Forty Years Ago...

Forty years ago yesterday, I interviewed Lee Marvin at the USA Film Fest in Dallas. I joked with him that he had shot the President – Ronald Reagan – back in The Killers (1964), Reagan’s last movie. “Yeah,” he responded with a wolfish grin, “but he wasn’t President yet when I shot him.” 

 Forty years ago today, John Hinckley tried to gatecrash into history by taking aim at the Commander in Chief. I was interim A&E editor for The Dallas Morning News, so I wound up working on the first and only “Extra” edition of my newspaper career. (It hit the streets that afternoon.) People may forget this now, but the early reports indicated Reagan was a goner. Film critic Philip Wuntch was out in L.A. for the Oscars, and he filed an absolutely brilliant overview of Reagan’s movie career on about one hour’s notice. And our theater critic Diane Werts went over to SMU where the USA Film Fest was taking place, to get a quote from Marvin. Team work, folks.

 I forget who it was, but someone showed up that afternoon, along with their publicist, for a previously scheduled interview to promote their next movie. I think I may have raised my voice few octaves when I explained that we had more important things going on. They left, but only reluctantly. Priorities, people. 

(Fun fact: The previous January, a Dallas TV station had programmed a Ronald Reagan movie each afternoon during the week of his inauguration. Trouble is, for Inauguration Day, someone at the station had scheduled – yes, you guessed it – The Killers. I pointed this out to our TV critic, Ed Bark, who wrote what I recall was one of the funniest columns of his career, taking the station to task. Within hours after the column appeared, the station changed its lineup. P.S. Considering that the station and the newspaper were owned by the same company at the time, this was an amazingly ballsy move on Bark’s part. But he remained in his job there a lot longer than I did mine.)

A passing thought about rampant remakes

As I told all my Facebook friends tonight: I can't help feeling weirded out by all these recent and upcoming remakes of '80s films that I reviewed back in the day. Because, really, I don't remember seeing that many remakes of '60s movies back in the '80s. Like, around 1987, no one was saying: "Hey, let's remake The Professionals with Charles Bronson in the Lee Marvin role and Burt Reynolds taking over for Burt Lancaster!" Or "Now here's a sure-fire hit: A new version of In the Heat of the Night with Eddie Murphy and Gene Hackman!" What's happened? Has Hollywood truly run out of original ideas? Or were the '80s actually a better era for cinema than I recall?

The other Point Blank

No, not the 1967 classic with the preternaturally badass Lee Marvin kicking butt and taking lives. This one is the 1998 version -- one of several direct-to-video clunkers that provided semi-steady employment for Mickey Rourke before his Oscar-nominated comeback in The Wrestler last year. Think about this whenever you find yourself wondering in 2010 why Rourke is grabbing after easy paychecks in Iron Man II and The Expendables. Trust me: He is one great actor who has bloody well earned his right to sell out.

Old Man Leydon

To paraphrase a posting from last year: Another birthday, another reminder of just how ancient I am becoming. Today, I turn 57. Consider: I am now two years older than Humphrey Bogart was when he played Lt. Comdr. Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. (Worse, I’m roughly the same age he was when he freakin' died.) I am now three years older than James Stewart was when he starred in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I am five years older than Walter Brennan was when he played Old Man Clanton in My Darling Clementine, and John Wayne was when he starred in Rio Bravo. I am seven years older than Claude Rains was when he co-starred in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I am 14 years older than Lee Marvin was when he took command of The Dirty Dozen. When I consider how old I used to think those guys looked in those movies….

Remembering Alvin (and Lee)

Believe it or not, I'm actually looking forward to next week's release of Alvin and the Chipmunks -- if only because, way, way back during the Antediluvian Period, when I was 10, I was a major fan of The Alvin Show, a TV cartoon series that aired Wednesday nights on CBS. But to give you some idea just how truly whack my childhood was: I would watch The Alvin Show each week right after the CBS affiliate in my hometown of New Orleans aired reruns of M Squad, quite possibly the most violent series in the history of television, featuring Lee Marvin as a pre-Miranda hardboiled cop and the coolest theme song I can remember from that era. Did I watch both shows? You bet. And, oddly enough, my sainted mother never saw anything wrong with this.