2021

Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Republic of Iran, right up until the point Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini threw him into the street.

In one of the 20th century’s most spectacular political collapses, the shah fled Iran on Jan. 16, 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini, who had directed the revolution from exile, returned home two weeks later. In the broad-based government that the ayatollah installed, Mr. Bani-Sadr served as deputy minister of finance, then minister of finance, and finally as minister of foreign affairs. With the ayatollah’s blessing, Mr. Bani-Sadr easily won the presidential election of Jan. 25, 1980. The ayatollah, however, had secured approval of a constitution giving him power to dismiss presidents at will. Over the next 18 months, he directed Mr. Bani-Sadr’s rise and fall.
In his first weeks in power, Mr. Bani-Sadr worked to bring order to the shambles that had been left by the collapse of the shah’s government. However, he was quickly was distracted by the hostage crisis.
“The takeover of the U.S. embassy was wholly in line with Khomeini’s strategy of focusing hostility abroad,” he later wrote. “It was at this moment that the idea of a religious state became viable. He also realized that he could now silence people at will, by threatening them with the accusation of being pro-American.”
In the venomous political climate of post-revolution Tehran, enemies rose against Mr. Bani-Sadr. Several of his associates were convicted on trumped-up charges and executed. After war with Iraq broke out, militants criticized him for relying more on the regular army, which they associated with the shah’s monarchy, than on revolutionary guards and other political forces. In the summer and fall of 1980, he survived two helicopter crashes.
The combination of the hostage crisis and the war created a hyper-radical atmosphere in which a tweedy, mustachioed intellectual like Mr. Bani-Sadr could hardly hope to survive. On June 10, 1981, Ayatollah Khomeini removed him from his post as commander in chief. On June 21, parliament ruled him “politically incompetent” and voted to impeach him as president. Ayatollah Khomeini signed the bill the next day.

Several years ago, when I was immersed in the Iranian Revolution, I read Mr. Bani-Sadr’s book. It is like many of the books that came out of revolutionary Iran: “We hated the Shah. We thought Khomeini would be a change for the better. Boy, we got played for suckers.”

Abdul Qadeer (A.Q) Khan, “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Patrick Horgan. He had a long run as “Dr. John Morrison” on “The Doctors”, and did a few movies: “Zelig” and “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion”. Other TV credits include an episode of a minor 1960s SF television series.

Interesting to me: he was “Major Strasser” in “Casablanca”.

“Casablanca”, the 1983 TV series starring David Soul as Rick Blaine, that is. Anybody remember that? I have a vague memory of seeing commercials for it, but I can’t blame you if you don’t remember it: it was cancelled after three episodes, and NBC burned off the remaining two during the summer.

Granville Adams, of “Oz” and “Homicide: Life on the Street”.

Posted in Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#60 in a series)

Friday, October 8th, 2021

This could be an obit watch, too, but I thought I’d go in this direction.

Over his long, provocative career, the artist Billy Apple changed his name, registered it as a trademark, branded products with it, had his genome sequenced and, finally, arranged to have his cells extracted and stored so that they might survive forever even if he could not. He died on Sept. 6 at his home in Auckland, New Zealand, at 85.

…

By 1964 he was in New York City (subletting a loft on the Bowery from the sculptor Eva Hesse) and showing his work. His cast bronze, half-eaten watermelon slice was one of many objects included in “The American Supermarket,” an early Pop spectacle at the Bianchini Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where one could buy artist’s versions of real products: a painted turkey by Roy Lichtenstein, candy made by Claes Oldenburg and Campbell’s soup cans signed by Andy Warhol. The gallerist took orders on a grocer’s pad.

…

Mr. Apple went on to work in neon, enchanting some reviewers like Robert Pincus-Witten of Artforum magazine, who described Mr. Apple’s rainbows as “sensuous neon impersonations.” But city inspectors were not charmed. In 1966, when Mr. Apple was 27, they unplugged a show of his at the Pepsi Gallery, in the lobby of the Pepsi-Cola Building at Park Avenue and 59th Street, saying the pieces weren’t wired to code.
The show’s opening had been so well attended that it caused a traffic jam. One attendee was Tom Wolfe, who later panned Mr. Apple’s pieces in New York Magazine — “they’re limp … they splutter,” he wrote. (Mr. Wolfe was writing about the artistry of commercial neon sign makers and poking fun at the art world in the process.)

