Movies posts

Its inalienable essence

One of the great takeaways from Sam Wasson's “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood” is just how much Roman Polanski meant to the script. Writing credits are really kind of nuts in Hollywood. People who work on a thing aren't credited, people who don't work on the thing wind up with screenwriting Oscars. According to Wasson, the screenwriter for “Chinatown, Robert Towne, ”secretly employed an old college friend named Edward Taylor as his uncredited writing partner for more than 40 years,“ including on ”Chinatown.“ But their draft went on and on and on. What Towne and Taylor couldn't do is kill their little darlings. That was up to Polanski. 

The new ”Polanski“ draft was focused on its inalienable essence: Jake Gittes. He was in every scene. True to convention, the audience would never know any more or any less than their screen detective but would uncover the mystery as he did, clue by clue.

Additionally Polanski had tossed out Evelyn and Escobar's affair along with their tangential subplot; he cut many of Gittes's lowlife vulgarisms and class consciousness, reviving in their place certain hard-boiled characteristics common to the genre; he removed scenes with Cross's goons and long expositional dialogues between Evelyn and Gittes—strewn confusingly with red herrings and dense conspiratorial fogs right out of The Big Sleep. Where once the character of Byron Samples—also cut completely from the new draft—accompanied Gittes on his investigation of the retirement home, now Evelyn goes with Gittes; the change enhances their complicity, their love story, and leads nicely to bed. In Towne's first drafts, Gittes's motivation is blurred in the smokescreen of twisty misdirects. After Evelyn drops the lawsuit against him, what does the water scandal matter to him personally? In the Polanski rewrite, an answer is offered as an outraged Gittes, in the barbershop, defends the integrity of his profession, an indication that for all his sleazy divorce work, a nobler detective is waiting to emerge. The water mystery is his opportunity to do good—which, in a flourish of chilling irony, he will blunder by hindering rather than helping, near the climax of the Polanski revision. In the original, Evelyn masterminded the showdown with her father; in the Polanski revision, Gittes instigates it, creating a new scene that further demonizes Cross. Rather than tremble and repent when confronted or wither under a narcotic haze, as he did in Towne's early drafts, Cross stands firm and fully justifies his crimes: ”You see, Mr. Gittes,“ he growls in the new scene, ”most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.“

It makes sense that Polanski more than Towne would come up with that line. Polanski grew up Jewish in Nazi-occupied Europe. He knew it firsthand.

”Chinatown" wound up being nominated for 11 Academy Awards. It won one: Towne.

Bad for glass. We're forever behind the detective who's forever behind.

I've seen “Chinatown” about half a dozen times, maybe more. It's the movie I keep returning to these days, as I once kept returning to “The Insider” or “All the President's Men.” Maybe it just resonated more during the Trump era. Forget it, Erik, it's the GOP.

I thought I got it, too. The movie is an updated film noir, except the femme fatale is the victim and the cynical private detective has no idea how awful the world is. Brilliant. I got it.

Then I read this quote from production designer Richard Sylbert in “Hollywood: An Oral History” and realized I wasn't seeing half of “Chinatown”: 

You say to yourself, “Okay, Chinatown is about a drought, so all the colors in this picture are going to be related to the idea of a drought. And the only time you're going to see green is when somebody has water for the grass.” ... All the buildings in this picture will be Spanish except one. And they'll all be white. The reason they're white is that the heat bounces off them. And not only will they all be white, they'll be above the eye level of the private eye. Above eye level means, for the private eye, that he has to walk uphill. It is always harder emotionally to walk uphill. You then decide what the colors are going to be and why they're going to be that way and what the range should be, let's say, from burnt grass, which is a terrific color, to white, which you know you're already going to deal with, to umber. Umber is interesting, because it's the color of a shadow. And in a movie like this, the more shadowy the better. You use the layers, the planes, use everything you can. All these things are available to you to structure a movie. Even opaque glass. You know what's interesting about opaque glass in a mystery? You can't quite see who's behind it, and it looks like frozen water. And in a picture where they're talking about water, it's an interesting object to get involved with. And you just keep doing that wherever you can.

How fucking brilliant is all that? Sylbert also worked on “Splendor in the Grass,” “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “The Graduate,” “Rosemary's Baby,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Shampoo,” “Reds,” “Frances,” “Breathless,” “Dick Tracy,” and “Carlito's Way.” Not a bad CV.

