Goodbye Major Tom

David Bowie is dead.

Killed by cancer just days after his sixty-ninth birthday and the release of his latest album.

Turning on twitter and seeing reports of his passing was a real kick in the teeth for me. Like millions of others around the world Bowie didn't seem like an ordinary mortal. Death seemed so inconceivable for such an important part of the soundscape of our lives. One could be forgiven for assuming that Bowie would just assume a new persona and genre and go off in some new creative direction. 

Sadly, he was just a human being and death came for him as it will come for us all eventually.

His death stings especially hard because Bowie taught people who were freaks growing up learned that not only were they not alone, there was a way they could be accepted and that's by being as creative and as accepting of others as they can possibly be. To be a Bowie fan was a responsibility. He wasn't everyone's cup of tea, and when I was growing up, a time when the music you listened to established your identity, those who didn't get Bowie liked to express their displeasure with your choices often verbally, and on rare occasions physically.

However, camaraderie could be found with other Bowie people, who would then introduce you to other bands and styles of music, who themselves were influenced by Bowie's work and versatility. Bowie was the gateway drug to alternative rock and alternative pop culture.

I always admired how Bowie managed to remain cool right to the end by avoiding the trap that had ruined so many of his profession. Since he was constantly experimenting and reinventing himself and his music, and wasn't wed to some look from what he considered his gloried past. A habit that transformed too many rock and pop legends into ridiculous or creepy parodies of themselves.

Could you imagine if he had never left his Ziggy Stardust phase?

*shudder*

That constant experimentation and reinvention also meant that if one of his experiments didn't succeed with some segment of the audience, no problem, his next project will be different anyway, and you might like that instead.

Well, we won't be able to take David Bowie for granted anymore.

Mass Murder-Mass Media-Mass Hysteria

There's been another mass shooting, this time a movie theatre in Lafayette Louisiana that was showing the comedy Trainwreck. As I'm writing this half a dozen people have been injured, two people are dead, and the shooter killed himself.

As usual after every mass atrocity there are the usual declarations by pundits, politicians, and even ordinary people that says if America bans guns, movies, religions, books, video games, politically incorrect comedians, or flags, then it will never happen again.

The trouble is that it will happen again, and it has to do with the difference between causes and excuses.

Shootings are not caused by guns, movies, religions, books, video games, comedians or even flags. Those are just excuses.

The causes of mass shootings are the shooters, and their real motives. The motives they admit to are, like I just said, excuses. The real cause is a hunger for power, fame, and a certain kind of immortality.

Look at the average profile of the mass shooter and you will have someone who can be politely described as a loser. They tend to fail at life, but have delusional senses of self-esteem. They feel that their brilliance is unappreciated by the philistines of the world and that it unfairly denies them the power and fame that they believe they deserve.

They look at the media coverage and the public reactions to other mass murders and those narcissistic losers who have a psychopathic disregard for human life see a way to get that power and fame. 

Murder a lot of innocent people and these losers are no longer a waste of air and groceries, they are transformed into near deities. Pundits, politicians, and people will demand laws be changed, expressions be censored, and society put in upheaval, all in their name. Meanwhile the media is repeatedly discussing and dissecting their every brain-fart 24/7 in some vain attempt to "understand" their excuses as if it was a great mystery until the next atrocity steals their publicity.

This gives the mass shooters the power and fame they crave, dead or alive, it doesn't matter than them, because they are your gods now.

Gun control won't stop them.

Censorship won't stop them.

There is only one thing that will stop them.

Deny them their godhood.

Don't publicize their name.

Don't publicize their so-called motives.

What you do is throw them in a hole, dead or alive, and build an outhouse over that hole. Then you open a global spicy food festival.

They care more about their image, and giving that image power over people's lives, than life, even their own. If all they have to look forward to is anonymity and an ignominious disposal of their soiled carcass, the power they crave more than life is gone.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1127: Tiny Tidbits

1:

Legendary voice actor Hal Douglas, who did thousands of movie trailers, has passed away at the age of 89.

His funeral will take place… IN A WORLD!

2:

Sony is not going to make Smurfs 3.