…

Their art-making methods — Mr. Apple went through a tidying phase, washing windows, scrubbing floor tiles and vacuuming up the dirt on his studio’s roof — were not always well received. His “Roof Dirt” piece, which came in the form of an invitation in 1971, prompted John Canaday of The New York Times to write that it “belongs to an area of art‐related activity in which nothing but the word of the artists makes the difference between a put‐on and a seriously offered project.”
Mr. Apple then turned to less festive practices, like saving tissues from his nosebleeds and toilet paper from his bathroom activities. When this work was included in a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, some objected, and the police shut it down. But Mr. Apple was no prankster. He was deadly serious about his work, which, besides meticulously documenting his bodily processes, often included renovation and redecorating suggestions to institutions like the Guggenheim. (He proposed getting rid of its planters; the museum ignored him.)
Back home in New Zealand, to which he returned for good in 1990, Mr. Apple began exploring, in a variety of work, ideas about the transactional nature of the art market, branding practices, mapping and scientific advances. Among the works was an apple cast from pure gold, Billy Apple coffee and tea (for sale in galleries only) and the “immortalization” of cells from his own body, which are now stored at the American Type Culture Collection and the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland.

…

In 2016, Mr. Apple donated some of his early career bathroom tissues along with a contemporary fecal sample to a molecular biologist, who was able to determine that nearly half of the bacteria in Mr. Apple’s gut was still present in his body decades later, as The New Zealand Herald reported. It was a boon for science, and Mr. Apple, too, made new work from the study.

Posted in Art, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 7, 2021.

Thursday, October 7th, 2021

Juli Reding.

She was most famous for the Bert Gordon horror film “Tormented”, which was also a MST3K episode. She also did some TV work in the 1960s, and then pretty much dropped off the map (except for a guest shot on “Murder She Wrote” in 1987).

NYT obit for Alan Kalter.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 6, 2021.

Wednesday, October 6th, 2021

Eddie Robinson has passed away. He was 100.

I’m not going to snark here. He was part of baseball for 60 years, as a player:

At 6 feet 2 inches and 210 pounds — good size for his era — the left-handed-hitting Robinson clubbed 16 home runs and drove in 83 runs to help the 1948 Indians capture the team’s first pennant since 1920 en route to defeating the Boston Braves in a six-game World Series. Playing in every Series game, Robinson batted .300.
He drove in more than 100 runs and played in the All-Star Game in three consecutive seasons in the early 1950s, with the Chicago White Sox and the Philadelphia Athletics, and in 1951 became the first White Sox player to drive a home run over the roof of the old Comiskey Park.
The Yankees obtained Robinson before the 1954 season in a multiplayer trade with the Athletics. He pinch-hit and played behind first basemen Joe Collins and Bill Skowron and flashed his power when 16 of his 36 hits in 1955 were home runs. He played in his second World Series when the Yankees lost to the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games that October.

As a scout:

In his memoir, “Lucky Me” (2011, with C. Paul Rogers III), Robinson wrote how the Yankee owner George Steinbrenner offered him the team’s general manager’s post in June 1982 and related that he “considered George one of my real friends in baseball.” But he decided to work as a Yankee scout and consultant instead, since he was well aware of Steinbrenner’s reputation as a difficult boss.
“It didn’t take long for George and me to get crossways,” Robinson recalled. He told how Steinbrenner had cooled to him after he agreed only reluctantly to be present for an October 1982 draft session; he and his wife had had a trip to Europe planned. He continued as a Yankee scout through 1985.

…

After his playing days, Robinson was a coach for the Orioles, a farm director for several teams, the general manager of the Atlanta Braves and the Texas Rangers, and a scout for the Red Sox, whom he worked for in 2004, his last year in baseball, as well as for the Yankees before that.

How long was he in baseball? This long:

Robinson played a role in a poignant baseball event in the summer of 1948.
When Babe Ruth, dying of cancer, was about to take the field at Yankee Stadium on the afternoon of June 13 for a ceremony retiring his No. 3, Robinson was in Cleveland’s dugout.
“He looked like he needed help physically, and I took a bat out of the bat rack and gave it to him,” Robinson told Major League Baseball in a 2020 interview. “He carried it up to home plate, and he used it as a kind of a crutch. When he came back, I got the bat and had him sign it.”
Nat Fein of The Herald Tribune in New York won a Pulitzer Prize for his rear view photograph depicting Ruth in Yankee pinstripes leaning on the bat, which belonged to Feller.

Cynthia Harris.