Fun fact: Jimmy Cagney didn't like being called Jimmy. Professionally he was James, his friends called him Jim, but early on Warner Bros. tagged him with the diminutive “Jimmy,” which, in their defense, made him seem like family. He was the kid down the street, your tough little brother, your ne'er-do-well son. Ruffle his hair why don’t you.

This is well-known is you know Cagney. Less talked about: Warners did the exact same thing with his character names. For about 10 years they were, if not diminutives, at least -y or -ie names.

For his big breakthrough he played Tom Powers, but the women in the film often called him Tommy. Then Warners gave him monosyllabic names like Jack, Bert, Matt and Joe. But starting in ’32, they put all their chips on the diminutive, calling him, for his next films, Jimmy, Lefty, Danny, and Patsy. He was Chester Kent for “Footlight Parade” and Dan Quigley for “Lady Killer” but then then they were back with Jimmy, Jerry, Chesty, Eddie and Tommy. As a G-Man, he was Brick, but in “The Irish in Us” he’s Danny again. Even when he broke from Warners for two pictures, he played a Johnny (Cave) and a Terry (Rooney). Once he returned, he played, among others, Rocky (Sullivan), Eddie (Bartlett), Jerry (Plunkett) and Danny (Kenny).

That last one was “City for Conquest,” a big production that went awry, and that was it for Cagney's diminutives. Did he put his foot down? “I'm 40, c'mon, guys.” 

For the last decade of his career, he didn't have much of a choice of character names since he increasingly played real people: James Cagney (a cameo in “Starlift”), Martin “Moe the Gimp” Snyder in “Love Me or Leave Me,” a George M. Cohan reprise in “The Seven Little Foys,” Lon Chaney in “Man of a Thousand Faces,” and Admiral Bill Halsey in “The Gallant Hours.” Even his ballyooed return to movies after 20 years was a non-fiction role: Rhinelander Waldo in “Ragtime.”

I am curious if Warners gave him all the diminutives because it made business sense or because it annoyed him. He was afraid to fly and they kept making him a pilot, too.

In “An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler wrote about the six Jews—most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe—who founded Hollywood. Fun fact: Michael Lerner played half of them. In 1980, he was cast as Jack Warner in “This Year's Blonde,” a TV movie about Marilyn Monroe, and in 1983 he played Harry Cohn in another TV movie, “Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess,” but all of that was mere prep for his great, Oscar-nominated turn as Jack Lipnick, a fictionalized version of Louis B. Mayer, in the Coen Bros.' “Barton Fink” in 1991. Someone—his agent?—should've realized this and helped him get roles as William Fox, Adolph Zucker and Carl Laemle to complete the cycle. Or maybe that's just the completist in me talking. But has any actor done all six? Lerner totally could've done it. To be honest, the biggest reach was the moustachioed Warner, and Lerner nailed that one first.

Oh, and if anyone thinks Lipnick shouldn't count as Louis B. Mayer, Lerner also played Mayer in a 2022 Russian film “Pervyy Oskar,” about the first film to win the Academy Award for best documentary. Per the Times, he was working on a biopic of the man as well. 

Lerner was in my life for a while. I was looking over his 183 credits and seeing familiar shows I probably watched in the 1970s: “The Odd Couple,” “Lucas Tanner,” “Rhoda,” “Wonder Woman.” Then I caught a few that I knew I'd watched. Lerner played Pierre Salinger in that mindfuck of a TV movie (when you're 10) about the near-death of the world, “The Missiles of October”; and maybe more importantly, he played the Japan-loving Capt. Futterman in that classic season 2 episode of “M*A*S*H,” “For Want of a Boot.” Futterman is one of the many links in a chain that Hawkeye builds so carefully, with each quid pro quo, so he can get a pair of non-leaking boots, only to see it all fall apart in the end. 

Related to the original Hollywood moguls mentioned above, Lerner also played his share of Jewish gangsters: notably Arnold Rothstein in John Sayles' “Eight Men Out,” the man who played with the faith of 50 million. 

Rest in peace. 

Sweet Raquel.

Isn't that what Red called her in “Shawshank Redemption”? In that great Morgan Freeman voice? She was the one on the wall when Andy Dufresne made his break. It might've been her most famous movie role. 

None of Andy's three pinups, by the way, were known by their birth names: 

• Rita Hayworth, née Margarita Carmen Cansino
• Marilyn Monroe, née Norma Jeane Mortenson
• Raquel Welch, née Jo-Raquel Tejada

Marilyn went alliterative, while the ethnicity of the two Latinas was covered up. Which was the style at the time. 

