Yaphet Kotto (1939-2021)

[DarkImbecile]

Yaphet Kotto, per a FB post from his wife

[therewillbeblus]

Yaphet Kotto, per a FB post from his wife

Damn, he was a welcome presence in any part, large or small, including Mr. Big in the much-maligned Live and Let Die, and of course Alien and Midnight Run as arguably his two most seen performances.

Until this year, I thought his best role was Blue Collar, but in the last few months I’ve coincidentally seen two Kottos that trump all: Across 110th Street and Bone, especially the latter, which if you haven’t seen it yet, please use this as a reason. I’m still in a mild state of shock that his character was able to exist at all, but to push beyond satire and be so.. affecting, well I don’t think any other actor could’ve pulled it off. A lot of perfs are called “brave,” and rarely do they overlap with “funny,” but here we are in a Venn diagram that includes several other eclectic ideas and tones best not spoiled here.

[hearthesilence]

I used to watch Homicide: Life On The Street in syndication - it may have been the first TV drama that I actually followed, though more on a semi-regular basis. Eventually saw him elsewhere, and Blue Collar and Alien may be the best of them, but Gee is easily my strongest memory of him in anything.

[domino harvey]

Like many here, he’ll always be G from Homicide to me, but I do fondly remember him from the TV Nation segment where Michael Moore set Kotto and a white ex-con further up on the same block and had both wave for a cab. No guesses who they always drove up to!

[Grand Wazoo]

What a powerhouse. As already stated his performance in Bone is just stunning. Has anyone ever been able to track down his sole directorial effort The Limit?

[JSC]

I do fondly remember him from the TV Nation segment where Michael Moore set Kotto and a white ex-con further up on the same block and had both wave for a cab. No guesses who they always drove up to

Gosh, I remember that... from back in the day when Bravo was an arts and culture station. I still
recall the bit when Kotto dragged over a huge electric sign saying 'I need a cab' to the side of the road
and the taxis continued to pass by.

[Calvin]

I haven't even seen evidence of a screening of The Limit since its original release. I asked Vinegar Syndrome's Brad Henderson earlier and he said that they've been trying to track it down but haven't had a response from the apparent owner.

[swo17]

I do fondly remember him from the TV Nation segment where Michael Moore set Kotto and a white ex-con further up on the same block and had both wave for a cab. No guesses who they always drove up to

Gosh, I remember that... from back in the day when Bravo was an arts and culture station. I still
recall the bit when Kotto dragged over a huge electric sign saying 'I need a cab' to the side of the road
and the taxis continued to pass by.

In the cabbies' defense, maybe they'd all seen Bone?

[domino harvey]

Here's the TV Nation segment

[domino harvey]

Also, who could ever forget this wild Vice interview about Kotto's "real life" encounters with aliens

[Zot!]

make a wrong freaking turn...or call me amigo

I laughed.

Love Yaphet...Alien, Running Man, Midnight Run. Great performances. It could be apocryphal, but I remember a story about the DP on Alien struggling to light a dark skinned Mr. Kotto and a pasty Harry Dean Stanton in the same frame with all the moody background atmospherics of the Nostromo. RIP

[hearthesilence]

Here's the TV Nation segment

Man, that is hilarious and really f-ing sad.

[beamish14]

He was so good as the authoritative voice of reason in films that it lead to a degree of typecasting, but he was always such a joy to watch on screen. He's great in Peter Hyams' The Star Chamber and I've been meaning to catch the very well-regarded Report to the Commissioner for some time.

[solaris72]

I've only seen Alien, The Running Man, The Puppet Masters, and lots of Homicide. Looking over his filmography, his typecasting is a bit unfortunate, he was a very talented actor and ought to have been cast in a lot more ambitious material than he was. He was in an all-black film version of Othello which never got a commercial release (more info here) but has been preserved on 16mm and screened in Chicago in 2019. Program from 1980 here. New York Public Library seems to own a copy...

[deathbird]

Bone is one of Larry Cohen's two or three best films, and one of Kotto's best performances. Amazing to think there was a time when films whose subject was race (and class) were both excoriating and entertaining, rather than the dour, obvious and self-righteous finger-wagging lectures we're mostly stuck with today.

