Movies posts

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.

I was reading an entertainment magazine about the new big summer franchise movie starring Ed Norton. It was ... no. Except he didn't see it as a sequel. And it wasn't a sequel. It was just a big movie starring Norton and directed by the same director of that summer franchise movie. They were being reteamed for the first time. In fact, they'd already made the sequel to the franchise movie with a different director, and Norton implied he thought it was better with a different director, and kinda sorta disparaged this new movie. but I was thinking the opposite. I liked the new movie better than the sequel to the summer blockbuster.

I was reading all of this in a small movie room—one of many. They were like the old MTVs of 1980s Taipei, with framed posters and pictures of movie stars on the wall. One room was dedicated to Heath Ledger. The girl who ran it got weepy at the thought of him.

Here we go again. 

So what is Thomas Dixon Jr. known for?

If you ask that of most people, they’d go “Who?” But if you ask that of someone who knows a little something of film history, not to mention racial history, they might say, “Isn’t that the guy who wrote the book that became ‘The Birth of a Nation’?" 

Yes. In 1905, Thomas E. Dixon Jr., a lawyer-minister, published a celebratory novel of the Ku Klux Klan called “The Clansman,” which D.W. Griffith adapted into the 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation,” one of the most innovative and controversial films of all time. It was screened at the White House and Pres. Woodrow Wilson called it history written with lightning. It expanded the boundaries of what filmmakers could do. It also helped resurrect the Klan in the 20th century, leading to untold death and misery. When Dixon died in 1946, the headline of his obit in The New York Times read: THOMAS DIXON DIES; WROTE ‘CLANSMAN.’ It is what Thomas Dixon was, and is, known for.

Except, of course, on IMDb.

Because apparently a day hasn’t gone by when we all haven’t argued about the legacy of “The Mark of the Beast.”

So how do the other movies rate ahead of “Birth of a Nation”? According to IMDb, the algorithm that compiles its “Known For” titles weights various factors in a filmmaker’s career, including:

1. The importance of the job (director > production assistant)
2. The frequency of the credit (if you’re mostly a writer, writing credits matter more)
3. The type of title (movies > TV shows)
4. The popularity of a title (based on page views/awards/user ratings, etc.)
5. The importance of the credit (starring > supporting)

I assume it's those first and fifth factors that are screwing up Dixon's result, since he directed “Mark of the Beast” and “Fall of a Nation.” He also produced “Beast.” It’s his one production credit. So he wrote, produced and directed “Mark of the Beast.” So, by the algorithm’s logic, it must be important. Meanwhile, “Birth,” directed by D.W. Griffith, was only adapted from Dixon’s novel. He didn’t even get the screenplay credit for it. So, per 5) above, it takes a ding.

You know which of the five isn’t weighted enough? That fourth one. I think IMDb is ignoring its own data. Here are the numbers for those top “known for” credits for Dixon that indicate user and cultural engagement:

* I.e., references in other movies and TV shows

I mean: Holy fuck. 

And here’s what makes it all worse. The three movies ahead of “Birth”? They don’t exist. There are no extant copies of “Beast” and “Fall.” As for “Gods of the Machine”—you notice there’s no date on it? That’s because it was never made. It’s classified as “in development,” from someone named Matthew Collins, who made one short film called “War!” in 2014, and who supposedly based his characters for “Gods” on some of Dixon’s characters. That’s why Dixon gets a credit. Because some guy who made one short film in 2014 said his new movie includes Dixon’s characters. So when are we going to see this epic? Who knows? It was last updated five years ago: April 3, 2017. I doubt it will ever be made 

Yet somehow, according to our preeminent film site, Thomas Dixon is known for this non-existent movie more than he’s known for one of the most famous movies of all time.

What a fucking joke, IMDb.

