Hackman plugging “Twice in a Lifetime” in Canada.

Today’s local NFL action begins with thoughts of Jill Clayburgh.

I watched horror movies as a kid–respectable ones like “Carrie,” and “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “The Omen,” as well as “Halloween,” and “Friday the 13th.” I also saw a bunch of low-budget horror classics like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “I Spit on Your Grave.” But it was a phase that didn’t last. Horror movies were never my thing, and the older I got the less interested I was in being scared.

I was also just as likely to be scared by an action movie like “The Road Warrior” or “Aliens” or a thriller like “Fatal Attraction” than I was by a horror movie. Horror movies were just iller, with all the blood and guts gore.

I got to thinking about scary movies over the weekend cause of Halloween and you know which one stands out? “Taxi Driver.”

It’s not a horror movie, strictly speaking, but it is a nightmare vision of New York and one that was easy to identify with–the isolation and danger, the fear and violence.

Scorsese once told an interviewer:

It was crucial to Travis Bickle’s character that he had experience life and death around him every second when he was in south-east Asia. That way it becomes more heightened when he comes back; the image of the street at night reflected in the dirty gutter becomes more threatening. I think that’s something a guy going through a war, any war, would experience when he comes back to what is supposedly ‘civilization’. He’d be more paranoid.

Pauline Kael gave it a rave in the New Yorker:

In its own way, this movie, too has an erotic aura. There is practically no sex in it, but no sex can be as disturbing as sex. And that’s what it’s about: the absence of sex–bottled-up, impacted energy and emotion, with a blood-splattering release. The fact that we experience Travis’s need for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the quality of consummation, makes “Taxi Driver” one of the few truly modern horror films.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw it, this scene featuring Martin Scorsese himself, really freaked me out…just, so…tense:

Michael Caine reads. We listen.

Michael Caine has a new book out.

Hollyrock Quotables.

Comfort Food (aka, fromage) from the Eighties:

GQ interview with Tony Curtis…

Another Hollywood Legend Passes: Tony Curtis, R.I.P.

My favorite Robin Williams flick.

Good looking to that tweetin’ fool, Matt B, for pointing out this piece on Martin Scorsese’s favorite gangster movies.

I’m partial to this one, myself:

Chris Jones profiles Javier Bardem in Esquire:

He apologized many times for his English; he didn’t need to. He talked about his reticence for publicity, how he thinks of himself as a working actor, not a celebrity. His mom was an actor, too, and she had raised three children in Madrid largely on her own by pretending to be other people. It was the family business. He said that he knows highly technical actors who can do the job regardless of their feelings for it. He said he is not such an actor: “I have to believe in what I’m doing, otherwise I don’t stand a chance.” He said that he tried to get out of No Country for Old Men, told the Coen brothers that he was a terrible choice, that he abhors violence and couldn’t drive and wouldn’t be able to say his lines without using a strange voice. They told him that made him perfect for it, and they were right. He said that when actors win Oscars, they’re happy only because it means they will probably get more work; he also said actors make lousy award-show presenters because “it’s the only time we have to be ourselves.” He talked about the choices he’s made, that he’s been lucky but also that he thinks about what he’s doing — not as though he’s making some grand plan but as though his days are numbered. He is deliberate. He talked about his doubts and fears and insecurities, this Oscar-winning actor who had just married Penélope Cruz. He talked about his dream of one day working with Al Pacino — “but I doubt that will ever happen” — and how he would love to play Pablo Escobar and Cortez the Killer. He said that he didn’t feel much need to talk about Eat Pray Love — “It doesn’t need any help,” he said — but that he would like to talk about Biutiful. “I think it’s a masterpiece,” he said, “and it needs help.”

On a fishing trip in 1939, film director Howard Hawks told Ernest Hemingway:

“Ernest, you’re a damn fool. You need money, you know. You can’t do all the things you’d like to do. If I make three dollars in a picture, you get one of them. I can make a picture out of your worst story.”

“What’s my worst story?”

“That god damned bunch of junk called To Have and To Have Not [sic.].”

“You can’t make anything out of that.”

“Yes I can. You’ve got the character of Harry Morgan; I think I can give you the wife. All you have to do is make a story about how they met.”

It’s not a great movie but it is good entertainment (and the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner of all people). Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael are winning in supporting roles and Lauren Bacall practically burns a hole in the screen. Man, what poise, what a kitten:

Because today we need to laugh.

I can get you a cheeseburger.

I once saw the actor Kevin McCarthy, Mary’s brother, walk out of my grandparent’s apartment building. I felt happy to see him, a recognizable face from so many forgettable movies. He was tall and elegant and though I didn’t say anything to him, I felt better just being near him for a minute.

He died on Saturday, 96 years old. R.I.P.