But don't applaud just yet. They may not be making a sequel to last year's Smurfs 2, but they are doing a REBOOT!

I hope they go all dark and gritty this time.

3:

Lionsgate TV has announced they're starting a reality TV series about the preparations for the first human colony on Mars.

The working title is MARS ONE, but I think INEVITABLE DISAPPOINTMENT will be more realistic.

R.I.P. Harold Ramis

Writer, director, and actor Harold Ramis passed away yesterday at the age of 69.

Ramis was never a movie "star" preferring to work either behind the camera, or as a supporting player, like his most famous role of Dr. Egon Spengler in the 1984 classic Ghostbusters.

If you spent any time of your life in the 1980s Ramis had revolutionized comedy. He crafted stories of underdogs trying to make their way in the world, battling forces seeking to keep them down, usually with hilarious results. 

My earliest memories of Ramis is not from his movies, but from seeing him on episodes of SCTV out of Toronto, and I think it would be a nice tribute to show some of his more famous bits from the show to remember him by.

Enjoy.

This one might be thought of as tacky, but I think he would like it:

This one was my personal favourite:

Hollywood Babble On & On #1117: Multiple Stuff...

RIP PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN

You've no doubt heard that Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of Hollywood's best character actors has passed away, and word is coming down that it was from a drug overdose.  I don't have to explain what a great actor he was, there's a whole Wikipedia page listing his awards and nominations.

He was one of a handful of performers in Hollywood who actually looked and acted like the characters they played were real people in a real world, no matter how unreal the on-screen situation was.

That's what makes his loss so saddening.

The fact that he most likely died of a heroin overdose is what makes his loss so enraging. 

It's sickening to hear of an actor who was always so original in his work to die from a celebrity cliche.

Reports are saying that he had been clean for twenty years, but had recently relapsed, and gone into a heroin induced death spiral. Heroin is especially pernicious because it induces a chemically induced selfishness in the addict. They lose all interest in family, friends, work, and life in general, and become single-mindedly dedicated to getting more heroin.

We'll never know exactly what sparked his initial addiction or his lethal relapse. There is no scan for the state of the human soul. So I won't speculate, I will just say that I hate to see such a disaster happen yet again.

If you are using heroin: Get help.

If you are thinking of starting to use heroin: Don't.

Too many have died for an illusion.

DC COMICS MATURITY PROBLEM

A tip of my jaunty sombrero to reader and twitter follower @MediaWarrior for linking me to this video review of some of the questionable decisions being made by DC Comics. It's nice to see someone agree with me on many points, though I must admit that I deliver them differently.

ZOOEY GETS ANIMATED

Zooey Deschanel has inked a deal to produce a fairy tale themed animated comedy for the Fox Network.

I don't have an opinion on the project, I just needed a cheap excuse to post her picture to cheer me up after two stories about things that made me sad and angry.

Okay, much better.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1106: Random Nuggets

SHOULD I REPEAT MYSELF?

A piece in Variety about the dearth of female directors making money-making feature films reminded me of the piece I wrote about the dearth of female feature film spec-writers which wondered if it was sexism or something unseen.

RIP RUN RUN SHAW

Legendary producer Sir Run Run Shaw, who with his older brother Runme Shaw, helped turn the Hong Kong film industry into a major international force, has passed away at the age of 106.

He started out in 1926 at the age of 19 helping his brother produce and distribute first silent films, and then some of Asia's first "talkies."

After World War 2 they helped revive the Asian film industry with Shaw Brothers Studio that brought the modern Martial Arts movie to the world.

He expanded from movies to pretty much all facets of media and in his later years became well known for his generous philanthropy.

EONE HUNDRED MILLION

EOne the fast growing Canadian media company has set up a $100 million fund to acquire independent films for them to distribute. 

This is good news for Canadian and British producers looking for a distributor since both lost some outlets in the recent spate of takeovers and mergers, including EOne's takeover of former Canuck juggernaut Alliance Films.

Good luck to them, I always like it when a company puts its money where its mouth is.

RIP Elmore Leonard.

Elmore Leonard passed away this morning, marking the end of an era in both literature and movies.

