Passages

[dadaistnun]

Jon Korkes (the son in Little Murders, Snowden in Catch-22), back in December.

[fdm]

T.K. Carter

[dadaistnun]

Another Little Murders alum, Marcia Rodd. Didn’t know until now she was the originator of Adrienne Barbeau’s role on Maude in the All in the Family episode that served as the spin-off pilot.

[beamish14]

James Grauerholz, longtime editor/literary executor for William S. Burroughs

[Gregory]

Director, writer, Producer Jefery Levy dead at 67
Those of us who used to frequent video rental stores will probably remember at least the cover picture for Ghoulies, which he produced and cowrote, with the green guy coming up out of the toilet. I don't think I ever rented it.

[dwk]

That Ghoulies cover scared one of my younger cousins to death. To scare (or scar, if ypu want) her, my brother and her brother took a Rancor toy and put it in the toilet with the hands sticking out. They were real bastatds when they were young.

[JamesF]

On a similar note, another maker of “scary small things” horror flicks - Mark Jones, director of the first Leprechaun as well as Rumplestiltskin.

[colinr0380]

Director, writer, Producer Jefery Levy dead at 67
Those of us who used to frequent video rental stores will probably remember at least the cover picture for Ghoulies, which he produced and cowrote, with the green guy coming up out of the toilet. I don't think I ever rented it.

Also writer and director of the Stephen Dorff starring 90s Gen X slacker, post-Kurt Cobain version of Network, S.F.W. (which I often think made Dorff an obvious choice for the lead role in John Waters' Cecil B. Demented at the end of the decade!). I quite like that film but its tame, almost melancholy, barbs at society unfortunately got crushed by coming out at the same time as Natural Born Killers, which ramped up the media satire to nuclear, take no prisoner, levels.

It is also interesting to see that Levy wrote and directed a version of Tanizaki's erotic drama The Key in 2014. That might be in the running for story re-told in the most notable versions, since there is the 1959 Kon Ichikawa one; a Tatsumi Kumashiro one from 1974; two in 1983 with Koji Wakamatsu and Tinto Brass's version; and Toshiharu Ikeda's version in 1997.

Although the film I am most interested in seeing is his debut in 1991, Drive, with David Warner as a driver, who I presume has to get decapitated at the end to reference back to his role in The Omen! Weirdly released the same year as Jim Jarmusch's car-centric drama Night on Earth, which I presume this will inevitably have to get compared to in the same way that S.F.W. has to be bracketed up against Natural Born Killers.

[hearthesilence]

Ralph Towner, the great guitarist, composer and pianist. He was a prolific recording artist who frequently recorded with Oregon as well as under his own name (becoming one of the most recognizable names on ECM Records), and he integrated jazz, classical and myriad cultural music traditions in a career that spanned seven decades.

[Captain Paranoia]

Roger Allers. Co-directed The Lion King and also worked on some of the other prominent Disney Renaissance features in a story capacity.

[Blutarsky]

Roger Allers. Co-directed The Lion King and also worked on some of the other prominent Disney Renaissance features in a story capacity.

A shame that his follow-up to The Lion King, Kingdom of the Sun, never came to be due to several external pressures brought on by Disney (brilliantly captured in The Sweatbox, which also will probably never see the light of day).

Emperor’s New Groove is a fine movie, just the potential it’s original vision had was truly wasted. One of the great “What if…” projects in my opinion.

[knives]

I think we wound up with the better film and it’s a shame that he never got to really get back to the level of The Lion King, which I’ve rediscovered a love for with my son. His Little Match Girl short is the closest and is a true wonder.

[MichaelB]

Peter Howden (1945-2026) won't mean anything to 99% of people reading this, although hopefully that percentage will fall a bit when I say that if you attended a repertory cinema in London between the late 1960s and the present day, you either saw something programmed directly by him or something that was strongly influenced by an approach that he perfected at the Electric Cinema and went on to refine at the Everyman (back in the days when it was a one-off single-screen cinema in Hampstead). In particular, the Scala basically did in the 1980s what the Electric had already been doing for a decade or more. He thought nothing of double billing Duck Soup with The Battle of Algiers, gave Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda its first British theatrical run (in a double bill with Andy Warhol's Bad), repeatedly championed classic Hollywood, arthouse cinema and grindhouse exploitation, and somehow managed to keep his various venues running for years despite not receiving any support other than from the box office.

