We mourn the loss of Haskell Wexler, one of the greatest cinematographers in Hollywood history, the director of the pioneering film “Medium Cool,” and the subject of a documentary by his son, Tell Them Who You Are.
The International Cinematographers Guild voted him one of the ten most influential in his field. He began doing television (including “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”), documentaries, and ads. He made an enormous impression with the black and white “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” for which he won his first Oscar.
His other films include Best Picture Oscar winners “In the Heat of the Night” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” as well as “Bound for Glory,” and “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip.” He made “Medium Cool” in the midst of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, filming in the midst of protests. Famously, you can hear one of his crew say, “Look out, Haskell, it’s real!”
Wexler’s son Mark also became a filmmaker, pointedly on the other end of the political spectrum from his outspokenly liberal father. Like My Architect and The Man Nobody Knew, Tell Them Who You Are is part of an arresting new genre of documentary as therapy, with sons (mostly) exploring and putting their own stamp on their father’s lives.
We mourn the loss of one of the great stars of the golden age of Hollywood, Maureen O’Hara. The Irish-born actress was made for technicolor. Her fiery hair, creamy skin, and green eyes made her an icon of classic films, many of them opposite John Wayne. Their storm-swept kiss in “The Quiet Man” is such a classic moment that Steven Spielberg appropriated it for a scene in “E.T.”
Ms. O’Hara’s endurance was often ascribed to the feisty intelligence she projected onscreen as well as her undeniable beauty. Her porcelain skin, green-hazel eyes, coltish jaw and cheekbones, and cascading red hair photographed superbly from any angle. She was promoted as the “queen of Technicolor” — a motion picture process much in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s.
Trained in fencing and fond of doing her own stunt work, she held her own in swashbucklers opposite Errol Flynn (“Against All Flags,” 1952) and Tyrone Power (“The Black Swan,” 1942). Those and other adventure yarns set the template for Ms. O’Hara’s screen persona: an independent-minded woman who knew her way around a sword.
She is most often remembered for her films with John Wayne, but she starred in a wide variety of classics, from the original “Parent Trap” to the original “Miracle on 34th Street” and the Oscar-winning “How Green Was My Valley.” She was superb in costume dramas, doing her own stunts in swashbucklers like “The Spanish Main” with Paul Henreid, “Sinbad the Sailor” with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., “At Sword’s Point” with Cornel Wilde, and “Against All Flags” with Errol Flynn. She was a superb light comedienne in “Sitting Pretty” and, opposite James Stewart, in “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation” and touching as the beloved of Quasimodo in “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Her grace and beauty were matched by her talent, wit, and charm. May her memory be a blessing.
We mourn the loss of actor/producer Kevin Corcoran, a child star in classic Disney movies and then a producer and director.
Kevin was one of several Corcoran siblings to appear on television and in movies in the 1950’s-60’s. His sister Noreen starred with John Forsythe and Jack Soo in “Bachelor Father” and Donna starred in the original movie version of “Angels in the Outfield.” Kevin was one of the brightest young stars of the Disney Studios, immediately a hit as the wide-eyed, enthusiastic, and often mischievous “Moochie” in the “Spin and Marty” series, playing that character and variations on it on television and in classic films like “Old Yeller,” “Pollyanna,” “Toby Tyler,” and “The Swiss Family Robinson.”
As an adult, he moved to the other side of the camera, working as assistant director and producer television series, including “Sons of Anarchy,” and, back at Disney, episodes of the “Love Bug” television series. He was named a Disney Legend in 2006. May his memory be a blessing.
When the sad news came about the death of actor Dean Jones, those who remembered him most fondly mostly fell into two separate groups with not much overlap. Many baby boomers remembered him as the eternally fresh-faced star of Disney films like “The Love Bug” and “The Shaggy DA.” And Broadway musical fans remembered him as originating the central figure in the Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical “Company.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6S1EvWcub4
The “hippies” in this clip seem more of a fantasy than the magic car.
Here he is with Dorothy Provine and Hayley Mills in the original “That Darn Cat.”
Jones appeared in “Company” briefly, but his performance on the cast album is considered a classic.
He appeared in “Jailhouse Rock” with Elvis Presley and with Jane Fonda in “Any Wednesday.”
He was a committed Christian whose Christian Rescue Fund protects persecuted Christians and Jews.
We mourn the loss of director Wes Craven, who knew what scared us and knew how much we loved being scared. His series films included “Scream,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” and “The Hills Have Eyes.” My friend Simon Abrams interviewed Craven for The Village Voice last year. He spoke about the dream quality of horror.
The power of the nightmare is that it addresses something that is universally recognized. In that sense, it’s very real, but not something that’s normally treated as reality. That’s a profoundly important world, it’s just not easily explained or mapped out by the rational mind of human beings.
And he spoke about his collaborative process in working with actors.
For instance, with Robert Englund, I always encouraged him to make his own. In fact, from casting on, I realized the power of that man. He was ready, and enthusiastic about exploring that persona in a way that came from his own imagination, as well as mine. The physicality of the character, for instance, was not necessarily on the page; much of it was was Robert experimenting and improvising based on a theme.
He described his fundamentalist upbringing and his thoughts about God.
There was certainly a point in my life where I thought, “The God people talk about is a God I can’t touch, I can’t find.” Not to say that I now feel that there’s nothing transcendent in the world. Anything having to do with the living film is astonishing. I don’t have the religious thing of looking to the Pope, or looking to a religious figure for a concept of what God is. But religious teachings of what’s most important in life, or one’s conducts — those teachings have never left me. I was raised on the teachings of Jesus, whether or not he was an actual living man, let alone the son of God. That way of looking at the world has never really left me.
“I came out of a very religious background,” he said in 1984. ”As fundamentalist Baptists, we were sequestered from the rest of the world. You couldn’t dance or drink or go to the movies. The first time I paid to see a movie (‘To Kill a Mockingbird’) I was a senior in college. … My whole youth was based on suppression of emotion. As they say in psychological circles, my family never got in touch with their rage. So making movies — these awful horror movies, no less — was, I guess, my way of purging this rage.”
Certainly, his focus on horror was a response or a way of processing the hellfire images and tragedies of his childhood, including the loss of his father when he was very young.
His films were gruesome and graphic, with cannibals, rapists, and serial killers, made even scarier because they took place not in gothic castles but in suburbia and other places that we think of as safe and familiar. What could be more terrifying than a killer who gets you in your sleep? And yet, Craven thought of his films as funny as well as scary, and his fans do, too. He equated comedy and horror as providing the same kind of release.
Craven did make a non-scary movie, “Music of the Heart,” a fact-based story with Meryl Streep as a violin teacher. But his own heart was in horror, and his films will be scaring people as long as there are ways to show them.