A veteran of the New York stage, Harris joined the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company in 1971, playing the role of Sarah originated by Barbara Barrie, and in 1993 co-founded The Actors Company Theater, where she served as artistic director and appeared in dozens of productions.

She also knocked around TV a bit: she was Wallis Simpson in the “Edward and Mrs. Simpson” mini series, played Dr. Asten’s wife on a couple of episodes of “Quincy”, and the mother of Paul Reiser’s character on “Mad About You”, among other roles.

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

Obit watch: October 5, 2021.

Tuesday, October 5th, 2021

Alan Kalter, David Letterman’s announcer on CBS.

The red-haired Kalter took over for the retired Bill Wendell as the Late Show announcer in September 1995 — about two years after Letterman moved from NBC to CBS — and remained through the host’s final program on May 20, 2015. On his first day on the job, Letterman tossed him into a pool.
With musical accompaniment from Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, Kalter announced the guests and cheekily introduced the host at the top of each show, then voiced the comic one-liner over the Worldwide Pants title card on the end credits.
In between, Kalter often acted in funny sketches that included hosting “Alan Kalter’s Celebrity Interview” after Letterman was finished with the guest and speaking from his announcer’s podium as the studio lights dimmed, trying to come on to lonely, divorced women as “Big Red” — much to the dismay of a “shocked” Letterman.

…

“When I came home and said I was offered the job as the announcer on the Late Show, I told my wife I wasn’t sure if I really wanted it because it would really rock the boat on those commercials I was doing around the country,” he recalled in 2019. “I wouldn’t be able to go away for three or four days at a time whenever I wanted to, to do that work. And my kids, who were in high school at the time, sort of immediately in chorus said, ‘Dad this is the first cool thing you’ve ever done in your life. Take it!’”

Pearl Tytell has passed away at 104. She was a leading examiner of questioned documents.

Mrs. Tytell worked with her husband, Martin, at their typewriter repair and rental business on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, which branched out into the scientific examination of documents in the early 1950s. A rare woman in a male-dominated field, Mrs. Tytell ran that end of the business and trained her son, Peter, a widely known examiner of documents until his death last year.
Mrs. Tytell was an expert witness for the federal government in 1982 in the tax-evasion case against the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification Church. By analyzing changes in his handwriting — particularly how his printed “S” had turned cursive — she testified that he signed checks in 1974, not in 1973 as his lawyers had said.
At another point, Mrs. Tytell used paper-mill records and her knowledge of watermarks to prove that a piece of paper had not been produced until after the date written on it.
“She was an exceptional witness,” Martin Flumenbaum, a prosecutor in the case, said in a phone interview. “She dominated the courtroom. I remember the jury being enthralled by her testimony.”

…

In one of her best-known cases, she was hired in 1972 by International Telephone and Telegraph to analyze a politically explosive memorandum written a year earlier by one of the company’s lobbyists, Dita Beard (who denied writing the memorandum). Its existence was revealed by the investigative journalist Jack Anderson.
It suggested a connection between the settlement of a government antitrust lawsuit against I.T.T. and a pledge by the company to pay $400,000 in costs for the 1972 Republican National Convention.
A report issued by I.T.T. said that Mrs. Tytell and a chemist, Walter McCrone, had used “microscopic, ultraviolet fluorescence and highly sophisticated micro chemical analyses” of the memorandum and other samples that had been typed on Mrs. Beard’s typewriter between June 25, 1971 (the date on the document) and February 1972. They determined that the memo had most likely been written in January 1972, nearly six months after the antitrust settlement, meaning a connection to the payment was not likely.
Their report — submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which investigated the financial pledge made in the memo — contradicted the F.B.I.’s analysis of the document, which suggested it had been written on June 25.

Todd Akin, former House member from Missouri. He gave up that seat to run for the Senate, and lost after making some controversial remarks about rape.

Angelo Codevilla, conservative author and theorist. (The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It)

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 2, 2021.

Saturday, October 2nd, 2021

For the historical record: NYT obits for Tommy Kirk and Commander Cody. The obit for the latter includes a video of “Hot Rod Lincoln”, which I was intending to go back and embed anyway.

Carlisle Floyd, opera guy.

Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.

…

His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.

…

Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 30, 2021.

Thursday, September 30th, 2021

Still on the road, but arrived safely at my destination yesterday. Blogging is still as time permits, but a few obits:

Tommy Kirk, of “Old Yeller”.

George Frayne, also know as “Commander Cody” of “Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen”.

(Hattip on those to Lawrence.)

NYT obit for Clive Sinclair.

