Passages

[beamish14]

Lawrence Turman, producer of The Graduate, American History X, and The Thing. Co-head of USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program, the first cinema graduate program expressly designed to prepare students for careers in producing, for many years.

[colinr0380]

Coco Lee at 48, from suicide after struggles with depression. Which is particularly upsettingly ironic because, as mentioned a while back in one of our music threads she came to prominence with particularly bouncy happy pop songs, one of the more internationally famous being It's A Party.

Here she is performing A Love Before Time from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the Academy Awards.

[Feego]

Betta St. John, whose roles ranged from classic Hollywood fare like Dream Wife and The Robe to horror/thrillers Corridors of Blood, The Snorkel, and Horror Hotel.

[Aunt Peg]

Actor Jeffrey Carlson, 48: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... es-aged-48

[Caligula]

Milan Kundera

[MichaelB]

Milan Kundera

Obviously most famous as a great novelist, but he was also a bigger player in Czechoslovak cinema than his rather sparse filmography would suggest. He initially studied film directing and screenwriting at FAMU in the 1950s (despite always considering his creative calling to be novels and poems), and then began lecturing in those subjects there, with the result that he had a direct personal influence on the single greatest generation of Czech and Slovak filmmakers - whom he would go on to outspokenly defend when their work, like his, ran into official trouble.

Here's a handy overview of his film and TV career, as this aspect is likely to be sidelined by many of the other obituaries.

[hearthesilence]

Ellen Hovde, one of the directors of Grey Gardens. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) and Muffie Meyer received directing credits on the film along with the Maysles brothers, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, were also its editors.

Hovde worked on several other films with the Maysles brothers in the late 1960s and ’70s - in 1969 she was a contributing editor on Salesman and the next year she was an editor on Gimme Shelter. In 1974 she was credited as a director, along with the Maysleses, on Christo’s Valley Curtain about an environmental art project the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected in Colorado in 1972. (That film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short.)

In 1978 Hovde and Meyer formed Middlemarch Films, which went on to make scores of documentary features and videos in various styles and on a wide range of subjects. Some explored subjects from the age before film and photography and used actors to re-create scenes. One of those, a television mini-series about Benjamin Franklin directed jointly by Meyer and Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction special.

[beamish14]

Daniel Goldberg, producing partner of Ivan Reitman who worked on Meatballs and Stripes. Also executive produced Chen Kaige’s sole Hollywood outing, Killing Me Softly

[colinr0380]

He also wrote and produced Reitman's early film Cannibal Girls, as well as co-writing Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone and segments of the Heavy Metal movie. The single film that he wrote and directed was that odd couple female take on the Police Academy films (though it anticipated Silence of the Lambs by a couple of years!) with the Rebecca De Mornay and Mary Gross starring Feds.

[beamish14]

He also wrote and produced Reitman's early film Cannibal Girls, as well as co-writing Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone and segments of the Heavy Metal movie. The single film that he wrote and directed was that odd couple female take on the Police Academy films (though it anticipated Silence of the Lambs by a couple of years!) with the Rebecca De Mornay and Mary Gross starring Feds.

Feds was a cable staple in my childhood, and I’m interested in seeing it again. With Reitman and Gerald Potterton having also passed away, he’s the third above-the-line member of Heavy Metal’s creative team to have passed away in the last 18 months

[MichaelB]

Veteran Guardian film critic Derek Malcolm. One of my jobs in the first half of the 1990s involved sucking up to him at every opportunity to try to get free coverage for things I was promoting whereby the artistic merit towered head and shoulders above the marketing budget, and it’s a great tribute to his innate understanding of this that he was so gracious and cooperative about it.

(To say that this wasn’t true of his immediate successor Toby Young - yes, that one, and I’m genuinely not making this up - would be putting it mildly.)

[yoloswegmaster]

Jane Birkin

[The Curious Sofa]

Jane Birkin

I was going to see her in concert in March but it got cancelled, the reason given was Birkin's health.

[alacal2]

Along with the late,great Philip French, Derek Maicolm was my torch in the cinematic dark.

[Fred Holywell]

Jane Birkin

A smart, stylish, talented lady. CBS Sunday Morning did a nice profile of her a few years ago, which they've just posted: From the archives: The iconic Jane Birkin

[colinr0380]

Along with the late,great Philip French, Derek Maicolm was my torch in the cinematic dark.