He started writing Westerns stories for pulp magazines and then expanded into Western novels and screenplays before expanding into crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many set in and around his hometown of Detroit, Michigan.

He was a master storyteller and most writers seek to come close to his skill with dialogue.

He will be missed, but his work will be enjoyed for generations.

Richard Matheson R.I.P.

Richard Matheson, writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, and teleplays in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, war, and even western passed away at the age of 87.

I can't tell you how much of an idol Matheson was to me. When I was a kid I started to pay attention to the names of writers on TV shows and movies, and when I saw Matheson's name pop up on an episode of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, or in a movie, I knew I was probably going to like it.

He was part of that small group of writers, nicknamed the Southern California Sorcerers, that included Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, William F. Nolan, Charles Beaumont, Jerry Sohl, George Clayton Johnson, and Rod Serling who proved to the world that writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror for television could be art.

Later on I got into his books and short stories, and my admiration for him grew exponentially. He could do it all, and do it extremely well if you look at the sheer volume of classics he created for print and screen.

Goodbye Richard, you will be missed.

RIP Jake Eberts

Jake Eberts passed away yesterday at the age of 71.

You probably don't know the name, or the face of this mild mannered Canadian, but if you're a fan of quality movies, you are definitely familiar with his work.

Directors are credited with making films, but it takes people like Eberts to get movies made. His specialty was bringing investors and filmmakers together, and his eye for risky, but high quality projects resulted in him being involved in movies that earned over 66 Oscar nominations, and 37 wins.

The Quebec born movie business dynamo was originally trained as a chemical engineer at McGill University in Montreal. He went on to get an MBA from Harvard and pursued a career in high finance.

It was that work that first got him involved in independent film in England, and he was a key player in the revival of the British film industry in the 1980s.

That revival was led by Goldcrest Films, a company he co-founded and headed first from 1977-1984, and then from 1985-1987.

During his first tenure at Goldcrest he was behind a string of successful movies that blended commercial appeal with award winning acclaim. It was a varied bunch of films, ranging from The Howling, and Escape From New York, to the back to back Oscar winners Chariots of Fire and Gandhi.

Gandhi was his most famous project since it had spent years wallowing as the film no studio wanted. On the surface it looked like a disaster in the making, an epic story about a skinny Hindu walking around India, a country the studios assumed the audience didn't care about, preaching non-violence. Eberts saw potential no one else did, made the movie, got it released, and helped make it not only an Oscar winner, but a commercial success.

Eberts left Goldcrest to take a high paying job in the USA, but was brought back to the company due to troubles it experienced during his absence.

Chief among those troubles were the films Revolution, The Mission, and Absolute Beginners. The three films were a break from Goldcrest's fundamental plan of modest budgets and high quality. They were relatively big money films that needed to be the 1980s equivalent of blockbusters to succeed.

They didn't. The Mission came close to breaking even, but not close enough, and neither Revolution or Absolute Beginners came remotely close.

Goldcrest was restructured and sold to new owners, and Eberts left to form a new company called Allied Filmmakers in partnership with the French cinema giant Pathe. Allied Filmmakers' specialty was bringing together investors and filmmakers, and was only rarely credited as a traditional production company.

Eberts wrote about his time at Goldcrest in his autobiography My Indecision Is Final, with journalist Terry Illot.  I feel that this book is essential for anyone remotely interested in the business of movies. Some may find it a little dry, since it's not about scandal or celebrities, but it contains vital information that every filmmaker should know about how things work.

He was a rare bird who showed that you can successfully sell mature and intelligent movies to a wide audience. I fear we might not see his kind again.

Thoughts On Aurora

Regular reader Kit asked:

The Aurora shooting:

-Some are saying WB should cancel theatre showings because of the shooting. What do you think?

I say they shouldn't.

Society lately has become obsessed by grief in recent years. Whenever there's a tragedy people start demanding that something or other be stopped, censored, or cancelled in the name of "sensitivity."

Now the events in Aurora, where a man who is either deranged, evil, or more likely both, murdered 12 people, wounded dozens of others at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises is more than tragedy, it's an atrocity.

