Roberta Collins: Love Is Strange

How can I have become such a big fan of Roberta Collins, an actress who died in 2008 and an actress with whom my experience is based on one movie - a movie in which she only had two minutes of total screen time that I saw 47 years ago?

Sometimes you just know awesome talent when you perceive it even when no one else does, such when those of us who love Rush heard the virtuosity and intellect in their music back when the critics dismissed them as a pretentious prog-metal outfit.  Roberta Collins had that effect when I saw her in Train Ride to Hollywood as Jean Harlow, though she never got any good notices for it, and no movie critic would have ever taken seriously any actor who appeared in the low-grade, barrel-scraped exploitation movies she starred in in the seventies and early eighties.  Those are the sorts of movies I myself avoid, and I did try to watch a couple of Collins' women-in-prison flicks for a couple of minutes each.  That was all I could tolerate, as, as cheaply made films exploiting sex and violence, The Big Doll House and Women In Cages live up to such reputations.  But Roberta Collins, like Pam Grier as well, proved herself as an actress; she wasn't just some pretty face who was there to titillate male audiences.  She was paying her dues to make it in real movies.

Alas, Collins never worked with name directors like Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Martin Ritt, or Norman Jewison, though she did work with Jonathan Demme - when he was paying his dues making the explitiaton flick Caged Heat. She never got to do serious dramas like Susan Sarandon and she never starred in the sort of rom-coms that usually feature Meg Ryan or Diane Keaton.  When she did act in a big-studio movie, it was usually a small role in what became a flop.  And so my love for her and her acting is based on that one movie - and to be honest, I wouldn't want to see Train Ride to Hollywood again, since there are so many things wrong with it.  Yes, Bloodstone delivered some superb music, but that's what the soundtrack record is for.  Had the movie been much better, so might Collins' career prospects have been better in 1975.              

One movie.  One role.  One actress.  But what an actress Roberta Collins was. She deserved better.  RIP. 😢   

Take Two

The Screen Actors Guild strike is over.  Over but the shouting, anyway; the actors' union still has to vote on the contract, and it will likely pass.  

This means that showbiz mediocrity and banality will be back in full force by early in 2024.  It only remains to be seen whether there'll be more of the humdrum in movies or television,  My guess is that it will be a photo finish.  But actors still got what they believe was a fair deal.

New seasons of television shows should be airing in February.  And if you thought the long drought of new TV material would make people forget certain TV shows and lead to their cancellation, like, say, CBS's reboot of "The Equalizer" - well, sorry to disappoint you.   

The SAG-ging AFTRA-math

Up to now I hadn't mentioned the Hollywood writers' strike because I never had time to discuss it.  Now, however, SAG-AFTRA (SAG used to stand for the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA used to stand for the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, but since they merged, they're just meaningless initials now) has gone on strike in solidarity with the writers, and for the same issues: the concerns over artificial intelligence crimping on their craft, the need for better pay and benefits, and a need for more residual payments for their work on streaming services.  Most actors, of course, are not household names, and they're threatened by the new and evolving business model based on streaming, which does not pay residuals. 

"How they plead poverty that they are losing money left and right when they give $100 million to their CEOs," SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said.  "If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines."

Wow - that's astonishing!  Fran Drescher is the SAG-AFTRA president now?

Hollywood has now shut down completely, and its best and most talented actors have been silenced.  Fortunately, that's not very serious.  For evidence of that, consider the fact that there's a now live-action movie based on Barbie.  The doll.  (Actually, Barbie is not a doll; it's an action figure that sees too little action and has too much of a figure.)  Hollywood has been going in a silly direction for years with all of these movies based on consumer products and comic books and rarely makes something comparable to modern classics like Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance, Save the Tiger, Chinatown, or The Conversation.  The best anyone can hope for is for this twin strike is that it brings down the studio system that makes so many artless blockbusters - once confined to the summer season but now prevalent year-round - and returns us to basic moviemaking, the sort of artistically centered cinema where someone can just make a movie showing two guys talking philosophy in a restaurant, like Louis Malle's masterpiece My Dinner with Andre.  Kids who want to be entertained by Barbie or by Mario can just stay home and play with their toys.  

I'm getting more misanthropic in late middle age, yes . . .