These were all before my time to have seen them on their original broadcast but there are a few of the Derek Malcolm-hosted BBC Film Club introductions on YouTube which have been nice to revisit in the wake of this news:

1986:
La balance
Blood Simple and D.O.A.. Plus a brief outro mentioning the next week's film, A Funny Dirty Little War.
THX-1138 and A Boy and His Dog
Alphaville
Last Year In Marienbad

1987:
Heaven's Gate
Pather Panchali
Fanny & Alexander (Part 1) and Smiles of a Summer Night
Fanny & Alexander (Part 2) and Sawdust and Tinsel
Andrei Rublev

And here's an interview from the mid-2010s from that great London Cinephile YouTube channel.

[GaryC]

Along with the late,great Philip French, Derek Maicolm was my torch in the cinematic dark.

These were all before my time to have seen them on their original broadcast but there are a few of the Derek Malcolm-hosted BBC Film Club introductions on YouTube which have been nice to revisit in the wake of this news:

1986:
La balance
Blood Simple and D.O.A.. Plus a brief outro mentioning the next week's film, A Funny Dirty Little War.
THX-1138 and A Boy and His Dog
Alphaville
Last Year In Marienbad

I did see several of these on broadcast. Note his pointing out that Marienbad was being shown letterboxed. It always annoyed me that a slot aimed at film buffs, and making a point of showing original versions without cuts, still panned and scanned Scope films - for example The Long Goodbye, language and violence intact, but still panned and scanned, which for an Altman film of the 70s is ruinous. Those showings of THX-1138 and A Boy and His Dog were panned and scanned, particularly badly in the first case, and a later showing of Two-Lane Blacktop became incomprehensible. Philip French introduced that one and pointed out that Monte Hellman conveyed plot information using the sides of the frame, which we of course couldn't see. Marienbad was the second half of a double bill with another Resnais Scope film, L'amour à mort, which was in colour and was panned and scanned. I suspect Marienbad was letterboxed because it was black and white, subtitled, narratively obscure and shown after 11pm at night, but I'm glad they did it.

[colinr0380]

I remember seeing 3 Women for the first time in Channel 4's Robert Altman season during the hot Summer of 1996 (which was the perfect sweltering atmosphere in which to experience that film for the first time), and that was pan-and-scanned although it was rather difficult to tell with that film because of all of the zooming and panning to pick out details going on. So I was left rather unsure in those pre-internet days of whether I was actually seeing the film in the correct aspect ratio or not, particularly because A Wedding was also shown in that season in its proper aspect ratio, which rather muddled things! I finally did get to see 3 Women on the Criterion DVD years later, which was a revelation and shows that even in films that are not composed tableau-like for snakes or funerals as in the famous Fritz Lang quote, it is still important to respect the original framing decisions!

Similarly with THX-1138 I feel really lucky to have first seen the film in its screening in Channel 4's "Sci-Fi Weekend" in 1995, which not only was in its original aspect ratio and is the last time that the film has been screened on UK television to date, but was also pre- the CGI revisions that turned up with the 2003 "Director's Cut" that entirely replaced the original version of the film, and not particularly for the better. (That Sci-Fi weekend also had the last UK television screenings to date of Destroy All Monsters and I Married A Monster From Outer Space; was probably commissioned because its centrepiece was a documentary about that notorious piece of 'alien autopsy' Roswell footage; and opened with an interesting introduction to the weekend from the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where Craig Charles proudly introduced a first peek at footage from the exciting new film that was about to re-define science fiction forever: Species! Although that convention ended up sadly being more notable as the one during which the author John Brunner had his fatal heart attack)

I suspect Marienbad was letterboxed because it was black and white, subtitled, narratively obscure and shown after 11pm at night, but I'm glad they did it.

I wonder if they did that thing of moving the letterboxed image up the screen instead of having it in the middle, so as to have an extra large area of black screen at the bottom for the subtitles (The BBC used that for Solaris and Andrei Rublev during the 90s, up to as late as a 1998 broadcast of The Hidden Fortress). That seemed to be a trend for a while in the era before widescreen television. Although the thing that I most remember in the 1990s was the "16:9 European Union Action Plan" which started pushing widescreen for the upcoming future of digital broadcasts but for most of the decade did the ruinous thing of "semi-pan-and-scanning" films in 2.35:1 down to a uniform 1.85:1 widescreen ratio. Which compromise ratio still cut off the sides of the image almost as badly as the full pan-and-scanning did! There were occasions where films were broadcast in their full 2.35:1 ratios during the 90s (2001: A Space Odyssey and Apocalypse Now come to mind. Plus THX-1138 and The Man Who Fell To Earth in that Sci-Fi Weekend) but until the 2000s digital switchover broadcasters did not seem confident in showing films in their original ratios (and then afterwards things shifted to the entirely opposite extreme of anything in 4:3 ratio being stretched to fit the presumed widescreen television viewer, or even worse in the case of The World At War's 'remaster', getting widescreen bands imposed onto the image).

