There were a couple of unexpected celebrity deaths over the weekend, if you haven’t heard.
The first was Bernie Mac, the comedian and actor whose humor often stemmed from the combination of his intimidating stature with a lovable heart within. I don’t have too much to say about him, except that I enjoyed his performances in Ocean’s 11 and Bad Santa, as well as his eponymous television sitcom. That show was only occasional, not regular, viewing at my house, but I admired it for transcending race (unlike many other sitcoms that were on at the same time and featured African-American casts) and being refreshingly un-P.C. Not to mention pretty damn funny at times. Bernie was one of those guys that simply made me smile when he turned up in something I was watching. He died Saturday at the far-too-young age of 50.
While Bernie’s death saddened me, I was genuinely stunned to hear that singer, actor, and all-round-force-of-cool Isaac Hayes had died Sunday, after being found unconscious alongside a treadmill at his home. (Heart attack while working out, perhaps?) The various tributes to him all mention his work as a songwriter and pioneer of the funk sound of the early ’70s, and of course his most famous song, the wacka-liciously awesome “Theme from Shaft“; his more recent work as the voice of South Park‘s Chef gets name-checked as well. But when I think of Hayes, I tend to think first of his role as The Duke of New York (he’s A-Number One!) in one of the greatest B-grade sci-fi action flicks of all time, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Here he is in all his glory with Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau (who’s also displaying all her glory, if you take my meaning):
I first saw Escape from New York on one of those RCA videodiscs, those things that were like movies on vinyl records, while sitting in the television section of the local appliance store where my mom worked part-time when I was a kid. The movie’s premise was pretty mind-blowing to a small-town Utah kid in the early ’80s — if you haven’t seen it, it’s set in a dystopian near-future where the crime rate has gotten so bad, the authorities wall off Manhattan Island and turn it into a prison where the prisoners can do anything they want, so long as they don’t try to leave. Hayes’ Duke was essentially a third-world warlord, the strongest of the riffraff, and he cracked me up with his quasi-military outfit and his Cadillac with chandeliers mounted on the front fenders. To this day, that remains my mental archetype of low-rent decadence.
According to Hayes’ LA Times obit, he’d just finished a movie called Soul Men with that other terminally cool, shaved-headed African-American Samuel L. Jackson, and, oddly enough, the late Bernie Mac. He was only days shy of his 66th birthday…