From a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

So much has happened in the past two months, I was unable to post my thoughts on Sean Connery, who died at the end of October.  Now, finally, I can say my peace.

Sean Connery will always be remembered as the original James Bond in the movies, but after making his last Bond movie in 1971 (except for a one-off return in 1983), he developed a record of achievement that ranks him as one of the greatest actors to ever come out of Britain, and certainly the best actor ever to come out of Scotland. He distinguished himself in the seventies with stellar and possibly unexpected performances in John Huston's 1975 movie The Man Who Would Be King and, as an aging Robin Hood, in 1976's Robin and Marian.  He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing an Irish Chicago cop in The Untouchables in a performance that was far better than the movie, and up to the turn of the millennium, he was still proving himself in Gus Van Sant's 2000 film Finding Forrester, about a distinguished but reclusive author who becomes a mentor to an inner-city teenager aspiring to be a writer.  (Finding Forrester is a rather underrated film, but if you're a writer like I am, you'll love it.)

And of course, who could forget his part in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? 😃

Although Connery hadn't appeared before a camera since 2003's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, his aura and his legend remained strong, and it would be a mistake to say that anyone missed him after he entered retirement.  His legend is likely to remain stronger with time, as people rediscover his abilities as an actor beyond 007.  RIP. 😢

Sentimental Journey

Doris Day, who died at the age of 97 only two weeks ago, was the epitome of wholesome Middle America in Hollywood and for a time being became uncool for her persona.  But she was much more than a rom-com actress whom Rock Hudson lost his heart to.  Day, who was from Ohio and in many ways really was as all-American as she appeared, was also an accomplished singer and made songs like "Sentimental Journey" and "Que Sera, Sera" all her own with the heart and care she put into them.  She could do drama just as well, as her heralded performance in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much demonstrated, and she was adept at television with her own show in the late sixties and early seventies - which she did, ironically, to pay debts incurred by her late husband without her knowledge.

Through it all, Doris Day held her own and kept her dignity.  She later became famous for her animal rights activism, and the contributions she made to that effort are as enduring as her greatest movies and records.  She was truly a class act, and we've lost her at a time when we need more of those. RIP. :-(

Oscar Blackout

Blacks - blacks, not African-Americans (I'm not going to sacrifice brevity in favor of a seven-syllable, sixteen-letter hyphenated word on the altar of political correctness) - are angry, and rightfully so, that not a single black actor has been nominated for an Academy Award for best acting in a major or supporting role this year. And, I would also add, there are no Asians honored with a nomination, and unless you count Spaniard Javier Bardem (since he's a white European, no one likely would), no Hispanics either. The reasons for the absence of blacks among the nominations vary, but many agree it can be boiled down to three reasons: No one feels a need to nominate a black actor for an Oscar for the sake of diversity, now that Barack Obama is President; most of the movies black actors were in that were released in 2010 weren't very good, and; the few that were Oscar-worthy, like Tyler Perry's film version of For Colored Girls, were underpublicized.

Fine, but not even one nomination? And no nominations for Latinos and Asians, either? It can be argued that Hollywood and people of color have had an uneasy relationship with each other, with the motion picture industry trying to accommodate diversity and so-called "minorities" expressing themselves in an alternative culture but still wanting a place in the mainstream. And it can't be denied that, people of color have earned a place in the mainstream. Certainly blacks. White people have embraced black culture in so many ways that everything from Louis Armstrong to Motown, from Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin to the artist once again known as Prince, from Chuck Berry to Halle Berry, isn't just "African-American" culture - it's American culture. And this is how we reward them? Okay, black actors didn't make great movies this past year, but maybe white directors like, say, Nancy Meyers might want to consider Angela Bassett for a role that would normally go to Diane Keaton? Does every role have to be specifically written for a white actor or a black actor? Unless you're doing a movie about an integrated neighborhood or interracial romance, I don't think so. And Hollywood has always been rather timid at any storyline that deliberately involves people of different races.

