William Gibson, best known as the man who wrote The Miracle Worker, died this week at age 94.
Gibson’s sequel to “The Miracle Worker,” “Monday After the Miracle,” was not a success, but I thought it was a fine play. I also have a special fondness for Two for the Seesaw, about a mismatched couple, and for his play about the young William Shakespeare, A Cry Of Players. It does not have the scope and audacity of “Shakespeare in Love,” but it is a very appealing story of a young writer who is torn between art and love and between passion and responsibility.
“I like to fall a little in love with my heroines, and the title — from Mark Twain, who said, ‘Helen is a miracle, and Miss Sullivan is the miracle-worker’ — was meant to show where my affections lay. This stubborn girl of 20, who six years earlier could not write her name, and in one month salvaged Helen’s soul, and lived thereafter in its shadow, seemed to me to deserve a star bow.”
I was very sorry to hear about the loss of author/director Michael Crichton. He was a man of astonishing range and accomplishment. He wrote best-selling novels, including Jurassic Park and the The Andromeda Strain. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he created the television show ER. He became an accomplished director. One of my favorite of his films was the period heist story The Great Train Robbery. I am also a fan of his non-fiction book Travels, in part because his tireless curiosity and imagination were so engaging. His 1993 essay on the future of media was recently recognized in Slate as stunningly prescient. He was master of entertainment and a fresh and provocative thinker and will be much missed.
Paul Newman died yesterday at age 83 after a long struggle with cancer. This tribute from Slate by Dahlia Lithwick describes Newman’s unassuming generosity in contributing a quarter of a billion dollars, 100% of the profits from his food companies, to help sick children. At his Hole in the Wall Gang camp,
Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who’d simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair. So he just kept on paying it forward…Today there are 11 camps modeled on the Hole in the Wall all around the world, and seven more in the works, including a camp in Hungary and one opening next year in the Middle East. Each summer of the four I spent at Newman’s flagship Connecticut camp was a living lesson in how one man can change everything. Terrified parents would deliver their wan, weary kid at the start of the session with warnings and cautions and lists of things not to be attempted. They’d return 10 days later to find the same kid, tanned and bruisey, halfway up a tree or canon-balling into the deep end of the pool. Their wigs or prosthetic arms–props of years spent trying to fit in–were forgotten in the duffel under the bed. Shame, stigma, fear, worry, all vaporized by a few days of being ordinary. In an era in which nearly everyone feels entitled to celebrity and fortune, Newman was always suspicious of both. He used his fame to give away his fortune, and he did that from some unspoken Zen-like conviction that neither had ever really belonged to him in the first place.
Entertainment Weekly has a fine list of Newman’s best performances. His best-loved films are probably the two he made with Robert Redford, The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was always superb as a flawed or damaged hero, as in The Hustler, Hud, and Harper. I enjoy his leading man performances in light romances like “A New Kind of Love” and “What a Way to Go.” But he was at his best in drama, and like many of the flawed characters unexpectedly seeking redemption he played, he kept getting better.
He was a lawyer no one expected to be honest in “The Verdict.”
And a man who was not going gently into old age in “Nobody’s Fool.”
Adam Bernstein’s perceptive obituary in the Washington Post sums up his career, calling Newman “the prime interpreter of selfish rebels.”
Newman had built up a critical reputation of imbuing stock characters with an intelligent restraint that often was not associated with the more flagrant of the Method acting followers. As examples, reviewers pointed to his work as boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956) and an Army officer accused of enemy collaboration in “The Rack” (1956). He brought a vulnerability to roles that emphasized his physique, notably in “The Long, Hot Summer,” based on stories by William Faulkner, and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (both 1958), from the Tennessee Williams play.
And Lithwick, who worked at his camp, sums up the man:
Hollywood legend holds that Paul Newman is and will always be larger-than-life, and it’s true. Nominated for 10 Oscars, he won one. He was Fast Eddie, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy. And then there were Those Eyes. But anyone who ever met Paul Newman will probably tell you that he was, in life, a pretty regular-sized guy: A guy with five beautiful daughters and a wonder of a wife, and a rambling country house in Connecticut where he screened movies out in the barn. He was a guy who went out of his way to ensure that everyone else–the thousands of campers, counselors, and volunteers at his camps, the friends he involved in his charities, and the millions of Americans who bought his popcorn–could feel like they were the real star.
I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Don LaFontaine. Few people knew his name but everyone knew his voice. He did the narration for more than 5000 movie trailers. You’ve heard him say it dozens of times: “In a world….” The trailers were not always enticing, but his voice always was, familiar, inviting, almost intimate. I will miss having him adding so much excitement to the anticipation of coming attractions.
I love this spoof with LaFontaine and his colleagues.
What a sad loss in the passing of actor-comedian Bernie Mac. The first time I saw him was in the comedy concert film, The Original Kings of Comedy. He played variations on that his stand-up character in Ocean’s Eleven (his car-buying and outrage at a racial remark scenes were among the movie’s highlights) and Charlie’s Angels – Full Throttle, where he took over the part of Bosley from Bill Murray. I think my favorite performance by him in a feature film was in Pride, the fact-based story of an inner-city swim team. As in all of his movies, he had a natural confidence on screen that made him immediately appealing and his pleasure at stirring up a little trouble always kept the audience paying close attention. We will miss him.
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