In revisiting many of the television series I loved as a kid, I’ve realized that TV production in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80 must’ve been a very small world. Watch enough of these old shows, and you’ll see the same familiar faces over and over again. For example, part of the fun of watching The Andy Griffith Show, for me anyway, is seeing all the guest stars who also appeared on Star Trek. I don’t notice this phenomenon quite as much these days, probably, I would imagine, because the barrier between TV and movies is so much more permeable than it used to be, which means there’s a much larger talent pool to draw from, and also perhaps because the last vestiges of the old studio system — in which actors were signed to exclusive contracts and used in everything the studio made — are long gone. But back in the day, it seemed like I was constantly snapping my fingers (yes, I would actually snap my fingers!) and saying, “hey, that’s the guy from — !”

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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…

Man, lately it’s really feeling like we’re at the end of an era, isn’t it? We’ve been losing so many of the men and women whose work meant so much to me in my formative years. The latest is the visual-effects genius Stan Winston, who died last night after a seven-year fight against multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer.

You know Winston’s work even if you’ve never heard his name. He specialized in what’re called “practical effects,” i.e., stuff that happens “live” on the set with the actors, notably effects that amount to very sophisticated puppets. The chromium robot skeleton that menaced Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies, the full-size T. Rex in Jurassic Park, and the little sweetheart you see in the photo above — the queen of Ripley’s nightmares in Aliens — were all Winston’s creations, full-size physical objects that came to life through the magic of hydraulics, compressed air, motors, and remote controls. He won three Oscars for the examples I named, and was nominated for several more projects, including the extra-terrestrial big-game hunter in Predator and the vicious-looking prosthetics worn by the gentle-hearted Edward Scissorhands.

In recent years, the sort of work that Winston excelled at has often been replaced by computer-generated models — for instance, the skeletal Terminators in the latest offshoot of that franchise, the Sarah Connor Chronicles television series, are mostly CGI — and even Stan himself has branched into the digital effects field. But for my money, CG puppets still don’t have the physical presence, the mass, or the menace of the real thing. I can still vividly recall the first time I saw The Terminator as a teenage boy sitting on his best friend’s living-room floor, my armpits drenched in flop sweat and stomach clenched in dread as that damned thing just kept coming, even after being blown in two by a pipe bomb. (That living room, by the way, no longer exists; my friend’s house was demolished years ago. But I still remember which corner the TV was in… and in my memory, the image on the screen is of that shining, red-eyed, mechanical skull dragging its own severed torso after its prey, unyielding and unrelenting even after being dismembered…)

No less intense was the first time I saw Aliens a couple of years later: it only takes a little mental nudge and I’m on the edge of my seat in a grungy second-run house, nervously tapping my fingertips on the sticky armrests like a three-pack-a-day-er in the middle of a nicky fit from hell as Ripley, armored up in an her industrial exoskeleton, slugs it out with the monstrous Queen.

That these experiences were so visceral they still linger after 20-some years is in large part because of Stan Winston. He made the monsters real, real enough for our heroes to defeat. His death at the relatively young age of 62 — the same age as my father — is a tremendous loss to the movies. He still had a lot of creatures left in him, I think, and I’m sorry that we’ll never have the chance to see them…

Catching up with the news, I see the Hollywood obituary list has been unusually long the last couple weeks. They say these things always come in threes, but there have been seven notable passings recently: a renowned actor-director, a composer, three of the men who made the original Star Trek into the classic it is, one of the funniest comedy straight men who ever lived, and a seminal blues-rock guitarist. Chances are you’ve all already heard about these, but I’d like to mention them anyhow…

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A week ago tomorrow, The Girlfriend — Anne — came home to find that her beloved miniature poodle Rusty had died while she was at work.

We knew this was coming. Rusty was diagnosed with congestive heart failure last fall and he’s been steadily deteriorating since then. But he didn’t seem to be deteriorating that quickly, and when he wasn’t wracked with fits of vicious coughing and wheezing, his behavior was pretty much what it’s always been. Which meant that somehow Anne and I had gotten it into our heads that he was going to last through the summer, that we wouldn’t have to face this inevitable sorrow until the weather turned cold again. But we were wrong… and sometime during the day last Thursday, little Rusty’s heart just… stopped. At least, I hope that’s how it happened. Anne told me that he appeared to be sleeping normally when she unlocked the door to her apartment, with no sign that he’d had to fight to take his final breaths. Again, I hope… well, I hope it was easy for him. He was a good dog; he deserved a painless journey into the unknown country.

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I just learned from the blog of Irene Gallo, the art director for Tor Books, that the illustrative artist John Berkey has died. Irene mentions something about him being in poor health in recent years, but so far, I haven’t been able to find any further details about his age or cause of death.

Berkey is probably best known for painting some of the very earliest pieces of promotional art associated with Star Wars — the image above was a poster concept for the movie, which ended up instead becoming the iconic cover of the film’s novelization — but his work was pretty commonly seen on all kinds of books and posters in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and it was a big influence on my developing sense of aesthetics. Several of his paintings still live in my memory; when I read of his death, I instantly recalled an image of his that appeared on Navy recruitment posters throughout my high school and early college years, and also this painting,which was the cover of a National Geographic coffee-table book called Our Universe. A friend of mine owned a copy of that book; as I recall, I borrowed it several times, but about all I remember about it now was that awesome cover painting.