We should all offer our condolences and prayers for the victims, their families, and loved ones.

But we can't just shut everything down because of such a tragic event. It serves no purpose other than to let the people who demand these shutdowns make a show of their "sensitivity."

Going to the movies, even The Dark Knight Rises, is not an insult to the victims.

What going to the movies is is a declaration that we are not going to let the maniacs of the world and the fear they thrive on control our lives.

Going to the movies is one of the few great communal events that people of all races, religions, and cultures can enjoy together in our increasingly interconnected, but also increasingly insular world.

We cannot permit people like the maniac in Aurora, who I will not name, because he gets enough attention already, to drive us even further into our own private little bubbles out of fear.

Because if we do, then the bastards have won.

Here's his next question:

-What should happen to this guy: LINK

I think a solid ass-whupping is appropriate.

If you don't feel like clicking the link, the story's about a guy who does stuff for Howard Stern's show prank calling a Denver TV station posing as a cop.

He says he does these pranks to illustrate how poorly managed the media is during times of crisis.

Well, guess what, we don't need a prank phone call to illustrate that. Especially when we have a reporter for the ABC Network suggesting that an innocent man was behind the shootings because he had a similar name and belonged to the Tea Party.

Here was an experienced senior journalist for a major TV news organization refusing to make the one phone call or Google search he needed to make to check his facts. He saw a name, saw a possible link to an organization that he is politically opposed to, made an assumption and ran with it on live television.

If that doesn't tell you that the whole media apparatus is deeply broken, a crank phone call isn't going to get it through your skull.

Richard D. Zanuck R.I.P.

Richard Zanuck, studio executive and movie producer, passed away yesterday at the age of 77.

He was the son of Darryl F. Zanuck, the Hollywood mogul who merged his 20th Century Productions with the then ailing Fox Pictures in 1933 to form the mega-studio 20th Century Fox. 

Naturally, he began his career with what was then the family business, starting in the story department, and worked his was up to producing his first feature film Compulsion by the time he was 25.

He became President of 20th Century Fox at the age of 28, but the doldrums that affected the whole industry in the late 1960s hit 20th Century Fox hard. Financial troubles with the studios and conflicts with his father led to him being fired and he began his life defining career as an independent producer.

He was a very successful producer, bringing a then young TV director named Stephen Spielberg to the big screen, first with the small scale drama The Sugarland Express, and breaking him into blockbusters with Jaws.

Since then he went on to produce films ranging from Oscar bait that could still win audiences like Driving Miss Daisy, to bombastic mega-blockbusters like Clash Of The Titans, to the broad cinematic fantasies of Tim Burton.

He considered movie producing an art form in itself, and for that he will have a lasting cinematic legacy.

RIP Ernest Borgnine

Ernest Borgnine, the prolific character actor who won an Academy Award for the title role of Marty, passed away at the age of 95, ending a career that spanned more than 60 years.

He was an unconventional Hollywood star and used that status to carve a niche for himself, and acting as an example to other actors for his energy and work ethic.

He spent ten years in the US Navy, including combat in the Pacific during World War 2. At the end of the war he had left the Navy and was wondering what he would do next when his mother said:  'You always like getting in front of people and making a fool of yourself, why don't you give it a try?'

That led to a career on the stage, starting in summer stock and touring companies, eventually to supporting parts on Broadway, and guest parts in the early days of television. 

His big screen break happened in 1953 when he was cast as the sadistic Sergeant "Fatso" Judson in From Here To Eternity.  That led to a string of parts playing "heavies," but it was playing a nice guy that took his career to the next level. That nice guy was Marty, a lovelorn butcher, and it earned him an Academy Award, beating Frank Sinatra, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, and the late James Dean.

Now, after winning an Oscar, a lot of actors end up spending their career chasing after another Oscar. Not Ernest Borgnine.

He knew that he wasn't "leading man" material, and that his place was as a character actor, but that didn't stop him from making the most of it.

He took almost every role he could fit in, including doing television, and brought a great amount of energy and professionalism. He did everything from sitcoms to cinema, and accumulating more than his share of classic roles.

You literally can't find anyone who hasn't seen something that didn't feature Borgnine in some way, regardless of their age.

