Mark Evanier lists those who were not included in this year’s “in memoriam” video at the Oscars:

Patrick McGoohan was in some pretty good movies and George Carlin was in more than you might think…but neither was included. Nor was Eartha Kitt. Nor was composer Neal Hefti. Nor were Harvey Korman, Earle Hagen, Mel Ferrer, Alexander Courage, John Phillip Law, Irving Brecher, George Furth, Beverly Garland or Guy McElwaine. There were several studio execs and one publicist included but not Bernie Brillstein.

 

But the startling omission, of course, was Don LaFontaine, who not only became a superstar of movie trailers but also served as the announcer of the Oscars several years.

I noticed LaFontaine’s absence myself and thought that was deeply weird; I honestly did not remember that many of the others Mark mentions had died in ’08. I wonder why people get left out of these things? I imagine there are time constraints that prevent the listing of everybody who passes on during any given year, but what determines whether someone is worthy of inclusion? It can’t be because the missing stars aren’t big enough. Lots of people would know Patrick McGoohan, George Carlin, and Harvey Korman, surely…

For anyone who was annoyed with the way the “in memoriam” montage was handled on this year’s Oscar broadcast, here it is as it should’ve been done on TV, with no annoying cutaways or zooms:

I thought it was nice they included Vampira, who was hardly a big star outside of cult-film circles but was beloved by those who like that sort of thing.

It is one of the great injustices of Hollywood history that Ricardo Montalban — who passed away last week at the age of 88 — never became a big star. Oh sure, he worked pretty steadily from the 1940s through the ’80s and continued to make appearances or voiceovers in various things right on up to the present (according to IMDB, he did an episode of Family Guy just last year). Just about everyone knew his name and silky voice, and we all loved him. But looking through his filmography, it appears that he was rarely the lead, the hero. Even in Fantasy Island, the late-70s/early-80s television series for which most people probably remember him these days, he got only a few minutes of screentime per episode. He functioned on that show very much like Rod Serling in the old Twilight Zones: all he did was set up the plot for that week’s episode, maybe pop back in midway through to provide some encouragement or vital information, and then he summed up the moral of the story at the end. The real stars of that show were the rotating assortment of has-beens and B-listers who were actually doing things in the stories.

And yet… he always seemed like a big star, didn’t he? He just had that air about him, a larger-than-life quality that came from his apparently effortless elegance, his good looks, and a masculinity that was unapologetic but never cruel or bullying, as traditionally macho types can so often become. You can seen what I’m talking about in that photo up at the top, which comes from one of the many ads he did for Chrysler in the ’70s. (If you’re of a certain age, you will, of course, instantly recognize the term “Corinthian leather,” even though there’s really no such thing; sorry, kids, it was all just an exercise in marketing.) Montalban exuded the old-fashioned, magnetic charisma of the Golden Age of Hollywood: like Clark Gable or Errol Flynn, he appealed equally to women and men, and probably for the same reasons. He radiated strength and mystery, but wasn’t threatening to we lesser mortals. He was quite simply, employing a word that I can’t imagine a man of Montalban’s generation comfortably using, cool.

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The Girlfriend just called me at home to ask if I’d heard the news: Forrest J. Ackerman, the original and possibly greatest fanboy of us all, died yesterday at the age of 92.

I imagine a lot of my readers probably have no idea who old Forry is, but to those of us who travel in certain rarefied circles, the man is a legend. He founded the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland way back in 1958; it was, so far as I know, the first professional publication devoted exclusively to genre movies. He was a writer and editor, and a literary agent for such giants of science-fiction literature as Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, and Hugo Gernsback (for whom the distinguished Hugo Awards are named). Forry was the first to publish a short story by some kid named Ray Bradbury. And he is credited with coining the term “sci fi,” much to the chagrin of a certain strain of too-serious-for-their-own-good fans who think this contraction of “science fiction” too undignified and childish.

But most of all, Forry is known for collecting stuff. To every fan with a basement full of cherished memorabilia, Forry is our spiritual godfather. He spent his entire life amassing books, magazines, posters, original art, movie props and costumes — anything and everything that had to do with his beloved horror, sci fi, and fantasy genres. His collection at one time reportedly comprised 300,00 pieces, and was valued in the mid-1960s at $10 million in today’s money.