Raquel was the big sex symbol when I was growing up in the 1970s—a one-named wonder—but I probably saw her more on variety or talk shows, or in jokes from hosts of variety or talk shows. She was the butt of a lot of jokes. One name, two assets. She was never a crush for me, though. My crushes were TV, initially: Ginger and Mary Ann; Farrah and Cheryl; Lindsay. The hips are what stun me now. She was curvy all the way around.

The first movie I saw her in was “Fantastic Voyage.” I'd read the book by Isaac Asimov in my teenage sci-fi phase and saw the movie ... in school? On television? I was disappointed. Special effects could not yet replicate what our imaginations could. Some wag said she was the best special effect in the movie. Was that her first substantial role? Before then, on IMDb, it's “Stewardess” and “Woman in Lobby” and “Miss France.” One of the many starlets in the room. For “Voyage,” she was a scientist, Cora, second-billed, and suited up for the journey like everyone else. The bikinis, fur or otherwise, came later. The poster for “One Million Years B.C.,” more than the movie, broke her. Both ways?

What was the second movie I saw her in? Probably “Bedazzled” in my 20s. She played Lilian Lust, the Devil's ultimate temptress. A lot of her roles were like that—jokes about the feelings she evoked: Lust, Jugs, Priestess With a Whip. Even being cast as “Myra Breckenridge,” Gore Vidal's transgender hero, was a 70s-era joke. That was once a man? Get outta town. So many of her starring roles were in middling '60s heist movies, or cop movies, or westerns. They were backward-looking rather than nouvelle vague. She trusted the old hands. 

I vaguely remember the ads for “Kansas City Bomber,” but not sure why. Because she looked great? Because it was a movie I maybe wanted to see but never saw? Then she did the “Musketeers” movies, to acclaim, and Stephen Sondheim's “Last of Sheila,” and my friend Stephen Manes' “Mother, Jugs and Speed” with Bill Cosby and Harvey Keitel. By then she was mid-30s and her bedmate in “Myra”—Farrah—was the sex symbol. Raquel played off her rep in “Mork & Mindy” and appeared in Playboy, then did the strong-woman TV movie thing, “The Legend of Far Walks Woman,” and that was it. She was gone. She barely made anything in the 1980s. Her daughter, Tahnee, was the Welch of the decade. In the '90s, she again played off her rep on sitcoms, “Seinfeld” most memorably, getting into a catfight with Elaine. In the '00s, post-J-Lo, she was finally allowed to play Latina in supporting roles in “Tortilla Soup” and “American Family.”

What might've happened if she'd been allowed to keep her name and ethnicity throughout her career? Or if musicals were a thing at the time? (She wanted to be a song-and-dance woman.) Or if she wasn't the big sex symbol when terms like objectification were entering the cultural vernacular? Maybe the same. Look at J-Lo. It's tough to make the right choices once you have choices.

Much muchness has left the earth. Rest in peace.

I’ve only seen a handful of her movies and not the better-known ones. Looking over her IMDb page, I guess it’s just “The Law” (1959) and “Beat the Devil” (1953) rather than, say, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1956) with Anthony Quinn and “Solomon and Sheba” (1959) with Yul Brynner. But she does leave an impression. Oof. Both sexy and lovely. Her figure almost gets in the way of how beautiful she is. Co-star and onscreen husband in “Beat the Devil,” Humphrey Bogart, put it well. He said she was “the most woman I’ve seen for a long time—makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.” In 1955, she starred in “La donna più bella del mondo,” which 20th Century Fox redubbed “Beautiful But Dangerous,” but the exact translation is more apt: The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

Then there’s that name. You couldn’t come up with a name that sounded more like a sex symbol. In fact, that may be where I first came across her: spoofed as Lollobrickida on “The Flintstones” and Gina Lollo Jupiter on “The Jetsons.”

She won three Donatellos for best actress—“La donna più bella del mondo” (1955), “Venere imperiale” (1963), and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” (1969)—and was nominated for a BAFTA for “Pane, amore e fantasia” (1955), but no Oscar noms. I guess the Academy couldn’t get past the name or the figure. She left the movies in the early 1970s, became a photo-journalist, interviewed Fidel Castro, returned to acting for “Falcon Crest” in the mid-1980s, ran for political office in the mid-1990s, lost. Apparently she lost a lot of her money along the way, too. Helluva life.

The most beautiful woman in the world. She was 95.

No directing credits is the idiocy. Adding that he's known for playing Cecil B. DeMille in “Sunset Blvd.” is the chef's kiss.