You can't really do much better when you're a character actor.

Rest In Peace Ernie.

RIP Ray Bradbury

Writer, screenwriter, and all around inspiration Ray Bradbury passed away at the age of 91.

While he had a long and full life his passing is still sad because he's been an active author for so long it was easy to assume that he was somehow eternal. A never-ending fantasy factory who was constantly working on something new.

He was a prolific author of short stories and novels in the genres of science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. To generations he was the gateway drug to the endless possibilities of genre fiction.

He was for me. I can remember picking up a copy of The Martian Chronicles when I was ten years old, and I was hooked. Soon I was picking up every bit of Bradbury I could find at my local library, combing through the collections of his short stories like R Is For Rocket, The Illustrated Man, and I Sing The Body Electric, and other novels like his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451.

He never really considered himself as belonging to any one specific genre, preferring to view himself as an "idea writer." He was probably the best "idea writer" in history. If you think you have a brilliant idea for a story, the odds are Bradbury probably did some form of it first. He could turn those ideas into words, and those words into dreams as they went on to inspire other writers and readers.

His passing leaves a tremendous hole in the literary landscape.

Goodbye Ray Bradbury, you will be deeply missed.

Hollywood Babble On & On #852: Hollywood Could Use Someone Like This Now...

Producer Bert Schneider has passed away at the age of 78.  Now many people may not know his name, or his face, but a lot of you know his films, because he was part of the generation that saved Hollywood from itself.

You see in the 1960s Hollywood was a sorry state.  Since the advent of television in the 1950s the entire industry had been flailing around trying to find something, anything, that could butts in theater seats.  They tried mega-budget epics loaded with lots of big name stars and special effects, they tried gimmicks like 3D, and for the most part they dropped more expensive bombs than Curtis LeMay.

Into this stumbled young Bert Schneider, the son of Abraham Schneider, a former President of Columbia Pictures, who had recently been expelled from Cornell, and rejected by the army. His father's status in the industry helped the then aimless Bert get a job at Columbia's Screen Gems TV division under the White Man's Affirmative Action Plan.

However, once he had his foot in the door he started to make a name for himself.  He joined forces with another young go-getter named Bob Rafelson, to form Raybert Productions, and put together a little show called The Monkees.

Not willing to rest on their laurels, or cash from The Monkees franchise, the partners branched out into feature films that attempted to break from the studio dominated norms and target audiences that had either been ignored or insulted by the majors. Their film Easy Rider became a break-out hit, and producer Stephen Blauner soon joined the team which was reformed as BBS Productions. 

BBS Productions then went on to produce such seminal films of the 1970s as Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show before he dropped out of the movie business entirely in the early 1980s.

Now let's take a moment to look at how Hollywood history is repeating itself.

We're seeing dwindling audiences who are finding entertainment from other mediums, skyrocketing budgets, huge gaps forming in the movie market, gimmicks like 3D, over-paid and under-performing stars, and a stifling group-think controlling Hollywood to the point that anyone dwelling outside its permitted attitude range is viewed as either alien at best, or sub-human at worst.

Yep, history is repeating itself... except I don't see any Bert Schneider's coming around to shake things up from the inside like he did.  In fact, I see an industry that would rather risk seeing itself die out completely before changing how it operates.

Cinemaniacal: Ken Russell Is Dead Is Edgy Dead Too?

British director, photographer, writer, and occasional actor Ken Russell passed away at the age of 84.  But I'm not going to offer an obituary for him, there are professionals doing that.  What I am going to talk about are his films, and what they meant to me.

Now Russell's oeuvre cast a wide net, but were best known for their then daring explorations of madness, sexuality, and spirituality. 

Many of his films were the definition of edgy, tackling controversial subjects in bold new ways.

They were also wildly uneven.  Some were cleverly constructed films that challenged the narrative conventions and mores of his times. Others went past simple surrealism into the realm of the incoherent mess.

However, I never got the sense that they were unnecessary.  

I'm not an expert on Russell or his work, but I do remember getting a sense that for the times they were made, they were needed, they were necessary, even if only to shake things up, to make people go: "You know, his direction may not be for me, but it's made me think of finding my own direction to make things fresh and new again."