He's also the major reason why I never bothered to get a formal film education, because with him as a boss for six years, who needs a film degree? Pretty much everything I know about this business I first learned from him, and what I do now really isn't that different from what I did back then; it's still curating and contextualising outstanding, often neglected films, only via a different medium than the 35mm and 16mm prints that were my bread and butter in those formative years. And of the ten people shortlisted for what became my job, I gather that I was the least experienced by some distance but also had the strongest film knowledge, so he took a chance on me ("You won't have learned any bad habits"), and I'm forever grateful that he did; I literally owe my career to him.

I always remember the thrill of him handing over his initial sketch for a bi-monthly programme, which would sometimes be extremely specific, and at other times vague ("Bresson triple"), and my job then would be to work out a combo of what would viably make money and what we hadn't shown especially recently—my job was to be on top of what was currently in commercial distribution and keep it circulating. And sometimes—quite a bit of the time, gratifyingly—we'd put stuff on for the wholly selfish reason that one or both of us wanted to see it ourselves. In fact, I remember when we showed the seven-hour-plus Hitler: A Film from Germany, which unavoidably had to start in the afternoon—so I asked Peter if I could pop in and see it during my normal working hours, and he said "Yes, but you have to watch the whole thing, and I'll be checking with the ushers."

As that anecdote suggests, he had a wonderfully dry sense of humour—sometimes so subtle that it wasn't immediately clear that he was joking. And some of my fondest memories of him involve things like him looking out of the window of my office that looked directly out onto the polling station in the 1992 general election and trying to guess which way people were voting. "Tory... possibly Labour... definitely Tory... no idea... oh my God, probably Rainbow Alliance."

I only saw him twice this side of the millennium changeover, once when I casually bumped into him in Shaftesbury Avenue, more recently at Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in 2022, when I was delighted—albeit unsurprised—to see that he'd barely changed a bit; if he looked old for his age when I knew him in the 1990s (when he'd have been in the latter half of his forties), his late seventies suited him very well indeed, and it was great getting a belated chance to catch up. As anyone who knew him even slightly will attest, he was an ultra-private, very shy man, and therefore not the kind of person you could just ring up at random for a chat; he was quite happy for me to be the front man most of the time as regards communicating with the outside world, although sometimes his dodging of repeated phone calls from people he didn't want to speak to became a tad farcical. Although I suspect he was fully aware of this and just wanted to see how hard they'd try.

[Matt]

Fashion legend Valentino (Garavani)

[beamish14]

Emperor’s New Groove is a fine movie, just the potential it’s original vision had was truly wasted. One of the great “What if…” projects in my opinion.

Chris Sanders’ American Dog becoming Bolt is maybe more tragic

[hearthesilence]

Midnight Oil drummer and songwriter Rob Hirst

[captveg]

Former 49er QB and NFL MVP John Brodie, 90

[FrauBlucher]

I didn't realize he was still alive. I saw him play at the end of his career. But remember him more for the work he did in the broadcast booth for NBC covering football and golf

[Grand Wazoo]

Uncle Floyd

[Lemmy Caution]

I would have thought Uncle Floyd was older than 74. He started his show on Tv in 1974. I remember now and then trying UHF, back when NY/NJ had 7 channels. And you'd run across Uncle Floyd in a blizzard of static on channel 68. It was like some off-beat shadow Tv most folks didn't know about.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Very sad to hear. There's a very good documentary from a few years ago called Flipside that explores, among many topics, Uncle Floyd and his career.

[GaryC]

I can't see any online obituaries as yet, but Australian film (documentaries) and stage director Norma Disher died on 23 January, aged 103.

She wasn't on this forum's centenarians list.

[Aunt Peg]

Also from Australia, Patsy King, 95, best known from TV's Prisoner (H Block H Internationally): https://televisionau.com/2026/01/obitua ... -king.html

[Buttery Jeb]

Bobby Sherman

[hearthesilence]

Legendary reggae drummer Sly Dunbar, one half of Sly & Robbie with the late Robbie Shakespeare.