Is his Homicide work available anywhere other than DVD? I've been wanting to watch the whole series but it seems completely absent from streaming and Blu.

[bearcuborg]

Is his Homicide work available anywhere other than DVD? I've been wanting to watch the whole series but it seems completely absent from streaming and Blu.

Apparently this was David Simon’s most asked question yesterday, it appears that streaming is a problem due to music rights issues.

I loved this guy in everything, from Midnight Run as a kid, to watching the Homicide premiere after the Super Bowl. He was cast despite his character based on a real life Italian American cop. I loved when G would talk with his hands, and share fondness for Italian cuisine with Jon Polito. What a great fucking show for the first 4-5 seasons. There’s an episode where he feels rejected by a black woman for being too dark-and for anyone who followed him on Facebook knows that he had some brilliant opinions on race/politics. In fact he was a hell of story teller, with his Robert Mitchum story being extraordinary.

[therewillbeblus]

In fact he was a hell of story teller, with his Robert Mitchum story being extraordinary.

I'm very curious to hear this one

[hearthesilence]

I would say the first two seasons were GREAT, and it never reached the same heights again. The third got hit with lamentable network changes that brought the show down a few notches. (NBC may have done Seinfeld right but the same regime didn't extend the same judgment to everything and really screwed a lot of their best shows, from The Tonight Show to Homicide to NewsRadio.) The acting still carried everything and there were plenty of highlights going forward, including Crosetti's "farewell' episode.

[domino harvey]

It was shot on film but almost surely edited/finished on tape, so I don't think there's any risk of a Blu-ray release, since no one's footing the bill for that-- it's a miracle A&E even bothered to release the whole series on DVD. And I'd say the show was great for far longer than just the first two seasons, but it was always kinda a mixed bag: as good as the acting and characters are, the handheld swishy filming style is pretty outre and tiring to sit through, let's be real

[hearthesilence]

That was actually one of the changes dictated for season two (and to slow things down with less edits and longer holds on shots). There were still great episodes after the season 2, probably a lot of them - "Crosetti" is arguably the best one they ever did. But generally the episodes became really hit-or-miss. Season 3 seemed like a blatant drop in quality - I binged watched the first four when they were released on DVD, and seen back-to-back it was painfully obvious, especially with some of the ridiculous "B" storylines that felt like they were phoned in from an inferior show. Even the general tone became more sensationalist and less cerebral.

[cdnchris]

This one hit hard. I always liked it when he would pop up in some random film and I wasn't aware he was in it, like that dreadful Sandra Bullock/Denis Leary "romantic comedy" Two If by Sea (the last newer movie I recall seeing him in and that was mid 90s I believe) and Freddy's Dead. I also think he was an excellent Bond villain (along with Julius Harris in the same film), it was just unfortunate the rest of the movie's insane flaws distract from that, especially his character's ridiculous demise.

[beamish14]

This one hit hard. I always liked it when he would pop up in some random film and I wasn't aware he was in it, like that dreadful Sandra Bullock/Denis Leary "romantic comedy" Two If by Sea (the last newer movie I recall seeing him in and that was mid 90s I believe) and Freddy's Dead. I also think he was an excellent Bond villain (along with Julius Harris in the same film), it was just unfortunate the rest of the movie's insane flaws distract from that, especially his character's ridiculous demise.

The last project I saw him in was the first reel or so of the predictably execrable Larry the Cable Guy comedy where our eponymous hero needs to be protected by the F.B.I.

He had quite a presence on FaceBook. He enjoyed answering questions from people and definitively stated that Alien was his favourite project ever. He made some waves just last year regarding alien abduction claims, and he said that he was frequently in contact with extraterrestrials.

[beamish14]

It was shot on film but almost surely edited/finished on tape, so I don't think there's any risk of a Blu-ray release, since no one's footing the bill for that-- it's a miracle A&E even bothered to release the whole series on DVD. And I'd say the show was great for far longer than just the first two seasons, but it was always kinda a mixed bag: as good as the acting and characters are, the handheld swishy filming style is pretty outre and tiring to sit through, let's be real

It's been too long since I've really watched either show, but wasn't the handheld aesthetic also a staple of Hill Street Blues, at least initially?