I first saw him in “Something Wild” as the ex-con hubbie of Melanie Griffith and he scared the shit out of me. I next saw him in “Field of Dreams” as the heavenly “Shoeless” Joe Jackson playing baseball in the Iowa cornfields, and he scared the shit out of me. Then it was “Goodfellas,” playing lead character and narrator Henry Hill, a kid from the neighborhood who becomes a wise guy, rats, and has to live out the rest of his life in suburbia “like a schnook,” and it was Joe Pesci who scared the shit out of me. That was one of the things that amazed me about that film—that Ray Liotta didn't scare the shit out of me. Of the wiseguys, he was the nice one.

He didn't get an Oscar nomination for “Goodfellas”—he was never nominated, in fact—but Pesci did, and won, and his career took off. Liotta? I'm looking at his IMDb page right now and the early '90s are full lof lead roles in forgetful movies. In “Article 99” he plays a compassionate doctor working with vets. In “Unlawful Entry” he plays a creepy cop obsessed with Madeleine Stowe. In “No Escape” he plays an Army captain convicted of murder and sent to a hellish prison. In “Corrina, Corrina,” he plays a 1959 widower who hires Whoopi Goldberg as a nanny. In “Operation Dumbo Drop,” he plays an Army captain who delivers an elephant to a Vietnamese village. I didn't see any of these movies. I doubt many people did. 

I saw “Copland,” with Stallone, but... Apparently he was on a killer good episode of “Just Shoot Me,” playing a Christmas-obsessed Ray Liotta. Then bits and pieces in other people's movies: “Blow,” “John Q,” “Bee Movie,” “Observe and Report,” “Sin City 2,” “Kill the Messenger.” Sometimes he popped, sometimes he didn't. He did for me in “Marriage Story,” as the 40th-floor attorney who is too cutthroat for Adam Driver until his own nice-guy lawyer, Alan Alda, gets burned. Then Driver says, “I need my own asshole.” Cut to Liotta. He should've played these roles more: fierce guys who cut through the shit. 

He puffed out in his later years and his piercing eyes seemed smaller in his head, but when he was young he was beautiful. Apparently he died in his sleep in the Dominican Republic filming another movie. “And now it's all over,” as Henry Hill said. Just 67. Another guy in his 60s.

Last night, in honor, Patricia and I watched “Goodfellas” again. It's one of the great movies, with one of the great endings, with one of the great examples of nonstop movie narration. It will live as long as people care about movies.

IMDb's problematic “Known For” algorithm is back, and this time it's a quiz!

Can you guess who this actor is?

Here's a hint: I associate him with none of these movies. But I do associate him with several fairly popular films from the 1980s. Am I wrong? Is the algorithm? Here are some of the factors that “may” (IMDb's word) count toward “Known For” designations.

The job performed on the title (a credit as director will have more weight than a credit as production assistant).

Our mystery guest is mostly an actor: 97 credits. He's directed two things. He's produced six. The above are all for acting.

The frequency of credits for a particular job in the context of the person's filmography (writing credits may have more weight for someone who is more frequently credited as a writer than as a producer).

Actor. See above. So far it's working.

The type of title (a credit for a theatrical feature has a different weight than a credit for a short film or a TV series).

Our mystery guest did have a semi-popular TV series in the 2000s but that didn't make the cut. But I associate him more with that series than with any of the above. Problems appearing.

The popularity of the title (this takes into consideration the number of hits/page views, the average user rating, any awards won by the title and several other indicators).

OK, this is where it starts getting crazy. Obviously “Dark Knight” is a popular title, and maybe “Foxcatcher” a little. But the other two? Not at all. And the movies that are missing? The ones I associate him with? More so. Here's how each of these movies rank, in terms of this guy's overall filmography, compared with the movies I associate him with:

“Dark Knight” aside, most of my movies trump the “Known For” movies by IMDb's own criteria. 

The relative importance of the credit among similar ones for the same title (for example an acting credit for someone who received top billing will weigh more than an acting credit for a cameo appearance).

And here's where it gets crazier. Along with his credit placement, per IMDb, I've included whether or not he's on the movie's main poster. 

In every one of the movies I associate him with, he's either a lead or supporting. And his credit in “Movie 2” is misleading. He's one of the six leads in it. He just gets sixth billing. 