Berkey’s work was more impressionistic than realistic, but one of the things it always conveyed was a true sense of mass. His starships and ocean-going craft and floating cities always felt huge and immensely powerful. It was a perfect style for the time of its greatest popularity, when Star Wars, with its mile-long Star Destroyers and moon-sized Death Star, set the tone for so much science fiction.

I don’t recall seeing any new work from Berkey in years, and I don’t know if that’s because he’s been ill or otherwise not working, or if his stuff just fell out of fashion. I rediscovered him a few years ago when I ran across a used art book at Sammy’s, and I spent several days marveling at how many of his paintings were familiar, and how much I still like them. That Star Wars piece above, for the record, is one of my favorites out of the hundreds of Original Trilogy-related paintings produced over the years; this companion piece is, too, even if it inaccurately depicts several Corellian YT-1300 light freighters at the Battle of Yavin, rather than just the one we all know actually was there…

In Sunday’s tribute to Charlton Heston, I mentioned something called the Big Money Movie. I think I’ve written about that before, but in case you didn’t catch the reference, the BMM was a local movie show here in Salt Lake that aired every weekday afternoon back in the mid-70s or thereabouts. The host was a funny little guy named Bernie Calderwood; his job was to introduce the day’s title and then, about midway through the show, to pull a phone number out of a rotating drum and call a lucky viewer at home. If the person answered and could tell Bernie what movie he was running or answer a trivia question or something, they won some cash (hence the “big money” part of the show’s title).

As best I can recall, the selection of films was exactly what you’d expect for a mid-afternoon slot in a (then) small television market (I’d imagine we probably qualify as “mid-sized” now), i.e., anything the station could get for cheap. That meant beat-up prints of decades-old back-catalog classics and a lot of B-grade genre flicks. I saw a lot of movies on the old BMM that I still adore, but the ones that are really standing out in my memory this afternoon are the adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories that starred Vincent Price and were directed by the legendary Roger Corman.

The “Poe movies,” as I think of them, are really amazing pieces of filmmaking: visually sumptuous and dripping with creepy atmosphere (if a bit sedate by modern standards) that become even more remarkable when you know the details of their creation. (Basically, they had budgets of about $1.98, but Corman cleverly “borrowed” sets, props, and costumes from A-level productions after they’d shut down for the day. Guerrilla filmmaking at its best, baby!) The films are rightly noted for their male stars, which included the always charming Price (he was in six of the seven Poe films produced by Corman) as well as Ray Milland, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone, not to mention a very young Jack Nicholson. But it was the female co-stars who drew much of my interest, even as a boy. They were, in a word, beautiful, voluptuous and powerfully feminine in a way that today’s emaciated and generally plain-jane starlets simply cannot match. And one of the most memorable of these unsung heroines was the lady who appears in the photo above, Hazel Court. She appeared in three of the Poe films: The Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, and, most impressively, as a conniving and very bitchy Lenore in The Raven. (The still above, with a sleepy-looking Boris Karloff, is from The Raven.)

Hazel, unlike some of the younger actresses who appeared in these movies, was more than a pretty face and nice cleavage, though; she had real presence and was more than capable of shining alongside the Hollywood legends with whom she shared the screen. She’s as much fun in The Raven as any of the “triad of terror” (Price, Karloff, and Lorre).

Hazel Court passed away last week at her home in Lake Tahoe; she was 82.

[Ed. note: I know I’m a couple weeks late for the funeral and pretty much the entire blogosphere has already had its say on the late actor Charlton Heston, but I feel I would be highly remiss if I didn’t recognize his passing here in my little corner of the InterWebs. So just imagine that it’s two weeks ago and this is current news, okay?]

One of the great treasures of my childhood was the time I spent watching old movies on television with my mom. I’m thinking in particular of the days before the home video revolution, when the viewer actually had very little control over the viewing experience. If you didn’t like whatever was on KSL’s Big Money Movie that day, you found something else to do. And if you did like the film, you really had to pay attention and savor it because there was no telling when it might air again.

I think that’s probably the biggest difference between The Way Things Used to Be and the on-demand world we now enjoy, the way we take it for granted that you can watch the same flick over and over, whenever you feel like it. When I was a kid, we just didn’t have that luxury, and I honestly think movies meant more to film lovers back then because of the relative scarcity of any given title.

There were, however, three pictures that you could count on seeing pretty regularly, because they always aired at least once a year, usually around holidays: The Wizard of Oz, Ben-Hur, and The Ten Commandments. As it happened, my mom loved all three of them, and, in the case of the two Heston films, could even recall seeing them on the big screen when they were new. (Somewhere down in the Bennion Archives, I have the Ben-Hur souvenir program that she bought in the lobby of the late, lamented Villa Theatre way back in 1959.) Squashing these epic movies down into the confines of a 24-inch TV screen robbed them of much of their grandeur, of course, but I didn’t fully understand that at the time. I thought they were neat, partly because watching them was an annual tradition, partly because my mom was so enthusiastic about them and my early tastes were heavily influenced by hers, but mostly because I liked Charlton Heston, who died April 5th at the age of 84.

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