Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

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Obit watch: June 12, 2018.

Tuesday, June 12th, 2018

Eunice Gayson. You may not recognize the name, but you may recognize the face: she was “Sylvia Trench” in “Dr. No”, the very first Bond girl.

After appearing in the Bond films, she acted in television shows, among them two 1960s spy series, “The Saint” (which starred a future James Bond, Roger Moore) and “The Avengers.” She remained a fixture in London theater. Among other productions, she appeared in the comedy “The Grass Is Greener” in 1971 and, in the early ’90s, in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” as the grandmother.

…

In 1953, she married the producer and journalist Leigh Vance on the CBS television show “Bride and Groom,” sponsored by Betty Crocker. The couple were flown to New York for the wedding, and it was chronicled in London’s newspapers. Critics, though, panned the show. The wedding was described in Billboard magazine as an example of bad taste that could “end the British way of life.” The couple divorced in 1959.

I’ve been holding on to this one for a couple of days, because I wasn’t sure if I could note it without coming across as a jerk.

Charlotte Fox passed away on May 24th. She was a mountain climber: she was the first woman to summit Gasherbrum II and Cho Oyu, both over 26,000 feet high.

She also summited Everest, making her the first woman to summit three mountains over 26,000 feet high. More interesting: her Everest summit attempt was during the 1996 expedition chronicled in Into Thin Air.

She was descending from the summit when a rogue storm swept across the mountain with wind chills of 100 degrees below zero. The blizzard, which lasted for hours, had killed eight climbers from four expeditions. Ms. Fox nearly froze to death, but she and others were rescued and evacuated by helicopter.

…

“My eyes were frozen,” she was quoted as saying in “Into Thin Air.” “I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive.”
“I didn’t think I could endure it anymore,” she added. “I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.”

She survived a husband and a boyfriend: one was killed in an avalanche, and the other in a paragliding crash.

I think the death of any survivor of the 1996 expedition would be worthy of note. But this is the part that makes me afraid of sounding like a jerk: Ms. Fox died apparently as a result of a fall in her home.

Returning from dinner, weekend guests discovered her body at the bottom of a 77-step hardwood staircase connecting the four stories of her house on Tomboy Road, which undulates along a mountainside. Her front door is on the top floor.

I guess this is just another reminder that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.

By the way, the paper of record, as far as I can tell, still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

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

Obit watch: June 7, 2018.

Thursday, June 7th, 2018

Jerry Maren, one of the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” and the last surviving little person from that group. (According to the NYT, some young girls were also hired to fill out the Munchkin ranks, and some of them are still alive.)

With a friend and fellow actor, Billy Barty, Mr. Maren in 1957 founded Little People of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that says it has roughly 6,000 members.
“He took it as his responsibility to show, through a strong sense of self and speaking out and personal example, that little people are just people,” Mr. Cox said. “All of the other Munchkins had a great deal of respect for Jerry.”

Mel Weinberg, of ABSCAM fame.

A convicted swindler with a Runyonesque persona, Mr. Weinberg, facing prison for fraud, traded his criminal savvy for probation and became a principal orchestrator and actor in the two-year operation code-named Abscam. The operation videotaped politicians and others taking bribes from federal agents posing as oil-rich Arabs seeking favors on immigration problems and investment projects.

…

With chartered jets, limousines and parties to lend verisimilitude, the government-run scam led to convictions and prison terms for Senator Harrison A. Williams, a New Jersey Democrat, as well as the mayor of Camden, N.J., and 17 others. It inspired a revision of guidelines in federal undercover cases and legal and ethical debates over whether the defendants had been unlawfully entrapped.

Posted in FBI, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2018.

Thursday, May 31st, 2018

Josh Greenfeld, writer.

Mr. Greenfeld shared an Oscar nomination with Paul Mazursky for the screenplay of “Harry and Tonto”. (They lost to “Chinatown”. Man, 1974 was a heck of a year.) He also wrote plays, reviews, and features.

But he was most famous for three books about his severely autistic son: A Child Called Noah, A Place for Noah, and A Client Called Noah.

Karl Greenfeld, who continued telling Noah’s story in his own book, “Boy Alone: A Brother’s Memoir” (2009), said his brother, now 51, is in an assisted living home in Lawndale, Calif. “My parents went to see him every weekend until my father’s condition deteriorated over the last three years,” he said.

Philly.com obit for Gardner Dozois. The paper of record has not seen fit to publish an obit yet.

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

Obit watch: May 23, 2018.

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018

Philip Roth, noted American novelist.

I wish I had more to say about this, but: I just found out about his death, I’ve never read a Roth novel, and I don’t much like liver.

Clint Walker, actor. He was the star of “Cheyenne”, and appeared in “The Dirty Dozen” (among other credits).

