Back in high school, my AP English teacher was fond of telling us that all fiction could be divided into “Literature with a capital L” — i.e., the good, important work, the books you read for AP English class — and everything else, which was, by implication, crap.

Needless to say, his list of “Literature with a capital L” did not include any science fiction titles. (Well, to be fair, it did include 1984 and Brave New World, which are technically SF, but they weren’t SF by my exacting standards of the time… no spaceships, you see.) This was 1987, way before geeks conquered the world, and SF was a ghetto genre that was widely dismissed as kid stuff, or else as disposable, escapist fare that couldn’t possibly provoke any worthwhile thoughts in its readers, and could possibly even be harmful to thinking. Even when you were reading the best the genre had to offer, there was something slightly shameful about being seen with it, as if you were just exiting a strip club and didn’t want to run into anyone you knew.

Nevertheless, I was a fan, dammit, and I was utterly incensed by the idea that the books and movies I loved above all others were considered second-class. I was a smart kid with good grades, college-bound for sure; reading SF certainly hadn’t caused any damage to my brain cells. Obviously, I needed to send a message, to strike a blow against the elistist literati who thought that dreary English moors made for better settings against which to explore the human heart than the surface of alien planets. It was, in the immortal words of Chris Knight, a moral imperative!

My message was to be a lengthy research paper on the genre, specifically on the giants of science fiction’s Golden Age: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Through sheer logic and examples I no longer recall, I set out to prove that the work of these three men was just as significant and influential, just as important, and most of all just as literary, as anything produced by Faulkner or Fitzgerald or whoever else we’d been reading in class.

What can I say? I was young.

Looking at those three authors now, through eyes that have seen a hell of a lot more of life than the ones that eagerly watched my old teacher for any signs of capitulation in the face of my audacious act of rebellion, I suspect I would probably come to different conclusions than I did back then. I haven’t actually read these authors in years. But from what I recall of their work, Heinlein — always my favorite of the three, by the way — would probably strike me as a writer of excellent adventure stories that weren’t lacking in significant ideas but perhaps also were not as profound as my 17-year-old self believed. As for Asimov… well, I doubt I could get through an Asimov novel these days; even when I was 17, I thought his characters were little more than cardboard props, and I suspect his most famous works probably haven’t aged very well. No, out of my “holy trinity,” only Arthur C. Clarke, the legendary science fiction author who died yesterday at the age of 90, produced anything that I would dare to call “Literature.”

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Damn. Another one. It seems to be the week for tributes to the departed. This one will require a bit of set-up, so here we go:

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There were a couple of deaths last week that I feel I need to mention.

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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.

Speaking of movie posters, I just read on PosterWire.com that the artist John Alvin has died. There’s a more detailed article here. He was only 59.

Alvin was the man behind many of the best-remembered one-sheet designs of the ’70s and ’80s, including Young Frankenstein, Empire of the Sun, The Lost Boys, The Color Purple, and Gremlins. His posters for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Blade Runner are iconic.

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 many of the posters he designed for movies we 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.

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.)

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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.

As I’ve said before, what a damn shame.

Gordon B. Hinckley, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whom Mormons believe to be a true prophet of God in the same sense as all those guys you read about in the Bible, died last night at the age of 97.

For anyone reading this who doesn’t already know, I am not a member of the LDS Church, even though I was born and raised at Ground Zero for the Church — the Salt Lake Valley — and most of my family and friends are Mormon. I didn’t revere President Hinckley, and I personally don’t believe he was a literal prophet. However, I did respect him as a human being, and I do believe he was a good, kind-hearted man with a refreshing sense of humor about himself and his religion.

Speaking as a self-identified outsider, many of the Church authorities come across as, well, less than friendly to people like me. They often have an air of unshakable smugness, as if there is absolutely no question of their superiority over the misguided gentiles of the world. (Yes, Mormons refer to non-Mormons as “gentiles,” a fact that greatly amuses the Jews of my acquaintance. And no, I’m not saying that the Church authorities I speak of actually believe themselves superior, only that they give that impression. There is a difference, and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.)