Some people, maybe even most people who had a collection like that would treat it as a mere investment, keep it to themselves, and worry constantly about its worth and safety. Forry, however, and to his great credit, was always happy to share it with whomever was interested. I’ve heard that all you had to do was show up at his California home, the “Ackermansion,” on a Saturday morning, and he would greet you at the door in Bela Lugosi’s Dracula cape and take you on the grand tour. Anne and I talked several times of making our own pilgrimage to the Ackermansion but just never got around to it.

Sadly, Forry’s collection is mostly gone now, sold off a little at a time over the past decade to cover medical and legal expenses. It’s a damn shame. To paraphrase Indiana Jones, all that stuff belonged in a museum as a monument to one man’s life and passion, and to a big chunk of Hollywood and publishing history. C’est la vie, I suppose. (For the record, I’m proud to own a small piece of Forry’s collection, a few American Cinematographer magazines I purchased off eBay a while back when I heard he was liquidating his stash.)

I never had the opportunity to meet Forrest Ackerman, and that is something I will long regret. He was, by all accounts, one of the truly good guys of this world. And probably of several others, too, given his life’s pursuits. His LA Times obit is here; an older piece containing more information about his collection is here.

Rest in peace, Dr. Acula…

I reject the notion that anything popular can’t be good. I don’t want to be obscure; I want to be read.

–Michael Crichton, 1994

I’m sure everyone’s heard by now that the best-selling novelist Michael Crichton died earlier this week, yet another victim of cancer, struck down at the relatively youthful age of 66. I have to admit that my feelings about him and his passing are a bit more muddled than is usually the case when I write these tributes.

I used to be a big admirer of his back in high school and college. His prose was serviceable at best, never soaring, but he was a master at plot, which was my primary interest in fiction in those days, and I found the science on which he based his plots fascinating and thought-provoking. I was an aspiring novelist myself, and on something of a personal crusade against the sort of high-minded literature that was read in academic settings but no where else. Actually, I should clarify that: I had no problem with Literature-with-a-capital-L itself — I even liked some of it — but I hated the snobbery that came along with it, the implication that there was something inherently wrong with fiction that simply entertained. (I still hate that attitude, come to think of it.) The popular stuff was what I preferred to read on my own time, and what I wanted to write myself, and I was always on the lookout for something that would validate my feelings on the issue. Crichton became a hero to me after I read that quote up there at the top of this entry in a newspaper interview; I scribbled it down in my notebook and used it for inspiration — and ammunition during arguments — for a very long time.

But then, perhaps inevitably, I cooled on Crichton, partly because my tastes were changing and I was finally coming to understand some of the criticisms of his writing, and partly because I think the quality of his work declined following Jurassic Park. The final straw came a couple years ago, when I was moved to publicly denounce him after learning of his shameful and childish attack on a journalist who’d had the temerity to question his ideas. You can read the details yourself, but the short version is that my old hero revealed himself to be a royal jerk. He wasn’t the first of my heroes who turned out to have feet of clay, but he was the most extreme in terms of how genuinely distasteful he revealed himself to be.
So now, upon his untimely death, the question for me is, which Michael Crichton should I be remembering? The one whose work I enjoyed and found inspirational as a young man or the one whose pettiness and total lack of class utterly disgusted me as a grown man? Which was the “true” Crichton?

Perhaps the best way to memorialize him is as a genuine human being who, like all human beings, was more complicated than strangers knew or believed, who had it in them to both please us and let us down. He wasn’t a marble statue, and he didn’t ask a naive college freshman into idolizing him.

And I should also keep in mind that despite my disillusion with the man, The Great Train Robbery, which he directed, is still a damn entertaining movie…

When you watch movies, you’ll see actors and you’ll see stars, but you very rarely see anyone who can honestly be described as both. These individuals combine two very different sets of qualities: the nuanced thespian skills and talents that enable them to create characters who genuinely seem to live and breathe apart from the actor themselves, and the personal charisma, the indefinable “it,” that makes audiences naturally gravitate toward them. In my opinion, these individuals are becoming more and more rare all the time; I don’t know if they were a product of the old Hollywood system that died out in the ’70s or perhaps they had a certain kind of training that’s no longer much practiced, or maybe the planets just aren’t properly aligned these days, but for whatever reason, the younger people in movies today simply don’t have the same effortlessly larger-than-life aura about them.

