I had the pleasure of chatting with the late, great
Martin Landau on several occasions — including a 1996 TV junket for The Adventures of Pinocchio, a movie he
made just two years after his Oscar-winning performance as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. (As I wrote in my Variety review: “Martin Landau plays
Geppetto, the aging puppet-maker who becomes a father for the first time after
his latest creation magically springs to life. It’s a role that could have been
played with broad gestures, cheap sentiment and other easy acting tricks. It is
much to Landau’s credit that he takes a more restrained approach, in a largely
successful attempt to make the character seem more endearingly poignant than
boisterously amusing.”) But when I heard of his passing Saturday at age 89,
the encounter I remembered most vividly was a 1980 interview I did with him for The Dallas Morning News, where I was
employed at the time, when he came to Big D to promote a movie called The Last Word.
Mind you, there was
nothing very memorable about the movie itself. (Truth to tell, I had to double
check my files a few minutes ago to ascertain that I had actually seen it.) But
I do recall that Landau was engagingly gracious and entertainingly loquacious,
and that our free-wheeling tête-à-tête took some interesting detours. Like, when he
talked about what he described as several instances of “bad timing” in the
years following his departure from the Mission: Impossible TV series.
To quote my
Dallas Morning News article:
“‘I made a movie
with Peter Falk and Jason Robards called Operation Snafu… I thought it was
hilarious when I read [the script]. But it came out the same year as M*A*S*H
and Kelly’s Heroes, two other war comedies. I thought we were going to be
first, but we wound up third.’
“As a result,
Landau noted, the comedy… received a pitifully limited release, and was quickly
dropped into the television market.
“Two years later,
Landau and [his then-wife Barbara Bain] teamed for Savage, a 90-minute pilot
film for a projected series about an investigative reporter.
“’That was before
Watergate, before 60 Minutes,’” he said. ‘Nobody wanted a series about an
investigative reporter. They were afraid of the show’
Ironically, the failed
pilot was an early effort of a director whose time had not yet come — Steven
Spielberg.
“’I had to fight
to get Spielberg,’ Landau said. ‘At the time, he hadn’t done a whole lot. He
was 23 at the time. It was right after he did Duel, but he had a reputation of
going over budget.
“‘He did go over budget [on Savage]. But he’s
always been talented. 1941 was one of his few less-than-successful ventures.’
Landau smiled wanly and added, ‘Savage was the other.’”
“In 1975, Landau
and his wife teamed again for a slightly more successful television venture. Space: 1999, a production of Britain’s flamboyant Sir Lew Grade,
featured Landau as the commander of a moon base where nuclear wastes were
stored. When the waste material exploded, the moon — and some 300 people
stationed on the base — went spinning off into outer space.
“The show, which
depicted the misadventures of the people on the prowling planet, attracted a
sizable audience in the United States, and an even greater following in Europe.
After two years, however, the producer opted to pull the plug on the program
when its ratings dipped slightly.
“‘Lew Grade got
into motion pictures,’ Landau said. “The $7 million it would have taken to
continue our show was what he needed for the advertising budget for Voyage of
the Damned, The Eagle Has Landed and The Cassandra Crossing.’
“So Grade decided
to end production on Space: 1999 — just a matter of months before Star Wars hit
the world’s movie screens and kicked off a brand new science-fiction craze. Had
Space: 1999 been able to hold out for a bit longer, it conceivably could have
capitalized on the Star Wars mania and vastly improved its ratings.
“Even so, the
series has been thriving in reruns. ‘There’s a whole cult around it,’ Landau
said. ‘Not as big as the Star Trek cult, but still a cult… I get all kinds of
things in the mail. Fan mail. Marriage letters. Divorce letters — things that
read, “Divorce that broad and marry me.” Sometimes you even get pictures that
are a little indecent — but that’s very rare.’
“‘At science fiction
conventions, outtakes from the show, single frames of film, go for $10. I went
to a convention in Columbus, Ohio — and 10,000 people showed up. A uniform I
wore went there for something like $400. I thought, “My God. I wish I had kept
my suits.” But it was too late.’”
Undeterred,
Martin Landau pressed on, racking up an astonishing number of TV credits over
the next three decades. He earned Academy Award nominations for his
pitch-perfect performances in Francis Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) — and finally took home the Best Supporting
Actor prize for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994).
Obviously, there are other credits on his resume that bespoke of a working
actor’s incessant need to pay his rent and maintain his visibility. But
consider this: Landau’s resume ran the gamut from Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest to Entourage (both the
HBO series and the movie spin-off). He appeared as a regular or guest star on
many TV series, and even managed to make a strong impression in something as
otherwise unremarkable as The Evidence, a
short-lived 2006 police procedural that, I confess, I continued to watch (just
to watch Landau) even after ABC consigned it to ignominious burn-off on
Saturday nights.
In short, he had
a hell of a run, because he was a hell of an actor. And while I can’t claim we
were close friends, I strongly suspect, based on my experiences on those
occasions when our paths crossed, that he was a hell of a nice guy. Even when
his timing may have been off.
Barry Morse