Passages

[tavernier]

In those Goulet tributes, Craig Kilborn I can take, but Will Farrell is unbearable.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Moira Lister

[dave41n]

Less than a month after Kerr's passing, Peter Viertel has died.

NY Times obituary

[domino harvey]

It was supposed to be Norman Mailer but then he hit the Grim Reaper with a hammer

well now this joke is ruined. Norman Mailer dead at 84

[tryavna]

It was supposed to be Norman Mailer but then he hit the Grim Reaper with a hammer

well now this joke is ruined. Norman Mailer dead at 84

Not at all! Just turn it around: It was the Grim Reaper who had the hammer this time.

[HerrSchreck]

Later Norm! Thanks for the excellent classes.

Norm was a very cool dude. Truly obsessed w Marilyn-- his whole basement was full of posters of her.

[kinjitsu]

NY Times obituary, plus an appraisal by Michiko Kakutani, and The Times' dedicated Mailer page.

[kaujot]

I had the amazing opportunity almost exactly one year ago to attend a discussion about/with Mailer, Gay Talese, and a Mailer scholar at UT whilst Mailer was donating his archives to the Ransom Center. At the end of it, he read from his last novel, The Castle in the Forest. It was very strange to hear an old man reading about Hitler's father ramming Hitler's mother with his "angry dog."

[tavernier]

It was very strange to hear an old man reading about Hitler's father ramming Hitler's mother with his "angry dog."

Mailer's career in a nutshell.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Laraine Day of Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent has died at 87 or 90 or so.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Delbert Mann, director of Marty, dead at 87.

[Galen Young]

Very sad to hear that Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby, as has died.

[colinr0380]

Very sad to hear that Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby, as has died.

A piece from the Guardian blog. I love The Stepford Wives - most probably think of Butch Cassidy or The Graduate when they think of Katherine Ross but The Stepford Wives is the film where she gets the chance to shine, though I had my first crush on Paula Prentiss as Bobbie (the start of my run of crushes on secondary characters that I then was left distraught by when something terrible happened to them!).

It might seem a little slow moving and obvious now that it has been ripped off so much but it is perfectly constructed and got a perfect director with an outsider's eye in Bryan Forbes (I'd love to think that Nanette Newman's later Fairy Liquid washing up liquid adverts were an ironic link back to her character in the film - that they'd hired the robotic housewife to express just how excited she was that Fairy Liquid cleaned this much more!)

I know the remake was primarily intended as a comedy but it really was an insult to the original with no female characters worth rooting for - are we really meant to celebrate Joanna's reinvention as a power suited career woman with the savvy to understand what is going on? (it might have been more interesting to have a twist where both the career women and the befrocked hausfraus both turn out to be robotic reductions of what women can be - the implied message that they could be one thing or the other but not both taken to the logical conclusion of an all out battle between the two factions! Then real women could be seen just trying to survive the fallout - the film could even be advertised with that Alien Vs Predator tagline "Whoever wins..we lose", but I digress!)

And the least said about the most jaw droppingly misguided and awful image I have seen in recent films - the rightly deleted scene where Bette Midler as that films Bobbie turns into a cleaning version of Inspector Gadget, with the nadir coming when a hoover comes out of her bottom to clean the floor - the better!

[Galen Young]

I agree that the original film version of The Stepford Wives is a terrific little film. My favorite bit of trivia related to this novel came from Levin himself, earlier this year, in a letter to the NY Times:

Political Theater: A Banned Play on the War
Published: March 27, 2007
To the Editor:

Re "Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School" (news article, March 24):

Wilton, Conn., where I lived in the 1960s, was the inspiration for Stepford, the fictional town I later wrote about in "The Stepford Wives."

I'm not surprised, therefore, to learn that Wilton High School has a Stepford principal, one who would keep his halls and classrooms squeaky-clean of any "inflammatory" material that might hurt some Wilton families.

It's heartening, though, to know that not all the Wilton High students have been Stepfordized. The ones who created and rehearsed the banished play "Voices in Conflict" are obviously thoughtful young people with minds of their own.

I salute them.

Ira Levin
New York, March 24, 2007

Brilliant!

[Caligula]

Fernando Fernan Gomez, Spanish actor (Spirit of the Beehive, All About My Mother) and director (Voyage to Nowhere), has died.

[MichaelB]

Verity Lambert, genuinely groundbreaking British TV producer, whose output included originating Doctor Who in 1963 and running Euston Films (The Sweeney, Minder, many others) in the 1970s. Her big-screen output was less distinguished, but the underrated Dreamchild (1985) is nothing to be ashamed of.

[colinr0380]

Her big-screen output was less distinguished, but the underrated Dreamchild (1985) is nothing to be ashamed of.

Or Clockwise! I didn't realise there was a connection to A Cry In The Dark as well.

The least said about Morons From Outer Space though!

While looking through some blogs I came across the mention of the death of Reg Parks at Video Watchblog. He played Hercules in four films including Bava's Hercules In The Haunted World (released on DVD by Fantoma) and one Hercules film directed by Antonio Marghereti. According to imdb he was born in Leeds!

Michael Blodgett who appeared in Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, The Trip and There Was A Crooked Man...

(He also wrote the stories for Turner & Hooch and Rent-a-Cop with Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli!)

There is also this very funny piece of trivia from the imdb page:

His jail-yard flogging in There Was a Crooked Man... (1970) ranks 67th on a list published in the book: "Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies."

Who would have thought such a book existed and more importantly why don't we yet have our own list of best flogging scenes?

[MichaelB]

Michael Blodgett who appeared in Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, The Trip and There Was A Crooked Man...

(He also wrote the stories for Turner & Hooch and Rent-a-Cop with Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli!)

...in addition to a handful of pulp novels (Captain Blood, Hero and the Terror) that offered up a strangely compelling blend of surprising literary erudition and luridly graphic sex and violence.

[domino harvey]

Kanye West has the touch of death: Evel Knievel Dead at 69

[Subbuteo]

Just heard on the radio that Karlheinz Stockhausen (aged 79) has passed away

[tavernier]

Now I'll never get to see all seven days of the Licht cycle.

[MichaelB]

Now I'll never get to see all seven days of the Licht cycle.

Not necessarily - my understanding is that the complete cycle planned for his 80th birthday next year is still going ahead.

[Tommaso]

I have just heard it as well, and am deeply shocked. There wasn't any hint of illness before, and he had just started composing a magnificent new cycle called "KLANG". The latest piece of it, an electronic composition called "Cosmic Pulses" has already been hailed as something astonishingly new (I still haven't heard it). What a loss, this grieves me even more than the death of Bergman, simply because Stockhausen was still active and still constantly expanding our notions of what music could be and achieve.

Tavernier, it may sound strange, but now that Stock is dead, I assume that it will be actually EASIER to hear or see the whole of LICHT (or even only the two not yet performed parts, "Mittwoch" and "Sonntag"), simply because I assume that his heirs will perhaps not pose such high and sometimes unrealistic demands on producers. But that of course is no comfort...

[tavernier]

Dresden, here I come!

I was assuming that, once S. died, no one would put on his work, especially Licht, since S. himself was the only caretaker of his legacy.

[Subbuteo]

Allegedly Stockhausen in 2001 described the September 11 attacks as "the greatest work of art one can imagine".
An interesting article on this