Updates later.

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 27, 2021.

Monday, September 27th, 2021

Frances T. “Sissy” Farenthold, noted female Texas politician of the 1960s and 1970s.

I wouldn’t have picked up on this if it wasn’t for the NYT obit: the HouChron ran one, but it was kind of buried, and they just re-ran the WP obit. The Statesman ran one…from the Corpus Christi newspaper.

Ms. Farenthold was a two-time candidate for the Texas governorship, the first chairwoman of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a college president and a nominee for the vice presidency of the United States a dozen years before Geraldine A. Ferraro became the first to be chosen for that office by a major party.

Yeah, she was a progressive, and I probably would have disagreed with her about everything. But she was a significant figure in Texas politics. Also, her story is full of sad.

Owing to the efforts of a slightly older brother, Benjamin Dudley III, to pronounce the word “sister,” the infant Mary Frances would be known to the end of her life as Sissy.
When Sissy was 2, and Benjamin 3, he died from complications of surgery to remove a swallowed coin. Her parents’ grief suffused the household ever after, she said.

…

In 1960, Ms. Farenthold’s 3-year-old son Vincent bled to death after a nighttime fall that went unheeded. Like several of the Farenthold children, he suffered from von Willebrand disease, a clotting disorder.

…

Three days after Ms. Farenthold’s runoff defeat, the body of her 32-year-old stepson, Randy Farenthold, from her husband’s prior marriage, was found in the Gulf of Mexico near Corpus Christi. His hands were bound and a concrete block was chained round his neck.
The younger Mr. Farenthold, described in the press as a millionaire playboy, had been scheduled to testify in the federal trial of four associates alleged to have defrauded him of $100,000 in a money-laundering scheme reported to involve organized crime. (One of them, Bruce Bass III, was indicted in the murder in 1976 and received a 16-year sentence in a plea agreement the next year.)

…

In 1989, her youngest child, Jimmy, disappeared, at 33. Jimmy, who was Vincent’s identical twin, was said never to have gotten over his brother’s death; by the time he was a young man he was addicted to drugs and drifting around Texas. Despite extensive searches, he was never found and is presumed dead. (The family held a funeral for him in 2005.)
Ms. Farenthold’s marriage ended in divorce. She is survived by her son George Farenthold II, who said the cause of death was Parkinson’s disease; another son, Dudley; a daughter, Emilie C. Farenthold; a sister, Genevieve Hearon; three grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a step-grandson, Blake, the son of Randy Farenthold. A younger brother, Dudley Tarlton, was killed in a helicopter crash in 2003.

Jean Hale, actress. She was in “In Like Flint” and “The Oscar”, appeared on “Batman” twice, and did guest shots on the good “5-0”, “Cannon”, “Perry Mason”, and “The Wild Wild West”, among other credits.

Bobby Zarem, noted PR guy.

Mr. Zarem’s clients included (in alphabetical order) Alan Alda, Ann-Margret, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Cher, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
He publicized the films “Tommy” (by staging a gala party in a Midtown Manhattan subway station) and “Saturday Night Fever” (after stealing stills of the production from the studio, which expected the movie to flop and neglected to distribute photographs of John Travolta), as well as “Rambo,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Pumping Iron,” the 1977 documentary about bodybuilding, which starred Mr. Schwarzenegger. For that film, Mr. Zarem arranged a meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that helped elevate Mr. Schwarzenegger to global superstardom.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Texas | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 25, 2021.

Saturday, September 25th, 2021

Cliff Freeman, advertising guy.

Among his credits: “Where’s the beef?”

In 1984, Wendy’s was looking to differentiate its burger, the modestly named Single, from McDonald’s Big Mac and Burger King’s Whopper. Research found that the Wendy’s Single patty was larger than the patties of the Big Mac and Whopper.
Working with the director Joe Sedelmaier, Mr. Freeman created separate commercials, one with three old women and one with three old men, scrutinizing the fluffy hamburger bun before seeing the tiny patty inside. The breakout version was the one with the women, specifically the squawky octogenarian Clara Peller, who demands to know where the beef is.

…

Mr. Freeman was still at Dancer Fitzgerald a year later when he wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of food choices by parodying the lack of choices in Soviet society. In a faux Russian fashion show, a heavyset woman struts on a runway, modeling the same shapeless dress for day wear, evening wear (accessorized with a flashlight) and swimwear (with a beach ball).
Mr. Freeman said it was his favorite ad, in part because of the response.
“The entire Russian government protested it,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2003. “How much more reaction can you get than that?”