As shooting of the show’s first season began, Mr. Walker confessed to the crew that he did not have a great deal of experience on horseback. He later recalled the response: “You’ll either be a good rider, or a dead one.”

Robert Indiana, visual artist, passed away on Saturday. He was most famous for his rendering of “L-O-V-E”:

I’m not sure I ordinarily would have noted this, but:

Mr. Indiana believed the piracy of the image harmed his reputation in the New York art world, and he retreated to Maine in 1978.

More:

Mr. Indiana, whose career was made, and nearly consumed, by his creation of the sculpture “LOVE,” had sought refuge here four decades ago, an exile from a New York art world he had come to resent, and settled into a rambling Victorian lodge hall overlooking Penobscot Bay, where he was, more or less, left alone to create his art.

He had become increasingly reclusive over the years, and his friends and associates wondered why. Turns out that, on Friday, the day before Mr. Indiana died:

…a company that says it has long held the rights to several of Mr. Indiana’s best-known works proposed an answer, arguing in court papers that the caretaker and a New York art publisher had tucked the artist away while they churned out unauthorized or adulterated versions of his work.

“They have isolated Indiana from his friends and supporters, forged some of Indiana’s most recognizable works, exhibited the fraudulent works in museums, and sold the fraudulent works to unsuspecting collectors,” said the lawsuit filed last week by Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

They filed the lawsuit on Friday. Mr. Indiana’s death was announced on Saturday. Very interesting.

Posted in Art, Books, Law, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch (and other things): May 15, 2018.

Tuesday, May 15th, 2018

I decided to put the Margo Kidder obits here: NYT. WP.

Adam Parfrey, publisher of weird stuff under the Amok Press and Feral House imprints.

My feelings about baseball in general, and the New York Yankees specifically, are well known. But this is a nice story:

For the past three years, the Yankees have been quietly sending flowers to the families and police departments of slain law enforcement officers across the country.

…

While the flowers usually arrive without warning or explanation beyond the message on the card, the gesture can elicit strong emotions. In Fargo, when Officer Jason Moszer was shot and killed in the line of duty in 2016, his 11-year-old stepson, Dillan Dahl, was devastated. When the flowers from the Yankees arrived, Dillan took them to his room and watered them, trying to keep them alive for as long as possible, said his father, Tim Dahl.
“It was the first time he smiled in days,” Dahl said.

This is a good story, too, and one I didn’t have time to blog on Sunday:

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Religion, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 14, 2018.

Monday, May 14th, 2018

This is a placeholder for Margot Kidder obits: once they start going up, I’ll add them here.

In the meantime:

Chuck Knox, noted NFL coach.

Ernest Medina, one of the central figures in the My Lai massacre.

Captain Medina went on trial in September 1971, defended by the prominent criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey, as well as a military lawyer. He was charged with involuntary manslaughter of at least 100 civilians, the murder of a woman and two counts of assault against a prisoner by firing twice over his head to frighten him the night after the massacre.
The defense contended that Captain Medina was unaware of large-scale killings of defenseless civilians until they had already occurred. The prosecution argued that the defense account was not credible since Captain Medina had been in continual radio contact with his platoons. The court-martial panel of five combat officers returned not guilty verdicts on all counts after an hour’s deliberation.

Doreen Simmons.

“Who?”

She was born in England, studied theology and classics at the University of Cambridge, and taught school in Singapore.

She was best known as an English-language sumo commentator for NHK from 1992 until March of this year.

“At the beginning, there were three play-by-play men who had experience of broadcasting games like baseball, but their knowledge of basic sumo was newly acquired and pretty limited,” she said in an interview last year with The Daily Express, a British newspaper. “They wanted the color provided by commentators like me who were hired because we were already knowledgeable about some aspect of sumo.”

Posted in History, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Sumo, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 9, 2018.

Wednesday, May 9th, 2018

NYT obit for James Avery.

Anne V. Coates, noted film editor. She was nominated five times for Oscars, and won for “Lawrence of Arabia”.

Her other Oscar nominations were for “Becket” (1964), directed by Peter Glenville; “The Elephant Man” (1980), by David Lynch; “In the Line of Fire” (1993), by Wolfgang Petersen; and “Out of Sight” (1998), by Steven Soderbergh.

George Deukmejian, former governor of California.

Posted in California Über Alles, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 2, 2018.

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018

Missed this one until it showed up on the NYT obits Twitter: noted film director Michael Anderson.

Among his credits: “Logan’s Run“, “Around the World in 80 Days“, “The Dam Busters“, and “The Quiller Memorandum“.