Anyone who watches movies knows that high school can be hell, especially on the teachers. Ask Michelle Pfieffer or Jim Belushi. One high school melodrama that I remember from my childhood is a Nick Nolte-Ralph Macchio movie called Teachers. It wasn’t very good but it featured Laura Dern who I had a crush on for years—loved all that pent up neurosis. It also co-starred Joebeth Williams who I also had a more private crush on at the time. She was never at the top of my list, she wasn’t like Pfieffer, my major 80’s crush, but she always turned me on. In the Big Chill, in this one. Anything she did.

Loved it when she flared her nostrils and got all righteous.

Pat Jordan is 69 years old and still writing. He jokingly refers to himself as the “Last Knight of the Freelance,” and it’s true, he’s the last guy of his generation to still make a living as a freelance magazine writer. He writes for the dough but he also writes because that’s what he does, that’s who he is–he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he wasn’t working.

Jordan takes on another old pro, William Shatner in a profile that appears in this week’s New York Times Magazine:

Shatner was interviewed once by a snarky British talk-show host, who showed scenes from Shatner’s TV cop show, “T. J. Hooker,” and asked, “What do you think about your acting?” Shatner replied: “Oh, I was terrible. How could I have played it that way?” Outside Starbucks, Shatner said to me: “If someone criticizes my acting, they may be right. Sometimes you shouldn’t work so hard” to entertain. Then, softly, he said: “I never thought of myself as a great actor, like Olivier. I was a working actor. I entertained people and always tried to be terrific at whatever it was.” His problem and his salvation. He played so many different roles that “people couldn’t define me like they could De Niro. I took whatever work came my way to pay the bills, even if it wasn’t a decent role.” His motto was “Work equals work,” which destroyed any hope he had of being taken seriously as an actor but also brought him longevity, wealth and fame. “I was always grubbing,” he said. “But I was saying the words somewhere.” He leaned toward me and said, with mock import, “I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.” He put his hand on my knee, squeezed gently, then said with breathless intimacy: “I said this one line for Priceline 20 times. I struggled to get the nuance. My silence reverberated in the ether.” His face was close to mine, as if imparting a great secret. “If you add a car and a hotel room, you will get an even better price from Priceline.com.” I nodded. “See! You got it!” Then, matter-of-factly, he straightened up and emphasized how much satisfaction that one line gave him. “A pro takes the job knowing it’s not a great role, just a paying job. But every word has music in it. My satisfaction is trying to reach that music.”

I don’t know if Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the Clint Eastwood vehicle featuring a young Jeff Bridges, is a sleeper but if you have never seen it, do yourself a favor and put it to the top of your Netflix queue. It was Michael Cimino’s directorial debut. George Kennedy is terrific, as usual, in a supporting role.

Speaking of Cimino, check out this 2002 feature on the director from Vanity Fair.

[Editor’s Note: Here’s another one from the Pat Jordan vaults, a short, cutting profile of Burt Reynolds, from the late Eighties. While Pat reserves his harshest criticism for himself, but he’s especially hard on jockish, so-called tough guy actors like Reynolds and Tom Selleck. He thought Reynolds wasted his talent and was willfully lazy for easy money and fame.

When this story was published Reyonlds’ publicist called Pat and called him the “evilest man in the world, the anti-christ.” Pat said, “Then I’ll see you in Hell.”

No business like show business. Enjoy.]

By Pat Jordan

It was just a wink. But it defined the rest of his career.

“They told me I couldn’t do it,” he says. “It would break down the wall between the actor and his audience. But the movie was just a cartoon. Smokey and the Bandit. Cotton Candy. I just wanted to say to the audience, I hope you’re having as much fun as I am. So I looked in the camera, and winked.”

Audiences loved it. That conspiratorial wink united them with the actor in his inside joke. This movie was just a lark. He didn’t take it seriously. He wasn’t really acting. He was just partying with friends in front of a camera, and he invited the audience to join in. His fans were so grateful they made his movie one of the biggest grosser of the year, 1977, and they made him a No 1 Box Office Attraction. A Star. But more than that. Their favorite actor. The actor they liked the most. Which was his problem.

“I thought acting was synonymous with being liked,” he says. “I courted my fans. I passionately wanted them to like me. I thought being liked meant I was a good actor.”

The critics weren’t so accepting as his fans. That wink didn’t play well with them. They read into it, not the actor’s good-spirits toward his fans, but his contempt for them, and his craft. It wasn’t an actor’s role to be liked by his fans. It was to entertain them. Just because he was having fun with his friends – Jackie Gleason, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, etc. – in a host of Sophomoric movies (Smokey and the Bandit, Iⅈ Cannonball Run, I&II) that actually did seem to be filmed parties of actors acting silly, that didn’t mean his audiences were having fun. They would have fun only as long as that wink deceived them into believing they were inside those parties. That they were getting drunk, cracking inside jokes, oogling beautiful girls, and crashing expensive cars with the actor and his friends. But the truth was, they weren’t and never would be. They were irrelevant to those parties, except that they made them possible by the vast sums of money they paid to see them on screen. When, and if, they woke to the deceit of that wink, how it made the actor rich at their expense, they’d stop paying to see such movies. Which they did. But not until after they made him a No 1 Box Office Attraction for five consecutive years.

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