We lost one of the last and greatest of these actor-stars Friday when the legendary Paul Newman succumbed at the age of 83 to the cancer he’s been rumored to have been battling for some time. This is one of those Hollywood deaths that I’ve been expecting, but which still strikes me to the bone. I can’t recall ever not knowing who Newman was; he’s always been one of my mother’s favorites, along with his occasional screen partner Robert Redford, and I have very dim memories of seeing The Sting with her when I was just a very small boy. (I can’t recall, however, if it was on TV or if my parents took me to the theater when it was first out. It seems like we saw it in the theater, but I may be imagining that.) Newman seemed like somebody I actually knew, and it hurts to think he’s gone.

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Well, they do say that Hollywood deaths always come in threes…

I just learned that singer, songwriter, and sometimes-actor Jerry Reed has died. He had a respectable career in country music, of course, including several big hits on both the country and pop charts (this was back in the 1970s when you could do that, unlike the rigidly segregated musical categories of today). But I think most of the obituaries you read are going to focus on his role as Burt Reynolds’ sidekick in the Smokey and the Bandit films. I know when I heard the news, the image that flashed through my mind was of Snowman sitting behind the wheel with his loyal basset hound Fred riding shotgun.

Despite my recent affirmation of SamuraiFrog’s opinion that we should do away with the term “guilty pleasure,” I have to admit I’m a bit sheepish when it comes to revealing my affection for Smokey and the Bandit. People often seem to be struggling not to roll their eyes when they hear the title, and I suppose I don’t blame them. After all, it’s basically just a 90-minute car chase, leavened by silly sight gags and vulgar one-liners. Worse, its success was directly responsible for many of the worst crimes committed against American culture in the late ’70s and early ’80s, including (but not limited to), two really lame sequels; scores of bad, low-budget movies and television shows about “good ol’ boys,” truck drivers, CB radios, and stupid law enforcement officers; the resulting destruction of countless perfectly good (and frequently classic) automobiles; and, of course, the exponential increase in the size of Burt Reynolds’ head. I always worry that admitting I’m a fan says something about me that I really don’t want people to assume. And yet… and yet I just love the damn thing.

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One of the best-known voices in the world has fallen silent. Don LaFontaine, the voiceover artist most people knew as “the movie-trailer guy,” died over the weekend at the age of 68, from a collapsed lung. According to his bio, LaFontaine recorded the narration for roughly 5,000 trailers over the years, as well as countless TV ads. He even parodied himself — and his usual catchphrase, “in a world where…” — in episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, as well as a recent commercial for Geico Insurance.

I heard LaFontaine’s deep, occasionally intimidating voice nearly every day for the five or so years I worked at that multiplex I’m always waxing nostalgic about. Every couple of hours, when the next round of shows was starting, it would boom out from the auditoriums, sometimes even after the doors were closed. He was as much a part of the atmosphere in that place as the smell of popcorn and windex. I remember I used to have this embarrassing fantasy that one day I’d hear him say my name in a trailer, something along the lines of, “From the bestselling novel by R. Jason Bennion comes a film of exquisite awesomeness…” Ah, well. C’est la vie, I suppose.

Here’s a video clip that I’ve seen in a few places around the ‘nets today, a brief bio of LaFontaine that feels like something made for an awards show (the Oscars perhaps? I haven’t been able to find out…) and includes a fair amount of the man himself chatting about his life and career. It sounds very much like he was just a guy with a unique talent who stumbled into a niche that he was able to make his own. He also sounds like he was a very cool guy:

If only I’d known that he was willing to do things like voicemail intros for random strangers!

There are a lot of voiceover artists out there and I’m sure many of them, if not most of them, are very good at what they do. But I doubt we’re going to hear a single voice as universally recognizable — and recognized — as LaFontaine’s for many years.