Much like how the Law and Order series pay the bills for a lot of Obie/Pulitzer-winning playwrights on their writing staffs, Homicide employed a lot of indie/upstart American filmmakers.

[hearthesilence]

It was shot on film but almost surely edited/finished on tape, so I don't think there's any risk of a Blu-ray release, since no one's footing the bill for that-- it's a miracle A&E even bothered to release the whole series on DVD. And I'd say the show was great for far longer than just the first two seasons, but it was always kinda a mixed bag: as good as the acting and characters are, the handheld swishy filming style is pretty outre and tiring to sit through, let's be real

It's been too long since I've really watched either show, but wasn't the handheld aesthetic also a staple of Hill Street Blues, at least initially?

Much like how the Law and Order series pay the bills for a lot of Obie/Pulitzer-winning playwrights on their writing staffs, Homicide employed a lot of indie/upstart American filmmakers.

Very true. Quite a few excellent directors passed through Homicide.

Re: Hill Street Blues I bought the first two (or three?) seasons on DVD when they came out, and I sold them like a month later. It was a good show, but it was massively disappointing - it made the case that American TV had spent most of its years playing catch up with theatrical films, and even then it was severely hampered by its self-imposed limitations. Everything that was innovative about Hill Street Blues was old hat to Hollywood - The French Connection alone had already done what HSB accomplished and more a dozen years earlier. There were scenes from HSB that did use handheld camera, but it was pretty sparing. Much of the "documentary"-like aspects of HSB were a bit watered down or undermined by other elements of the show. It still felt slick and staged compared to the best police movies of the previous decade. The acting was pretty good, but the writing often got ridiculous - I can still remember David Caruso's Irish gang leader with his leprechaun hat. Convincing if West Side Story is your idea of real urban street gangs.

[bearcuborg]

It was shot on film but almost surely edited/finished on tape, so I don't think there's any risk of a Blu-ray release, since no one's footing the bill for that-- it's a miracle A&E even bothered to release the whole series on DVD. And I'd say the show was great for far longer than just the first two seasons, but it was always kinda a mixed bag: as good as the acting and characters are, the handheld swishy filming style is pretty outre and tiring to sit through, let's be real

It's been too long since I've really watched either show, but wasn't the handheld aesthetic also a staple of Hill Street Blues, at least initially?

Much like how the Law and Order series pay the bills for a lot of Obie/Pulitzer-winning playwrights on their writing staffs, Homicide employed a lot of indie/upstart American filmmakers.

Whit Stillman directed a pretty great episode (with Chris Eigeman!) that made me go buy a Eels CD that very weekend...

I would say the first two seasons were GREAT, and it never reached the same heights again. The third got hit with lamentable network changes that brought the show down a few notches. (NBC may have done Seinfeld right but the same regime didn't extend the same judgment to everything and really screwed a lot of their best shows, from The Tonight Show to Homicide to NewsRadio.) The acting still carried everything and there were plenty of highlights going forward, including Crosetti's "farewell' episode.

I assume you mean the Tonight Show going from Carson to Leno? Because I don't think Leno's tenure had any stretch that was watchable. Newsradio might have got screwed over in promotion, but the show was pretty much great till Phil passed, and even that last season had some good episodes.

I'm not sure if you remember HLOTS season 4 with the stakeout episode, but that one pretty much concludes the Crosetti storyline with Meldrick having a heart to heart with Kay, and Kotto gets some great stuff regarding his daughter - his scene with Pempleton is pretty powerful. Homicide was maybe the first great black TV drama. Kudos to the production team in understanding Baltimore in that regard.

With his passing I finally decided to get that long coveted file cabinet box set, just to have the 3 Law and Order crossovers. Anyway, I kinda dig the cinematography and cutting (lines being repeated 3xs) mostly because I don't see playful things like that being done nowadays on TV.

In fact he was a hell of story teller, with his Robert Mitchum story being extraordinary.

I'm very curious to hear this one

Okay, here it is...

January 27, 2018 ·
Kotto and Mitchum
Robert Mitchum was regarded by many critics as one of the greatest actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. No one seemed to know that he was more than just a film actor, director, author, poet, composer, and singer. Before the antiheroes in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was, he was. He was considered a forerunner of the antiheroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s…. and... He was probably my best friend. We had a few things in common. His father James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident, my father, Njoku Manga Bell was crushed and injured by a steel beam, eventually dying from his injuries on a construction job in Queens, New York.
It was February of 1967, and the Beatles seemed to have caused the world to leave its orbit with the release of their "Penny Lane" & "Strawberry Fields" record. Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa begins 8-year jail sentence for defrauding the union & jury tampering. United States Marine Corps and ARVN troops launch "Operation Deckhouse Five" in the Mekong River delta. A Black Man, Edward W. Brooke (Senator-Republican-Massachusetts), takes his seat as the 1st popularly elected African American to the US Senate…and while "Respect" single recorded by Aretha Franklin made the Billboard Song of the Year, Yaphet Frederick Kotto signed a contract with producer Hal Wallis as a featured player in Paramount’s Five Card Stud starring Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum.
After about six weeks of heavy duty filming in Durango, located in the fourth largest state in Mexico and living with the cast and crew at the Mexican Campo courts. Movie legend, Director Henry Hathaway and his large Paramount army of crew and casts left the state that was bordered to the north by Chihuahua, to the northeast by Coahuila, to the southeast by Zacatecas, to the southwest by Nayarit, to the west by Sinaloa and journeyed for Estudios Churubusco, one of the oldest and largest movie studios in Latin America.
Most of the cast Inger Stevens and Roddy McDowell flew to Mexico City, Mitcham decided he would ride and invited me to go along with him and his driver, it was a thrill to ride along with a super star like Mitchum. He told jokes about his Marijuana bust and his stay in a county jail and then 43 days on a prison farm for possession of marijuana. He laughed about it and seem to take it in stride—The slammer was "just like Palm Springs, but without the Jive" he’d punctuate many things he said by slapping me five—Bob was totally cool, I kept wanting to ask him are you a really white or are you a black man in disguise? When he told me, he had done time on a chain gang when he was 14. I knew he was street wise and a tough dude.
The Mexican sun has cast its slanting beams upon the distant ocean, here and there visible through the trees. A wave of molten gold sweeps toward one and is gone, in a burst of crimson, purple, and turquoise. The moon climbs over a group of feather-duster palms, making the waterways in shadows even more mysterious. An alligator goes "plop" into deep water, a gull circles beyond. The great white moves out again and dives again into deeper, wider waters, all the earth is stilled in the twilight hush and the glow of the ocean’s harmony.
The car moved slowly over the dust-covered streets. Bob Mitchum stared moodily out the window at the ink-black scenery as Jorge Javier steered the car. Jorge was also an limousine driver of Churubusco, in charge of the take Mitchum around department. We were on our way through Zacatecas from the Mexican Campo courts in Durango. We were at least 5 hours 28 minutes. Away from Mexico City. Realistically it was going to take longer, , with rest stops, gas, and food stops along the way…Mitchum told stories and played a dozen or more characters as we drove..Jorge and I were amazed..
“Bob. Why don’t you bring these characters to the screen?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? The minute I start to act, a dozen studio executives show up on the set asking for old Sleepy Eyes to go back to work!” …
The scenery across the state line changed immediately It had shocked me the first time I had seen it and it still did. The clean, neat buildings and houses of Durango changed to the decrepit and decaying buildings of old Mexico. Even those built within the last six months seemed to have a sense of shoddiness about them. They always looked the same way from the time they were built until they collapsed or were torn down.
The same smell of Durango was there too, that of burning meat in the streets from the vendors who cooked their hot tacos on the corners. Noise was everywhere--horns were blowing and people were screaming at each other for no apparent reason. Children were selling everything imaginable on the sidewalks and running up to the cars to thrust chewing gum, cashew nuts, and souvenirs right in the faces of the motorists.