Ready to find out who the dude is? Here are the movies I've hidden until now:

Yes, it's Anthony Michael Hall. 

And when you think Anthony Michael Hall, of course you think “Live By Night.” And “Dark Knight.” And “War Machine.” Doesn't everyone? 

I mean, that's gotta be one fucked-up algorithm.

Here's the thing, though. While researching the above, I came across this beauty of a caveat on IMDb's explanation page for its “Known For” algorithm:

Since this is an entirely mathematical approach, some of our Known For choices may occasionally not be the best or most representative ones - if you're an active IMDbPro member, you may select your Known For titles. (italics mine)

Holy hell. So did A.M. Hall choose these films for himself? How does one know? Shouldn't there be a proviso stating so? If he did, there isn't. If he didn't, my original thought stands: that's one fucked-up algorithm.

Hurt in “Broadcast News”: the devil then, benign now.

He kind of leapt right into it, didn't he? At least on the screen, there wasn't a lot of dues-paying. He did a couple of episodes of “Kojak” in '77, then a mini-series and another guest spot; and then it was “Altered States” (boom),  and “Body Heat” and “Eyewitness” (boom boom). Now he was a star. He had a helluva run: “Big Chill,” “Gorky Park,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (Oscar), “Children of a Lesser God” (Oscar nom), and “Broadcast News” (nom). That was followed by “Accidental Tourst” and Woody Allen's “Alice.” And when the '80s ended, his star turn kinda did, too.

Oh sure, he did one of those privileged-men-brought-low movies of 1991, “The Doctor,” to go with Harrison Ford's “Regarding Henry,” which blah, and “Until the End of the World,” which was huh, and then he an I lost touch. We caught up with “Smoke” in 1995, which was mostly Harvey Keitel, and “One True Thing” in 1998, which was mostly Meryl Streep and Renee Zellwegger. A few years later he got another Oscar nom, this time in supporting, for playing a crime boss in “A History of Violence.” He kept veering away from the white-collar WASP roles that made him famous. Beginning in 2008, he began playing Gen. “Thunderbolt” Ross in the Marvel movies.

This is the wrong place to say it but I never quite got him. Women said he was good-looking and sexy but I never saw it or felt it. His screen personality just didn't jibe with me. It was like his characters were annoyed with things beyond the scope of the movie and maybe I felt he was annoyed with me. In real life, he came from a privileged background and maybe I felt that, too. He was just too blonde for me, and not in the e.e. cumming way. On the other hand, I thought he was great in “Broadcast News” as the shallow anchorman who would dumb us down bit by bit and ruin America. Now, of course, in the wake of Fox News and Facebook, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, his character seems benign. You watch it and go, “Those were the days, my friend.”

Here's a nice tribute from Mark Harris:

He was only 71. More here. Rest in peace.

Dave Itzkoff: Have you rewatched the film recently?
Al Pacino: No. I might have seen it two, three years ago. It's the kind of movie when you start watching it, you keep watching it.
— from “The Godfather at 50: 'It's Taken Me a Lifetime to Accept It and Move On,'” in The New York Times

Truer words. I remember renting it in the mid-90s, on VHS from Video Isle, a great little video store about a block from where I lived in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. I think I'd seen the movie once or twice at that point, liked it enough, but this is the moment where I fell. Sunday evening, getting ready to return it, I rewound the tape, and then felt this tingle, this urge. “I'll just rewatch the opening, the 'I believe in America,' and the pullback to Brando. OK, just the wedding. Oh man, Tom in Hollywood. And the Turk. And Brando's shot. Michael at the hospital. 'You know my father? Men are coming to kill him. Now help me, please.' Looking at his unshaking hands. Then the pull in to Michael taking over.”

Readers, I rewatched the whole thing.

I haven't rewatched it in the last few years. Maybe it's too ingrained? There's not a lot left where I go, “Oh yeah, this.” But if I did start watching it, I'd keep watching it. Pacino's right. It's that kind of movie. 