We’ve talked about watching “The Dam Busters”, but it won’t be this weekend even if we had the DVD, and that DVD is a touch pricey. I wouldn’t mind watching “Quiller” either, and I’ve never actually seen “Logan’s Run”.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 23, 2018.

Monday, April 23rd, 2018

For the record: Verne Troyer.

Posted in Amish, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 16, 2018.

Monday, April 16th, 2018

It was another busy weekend: birthday dinner, BAG day (post forthcoming), lots of running around…so let us get caught up.

Art Bell, noted radio host.

For more than two decades, Mr. Bell, who was 72 when he died April 13 at his home in Pahrump, Nev., stayed up all night talking to those people on the radio, patiently encouraging them to tell their stories about alien abductions, crop circles, anthrax scares and, as he put it, all things “seen at the edge of vision.”

I used to listen to a lot of late night radio, but my time preceded Art Bell. I know someone whose job requires them to drive in sometimes late at night, and back in the day they were an Art Bell listener.

Tim O’Connor, character actor. He had a long-running role on the “Peyton Place” TV series, and also did guest shots in just about everything. (Including “Mannix”.)

Milos Forman, one of the great directors. (“Amadeus”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”)

And finally, R. Lee Ermey. Borepatch.

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

Obit watch: April 2, 2018.

Monday, April 2nd, 2018

Man, it’s been a really busy couple of days.

Deborah Carrington, actress. Among her credits: Thumbelina in the original “Total Recall”, Valerie Vomit in “The Garbage Pail Kids Movie”, various Ewoks, and the “Bride of Chucky”.

Stéphane Audran, Babette in “Babette’s Feast”.

Delores Taylor, also an actress. She appeared in a bunch of her husband, Tom Laughlin’s, films, including “Billy Jack” and the two sequels.

Anita Shreve, noted novelist.

Separated at birth?

Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt


INS reporter Carl Kolchak.

Finally, noted TV producer Steven Bochco. (“Hill Street Blues”, “LA Law”, “NYPD Blue”, “Doogie Howser MD”. And where’s my damn “Hooperman” box set? I’m not kidding: I remember that being a kind of fun show.)

Let’s go out with a bang, shall we?

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

Obit watch: January 22, 2018.

Monday, January 22nd, 2018

Hemmingway and Ruark have a new hunting partner.

Harry Selby passed away on Saturday at the age of 92.

I’ve touched briefly on Selby in the past, but more in the context of Ruark. So please indulge me:

Mr. Selby was a postwar protégé of the East Africa hunter Philip Hope Percival, who took Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway on safaris, and he became a professional hunter himself in the late 1940s. He took the American author Robert Ruark on safari in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and with the 1953 publication of Ruark’s best-selling book “Horn of the Hunter,” Mr. Selby became one of Africa’s most famous hunting guides.

…

Without cellphones or evacuation helicopters, Mr. Selby had to be the doctor, mechanic, chauffeur, gin-rummy-and-drinking partner and universal guide, knowledgeable about mountain ranges, grassy plains, rivers, jungles, hunting laws, migratory patterns, and the Bushmen, Masai, Samburu, Dinka and Zulu tribes. He spoke three dialects of Swahili. And he improvised; if there was no firewood, he burned wildebeest dung.
He was no Gregory Peck, but had an easygoing personality that made for good company in the bush. He coped with emergencies, pulling a client clear of a stampede or a vehicle from a bog, treating snakebites or tracking a wounded lion in a thicket — his most dangerous game. He was left-handed, but his favorite gun was a right-handed .416 Rigby, which can knock down an onrushing bull elephant or Cape buffalo in a thundering instant.

…

For 30 years, Mr. Selby ran company operations in Botswana, and guided hunters and photographers into leased concessions covering thousands of square miles in the Okavango Delta in the north and the vast Kalahari Desert in the south, home of the click-talking Bushmen. He cut tracks and built airfields in the wilderness.
In 1970, he established Botswana’s first lodge and camps for photographic safaris. He hired guides and a large support staff for what became a dominant safari business in Southern Africa. After Ker, Downey and Selby was bought by Safari South in 1978, he remained a director, and even after resigning in 1993 he continued to lead safaris privately until retiring in 2000.

Noted actor Bradford Dillman.

Mr. Dillman played prominent roles in “The Enforcer” and “Sudden Impact,” the third and fourth films in the “Dirty Harry” series, and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1975 for his work on the TV series “The ABC Afternoon Playbreak.”

He was “Capt. McKay” in “The Enforcer” and “Captain Briggs” (not to be confused with Hal Holbrook’s “Lt. Briggs” in “Magnum Force”) in “Sudden Impact”. As we all know, Callahan went through captains like CNN goes through Russian conspiracy theories.

And finally, more of local interest: Hisako Tsuchiyama Roberts. Mrs. Roberts and her husband, Thurman, founded the Salt Lick barbecue restaurant in Driftwood, a little outside of Austin.

