EVAN, KATE, ERNEST, AND MY BLOODSHOT EYES

I'm back! (Now let's see if I can remember how to do this...)




I've got some good stuff on the table that I'll have ready in the next couple of days, but this evening I just wanted to let something loose to say hi, and that the time off was fun, even though I did end up working a whole lot of that time, and even more so this week to make up for all that I didn't do while I was off watching movies with my nephew. And we did watch us some movies. But there's something I have to admit...

I've met two people in my life since graduating from college in 1981 who really shifted my perpsective concerning my own film-going habits and cinematic knowledge. The first was a terrific, caustic, crazy, raucous woman by the name of Kate Perrier, who I met in 1987 when I first moved to Los Angeles. When I came here I figured I knew a lot about movies. I graduated with a film degree, by gum, and I saw five, six, seven movies a week, if I could arrange (and afford) it. Who among the small group of friends I found myself amidst in my early days as a transplanted Oregonian in Los Angeles could dare to compare, thought I? (I was a haughty little prick, wasn't I?) Well, I soon found out that Kate Perrier could, by gum and by cracky. This woman, who died after several bouts with cancer in 1994, knew old Hollywood, the French New Wave and the American "Golden Age" of the '70s like the oracle at Delphi, and that's basically how I ended up approaching her. She knew a lot, her interests were varied beyond films, and she had a brutal sense of humor, three qualities that made spending time with her (she was a senior editor in the office where I had found a job) a pleasure and quite rewarding. Without ever lording her encyclopedic knowledge of movies over me, or anyone else, she earned my respect as someone who was cool and sharp enough to understand the importance of film history without needing validation so badly as to constantly call attention to and trumpet that knowledge. She wasn't in it to make anyone look dumb or herself look so smart-- she just loved movies, and her enthusiasm was infectious. And in very short order she made me realize that I didn't know shit.

The second is my nephew, Evan Cossey. My dad would probably say the same thing about Evan that he often did about me-- "That kid doesn't do anything but sit around and watch movies! He's gonna disappear into that couch!" In fact, there were times during our week together when I thought that very thing. And my wife was convinced that he was bored out of his mind all week long, because I did very little during the day to "entertain" him in the way that one typically commandeers the schedule of a house guest-- with the exception of one weekend trip to Legoland to start off his week, there was no Disneyland, no Universal Studios tour, none of that. While I worked out of my house during the day, Evan would get up as late as possible from his air bed on the living room floor, brush his teeth, eat a bowl of cereal, take a shower, and hit the DVD player. Hard. And his mother will confirm that this was exactly what he had in mind to while away his days-- total access to a library of 700+ DVDs and no one to bug him about getting outside for some sun or insisting that he do something constructive with his time. It was a dream come true for him. And back in my college days, if given the same opportunity, I probably would have enjoyed the same schedule. But I don't think, even at my most prodigious level of cinema consumption-- five or six movies over a weekend, plus sometimes four or five during the week (including ones seen in class), during my college daze-- I would have ever had the endurance capabilities of Evan Cossey. We saw seven movies in the theaters last week-- pretty exxxx-treme, right? Well, while I was working, Evan stuffed another 13 movies in the cracks on DVD, including one intriguing-looking bit of CGI anime called Appleseed a total of three times. If it were me attempting a viewing schedule like that, my bloodshot eyes would have been rolling around useless in their sockets like Visine-soaked marbles. My friend Bruce and I like to think that our viewing habits, especially when we get together, are pretty hard-core, but we've both got to throw in the towel to Evan. As I said in the one and only comment I posted last week, with apologies to Pete Townshend and Elton John, I've just handed my film nut crown to him, to him, to himmmmmmmm...!

All right, back at it. I've got my tickets for the Alex Theater screening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly coming up July 23 and for the Arclight presentation of Once Upon a Time in the West (I'll post a link to the Leone Festival again sometime next week, for those of you who care to be reminded), and I've got plenty of stuff to write about in the coming days, including some big-ticket items I've been promising for some time now. Special shout-outs to Thom McGregor, Blaaagh, Benaiah, Machine Gun McCain, PSaga (my date for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly-- Patty says she gets enough good, bad and ugly at home!), Virgil Hilts, the Mysterious Adrian Betamax, Alison, Sharon and all the rest of you whom I'm forgetting in my late-night delirium that stuck with the site during my down time-- thanks for hanging in there with me.

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"Work, work, work, work, work, work-- How ya doin', boys? Nice to see you! I missed you!"

-- Gov. William J. LePetomaine to his super-stacked secretary, from one of the sacred texts, that being (FILL IN THE BLANK)

First one to drop the right answer in the comments column gets a kiss and a hug (glory is a better motivation, to be sure, but I'm in a friendly mood tonight).

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Finally, rest in peace, Ernest Lehman, the legendary screenwriter who counted Sweet Smell of Success and North by Northwest among his many credits, and who, like so many of the great ones, went unrecognized by the Academy until his honorary Oscar in 2001. This, from David Thomson's Bioghraphical DIctionary of Film, by way of David Hudson and the good folks at GreenCineDaily:

"Around the age of sixty, Ernest Lehman seemed to have stopped doing scripts - and that's our loss. Of course, he may have been writing away (like Billy Wilder) on screenplays that are smart, funny, and beautifully constructed, only to be told that no one has the patience for movies like that any more and, anyway, what does he know about what kids want? So the kids are deprived, too, and everyone misses Lehman's subtle way of getting us to grow up."

Something to ruminate upon before and after the blockbusters of summer begin to pile up and smolder together on the ash heap of quick and dirty (and loud) sensation. Good night, Mr. Lehman, and travel well...