I know it is advertising, and I know my sense of humor is sometimes lowbrow, but I think that’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on television. (I’m also a sucker for jokes about Communism.)

He also did commercials for Little Caesars, Outpost.com, and Fox Sports.

But Cliff Freeman & Partners lasted only 11 more years. Amid a recession, executive turmoil and client departures, it shut down in 2009.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 24, 2021.

Friday, September 24th, 2021

Basil Hoffman.

He had more than 200 acting credits across film, television and stage. He appeared as Sloan in Ordinary People (1980) and as an auctioneer in The Artist (2011). Both dramas won best picture at the Oscars. Hoffman also had roles in the films My Favorite Year (1982), The Last Word (2017), All the President’s Men (1976) and Rio, I Love You (2014). Some of his television credits include recurring roles on the 1980s series Hill Street Blues and Square Pegs.

He was also in “Hail, Caesar!” and had parts on a few cop shows, including “Columbo” among other credits.

Posted in Movies, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 23, 2021.

Thursday, September 23rd, 2021

Melvin Van Peebles.

A Renaissance man whose work spanned books, theater and music, Mr. Van Peebles is best known for his third feature film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” which drew mixed reviews when it was released in 1971, ignited intense debate and became a national hit. The hero, Sweetback, starred in a sex show at a brothel, and the movie sizzled with explosive violence, explicit sex and righteous antagonism toward the white power structure. It was dedicated to “all the Black brothers and sisters who have had enough of The Man.”

…

In addition to making movies, Mr. Van Peebles published novels, in French as well as in English; wrote two Broadway musicals and produced them simultaneously; and wrote and performed spoken-word albums that many have called forebears of rap.
Over the course of his life he was also a cable-car driver in San Francisco, a portrait painter in Mexico City, a street performer in Paris, a stock options trader in New York, the navigator of an Air Force bomber, a postal worker, a visual artist and, by his own account, a very successful gigolo.

…

…Columbia Pictures then hired him to direct “Watermelon Man” (1970), a satirical comedy about a white bigot, played by Godfrey Cambridge, who turns into a Black man.
Columbia wanted Mr. Van Peebles to shoot alternative endings — one in which the protagonist becomes a Black militant, and another in which he discovers that it was all a dream. Mr. Van Peebles said he “forgot” to shoot the second ending.
Disliking working for a studio, he set out to be an independent filmmaker. To make “Sweetback,” for $500,000, he combined his $70,000 savings with loans, used a nonunion crew and persuaded a film lab to extend him credit.
The plot of the movie concerns a man who attacks two crooked police officers and then escapes as a fugitive to Mexico, vowing to return and “collect some dues.” Only two theaters, in Detroit and Atlanta, would show the movie at first, but it caught fire and for several weeks outgrossed “Love Story.” Its American box office exceeded $15 million (about $100 million in today’s money), a bonanza for an independent film at the time.

Barbara Campbell Cooke. She actually passed away in April at 85, but her family didn’t make an announcement until recently.

Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.

She married Sam Cooke in 1959 (or 1958, according to Wikipedia). When he died in 1964, she married Bobby Womack (who worked with Sam Cooke) three months later. He was 19, she was 29, and a lot of fans were not happy.

But it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.

The sad goes on. The Cookes had a son who died at 18 months. Ms. Cooke and Mr. Womack also had a son who strugged with addiction and killed himself at 21.

Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.
“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”

Al Harrington. He was “Ben Kokua” in the good 5-0 (his character replaced Kono), and was a surf shop owner in the bad 5-0. Also a couple of appearances on “Jake and the Fatman”, among other credits.

When Harrington left the show in 1975, he launched a second-act career as a Waikiki showroom headliner and recording artist known affectionately as “The South Pacific Man.” He retired from the stage in 1992, and spent the next 13 years living on the mainland doing film work in Utah and California.

Roger Michell, director. Most of his films were British, but he’s perhaps best known for “Notting Hill” (that Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie) and “Changing Lanes” (the Ben Affleck/Samuel L. Jackson movie).

Later films included Hyde Park on Hudson, a historical drama starring Bill Murray as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and The Duke, a real-life art heist story starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren that premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.

NYT obit for George Holliday.

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Obit watch: September 22, 2021.

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021

Loral I Delaney, well known dog trainer…and legendary trapshooter.