I don't really get that from the so-called "edgy" filmmakers that followed him.  Challenging an audience the way Russell did has been replaced with insulting the audience by rehashing some of the things Russell did, but with a heavy layer of elitist condescension.

Russell's "edgy" work always seemed to be looking for something that lay beyond the films' obvious style and subject matter. Today's so-called "edgy" artists don't strike me as looking for anything beyond cheap attention, and pats on the back from their circle of peers for their "courage" in "speaking truth to power" against those who can't and won't do any harm to them in the first place beyond simply ignoring them.

Essentially, it just all seems so unnecessary to me.

Hollywood Babble On & On #804: They Don't Know How He Did It...

Hollywood doesn't know history. You can see that whenever you see a period drama from a major studio. But the one thing modern Hollywood really doesn't know, comprehend, or appreciate is its own history beyond seeing what titles from the 1980s they can remake.

This week saw the passing of an important figure in the history of Hollywood, producer and studio executive John Calley, who died Tuesday at the age of 81.

Now I'm not exactly known for saying nice things about studio executives. In fact, I fear that this might be a first, but Calley was a role model for studio executives who knew how to balance movies as an art that's a business and a business that's an art.

It all goes back to the late 1960s. The whole studio system was in trouble. They were faced with skyrocketing costs, dwindling audiences and were blindly chasing fads and gimmicks in the vain hope of winning those audiences back, but were so slow and clumsy, by the time they caught a fad, or a gimmick the novelty was long dead.

Sound familiar?

One of the companies most seriously hurt by these developments was Warner Bros. Jack Warner, last of the founders, had sold it to the Seven Arts Productions, but they faced the same problems, so they, in turn sold to the Kinney National Company who at that time was known as the owner of parking lots and what would become DC Comics.

Kinney put John Calley in charge in 1969, and that's when everything started to change during what I call Warner's "3 Band-Aid" era, a name I came up with when I was a kid in the late 1970s and first saw their logo.

Calley saw all the problems facing the studios, and came up with a solution. It wasn't fads or big budgets that were going to get people away from the boob tube. The company had to make films that people would see as worth the effort of going to see.

That meant new stories told for the most part by new filmmakers. During his run Warner Bros. enjoyed not only box office success, but critical acclaim with films like The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, and many others. Hollywood entered a creative and commercial golden age that saved the industry.

He left the company in 1980, only to return in 1989 as an independent producer, then he returned to the corner office, first trying to revive MGM with mixed results, but enjoying greater success as head of Sony Pictures, where he is credited for reviving company after the disastrous tenure of Peter Guber and Jon Peters.

His secret then: Make movies the audience thought worth the effort of going out to see.

He ran Sony Pictures until his retirement in 2003, and without him history is repeating itself.

Movie audiences are down, television's besting the big screen in both quality and quantity, and the studios are scrambling to win them back, blowing big money chasing fads like comic book movies, and big FX extravaganzas.

None of the dozens of executives that each studio seems to have remembers the lessons of John Calley's career.

Make films people want to see, start with a good story, add good filmmakers, keep an eye on quality and budget and the rest will take care of itself.

It's not rocket science.

Elisabeth Sladen RIP

Actress Elisabeth Sladen, best known as Sarah Jane Smith, Dr. Who's most definitive companion and star of her own spin-off series has passed away at the age of 63.

Pete Postlethwaite R.I.P.

I hope it's not the sign of a coming trend that my first post of 2011 is to bring this sad news. Actor Pete Postlethwaite passed away at the age of 64 after a long battle with cancer.

He was nominated for an Oscar for his role in the movie In The Name Of The Father where he played an innocent man imprisoned for terrorism by British authorities, and as the enigmatic lawyer Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects. However he really shone as a character actor when he played the villainous, lecherous, and sadistic Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, opposite Sean Bean in the popular Sharpe series.

He was one of the best actors of his generation, and he and his talent will be greatly missed.

The Rule Of Three Strikes Again...

Welcome to the show folks...