One boy not more than twelve, reached through an opened window of a parked dodge limousine and snatched something from the dashboard. The kid jumped in surprise as the driver ran from a two story hotel and slapped at him but he ran off into the crowd, laughing.
“Stop the car, Jorge.” Mitchum said. “That’s an American limo, somebody’s in trouble.”
“You must go for a priest, Manuel, pronto.” A stout housekeeper said to one of the men, as the long gaunt white man tumbled about on the crude shuck bedtick and moaned with his pain. “I’m dying. I can’t stand any more,” he moaned in despair. “Sweet Jesus, come and get me!”
About a dozen Mexican people stood in the room and suffered with him. He used to be able to drink his ass off and just feel kind of tired the next day, but now he was waking up dizzy, vomiting with headaches. He was alone with his dizziness and his need to vomit, and the bitter taste to sour taste in his mouth, surrounded by a dozen of the hotel’s management team, praying that he wouldn’t die in their hotel room, the hospital of Saint Augustin, was seventeen miles to the nearest doctor which was an hour and a half away.
“Just let me go to the Lord,” he told the housekeeper grimly.
“This is all my fault.” She whimpered. “I should never have let him drink that last bottle of pulque.” She said, Pulque a is a milk-colored, somewhat viscous liquid that produces a light foam. It is made by fermenting the sap of certain types of maguey (agave) plants. In contrast, mezcal is made from the cooked heart of certain agave plants, for tequila, and is known for knocking many of strong men on their ass.
Suddenly the American rolled out of bed and dropped to the floor. Before the sandaled feet of the people in the room, on his knees, he kissed the brown withered hand of the woman and begged God, not to send him to hell, at that moment the closed door of the bedroom opened and over the threshold stepped Robert Mitchum. He bulked in the doorway with yours truly right behind him.
Slowly, he walked straight to the man kneeling before the housekeeper on the floor.. “What the hell’s going on, Jason? Mitchum said, as he reached for the drunk man’s arm, and lifted him off the floor like a sack of wet sand.
“Bob! What the hell are you doing here? Can’t you let a man die in peace?”
“You’re not dying, Jason, you’re drunk“
“I am not drunk. I am dying! I’d appreciate it of you mind your business, Mr Mitchum! Can’t you see I’ve been given my last rites!”
“Kotto…” Bob started when a wail of torment suddenly streamed from the throat of a guest across the hall from another room, it caught everyone’s attention. It was a bone chilling, desperate wail then caused everyone to lurch out of the dim hotel bedroom.
“Get Jason down to his car, tell Jorge to look in the cantina for his driver and get a doctor!” He said this while passing the drunken man off to me and starting out of the room with the crowd of Mexicans.
Being black, and helping a drunk ‘Americano’ to his limousine on the street, somehow seemed to equate to my being available for something crooked... I was hit on about every thirty feet I walked. I could only attribute the bad manners to masked inhibitions, assumingly due to the wide open party atmosphere.
Within the hour I helped the drunk into the passenger seat of his limo, found Jorge and the diver in the cantina and returned to Mitchum who was now ministering to a tortured woman in a cheap room across the hall where we found ‘Jason’. It was late in the night when Jorge returned with a doctor, who leaned over the bed and examined the young wife casually.
“The woman is in much pain, senore,” he said to Jorge. “She will have to live with it for these baby. ‘The time is near only a few hours now at most.”
“Pero no puedo soportar más, doctor,” pleaded the suffering patient. “The pain is killing me. You must do something doctor, don’t let me suffer! I beg you!!!”
“Why don’t you do something for her doc?” Mitchum’s words, too, were tough, fearful.
“You want I give her the ‘twilight sleep’,” he mused. “That is what your Gringo medical men in the US call the new discovery. I warn you, it’s dangerous senore. It has been known to kill the newborn. Are you the husband of this woman.”
“Its her decision, ace, not mine.”
The hypodermic was given. The patient relaxed, and in two hours the baby was born. It was a tiny thing, blue as indigo, and lifeless. The doctor examined it doubtfully. Then he picked it up by the ankles and swung it rapidly to and fro with one hand, while with the other hand he slapped it vigorously on the back.
There was a feeble gasp or two, then apparent lifelessness. For several minutes he blew into its mouth and nose. No sign of life came to reward his efforts. The mother slept peacefully. Finally, the doctor handed the baby to a nearby midwife and shook his head.
