Passages

[hearthesilence]

Pretty crazy that he was starring in prestige pictures with Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe and Annette Bening at the height of their careers while doing Ernest movies in-between.

[Beloved Aunt]

...did he play Franklin Delano Romanowski on Seinfeld?

[ando]

Alfred Brendel

Wow. I hadn't heard. Thanks. His Mozart and Beethoven sets are favorites in my collection. I've occasionally listened to the lectures he made on some of the major classical composers. Nice YT tribute. R.I.P.

[Roger Ryan]

Pretty crazy that he was starring in prestige pictures with Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe and Annette Bening at the height of their careers while doing Ernest movies in-between.

Similarly, what other actor appeared in multiple Alan Rudolph films and multiple Ernest movies during the same time period?

[domino harvey]

Fun fact: Gailard Sartain and Bill Byrge are in all those Ernest movies because like Varney, their characters originated in a series of commercials created by John Cherry’s ad agency

[hearthesilence]

Should add that casting Sartain as the Big Bopper probably took a millisecond of thought.

[PfR73]

...did he play Franklin Delano Romanowski on Seinfeld?

No, that's Michael McShane, who played Friar Tuck in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the hypnotist in Office Space, along with frequent appearances on the original UK Whose Line Is It Anyway?

[ellipsis7]

Lea Massari

[JSC]

Incredible in L'avventura.

[MichaelB]

Lalo Schifrin, one of only three composers to receive an honorary Oscar for their entire body of work - and it's very fitting that one of the others was Ennio Morricone, as they had a huge amount in common, not least the fact that the 1960s/70s genre-film landscape would have sounded unimaginably different without their massive contribution.

[John Cope]

Bill Moyers.

[Mr Sausage]

Apparently veteran stuntman and martial arts actor Richard Norton died three months back. He did a lot of memorable work with Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, and some work with Cynthia Rothrock in North America where he could show off his dry sense of humour.

[hearthesilence]

Rebekah Del Rio, a singer-songwriter who achieved cinematic legend with her performance of “Llorando” in David Lynch‘s Mulholland Drive, died June 23 at her residence in Los Angeles. She was 57 years old.

Del Rio’s death was confirmed through the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office. No further details about her death are currently available.

[captveg]

Dave Parker, aka The Cobra, just a month before his Hall of Fame induction, losing his battle to Parkinson's. Between his and Rickey Henderson's passing my 10-year-old self that fell in love with baseball because of the 1989 A's has had it rough these past six months.

[Lemmy Caution]

For some reason I associate Dave Parker with the shoestring catch. For a big man he moved well.

Seemed one of those late 70's early 80's players who had a few good years, but weren't consistent and had trouble living up to the previous generation. I think many of them got derailed by cocaine and the new social permissiveness. Jim Rice his AL counterpart. Andre Dawson similar. George Foster too. After Parker had a great 3 year run from 1977-79, culminating in the We Are Family championship, Parker only had one more good year with the Pirates, followed by three drug and injury years where he was useless. Credit to Parker for getting himself together and having a late career renaissance with the Reds. Though since that was 85-86, I wonder if that was steroidal.

Dave Parker had all around talent. Hit for average, had power, good fielder, strong arm.
I was more a Bill Madlock, Stargell fan for some reason. A friend of mine was big on Parker. Talking him up for a few years. Which got me to pay attention to his prowess. And for some reason his fielding stood out for me.

[beamish14]

Former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter

[jbeall]

Disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart

[pistolwink]

"Disgraced televangelist" is almost redundant.

Swaggart's son, who inherited his pulpit (and the presumably much-diminished earnings therefrom), said that there was "no greater example of a good and faithful servant" than his dad, which... is not how I'd describe Jimmy Swaggart. I'd say it's amazing to watch old videos of his ministry and see thousands of people in thrall to this obvious huckster but, well, it's 2025. That's the whole country now.

[Captain Paranoia]

"Disgraced televangelist" is almost redundant.

Swaggart's son, who inherited his pulpit (and the presumably much-diminished earnings therefrom), said that there was "no greater example of a good and faithful servant" than his dad, which... is not how I'd describe Jimmy Swaggart. I'd say it's amazing to watch old videos of his ministry and see thousands of people in thrall to this obvious huckster but, well, it's 2025. That's the whole country now.