I originally planned to take American Thanksgiving day off, because it's usually a slow time for the sort of news I rant and rave about, but then I got sick, and have been wallowing in my own misery since. I'm not fully recovered but I'm well enough to take on the sad duty that fallen on me this evening.

I'm talking about that all encompassing rule of threes where celebrities die in packs of three within a few days of each other, and it's happened again.

INGRID PITT

Became the queen of Hammer Films in the early 1970s, giving new meaning to the term femme fatale, but she was also a holocaust survivor, an escapee from communist East Germany, and a writer.

I remember first seeing her when I caught her first Hammer movie The Vampire Lovers on a pirated pay-TV signal when I was 13. I believe my reaction at the time was "Wow!" However, she was more than just a sex symbol, proving herself a talented actress capable of breathing life in her sometimes undead characters, and the movies she starred in.

She was also the first celebrity I ever communicated with on line. I sort of bumped into her cybernetically back during the glory days of MySpace, and exchanged some polite pleasantries. Very gracious, and classy to fans and, according to reports, colleagues alike.

LESLIE NIELSEN

Spent the first couple of decades of his career playing straight dramatic parts, then at the age of 54 reinventing his image and career as a comedic performer.

He grew up, the son of a Mountie in Western Canada, studied drama, worked in movies like Forbidden Planet, and ended up doing the guest-star rounds in television, playing police detectives, district attorneys, and doctors. No one really considered a comedian.

Then came the film Airplane. It was a wild surrealist comedy, that the filmmakers populated with mostly straight dramatic actors from television. The casting was a joke in itself, presenting these people who usually played somber, sober authority figures acting crazy.

Nielsen and the Airplane crew then went on to do Police Squad, that tried to bring that surrealistic style to television. The show died on the small screen, but went to big-screen heaven with the Naked Gun movie trilogy.

Nielsen was reborn as the king of goofball comedy and a box office star, and even though he had been elevated to the 'A-List,' and had an output that outstripped stars that were decades younger, he still kept working in smaller projects in his native Canada, knowing that his name could help a filmmaker get his film or TV show made.

He will always be remembered as a funny, talented and versatile actor, and will be greatly missed.

IRVIN KERSHNER

I will confess, I used to resent Irvin Kershner. Not for anything he did, but because his most famous film, The Empire Strikes Back, was such a downer.

Spoiler alert for those who have lived in a cave for the last 30 years, the film ended with Han Solo frozen in carbonite, Luke Skywalker getting his hand cut off and finding out his Daddy's an armor plated half-robot sociopath, and the rebellion's on the run after being chased off the froze backwater they had called home.

Now I can appreciate Kershner's courage. He knew the film was going to be hard going for the audience, being the second downbeat part of a trilogy, and fans of the first film would be hyper critical since he was not George Lucas, but he still put together a finely crafted adventure film. He burned real calories making that film the best he could, and give it the dramatic weight it needed when any someone who treated the project as just a hired gun would have just piled on the special effects.

All three made their own unique contributions to popular culture, and all three will be missed.

Dino De Laurentiis RIP

Dino De Laurentiis the prolific producer of 160+ films has passed away at the age of 91.

I think Dino De Laurentiis was the embodiment of the trials, triumphs, troubles and traps that surround an independent film producer. His output ran the gamut from gritty realist dramas like Serpico, the revenge classic Death Wish, thrillers like Manhunter & the offbeat Blue Velvet, cult-horror like Evil Dead 2, as well as purely ridiculous fare like Orca, King Kong Lives and Maximum Overdrive.

It was either feast or famine when it came to critical and/or commercial success. This fact was slammed home when he tried to start his own studio the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group in the 1980s.

The overly complicated financial dealings that are the bread and butter of the major studios were the downfall of DEG, leading it to declare bankruptcy and sell off its library and slate of unreleased films after just two years in business.

With the collapse of DEG, he slowed down from his usually immense output, getting involved with fewer and fewer projects, going into a form of quasi-retirement.

Regardless of what people thought of him, he was the sort of colorful and intriguing character that you don't see very often in Hollywood these days. His combination of hard bargainer, charming salesman, risk-loving gambler, and shameless showman made him the quintessential movie producer.