Howard Hesseman, RIP

About thirty years ago, I was on my way to work at the car wash. Stopped and ate at Wendy's. It was the end of Spring term at the University of Oregon. Students were leaving. Some long haired young fellow sat quietly having lunch with his father who talked and talked. He must have come from California to get him.

His father complained about MTV. "They have this thing called Beavis & Butt-head. It's twelve-year-old humor." He told about a friend who had invested in the New WKRP shown on a different music video channel. 

I glanced in their direction and he looked back at me. I was caught listening, but that was probably what he wanted.

"Tom Jones puts on a good show," he told his son. "So. Are there a lot of rednecks here?"

His son didn't speak at all.  

I probably could have intruded on their discussion. I would have said that there are rednecks everywhere, but Eugene is known for its hippies. In fact, WKRP's Howard Hesseman went to the University of Oregon around 1960. My mother had a cousin there at the time who was friends with him. 

Howard Hesseman died yesterday at age 81.

Played an early gay character on The Bob Newhart Show. Appeared on The Andy Griffith Show, Dragnet and in the movie Billy Jack.

Used the stage name Don Sturdy for his role on Dragnet.

 

84 Charing Cross Road (1987)

True story of New York playwright and TV writer Helene Hanff's correspondence over the years with a staid London used bookstore owner starting in the early '50's. 

British wartime rationing continued into the 1950's. They had war debt to pay off and the country wasn't in good shape. Hanff orders a food package for them. 

I've talked with British people online. Asked one of she'd ever eaten blood pudding which, it turns out, is a type of sausage. She never had but her father loved it. Another said that her father had been a "rocker" in the 1960s and would go out looking for "mods" to beat up. She told about the time they almost wrecked their Morris Minor.

So I've been through this, and I can tell you that the way you communicate in writing would, for many of us, be a little embarrassing read it in voice-over. Things you think are witty or amusing when typed can sound affected when spoken out loud. Look at You've Got Mail.  

With Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench. Based on a play which was based on Hanff's book of the same title.

Search for Helene Hanff on IMDb. She wrote some 1950's Hallmark movies which you can find on YouTube. Also some episodes of Ellery Queen.  They look like live TV shows.  I found one of her episodes on the streaming channel Pub-D-Hub.

The real Helene Hanff, London, 1971.

El Mariachi: Original intent

I wouldn't do that.

I haven't seen it in almost 30 years. I was sitting in a writing group at the senior center. I mentioned it in something I wrote. A guy in his 80's who had lived in Mexico in the 1950's said he thought it was a stupid movie. Every time the guy went outside, people tried to kill him. Why didn't he stay in his room?

I looked back on here and found that I've brought the movie up over and over on this blog saying pretty much the same things about it each time.

The thing about it is that if you mention it, people will think you're talking about making a movie for a few thousand dollars that would be picked up by a major studio and rake in a fortune. I never thought that way. There's no hope at all of that happening now. I look at Robert Rodriguez's original intent which was to sell it to a Spanish language home video company and make a few thousand dollars profit. I don't understand why that idea is so unappealing to film schoolers.

Seems like something you could do before hitting it big. At least you'd have a few thousand dollars to wave in your parents' face and say "I told you so!"

I've been around film school graduates. One worked in a pizza place. The others were unemployed. One did quite a bit of legwork in vain hope of becoming a box boy.

One had never had a job of any kind. I told him to put his student films on his resume as work experience. Emphasize scheduling and being responsible for expensive equipment. He didn't listen.

I hipped them to a job in a related field. TV stations need studio camera operators for the local news. It's a bad job. It pays minimum wage and you work a split shift. You come in for the evening news, go home and come back for the 11 o'clock news. But that's good because they have a very high turnover and it's an easy job to get. If you need to, you can get experience at the community access station. It's a question of knowing which cables to connect.

I don't know if you could parlay that into a better job at the station, like becoming an editor. We'll never know because none of them went for it.

You bring up El Mariachi and they always say the same thing: That the studio put extra money into it. They think they're debunking it. Columbia pictures put $200 thousand into remixing the sound and making a transfer to film. It was shot on 16mm then digitized and edited on computer. As far as I know, no 16mm print of the final film existed.

I don't know what it tells you that they bring THAT up but say nothing about the millions they had to have spent on publicity and advertising. 