It seems to be disgraced as in getting caught up with prostitutes twice leading to him being essentially excommunicated, but yeah that is rather tame considering much of the controversies that occur with preachers such as him. There's quite a low bar in the evangelical community. (On a random note, I'm now learning after his death that his double cousin was Jerry Lee Lewis).

[pistolwink]

There are juicy stories in several Lewis biographies about Lewis, Swaggart, and their mutual cousin Mickey Gilley (a great country singer) cavorting as kids and young adults.

[feihong]

Former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter

No one will speak up for Jim Shooter? I will, then.

Editors in comics––Editors-in-Chief especially––always have very mixed track records, and Shooter is no exception. Certainly the firing of beloved illustrator Gene Colan sat badly with people, but Shooter turned Marvel's sales around during a slump that really seemed to be due to missed deadlines. And while writer Steve Englehardt was either forced out or departed due to Shooter's attempts to make the trains run on time, Shooter hired him again later on for the West Coast Avengers, home to one of Englehardt's best stories, "Lost in Space-Time." And while Shooter gave important jobs to and helped make a superstar penciller out of John Byrne, he did fire him eventually (to be fair, Byrne thought he could write and draw Fantastic Four for Marvel and Superman for DC at the same time––Byrne allegedly burned Shooter in effigy at a party held to celebrate Shooter's eventual firing from Marvel). Shooter was a writer of mostly aggravating, disappointing comics material himself, and he had an attitude towards story and art many artists at the company found exasperating, but he enabled several Marvel properties to develop lasting sophistication and depth where there had sometimes hardly been any to begin with. The most notable here has to be X-men, where Shooter defended writer Chris Claremont for years from most attempts to usurp his control of the title, recognizing, as he said to editor Louise Simonson, that Chris was, in his words, "writing a modern novel" with the book. Even there, an editor can be enabling and helpful one minute, and screwing the artist up the next, and Shooter did preside over the X-factor comic, the second attempt to franchise the X-men, and an attempt to expand the franchise beyond Claremont's coterie––which ended up nearly disintegrating in his hands, and was rescued by Claremont associates Louise and Walter Simonson. Shooter presided over the move from newsstands to dedicated comic shops, leading to Marvel helping to set up comic shops around the nation. A deal with a retiring employee led to the creation of the direct comics market. Pressures to maximize profits rose as Marvel was bought and sold, and Shooter was fired ultimately for his last and maybe most important action, establishing a royalty system for the artists who worked on Marvel comic books. After that, in keeping with his personal aesthetics, he masterminded one of the most homely, blandest superhero comic lines imaginable, the Valiant Universe (later resurrected by a lot of much less inhibited artists and writers.

As a creator, or ringmaster, Shooter ushered in the era of blockbuster event comics, writing the childish but extremely successful Secret Wars, then bringing much more extravagant literary ambitions to the desperate folly of Secret Wars II. And his bold venture to create the much-promoted flop, the New Universe, was an abject failure which impacted the health of the company as a whole. As a writer, Shooter is famed for an early run on Legion of Superheroes at DC, mostly done when he was a teenager. Later, as EIC of Marvel, Shooter's stories frequently put the pressures of being an editor-in-chief first and foremost in the story. This is a dominant theme of both the notable Avengers mini-epic, The Korvac Saga (Korvac has power over every living thing, the Avengers try to stop him, and one of them discovers––after they ruin his life by making him kill them in front of his girlfriend and then he makes himself disappear for good––that he really intended to do good with his godlike abilities, and the Avengers ruined it for the universe. And Secret Wars replays that same storyline with Dr. Doom in charged of ultimate power. When he wasn't making godlike author-insert characters with ultimate power, but whose good intentions everyone misunderstands, Shooter was writing embarrassingly about what one might suspect was his own sex life in the pages of the awful New Universe title, Starbrand. The most stomach-churning examples of twisted sexual politics in his writing, however, comes from his contribution (along with three other credited writers, but with significant oversight on the project) to his most infamous credit, on Avengers issue 200––a comic which prompted Carol Strickland's quintessential piece of comics criticism of the era, "The Rape of Ms. Marvel." Shooter was gracious enough to let a furious Chris Claremont take over an Avengers Annual to write a rebuke of the issue in fiction, introduce the new character Rogue for good measure, and then take his beloved Ms. Marvel away from the Avengers writers. In later years Shooter has denied writing the book, though he has a plotting credit and takes responsibility for publishing it. But the theme of the story is the same as many of his others, that of the all-powerful man whose good intentions the heroes mistrust, causing them to turn on him, essentially hurt his feelings, and then he uses his power to disappear forever. It's all pretty wild; it's comics history. EICs immediately after Shooter plunged Marvel into the depths of despair over the next few years, leading to bankruptcy, leading to the movies, etc., etc. But Shooter always kept the action hot in the comics themselves, where it always belonged.