Tsuchiyama Roberts, who held a masters degree in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, dedicated her professional life in Texas to running the restaurant in the idyllic setting. She brought her flavors of her own culture to the smoked meat specialists, according to her son, Scott Roberts, who in his 2014 book “Salt Lick Cookbook: A Story of Land, Family, and Love,” wrote about his mother’s tempura frying of vegetables and shrimp for the menu along with her addition of poppy seeds to cole slaw and celery seeds to potato salad.

…

…with her passing, family shared a tale of the diminutive Tsuchiyama Roberts felling a charging buck with the swing of a pecan bucket she was using for shelling and killing it with a rock while her husband and his friends were away on an unsuccessful hunting trip.

She was 104.

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Guns, Movies, Obits, Ruark | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 20, 2018.

Saturday, January 20th, 2018

Paul Bocuse, one of the great French chefs.

I don’t have my copy of Alice Let’s Eat in front of me, but I remember Trillin quoting Bocuse: “Without butter, without cream, there is no point to cooking.” Bocuse was 91.

Dorothy Malone, Texan and retired actress. She was in Douglas Sirk’s “Written on the Wind” (and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). She also played Constance McKenzie for four out of five seasons of the “Peyton Place” TV series. (She was written out after season four.)

Dorothy Eloise Maloney was born on Jan. 30, 1924, in Chicago and grew up in Dallas, one of five children of Robert Ignatius Maloney and the former Esther Smith. Two of her sisters died of polio in childhood, and a brother was fatally struck by lightning in his teens.

Stansfield Turner, former CIA director.

Peter Mayle, author. I never read A Year in Provence but from the description it sounds a lot like a French version of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

Posted in Books, Food, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: January 16, 2018.

Thursday, January 18th, 2018

Yes, we know, we’re way late. It doesn’t have anything to do with something we’ll get to in a moment. It’s just been a matter of it being relatively cold here in the greater Austin metroplex. And like a giant lizard or some other cold-blooded animal, we’ve been curling up and conserving body heat. (We also fell into a time sink Tuesday night reading the archives of Damn Interesting. But that’s another story.)

But the cold spell is starting to break. After the jump, this week’s TMQ. Plus: viewer mail!

(more…)

Posted in Admin, Food, Movies, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 14, 2018.

Sunday, January 14th, 2018

Some more from the past couple of days:

Keith Jackson, legendary announcer.

Edgar Ray Killen is burning in Hell.

David Toschi passed away a week ago Saturday. FotB RoadRich mentioned this to me in the middle of the week – he saw it on a low-rent cable channel – but I had a lot of trouble finding a good obit. I couldn’t find the actual obit on SFGate: I was only able to get at an arthive.org version.

Anyway, “David who”? He was a famous San Francisco PD detective. He was one of the lead investigators on the Zodiac killings.

He was removed from the case after revelations that in 1976 he had sent several letters praising his own work to a San Francisco newspaper writer under fake names.
“It was a foolish thing to do,” he acknowledged at the time.

I don’t remember where I picked up this detail (maybe in the archive.org version), but that “newspaper writer” the NYT doesn’t name? Armistead Maupin, who was working as a reporter for the SF Chron at the time.

But that wasn’t the only reason he was semi-famous, at least among us common sewers connoisseurs:

Mr. Toschi was a personality in the police department even before his involvement with the Zodiac case, so much so that Steve McQueen had borrowed from him for the fictional police officer he played in the 1968 movie “Bullitt.”
“They literally were filming in my dad’s office,” Ms. Toschi-Chambers said. “My dad took off his jacket, and Steve McQueen said, ‘What is that?’ And my dad said, ‘That’s my holster.’ And Steve McQueen told the director, ‘I want one of those.’ ”

(I wonder what that holster was: and if it’s out of production, how much do vintage ones go for? There’s a discussion on defensivecarry.com, but I can’t judge how accurate it is.)

Clint Eastwood also drew on Mr. Toschi for his portrayal of the title character in “Dirty Harry,” Don Siegel’s influential 1971 movie about a San Francisco police inspector, Harry Callahan, who hunts a psychopathic killer. Mr. Toschi, though, was bothered by Callahan’s penchant for administering his own brand of justice. He is said to have walked out of a screening of the movie, which was released when the Zodiac investigation was in full swing.

(Damn shame. He missed out. And I still haven’t seen “Zodiac”.)

Edited to add: this might lead to a longer post later, but: there are certainly worse hobbies in the world than engaging in Steve McQueen cosplay. Though I will concede that could get expensive quick, especially if you go full “Bullitt” and start looking for a Mustang.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Cops, Guns, History, Law, Movies, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

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