For once, IMDb's “Known For” algorithm gets it right. Mostly...

Yes, yes, yes ... huh? 

Of all the movies Wilder made with Richard Pryor, that one? I actually saw “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” in a theater, possibly the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis, on a sad day in 1989. It was a sad day because I saw “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” and experienced the fall of a great comic duo. Other critics felt the same. It's got a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert dismissed it sadly: “The possibilities for visual comedy with this idea are seemingly endless, but the movie chooses instead to plug the characters into a dumb plot about industrial espionage.”

So why is it fourth on the IMDb Wilder list rather than better Wilder-Pryor teamups like “Stir Crazy” or “Silver Streak”? Maybe because IMDb's users rate it about the same:

Now that's depressing. They've also voted on it twice as much. Because it streamed somewhere and the others didn't? And masses of doofuses descended on IMDb to show their approval? But that wouldn't explain why the others are rated so low. I'd think both “Silver Streak” and “Stir Crazy” would be low to mid 7s. Are they really not that good? Were we wrong back then?

Oddly, on Richard Pryor's IMDb page, he's “known for” “Silver Streak” more than “See No Evil,” which are Nos. 3 and 4 on his list. Nos. 1 and 2? “Superman III” and “Bustin' Loose.” Another sigh.

And, as my brother reminded me, where the hell is “Blazing Saddles” for Wilder?

No, not for one of the most famous screen incarnations of all time. Of course not. Why would he be?

Some might be mollified by the 1935 sequel up there in first place but not me. And that's knowing what I know. I know Karloff isn't known for “Frankenstein” per IMDb's algorithm because he wasn't the star of it. He was fourth-billed. Colin Clive was the nominal star, and, yes, per IMDb, he's known for Frankenstein. It's No. 1 for him. Ditto Mae Clarke as Elizabeth, Edward van Sloan as Dr. Wadman, and John Boles as Victor Moritz. They're all known for “Frankenstein” but the guy who played Frankenstein's Monster is not known for Frankenstein because he didn't star in it. He starred in other things afterwards because this movie made him a star. It made him known. And that's why he's not known for it.

See the cat? See the cradle?

This is the thing IMDb needs to fix. One of the things. You're missing the overall, as Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward.

How much is IMDb/Amazon warping our history? Here's D.W. Griffith's Wikipedia page, second graf. I mean it says it right there:

Griffith is known to modern audiences primarily for directing the film The Birth of a Nation (1915). One of the most financially successful films of all time, it made investors enormous profits, but it also attracted much controversy for its degrading portrayals of African Americans, its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, and its racist viewpoint.

Here's an obit from 1948:

Here's a comparison of these four films using IMDb's own stats:

In terms of engagement/interest, “Birth” trumps everything. I mean, I'd go in this order: “Birth,” “Intolerance,” “Broken Blossoms,” and then maybe “Abraham Lincoln”? I'll leave the last one to true film historians or Griffith scholars. But “The Mother and the Law”? Which is simply a portion of “Intolerance” released three years later? Putting that ahead of “Birth of a Nation”? I'm intolerant of that. 

Yes, it's not as bad as IMDb's “Known For” for Thomas Dixon, but it's not good. I'm almost getting the feeling IMDb doesn't take its role as the repostiory of our online movie information very seriously.

Question: Why, before I ever saw “Goodfellas,” did I think Paul Sorvino was not right for mob boss Paul Cicero? I mean, I guess I know why. I thought he was too nice. I didn't think he was scary enough. But where did this idea come from? How did I know him? I'm looking over his credits on IMDb and wondering what I ever saw him in as a kid. “Day of the Dolphin”? Just that?

I wouldn't be surprised if it was through commercials. Not like ads for dishwashing detergent or whatever, but commercials for the shows he was on: the Alan Alda-created “We'll Get By,” in which he played a suburban dad and a husband, and which lasted 13 episodes in the summer of '75; and “Bert D'Angelo, Superstar,” in which he played the titular maverick cop, and which lasted 11 episodes in '76. I never watched either but maybe some of it seeped in. Maybe some part of me thought “Bert D'Angelo, superstar, as a mob boss? Whatever, Marty.” 

Of course he was great in “Goodfellas”: calm, understated, handy with a razor blade and a piece of garlic. I assume he's closer to the real thing than, say, Brando in “The Godfather.” Don Corleone is what mob guys imagine themselves to be; Paul Cicero is closer to what they are. And even then...