So many ups and downs. What is an editor, for good or ill? For X-men fans especially, we got to where we got to be thanks in no small part to Jim Shooter backing his best writer of the era in his grandest ambitions. Shooter himself was an interesting guy; he starts in comics at a ridiculously young age, and is essentially what we might call a prodigy in the medium. As EIC, he was younger than most of his Marvel staff, telling them all what to do, and frequently turning out to be right about it. As he got older, the limited horizons afforded to him with his success in his chosen field made him a writer without a lot of natural subject matter, and seemed to atrophy his somewhat limited sense of what made an interesting comic book. In spite of lots of Shooter's effort, Marvel did not develop an "evergreen" graphic novel during his tenure, to match DC's classics from the time, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: Year One (though perhaps X-men: God Loves, Man Kills or Elektra: Assassin should have been a similar kind of success and simply wasn't). You could make the case that Shooter was out of Marvel at exactly the last point an EIC could have such a vast personal impact on what went out the door at Marvel. Afterwards, corporate raiders saw to it that few such people harbored artistic ambitions for a long time afterwards––though I think some of the more aggressive and ambitious editor-in-chiefs of later eras, like Bill Jemas and Axel Alonso, took a page from Shooter.

For me, he was a fascinating figure in the background of the era where I became hopelessly lost inside comics. Claremont and Louise Simonson's writing on X-men books bewitched me as a kid––reading, I felt like I was for the first time being given privileged access to the world of how adults thought. And Annie Nocenti introduced me to Marshall McLuhan in a New Mutants Summer Special. Shooter backed all these writers, either putting them in that place or keeping them there, so I could read the best things they would do. It's impossible to feel about the Editor-in-Chief the way you do about the principal auteurs of the work––and Shooter's own artistic record is batsh*t crazy, and no measure of success or appeal. But I have a soft spot for him, I guess, as the organizer of the first great show of my life, before the movies––and, these days, my job, sort of. So, thanks Jim Shooter, I think.

[Gregory]

Florence Delay, who portrayed Jeanne d'Arc in the Bresson film and was an actor, narrator, or writer for movies by Chris Marker, Hugo Santiago, Benoît Jacquot, Emilio Mail, and Michel Deville, but was mainly active as a novelist/playwright.

Ismail Abu Hatab, 32-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and filmmaker, was murdered in an airstrike in Gaza along with 41 others on Monday. This took place after he'd already been seriously injured in a 2023 airstrike while covering the invasion of Gaza.

[GaryC]

Kenneth Colley, aged 87. Given a career of over sixty years (his debut was as an uncredited dead body in A for Andromeda in 1961) all the obituaries I've seen so far can find to mention is the fact that he was in a Star Wars film.

[hearthesilence]

Florence Delay, who portrayed Jeanne d'Arc in the Bresson film and was an actor, narrator, or writer for movies by Chris Marker, Hugo Santiago, Benoît Jacquot, Emilio Mail, and Michel Deville, but was mainly active as a novelist/playwright.

An extensive interview (and accompanying photo) with Delay that took place in Paris on Friday, November 24, 2023, in her apartment on the Boulevard Saint Michel.

[hearthesilence]

Ismail Abu Hatab, 32-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and filmmaker, was murdered in an airstrike in Gaza along with 41 others on Monday. This took place after he'd already been seriously injured in a 2023 airstrike while covering the invasion of Gaza.

This is the airstrike in question, and large fragments from the cafe ruins have been identified by ordnance experts as parts of a 500 lbs. MK-82 bomb, a powerful and indiscriminate weapon that generates a massive blast wave and scatters shrapnel over a wide area. (The large crater left by the explosion was further evidence of its use.) Experts in international law said the use of such a munition despite the known presence of many unprotected civilians, including children, women and elderly people, was almost certainly unlawful and may constitute a war crime. An IDF spokesperson said the attack was under review and that “prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians using aerial surveillance" but quite frankly these excuses which have become boilerplate after so many ongoing incidents ring extremely hollow at this point.