Yesterday, Francis Ford Coppola was trending on Twitter because of a good GQ article on him 50 years after directing “The Godfather.” I like this quote:

“There used to be studio films. Now there are Marvel pictures. And what is a Marvel picture? A Marvel picture is one prototype movie that is made over and over and over and over and over again to look different. Even the talented people—you could take Dune, made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take No Time to Die, directed by ... Cary Fukunaga, extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together. The same sequence where the cars all crash into each other. They all have that stuff in it. And they almost have to have it if they're going to justify their budget. And that's the good films, and the talented filmmakers.”

Well, I don't know if “No Time to Die” is good, exactly. I thought the opposite. 

Anyway, it lead me to IMDb and ... oops, they did it again:

That producer fixation. Not a directing credit in the bunch. I wound up tweeting the below to the amusement of half a dozen:

Me: So what's Francis Ford Coppola known for again?
IMDb: Oh, he's a great producer! He produced “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation” and “The Godfather Part II.”
Me: That's impressive. Did he do anything else?
IMDb: Yes. He got thanks in “The Godfather”!
Me: Thanks? For what?
IMDb: Just ... thanks.
Me: Much clearer now.

Seriously, that “Thanks” is the chef's kiss of IMDb idiocy. Give me a year and I could never have come up with something as assanine as saying Francis Ford Coppola is known for—not directing “The Godfather,” one of the greatest movies ever made, but receiving thanks for ... what was it again? ... oh, its 2007 restoration. And yet IMDb's “Known For” algorithm found this without any effort at all. Ping! There it was. And to the algorithm's credit, Coppola does have more “Thanks” credits (43) than “Director” credits (37), so, really, at the end of the day, isn't that what he should be “known for”?

Someday I'll stop this. Just not yet. Just not yet.

Watched “The Great Ziegfeld” for the first time a few days back (review up soon) and in the Ziegfeld Follies heyday we got a shot of this marquee. 

My thoughts went:

• Will Rogers was a cantor?
• Will Rogers was Jewish?

Pause.

Pause.

• Ohhhhh, Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers.

Both men are played by actors, or impersonators, and both aren't bad: Buddy Doyle is Cantor, singing “If You Knew Susie” (unfortunately in blackface) while A.A. Trimble, a Midwest salesman, plays Rogers backstage, talkin' homespun and doing rope tricks. Fanny Brice, another Follies favorite, plays herself. Yet another Follies favorite, Bert Williams, is only namechecked. I guess they figured Cantor's black face was enough. 

The movie is, at three hours, way too long, and too hokey, but it won an undeserved best picture.

“Big Nurse ain't so bad, right?”

Apparently China has broken the first, second and third rules of “Fight Club”: It's gotten everyone talking about “Fight Club.”

In case you haven't heard: It was recently discovered that on a Chinese streaming service, Tencent, the ending to the dystopic, cultish 1999 Brad Pitt-Ed Norton movie has been changed/censored. Instead of the Narrator (Norton) realizing that Tyler (Pitt) is a figment of his imagination, and he and the girl, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), watching the tall financial buildings around them blowing up and imploding like a precursor to 9/11, we get a title card with the following revision:

“Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to [a] lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”

You'd think a movie about the decadence and economic disparity of the west would fit the Communist Chinese narrative, but apparently not. Also, whoever wrote the above didn't seem to know that Tyler didn't really exist. Also, they didn't have it copy-edited by a native speaker, since they make the classic ESL mistake of leaving out the indefinite article. They play into the stereotype.

Anyway, the whole thing makes me wonder how China might change the ending to other classic Hollywood movies.

The Godfather
Kay went to police and all the Corleone family was arrested. She remained loyal to Michael, and visited him, and he promised to go straight. He was discharged from prison in 1977 and returned to making a living in the olive oil import-export business. Fredo became a successful manager in Las Vegas. Connie remarried to a nice man.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy was only faking the lobotomy and he was fine. Then he and Bromden realized that Big Nurse was strict but big-hearted and they decided to behave themselves for the good of society. They were discharged from the hospital in 1981.