When news broke of his death on Monday at age 83, one thing that was passed around on social media, which I loved seeing, was video from when his daughter Mira won the Oscar for “Mighty Aphrodite:”  how she thanked her family, and her parents, and her father “who has taught me everything I know about acting”; and how he, in the audience, already tearing up, just crumpled. Reminds of a series of photographs from, I believe, Life magazine from like the 1940s or '50s: another burly Italian father, walking down the aisle at his daughter's wedding, about to give her away, and breaking down with each step. 

We're losing all of our cinematic mob guys all of a sudden: Liotta, Caan, Sorvino. It's like last fall when we kept losing 60-something standup comedians. It's like we're in the middle of a mob war.

Zack Snyder is the Donald Trump of moviedom. Everything about him is horrible but somehow he has legions of rabid fans demanding more horribleness and attacking anyone who gets in the way. Snyder doesn't destroy lives the way Trump does, he just destroys culture. Twice I picked films he directed as the worst movie of the year (“Sucker Punch” in 2011, “Batman v. Superman” in 2016), and it was just the two because I wasn't making “worst of” lists in 2009 (for “Watchmen”) and 2007 (for “300”).

He so botched the much-anticipated “Justice League” movie that Warners took it away from him and gave it to “Avengers” director Joss Whedon to finish. He did more than finish it, he kind of remade it, and it was a bit oil and water (OK, it was very oil and water), but my immediate thought was, “Well, it's better than 'Batman v. Superman.'” Anyway, that seemed the end of it. 

In another time, it would've been. 

In our awful time, we kept hearing from Snyder's legions of fans. They showed up on social media, hashtag-ready, demanding a #ReleaseOfTheSnyderCut, and incessently attacking anyone who disagreed. Apparently they threatened people. Apparently they threatened lives.

Eventually it worked. Warners gave Snyder the money ($100 million?) to finish his version of “Justice League,” it premiered on HBO last year, four hours long, and with his name at the top of the title. He got top billing: “Zack Snyder's Justice League.” But it was considered better than the oil-and-water-version: 71% to 39% via Roten Tomatoes.

Except now Rolling Stone has just published an investigative piece indicating that the Zackbrats, the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut cult, might not have been as organic as it claimed. Snyder might have orchestrated it. With bots.

I wish I could tell you more about it but the article is under a pay wall. Good for them. I mean, I'd pay for the article, or even a physical copy of the magazine if I knew where to buy one, but I don't need another subscription. I'm inundanted as is.

So I'm relying on a website called slashfilm that has summed it up. Some key lines:

The article by Tatiana Siegel (with additional reporting from Adam Rawnsley) reveals that Warner Bros. was so suspicious of the “organic” fan movement that was somehow coordinated with military precision that they hired outside cyber security firms to investigate their legitimacy and found that at least 13% of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut warriors were bots or fake accounts. Rolling Stone also consulted with social media tracking firms and they came to the same conclusion: not all the Snyder Cut accounts were fake, but there are a whole lot more fake accounts than is standard for this kind of movement. (Daily active spam accounts on Twitter usually track at around 5%, for comparison.)

Zack doesn't come off well. With each attack, he'd claim ignorance, inability to control fans, etc., but, as slashfilm writes:

It just so happens they're always mad at the exact people who stood in his way between “Batman V Superman” and the release of the Zack Snyder Cut of “Justice League.” These are executives who nobody knew before this movement yet everybody sure seemed to know to target at the same time.

Apparently some Snyder cultists still want him to return to the DCEU and fix everything, or “300”-ize everything, but that ship might've sailed. He's over at Netflix now—which is having its own problems, of course. He made an “Army of the Dead” movie (67%), which is appropriate, and has been announced as the director of another adaptation of Ayn Rand's “The Fountainhead,” which is even more appropriate. It's two of my least-favorite things in one package. Can a reboot of “Triumph of the Will” be far behind? 

Here's Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in 1942 in “Now, Voyager”:

A quarter-century later, Barry Manilow would prove him right. Kinda. There's certainly an ear-worm in the word. But Manilow's song only rose to No. 8 on the U.S. charts? Damn, it sure as hell played enough back then for a No. 1.

In mid-1970s, leading man form.