“lo siento, mi amigo,” he said to Jorge, “but I am wasting your time. I have done all that can be done. The medicine she can preserve life when life is already there; but there is no power on earth can give back life when it is gone. The baby is dead.”
“Maybe not,” Mitchum spoke up, who took the infant from Jorge’s hands, peering curiously into its expressionless blue face. “Maybe not.” With his face as impassive as Mount Rushmore, repeated the denial, this time as though he were addressing the words to himself, or to a movie character not present except in a screenwriter’s imagination.
“Let’s not forget the good lord upstairs, doc. If he can give life, he sure as hell can give it back again.” With his Now, graying hair falling in little wings over his forehead he rumbled “Let’s see if he’s willing to get off his ass and give it back”
“Jorge,” he said excitedly. Mitchum impulsively moves with the baby in one hand and drags Jorge toward the bedroom door
“Get my Courvoisier out of the glove compartment., get me two pans o’ water quick, one middlin’ hot an’ the other’n cold.” He was trembling from his head to his feet; there was a strange insane light in his weird Droopy eyelids eyes that looked like he was getting ready for bed, Mitchum the pothead and two-fisted drinker. Mitchum the lady-killer started to sing a song in spanish toward the lifeless body of the infant in his arms.
Jorge took an anxious glance back toward the dumbfounded doctor as the big movie stars singing fills the room. For an hour the man of medicine stood watching the curious manipulations of this curious, unscientific man of the movie screen, dipping the lifeless little form first in one pan and then the other. He worked nervously, abstractedly, his lips moving with his sing as though in prayer.
“This is not a Hollywood movie, senore Mitchum,” the doctor told him finally. “There’s no happy ending here. There’s no greater medicine, than man’s medicino, no power Hollywood screen writer can make life where there is no life.” As he spoke he picked up his bag and turned to Jorge. “Sorry, my friend. Tell the husband his wife will be fine. But his infant is dead”
Mitchum refused to listen to him, he knew there was is an invisible wall of divine protection enveloping us on all sides. It is unseen and consequently more potent than the visible protection that we receive. Mitchum was counting on this protection. The doctor who had made his ‘professional’ was denying the existence of that protection. Mitchum refused to believe that baby was gone.
So he kept on administering to the infant, his body and hands moving to the rhythm of his spanish song. Mitchum behaved as if he had healed before and he was determined to heal again.
“More water, Jorge,” cried Mitchum, put a little brandy in it continuing his furious manipulations, his inconsistent ministrations almost matching the rhythm of his feverish song in his throat. Another hour followed the doctor’s departure. Mitchum’s, perspiration now streaming down his face his eyes still burning with that insane fire, held the mother, myself and everyone in that room hanging desperately to a delicate thread of hope, even against his own reason and the doctor’s professional verdict.
Patiently, ceaselessly the Hollywood movie star labored on an on with the pitiful little form of blue flesh, pausing only now and then to call out for more water and singing a brighter tune than the one he started with earlier. Then suddenly a flame of fever leaped into his face. The man, not having discerned the almost imperceptible pulse of life that flickered through the tiny body, grew momentarily fearfully for the woman’s mind. But before he could speak, the lips of the infant quivered. His eyes caught the faint movement almost as soon as did Robert Mitchum’s. He started to cry out; but before he could utter a syllable the joy that had choked him was checked in his throat by a tremendous gasp, which was promptly followed by a lusty wail.
The child was alive!
The people in the room exploded in applause and cheers, gathering around the movie star and pounding him on the shoulders and back. It was a celebration in that little, dingy hotel room with the women crying and shouts of ‘How did you do that sir? It’s a miracle….a miracle!!Praise the Blessed Mother and Madre Dios. It’s a miracle” When the mother woke, she found the little bundle of brown flesh lying in the crook of her arm, very much alive by now and sleeping peacefully.
“You did it! I said excitedly. “How did you do it?”
“Did what?”
“You saved that baby’s life!”
“How about that shit?” Mitchum growled as we started out of the room with the happy mother holding the baby in her arms.
“Tell me something, Bob. Was that Jason Robards, I helped out of this room tonight, man?”
“Jason who?”
“Jason Robards…You know the actor in Long Days Journey into night…The iceman cometh.”
“Never heard of him. Never saw him down here. How about you?”
“Oh. Okay. No. I never saw him down here either.”
“Cool, my man, real cool.” And with that he slapped me five and we left the room.