Chinatown
Noah Cross convinced Jake that the irrigation project was a glorious project that will bring many benefits to the people. Katherine is his granddaughter and Evelyn misspoke before. They were all happy to be together. When Jake suggested getting an American meal, Noah told him, “Forget it, Jake, let's go to Chinatown.”

Alright, this kind of thing isn't my forte, but, in my defense, the whole thing seems beyond satire. Joseph Breen had nothing on these guys.

Peter Bogdanovich died last week at age 82. Here are some of the headlines:

• CNN: Peter Bogdanovich, the Oscar-nominated director of 'The Last Picture Show,' dead at 82
• The New York Times: Peter Bogdanovich, 82, Director Whose Career Was a Hollywood Drama, Dies
• Variety: Ellen Burstyn Remembers 'Last Picture Show' Director Peter Bogdanovich: 'He Loved and Understood Film Better Than Anyone'

Director, director, director. And here's what he's “known for” according to the algorithms of IMDb:

One out of four. Given IMDb's known-for history, I suppose we'll take it. 

Tech geeks are kind of screwing up the knowledge of the world, aren't they? “Since Peter Bogdanovich has more acting credits, he's mostly an actor. Since Steven Spielberg has more producing credits, he's mostly a producer. That's what they're known for.” 

Children.

A dream from the other night.

I had just finished a writing project, needed to do more, but wanted to clear my head so I went for a bike ride. Mid-ride I thought I’d pop in over to Mark Hamill’s house. We were friends—kind of. We’d just done something together earlier that day. Even as I was riding over there, though, I was thinking, “Does this pop-in make sense? Who does pop-ins anymore? And I don’t really know him that well.” But my momentum kept me going. I knew it was a bad idea but I kept moving forward. His house was a big house like the Ollermans near Lake Harriet, I rang the doorbell and came inside. There was a distinguished older man wearing a suit and standing just off the doorway in a book-lined den. He asked me what I wanted and I asked if Mark was home. He hesitated, and—figuring Mark had a lot of fans showing up unbidden and unwanted—I said, “We’re friends. I’m Erik. We just went to …” and then mentioned the place we’d been to earlier that day. He nodded and called for Mark.

Mark and I were in our twenties. He wasn’t happy to see me.

Me: Hey, sorry for popping in like this.
He: Uh huh.
Me: I was just writing and needed a break.
He: Uh huh.
Me: Probably wasn’t a good idea.
He: Uh huh.
Me: I … should probably just go, right?
He: Uh huh.

Then I was outside, walking down the stairs to my bike, chastising myself. I had known it was a bad idea. Why had I kept going? I picked up my bike and tried to find the bike path again. There was a public bike path that wound through their backyard but it seemed one way. Everyone was going around the big house and that wasn’t the way I wanted to go. But it’s the way I wound up going.

According to “Belafonte’s Balancing Act,” an essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that appeared in The New Yorker in 1996, when Harry Belafonte joined the American Negro Theater in Harlem in the late 1940s he met another aspiring young actor, originally from Cat Island, Bahamas, with whom he quickly became friends even though they often competed for the same roles. In one production called “Days of Our Youth,” Belafonte got the lead but he also had a regular job as a janitor’s assistant, emptying garbage, etc., and one night he couldn’t find anyone to cover for the janitor job, so the understudy, his friend, went on in his place. That also happened to be the night off-Broadway producers came to the theater seeking actors for an all-Black version of Lysistrata. They tapped the understudy. Soon his friend had a starring role in the Joseph Mankiewicz movie “No Way Out,” co-starring Richard Widmark, and was on his way.

“As a result,” Gates writes, “Belafonte has long joked that [Sidney] Poitier’s career is ‘based on garbage.’” Good line.

Sidney Poitier was the first the way that Jackie Robinson was the first—but also not. After Jackie broke through he was followed by Larry Doby and Hank Thompson, Roy Campanella and Monte Irvin, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks and Frank Robinson. Baseball was forever changed. After Sidney Poitier broke through as a leading man in prestige Hollywood productions, he was followed by … um … Denzel? Whoever it was, it took a while. We got blaxploitation stars: Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal. I guess James Earl Jones and Paul Winfield had moments, Howard E. Rollins had a moment, but the next crossover stars were comedians: Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy. So really it’s Denzel. It took decades.