This is how much of a prude I was as a kid. I watched “Brian’s Song,” about the friendship between Chicago Bears running backs Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, and the death of the latter from cancer at age 26, when it premiered on television in November 1971. I was just 8, which is what, second grade? I think this was my intro to football, in fact. I wasn’t a fan yet and became one shortly thereafter. The movie, of course, wrecked me and my entire generation of boys. We were still living in insensitive times, when boys weren’t supposed to cry, when they were mocked for doing so; but if some kid said he never cried we’d go “What about ‘Brian’s Song’?” and he’d usually admit, “Yeah, OK, ‘Brian’s Song,’ sure. Who didn’t?” I still can’t hear the theme music without something stirring. For that role, James Caan was basically the patron saint of our generation: the full-of-life dude that died way too young.

Which explains my prudeness: how I was disappointed in Caan when I saw he was starring in a movie called “Rollerball” that was actually Rated R.

To the world he’ll forever be known as Sonny Corleone, the hothead brother and heir apparent to the Godfather throne, but he almost didn’t get the role. For the past few weeks I’ve been reading “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli,” about the making of “The Godfather,” and while I knew there were disagreements on casting, I didn’t know how bad it got. Paramount and its president, Robert Evans, initially said they should go with unknowns and a smaller budget (because mob movies didn’t make money), then switched and said, “Hey, how about Robert Redford? How about Ryan O’Neal? Dustin Hoffman?” All were considered for Michael. Yeah, Michael. Director Francis Ford Coppola, meanwhile, had this idea from the get-go:

• Brando
• Pacino
• Caan
• Duvall

John Cazale was found off-Broadway.

Anyway, the studio didn’t want who he wanted, and eventually they spent nearly half a mil on screen tests to prove him wrong. Evans didn’t want Pacino in particular, who was an unknown and whom Evans dismissed as a shrimp, and so for a time Caan was tapped to play Michael rather than Sonny. But at the 11th hour, Coppola got his way and the rest is cinematic history. Pacino became a star, Caan became a star. He makes no sense as a Sicilian but we tend to gloss over that because he’s so good: angry, personable, fun, bada-beep bada-boop.

He was a man’s man who cut quite a figure with the ladies. In his heyday, he was broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, light on his toes, with a tick-tock walk and a look that often said, “Why the hell are you talking to me?” without heat. The other night we rewatched Michael Mann’s “Thief,” that ultimate Mann (and man) movie, and Caan in his early 40s looks fantastic: trim and handsome, quiet and sharp. (The New York Times obit says he plays a “not-too-bright ex-con” in the film, which is a not-too-bright description.) 

I haven’t seen many of his other ’70s flicks and hope to rectify that soon, but I remember him always there as I was growing up. And then he was gone. I assumed he took a break after a long period of starring roles—like Will Smith from 2008-2012—or maybe he just didn't like the way they were making movies in the early-to-mid-80s as opposed to the auteur '70s; but it was actually a bad cocaine habit. He didn’t make a movie for five years, wound up in debt, and when he returned, in Coppola’s “Gardens of Stone” in 1987, he looked much older. He was a young 41 and an old 47. I remember the ballyhoo about the return, and I went to the movie hoping for greatness. Has anyone seen it recently? Is it anything? Then “Alien Nation,” which I missed, and “Misery,” which I also missed.

I kept missing his movies—even the popular ones: “For the Boys,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “Mickey Blue Eyes.” The one Wes Anderson movie I’ve never seen is the one he’s in. I’ll have to rectify that. How many times did he play off the mob role? Or the tough-guy persona? That’s part of the joy of “Elf”: that man, that face, having to deal with batshit Santa stuff.

“I’ve been accused [of being a mob guy] so many times,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I won ‘Italian of the Year’ twice in New York.”

He was Jewish, of course. He grew up in the Bronx, where his father was a kosher meat wholesaler. He hung around tough guys. He played football but he didn’t make the cut at Michigan State. Football’s loss was acting’s gain.

The Times obit says he improvised the bada bing part in this famous “Godfather” quote: “You gotta get up like this and—bada bing!—you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.”

I’ll also remember him for a line he didn’t speak but is spoken about him: 

Brian Piccolo is sick, very sick…

Rest in peace.

What is Paul McCartney known for, according to IMDb?

• Yes
• No
• Yes
• No

Thanks for coming. 

Why “Vanilla Sky” by the way? Because Paul did the title song. 

What could go in place of “Vanilla Sky”? I don't know. “Help!” maybe? “Let It Be”? The new “Get Back”? How about “Live and Let Die”? He did the title track to that one, too, and the song was a top 10 hit in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. “Vanilla Sky”? It went to No. 62 in Japan. That's it. Charted nowhere else. Nowhere. Else.

Happy 80th, Paul.