President Hinckley was different. He had a way of disarming defensive heathens like myself. Partly it was his willingness to laugh instead of taking offense when someone poked fun at the Church. (See local humor columnist Robert Kirby’s elegy for an example.) But it was more than that. He appeared to genuinely care about the beliefs and opinions of people who weren’t exactly like him. He always projected absolute certainty in the correctness of his own beliefs, but he wasn’t dismissive or contemptuous of those who didn’t happen to share those beliefs. That’s a trait a lot of people could stand to learn.

I know Mormons tend to have close emotional ties to their leaders, even when they don’t know them personally. My friends Cheno and Steve both speak from this perspective in their blog entries on this event. To them and anyone else who is mourning President Hinckley today, I’m very sorry for your loss.

I have to be honest, when I heard Heath Ledger had died of a drug overdose, my automatic assumption was that it was either (a) a deliberate suicide, or (b) a sordid Belushi-esque adventure with an illegal street high. Now it’s looking more and more like it was merely an accident with prescription meds, and somehow that’s even more pathetic than the thought of him nodding off forever with a needle in his arm. At least that would’ve been a “cool” death, “cool” in the sense of “the stupid and miserable thing that celebrities do, but at least he’ll live on in infamy as a warning to others.” Just mixing the wrong meds or taking one too many Seconal tabs, though… that’s mundane, isn’t it? I don’t know… my feelings about that don’t make a lot of sense even to me. I guess I’m hoping that I can sort them out by burning a few more electrons on the subject. Hope I’m not boring you all.

In any event, Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre made a few remarks that I find worth repeating:

It’s not uncommon for us to feel more connected with famous people. We identify them with the characters they play and it’s only natural that we think that a little bit of them comes out in each performance. So based on his movies, I liked Heath Ledger. Maybe he was an asshole, maybe he was a very nice man. Maybe he was the most humble actor to ever walk the face of this earth. I don’t know, but I do know that Heath showed promise and that’s enough. Promise cut down in its prime is truly tragic. And now in his absence, I am forced to imagine what could have been.

As I said the other day, I think Heath Ledger might have been one of the greats, in time. It’s the same thing I thought when River Phoenix died, that he could’ve been so much and won’t ever get the chance to do anything more than what he’s already done. That’s almost unutterably sad. I feel bad when one of the old-timers I’ve loved my entire life passes on, but at least they had their runs. The young ones, though… their deaths just suck.

Oh, and so do idiots who picket funerals because they think their religious beliefs (read: bigotry against all things homosexual, including a straight actor who just happened to play a gay man in a high-profile movie) gives them license to behave like disrespectful asshats. That’s real Christian behavior, guys…

The news is flashing across the blogosphere at just under the speed of light, so you may have already heard: the actor Heath Ledger was found dead this afternoon in a Manhattan apartment, apparently of a drug overdose. He was only 28.

It’s a sad and cliche’d end for a talented young man who I think had the potential to be one of the greats. I remember seeing him in a short-lived TV series called Roar way back in the early ’90s — I think I was one of about six people who actually watched that one — and thinking “this kid has some presence, he’s going to go somewhere.” He was brilliant in Brokeback Mountain, in which he completely submerged himself into a character of few words who expresses everything physically, a difficult performance that few actors would even attempt. And based on the trailers I’ve seen for The Dark Knight, the upcoming sequel to Batman Begins, there’s a good chance that his take on The Joker is going to eclipse even the immortal Jack Nicholson’s version.

You know, there are some celebs that you expect this sort of thing from, and some you don’t. Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan could OD tomorrow and I wouldn’t feel at all surprised. Sad for their wasted lives perhaps, but not surprised. This one, though, coming out of the blue like this… wow. Like the death of River Phoenix fifteen years ago — god, has it really been so long? — this news has hit me like a hard fist to the stomach because I didn’t realize until just this moment how much I really liked and respected the kid.

What a damn shame…