I do find it fascinating, though, that blacks are upset about black actors not getting nominations for awards from an academy that the Golden Globes and the awards from the Screen Actors Guild are making increasingly irrelevant; people only watch the Oscars to see the gowns the starlets are wearing. Oscars always seem to go to commercially successful "serious" films from the studios or to smaller films with respectable box office numbers. And when Hollywood does try to acknowledge race or ethnicity, the results can be humorous. I'm sure Gandhi deserved the 1983 Best Picture Oscar. And Ben Kingsley, who won the Best Actor Oscar that year for the title role, can win an award by reading the London phone book. But some observers wryly noted that Gandhi was celebrated so spectacularly because Gandhi himself represented everything people in Hollywood want to be - "moral, tan and thin."

How about 1985's The Color Purple? No one was going to argue that a serious movie bringing Alice Walker's black feminist novel to life didn't deserve recognition from the Academy. And it did get recognition in the form of eleven nominations. There was just one problem: Steven Spielberg directed it. Spielberg didn't get a nomination for best director, largely because he remained disrespected for his family action movies and, besides, despite some critical acclaim for his film, many folks in turn found his adaptation of Walker's book disrespectful. Having acknowledged the earnestness of Spielberg's efforts to promote black-oriented cinema without actually having to nominate Spielberg himself, the Academy then let Spielberg know that they liked the book better by giving the movie no Oscars. (Until his Schindler's List won the Best Picture Oscar nearly a decade later, the only color Spielberg saw was red.)

Black cinematic achievements have come in fits and starts, just like any other struggle for equality in America, so this story isn't going to go away even after the Oscar ceremony tomorrow. In the meantime, though, we should consider some even more troubling trends, like the fact that there are no black U.S. Senators and only one black state governor. And maybe we as a nation should concentrate on how to produce more black scientists and doctors, as well as more black professors of something other than ethnic studies.

Now, if you'll please excuse me, I'm going to check on who won the Razzies. As for the Oscars tomorrow, white America's terminal Anglophilia (that would include me, I'm afraid) should ensure that The King's Speech will clean up handily.

The Ballad Of the Easy Rider

To explain the persona of Dennis Hopper, who died this past weekend at 74, is ultimately a lost cause. Hopper was one of those actors who defied explanation or categorization. He had a rebellious streak in his performances, as his role in Easy Rider demonstrated, but he also had a penchant for portraying weird, tortured (or sometimes torturous) characters as he did in Blue Velvet. He was no one's idea of a matinee idol, though he performed quite admirably in bringing to life the unconventional visions of the directors who cast him. There was a bit of self-cheapening in Hopper's career at the end - remember his Fidelity Investments ads with the music of the Spencer Davis Group playing in the background? - but even they had a sense of coolness and detachment. Dennis Hopper's career can be analyzed and studied, and will be for years to come. But explaining it? Explaining him? You might as well explain existentialism with an abstract painting. RIP.

RIP Karl Malden

Karl Malden, who died at 97 on Wednesday, was perhaps the last of the great character actors with star quality. Though never a leading man, Malden was a solid presence in the many movies in which he appeared, and he was very adept at playing so many different regular guys.

Little known fact about Malden: He was a stamp collector and a member of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, the group that selects topics for U.S. postage stamps. A post office in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles is named for him.

Karl Malden was a great man, and he will be missed.

Oscars and Razzies

The Oscars were last night, and Slumdog Millionaire won all but two of the awards it was up for including Best Picture. Now that it's won so many awards, the Academy members - to cop a phrase from Albert Brooks - are going to have to see it. :-D

Two very exotic European actresses won the best lead and supporting actress awards - Britain's Kate Winslet for The Reader, which I haven't seen, and Spain's Penelope Cruz for Vicki Cristina Barcelona, which I have. I think Cruz deserved her Oscar. :-)

I looked at the Razzies ,and I was disappointed. Sure, Mike Myers probably deserved to be dishonored for The Love Guru, and Paris Hilton was undoubtedly a shoo-in, but these were false, easy targets; no one expects much from Mike Myers when he's not playing Wayne Campbell or Austin Powers, and Paris Hilton isn't a real actress like Razzie laureate Halle Berry. Much more interesting was M. Night Shyamalan's "win" for his horror movie The Happening, because he's a hotshot hot-ticket director who's taken seriously.

They named Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as worst sequel. Hey, I liked that movie! :-O

Oscars 2009

Tomorrow is the ceremony for the Academy Awards, where Hollywood's greatest cimema, directing, acting, and writing are solemnly celebrated.

Yeah, who cares? Who won the Razzies already? :-D