To use that 1996 Robert Altman series as an example of the weird decision making going on (maybe dictated by what was available too, perhaps), A Wedding and Nashville got 2.35:1 screenings whilst the 'big movies' of MASH and Popeye (as well as Buffalo Bill) were shown cut down to 1.85:1, and as mentioned 3 Women was pan-and-scanned! So that was a mixed bag of screenings. Even if I still very much appreciate that season as my intensely compressed introductory course to Altman's work.

[Orlac]

I remember seeing 3 Women for the first time in Channel 4's Robert Altman season during the hot Summer of 1996 (which was the perfect sweltering atmosphere in which to experience that film for the first time), and that was pan-and-scanned although it was rather difficult to tell with that film because of all of the zooming and panning to pick out details going on. So I was left rather unsure in those pre-internet days of whether I was actually seeing the film in the correct aspect ratio or not, particularly because A Wedding was also shown in that season in its proper aspect ratio, which rather muddled things! I finally did get to see 3 Women on the Criterion DVD years later, which was a revelation and shows that even in films that are not composed tableau-like for snakes or funerals as in the famous Fritz Lang quote, it is still important to respect the original framing decisions!

Similarly with THX-1138 I feel really lucky to have first seen the film in its screening in Channel 4's "Sci-Fi Weekend" in 1995, which not only was in its original aspect ratio and is the last time that the film has been screened on UK television to date, but was also pre- the CGI revisions that turned up with the 2003 "Director's Cut" that entirely replaced the original version of the film, and not particularly for the better. (That Sci-Fi weekend also had the last UK television screenings to date of Destroy All Monsters and I Married A Monster From Outer Space; was probably commissioned because its centrepiece was a documentary about that notorious piece of 'alien autopsy' Roswell footage; and opened with an interesting introduction to the weekend from the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where Craig Charles proudly introduced a first peek at footage from the exciting new film that was about to re-define science fiction forever: Species! Although that convention ended up sadly being more notable as the one during which the author John Brunner had his fatal heart attack)

Ooh, I rember that sci-fi weekend - I was 8 and watched Earth vs The Flying Saucers. The Roswell autopsy footage terrified me!

[GaryC]

and opened with an interesting introduction to the weekend from the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where Craig Charles proudly introduced a first peek at footage from the exciting new film that was about to re-define science fiction forever: Species! Although that convention ended up sadly being more notable as the one during which the author John Brunner had his fatal heart attack)

I was at that convention. Brunner was popular among many SF fans and there were reportedly some of them in tears as a result. One of the guests of honour, Samuel R. Delany, began his GOH speech by payimg tribute to Brunner, and there were tributes at the Hugo Awards ceremony.

I suspect Marienbad was letterboxed because it was black and white, subtitled, narratively obscure and shown after 11pm at night, but I'm glad they did it.

I wonder if they did that thing of moving the letterboxed image up the screen instead of having it in the middle, so as to have an extra large area of black screen at the bottom for the subtitles (The BBC used that for Solaris and Andrei Rublev during the 90s, up to as late as a 1998 broadcast of The Hidden Fortress). [/quote]

I could be wrong, but I don't remember that being the case.

[esl]

Tony Bennett at 96. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/lege ... d=75761535

[colinr0380]

Josephine Chaplin, who appeared as a child in her father's films Limelight and A Countess In Hong Kong as well as a varied list of films including Pasolini's take on The Canterbury Tales, Jess Franco's German-set(!) version of Jack The Ripper starring Klaus Kinski, and Chabrol's Cop au Vin.

[hearthesilence]

Tony Bennett at 96. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/lege ... d=75761535

The two albums with Bill Evans are wonderful, especially the first one. IIRC they were recorded at a low point of his career when he was dropped by Columbia and more or less an independent recording artist. They remained his personal favorites long after his career was revitalized.

[soundchaser]

Tony Bennett at 96. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/lege ... d=75761535

The two albums with Bill Evans are wonderful, especially the first one. IIRC they were recorded at a low point of his career when he was dropped by Columbia and more or less an independent recording artist. They remained his personal favorites long after his career was revitalized.

The recording of “You Must Believe in Spring” they did together is one of my all-time favorite tunes, period.

[hearthesilence]

Totally forgot "Rags to Riches" is the very first music cue in GoodFellas...the whole movie comes to mind when I hear that opening with the horns and Bennett's first line.