The point is Sidney was alone on his journey. The point is that while Jackie stopped having to turn the other cheek in 1949, Sidney never really got the chance. Endicott notwithstanding.

He was already legendary but kind of over by the time I came of age in the mid-1970s. Historian Donald Bogle calls him “a hero for an integrationist age,” which is why he was kind of over. No one was fighting for integration anymore. 

Did he ever tire of the routine? Show up, be exceptional, turn racists around? That feels like half his movies. “A Black doctor is assigned to treat two white racist suspects…” “Two escaped convicts chained together…” “A couple’s attitudes are challenged when…” “A blind, uneducated white girl is befriended by…” “A traveling handyman becomes the answers to the prayers of nuns…”

And of course: “A Black Philadelphia police detective is mistakenly suspected of…”

Mark Harris, in his obit, touches on the burden he carried:

For a movie actor, there is perhaps no crueler fate than to be forced to serve as a symbol from the first day you step in front of the cameras to the moment when, more than 50 years later, you give your final performance. Acting is about risk-taking, exploration, struggling all your life with how best to make vivid the humanity of the character you play, for better and for worse. It's hard, maybe even impossible, to do your job when the expectations of an entire industry, and of an entire race, are draped across your shoulders.

It is part of the lasting significance of Poitier that he took on a burden he never asked for not as a curse but as a responsibility, and bore it not with resentment but with unshowy solemnity. 

Then there's Howard Bryant’s tweet on this scene in “In the Heat of the Night,” whose significance I missed:

Did anyone have a year like Poitier had in 1967? “To Sir With Love” was released in June, “In the Heat of the Night’ in August, and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” December. All three were box-office smashes. “Guess Who” was the second-biggest movie of the year after “The Graduate,” while the title song to “To Sir With Love”—which was basically a love song to Sidney Poitier—was the No. 1 song of the year. “Guess Who” was nominated for 10 Oscars and won two (actress; screenplay), while “In the Heat of the Night” was nominated for seven and won five, including actor for Rod Steiger, editing for Hal Ashby, and best picture. It also had the longest legs. Sidney played Virgil Tibbs two more times in the 1970s, and the concept became a TV staple in the 1980s with Carroll O’Connor and Howard E. Rollins.

He was shut out that year. Poitier received just two Oscar nominations in his career: the famous one he won, “Lilies in the Fields,” which probably had more to do with the year it was released—the year of Birmingham, the March, and the JFK assassination—than anything else; and “The Defiant Ones” in 1958. That one was a breakthrough, too: the first nomination for a Black man in any acting category. The next Black actor to win an Oscar after Poitier was Louis Gosset Jr. in 1982. The next to win as lead was Denzel in 2001. Poitier was actually more honored in England, where the BAFTAs had a “Foreign Actor” category—basically anyone not British—and where he was nominated six times: “Edge of the City,” “Defiant Ones,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lilies,” “Patch of Blue” and “In the Heat of the Night.” He won for “Defiant Ones.”

By the time I came of age, Poitier wasn’t doing the integrationist thing anymore; he was directing and starring in a series of comedies with Bill Cosby. I wouldn’t mind seeing those, to be honest, to see if there’s anything there. He also directed “Stir Crazy,” with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, a huge, huge hit. He also directed himself and his old friend, Harry Belafonte, in a western, “Buck and the Preacher.”

Two more things from Gates’ essay. At one point in the late 1940s, still scrambling, Belafonte and Poitier decided that comedy was the way to go and worked on a standup routine. Can you imagine? The comedy stylings of Belafonte and Poitier? The young actors were also befriended by acting/singing legend Paul Robeson, who was impressed with them. “I remember times,” Poitier says in the essay, “when he and I would meet Robeson in a bar on Fifth Avenue just off 125th Street, and sit there and talk.” Feels like it could be a play—a 1940s version of “One Night in Miami.” Someone should be working on that.