An animal lover who as a young girl kept as pets every creature from raccoons to skunks, Delaney at age 5 headlined her first dog act in 1943 at the Northwest Sportshow in Minneapolis.
When she returned to the same stage a year later, the Minneapolis Tribune gushed, “The tiny daughter of Fred Armstrong put her two beautiful black Labradors through a retrieving act that literally brought down the house.”
In the nearly six decades that followed, Delaney and her dogs would appear at sports shows from New York to Los Angeles. She often drove herself, pulling a trailer full of Labradors, setters, pointers and Chesapeake Bay retrievers.

…

Trapshooting brought Delaney still wider acclaim. The first time she competed at the Minnesota State Trapshoot at age 19, she won the women’s title, breaking 197×200. At the same competition, she won the handicap in a shoot-off with five men.
A member of the National Trapshooting Hall of Fame, Delaney was named to every All-American Trapshooting team from 1966 to 1981, with the exception of one year. She won the Women’s World Flyer Championships four times. She shot on the U.S. Women’s Trapshooting Team before women’s trapshooting was included in the Olympics. And she and Chuck won the husband-wife U.S. trapshooting title four times.
Delaney also won seven Grand American World Trapshooting Championships, include five years consecutively, and was the only woman to win more than two in a row and more than four total.

Bennie Pete, leader of the New Orleans brass band, the Hot 8.

The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.
“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”
By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.

Post Katrina, the Hot 8 led the effort to keep New Orleans’s musical heritage intact.

Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”
As despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.
“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”

They were featured in Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” and got a record deal.

Released in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.
“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”

…

But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.
In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.

Mr. Pete was 45 years old. He died from complications of COVID and sarcoidosis, according to his family.

Willie Garson, from “Sex and the City”.

In addition to the “Sex and the City” movies, Mr. Garson worked with the Farrelly brothers in some of their films, including “Kingpin” (1996), “There’s Something About Mary” (1998) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).
He also played Lee Harvey Oswald three times, in the film “Ruby” (1992) and on the TV shows “Quantum Leap” and “MADtv.”

Saadi Yacef. He was a major figure in the Algerian revolt.

Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.
He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.
“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”

Charles de Gaulle eventually freed him. And then he went on to act in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”.

With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.
The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.

I have “The Battle of Algiers” but haven’t watched it yet. It is a tough sell for the Saturday Night Movie Group, especially since I sort of forced them to watch another movie about the Algerian revolt (“Lost Command“, based on The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy).

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Obit watch: September 21, 2021.

Tuesday, September 21st, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit from – I kid you not – the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services” for actor Tim Donnelly.

He only has 19 credits in IMDB. No “Mannix” but he did appear on the 1960s “Dragnet” multiple times, and also did a guest shot on the good “Hawaii 5-0”. Other credits include “Adam-12”, “Parts: The Clonus Horror”, and “Project U.F.O.”

Why the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services”, though? Mr. Donnelly’s most famous role was “Chet Kelly” in “Emergency”.

That was one of the great ‘staches in 1970s TV.

More seriously, I loved “Emergency” as a child, and I’m sad to see him go. (Kevin Tighe and Randolph Mantooth are both still alive, though.)

FotB RoadRich sent over the obit for George Holliday. Mr. Holliday was the man who filmed the Rodney King beating.

Reuben Klamer. Mr. Klamer was an inventor and toy creator: among other things, he invented “The Game of Life”.

His creations included his own version of the hula hoop and a variation on the Erector Set. He came up with a Pink Panther show car built on an Oldsmobile chassis and rode around in it to promote the “Pink Panther” cartoon series.
He also worked closely with television producers and built props for popular shows, including the Starfleet phaser rifle, which could stun or disintegrate living creatures, for the original “Star Trek” series. (He said he had an agreement for the toy rights to the rifle, but it fell apart and his toy phaser was never produced.) He made a special Napoleon Solo gun for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that was so popular, the gun itself received fan mail. (He successfully created a toy version of that one.)

Anthony Johnson, “Ezal” in “Friday”.

This isn’t exactly an obit, but I think it’s worth noting.

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

Obit watch: September 17, 2021.

Friday, September 17th, 2021

Jane Powell. THR.

She was one of the old time greats: she co-starred with Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding”, and also had a starring role in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding good roles after that. She did some TV work, including appearances on “Fantasy Island” and “The Love Boat”, and was a semi-regular on “Growing Pains”.

She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”
She never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)

I don’t intend for this to be all Norm Macdonald all the time, and I know “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. But this is a cool story, and I believe this person is telling the truth.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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