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

Abrasive New York alcoholic Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is a washed up writer of biographies. Her agent (Jane Curtin) tells her she needs to write in her own voice and that her terrible personality is an impediment to her career. 

In an early scene, she's fired from a job for swearing at her boss when he asks her not to drink at her desk. 

Desperate for money, she starts forging witty letters from such people as Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. She sells them to dealers who market them to collectors. 

There've been murders and robberies inspired by movies. I've mentioned the two morons in this state who killed a couple on vacation so they could flee to Mexico and be like Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in In Cold Blood. But Lee Israel committed a perfectly reasonable, profitable string of crimes and I'll bet she doesn't get a single copycat. 

It seems natural that she lived in New York in part because it's hard to imagine someone like her anywhere else. I thought writers usually flocked to small, economically depressed communities with a low cost of living. The documentary Murder Among the Mormons showed that document forgery is a thing you can do lots of places.

Logan's Run (1976)

It had an awful lot of nudity for something rated PG, but it had less than I remembered and I think it was censored in the DVD.

I'd seen this thing several times in a theater when I was thirteen or fourteen. I found the nudity disappointing and was more interested in the guys shooting people with futuristic guns. But that was disappointing, too, because they were such terrible shots. Plus they were just murdering people and not shooting it out.

Mostly takes place in a large domed city. Filmed in an unused shopping mall. Escalator technology hadn't advanced at all over the centuries. 

It really wasn't bad. Michael York plays a "Sandman" whose job it is to kill "runners" who try to escape being euthanized at age thirty. They're told they'll be reborn, but not everyone is buying it. He joins Jenny Agutter in the resistance.

I suppose it could be seen as a sort of an anti-vaxxer allegory. People blindly believe what they're told, that they'll be renewed and those who see through the lies are clearly the heroes. The ecological disaster that caused this whole thing cleared up by itself, but from the point of view of the giant lying computer running the place, anyone who wants to live past thirty was wrecking it for everybody else. 

In fairness, overpopulation would obviously be a serious problem in a domed city.

Based on a 1967 novel.

With Peter Ustinov, Richard Jordan and Farrah Fawcett.

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)

My mother keeps watching it. Strange that she goes for this thing. 

Bridget Jones has a series of what most would consider really good jobs and wealthy professional boyfriends but all she does is talk about how pitiful she is. How is that supposed to make us feel?

On the occasion of Meat Loaf's death

I never listened to Meat Loaf. Wouldn't recognize him if he stepped on my foot. All I remember was a TV interview, I think on The Tomorrow Show where he said that, where he was from, everyone drove around with a rifle on a gun rack or a gun in the glove compartment.

He was unvaccinated and died of COVID.

As a kid I watched when Christopher Lee hosted SNL and introduced the "musical" act saying And now I'd like you to meet Loaf. There was a smattering of applause. He looked off camera and said, Oh, I'm terribly sorry, and introduced "Meat Loaf." 

I thought back to it years later and realized it was a joke.

Delaware Shore (2018)

Could have been interesting if it hadn't been so terrible, or if it had been terrible in a different way.

A Holocaust survivor is stuck bringing up her two grandchildren who she abuses. She addresses her gay grandson as "Mr Faggot" and screams at her granddaughter that her poetry is worthless because she can't eat it.

It wasn't entirely clear, but she wasn't so much a Holocaust survivor as she was a Nazi---either a regular Nazi or a kapo. Other reviews withheld that bit of information, but I think it's more teaser than spoiler. She kills a couple people and has a handyman take care of the bodies.

Important lesson here is that your movie will never be "so bad it's good" if it contains concentration camp footage.

Nicely photographed. 98 minutes.

Available on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

The Hours and Times (1991)

Didn't make homosexuality sound like any fun at all. John Lennon (Ian Hart) and the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein (David Angus), travel to Spain in 1963. Lennon was married and had a child and Epstein was gay and apparently in love with him.

In one scene, they meet an anti-Semitic Spanish fascist.

The guy playing John Lennon didn't really look like him, but once in a while you see him at the right angle and you can see a resemblance. Set before he switched to granny glasses.

Black and white. They drive through the city, the camera aimed out the side window looking upward so we see the buildings and not the cars parked along the street. I wondered what it would look like filmed in the age of digital video. It wouldn't be an improvement.

58 minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel.