Here’s another item to put on the list of Everyday Stuff We Grew Up With That’s Now Consigned to the Dustbins of History: Polaroid photography.
I just read that the Polaroid company plans to stop making its “instant film” as soon as there’s enough stockpiled to carry it through the rest of this year. (The company already stopped making Polaroid cameras a while back.) There is some talk of licensing the technology to other manufacturers, in order to keep die-hard niche enthusiasts supplied, but for all intents and purposes, the photo technique preferred by grandmas everywhere in the 1970s and ’80s is dead.
The fraternity of actors who are forever identified with a particular, memorable line is a small one, and I often wonder how the members of that exclusive club feel about being so strongly associated with a single sentence uttered in the course of a single job. Did Bogie ever get tired of people shouting, “here’s lookin’ at you, kid!” from across the street? Did Brando cringe whenever some two-bit impressionist would “make somebody an offer they can’t refuse?” And has even The Governator gotten tired of “I’ll be back?” (Probably not, in the latter case.)
This question is on my mind because I’m wondering what Roy Scheider — who died yesterday at the age of 75 after a long struggle with cancer — would say about the fact that every obituary I’ve read today has referenced his famous dead-pan quip from Jaws: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
I hope he’d be amused by it, and maybe even proud. Jaws still holds up today, 33 years after its release, as a terrific adventure film — it’s not a horror movie, despite what most people think — due in no small part to Scheider’s contribution. His character, Chief Brody, is the Everyman, the non-expert, the guy the audience identifies with, because he doesn’t know anything and he’s terrified, just like we would be in the same situation. It makes the movie much more believable than it would be if Brody was some kind of uber-competent cartoon character, and that ultimately makes the film more effective in squeezing our adrenal glands.
Scheider was like a lot of actors who came along in the mid-70s: good-looking, but not exceptionally handsome, regular joes who usually played ordinary working-class guys. We don’t have many actors like that these days — it seems like most of them nowadays are far too concerned with being a star, or a hero, or at least cool, to play anything so prosaic as just a guy. That wasn’t Roy. He was a guy in great movie after great movie: The French Connection, Blue Thunder, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (yeah, I like that one, so what?)… he was even a regular guy (and the most appealing aspect of) that television abortion called SeaQuest DSV. (I’ve never seen All That Jazz, the other big Scheider movie that many bloggers and journalists are mentioning today, and in which I gather Roy was anything but a regular guy. Hey, I didn’t say he couldn’t play more exotic roles, only that the stuff I remember him for was the blue-collar characters.)
Of all the regular guys he played, though, it’s that small-town New England sheriff and his battle with a mechanical shark named Bruce that I think is really going to endure, and if I were Roy Scheider, I’d have been fine with that. Jaws is one of my favorite movies; Roy Scheider was one of my favorite actors for having been in it. I hope he got that bigger boat in the end.
Courtesy of Scalzi, who seems to have a pretty good business head on his shoulders:
I guess the idea is that ambition excuses all dickheadedness in the long run. Sorry, it doesn’t.
John is talking about a very specific scenario involving pro writers and would-be pro writers, but I think it’s a good point in general. I can think of a number of young up-and-comers right here in my own company who would do well to heed those words. No one I’d name here in public, of course, but even so…
As I’ve mentioned before, I started collecting one-sheets when I was working as an usher and later a projectionist for the local multiplex. Alvin was in full bloom during that period, and manyof thepostershedesignedformovieswe ran found their way into my Archives.
If you click over to this fan site, you’re sure to recognize much more of his work than what I’ve linked to here. Alvin’s style wasn’t as recognizable as Drew Struzan’s, but it also didn’t suffer from the predictable quality of Struzan’s work. (It’s always fairly easy to tell which publicity still Struzan has copied a facial expression or a pose from, even though he does magical things with the image.) Alvin’s images were frequently more graphical than portrait-like, using silhouettes instead of clear faces, for example, and clean patches of color with no detail in them. It was distinctive. And it was beautiful in its own regards.
Movie posters have always excited me, stirred my imagination, whetted my appetite for the cinematic experience to come, and reminded me of the good times I’ve had in the dark. Alvin’s posters were especially good at accomplishing those tasks. I’ll miss the work he may have done in the future.
I stayed up way too late last night watching a really bad movie called One Million Years B.C. I remember liking it a lot when I was a kid, so when I ran across the DVD on sale for five bucks, and I considered that it contained stop-motion dinosaurs animated by the legendary Ray Harryhausenand Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, I thought I couldn’t go wrong. Sadly, it turned out to be one of those flicks that should’ve remained a fond memory. C’est la vie.
The real injury, however, happened when the receptionist here at my office asked me why I was looking so tired. I told her… and got a completely blank look. I didn’t expect her to recognize the movie title, but she didn’t know who Raquel Welch was either. Come on! Raquel Welch? She was only one of the biggest sex symbols of the 20th Century! And she only appeared on one of the most famous cheesecake posters ever produced! (That’s it up there at the top of the entry. I remember many comic-book ads for posters-by-mail, and this one was always the largest thing on the page. It’s still available, too.) But no, the kid had no idea whatsoever.
Some days I really feel like I may as well stop fighting it, apply for Social Security, and go invest in a rocking chair…
This kind of random, but here’s a meme I ran across somewhere in my blog-wanderings today that looked kind of fun. First up, the obligatory description of The Rules:
Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
John Kenneth Muir and The Bad Astronomer are both noting that the actor Barry Morse has died at the age of 89.
Morse was not one of those actors most people are going to know by name, but at least one of his roles — Lt. Philip Gerard, the dogged pursuer of Dr. Richard Kimble on the original TV version of The Fugitive (the character played by Tommy Lee Jones in the 1993 feature film) — is iconic.
Sci-fi fans are more likely to recognize him from the series Space: 1999, in which he played the fatherly Professor Victor Bergman for one season before being unceremoniously dumped in the show’s second-season retool. (The character never even got an on-screen explanation for what happened to him; he simply wasn’t on the show any more when year two began.)
And in other news, the death last month of actor Heath Ledger has been ruled an accidental overdose of several prescription medications. A statement from his family indicates that none of the drugs were taken in excess; rather, it was a fatal combination of ordinary meds taken at ordinary dosages. While I’m happy that this talented young man didn’t commit the ultimate stupidity — suicide and/or death by street drugs — there is nevertheless something small and ignominious about this kind of thing.
Well, here it is, the morning after, and we still can’t predict with any certainty who the Democratic nominee for president is going to be, but it’s looking pretty likely the Republican nom will go to McCain. My own prediction — and this isn’t my own preference, mind you, it’s just what my Magic 8-Ball is telling me — is that we’re going to end up choosing between Clinton and McCain come November. But who really knows? There’s still a lot of time to go…
I find it interesting that Huckabee made such a strong showing; obviously, his surge was fueled by Christian evangelicals in southern states where they are in the majority. I wonder if they honestly believe their guy has a chance in the general election, if they were just voting their principles, or if voting for Huckabee was really a strategy to block Mitt Romney, because evangelicals have such a problem with Mitt being Mormon?
Here in Utah, the voting went pretty much as I expected. Romney won the local Republican primary by a ridiculous margin (90 percent, I believe), owing, I’m sure, to his religion and his reputation as the man who saved Utah’s bacon during the 2002 Winter Olympics. (Long story, but just in case you don’t know it, the Cliff’s Note version is that preparations for SLC’s Games were not going well, there were scandals, and the whole thing looked like it was going to be a embarrassing disaster. Mitt took over the Organizing Committee at the last minute and the Games turned out to be a resounding success.) On the Democratic side, Obama took a wide lead over Clinton. Many people I’ve talked with this morning seem surprised by this; I’m not. Even among Democrats, Hillary is not well-liked in these parts. My theory is that even many so-called liberal Utahns — who, let’s be honest, would be considered fairly conservative in other parts of the country — tend to subscribe to more, ahem, traditional views of gender roles, and Hillary alienated, offended, or threatened them during the Wild Bill Years with her strong will and apparent acceptance of her husband’s philandering. But that’s just me talking out of my hat; it could also be something as simple as Obama visiting the state in person while Hillary just sent Bill and Chelsea in her place.
Either way, it was an interesting experience to be part of the Big Time for a change. Only eight months to go…
I’m pretty unrelenting in my affection and respect for pop-cultural relics that the rest of society long ago dismissed as hopelessly cheez-ball (e.g., the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, pretty much the entire career of William Shatner), but even I would be daunted by the current blog-project of a guy named Larry Aydlette. In honor of the impending 72nd birthday of Burt Reynolds, the man whose mustache epitomized the late 1970s, Larry has decided to “honor [Burt’s] work ethic and use his birth month for 29 straight days of Burt Reynolds coverage.” Or, as his blog’s tagline puts it, he’s going “All Burt. All month.”
This isn’t a love-a-thon. In rewatching a lot of his movies, I’ve come to the conclusion that he didn’t necessarily deserve to win the Oscar for the films that he and many critics thought he should have won them for. And he was never nominated for what seems to me to be his one indisputable masterpiece (although I doubt many critics will agree with me). But there are quite a few of his films that are very, very good, and deserve reconsideration.
I do think the breadth of his career is certainly worthy of an honorary Oscar. Let’s not forget that he ruled America’s box office from the late ’70s to the early ’80s. He is the self-proclaimed “Picasso of car pictures.” He was a big, big star.
No argument from me on any of that. At one time, I probably would’ve classed Burt among my heroes. Hell, he was The Bandit, man. I still envy that character’s way with the ladies, and of course that kick-ass black Trans Am.
Anyway, Larry is doing some genuinely interesting film criticism and cultural history over there. I found his re-appraisal of Semi-Tough and Boogie Nights especially interesting. Go have a look…
