It’s sad how quickly we’re
losing members of the greater Hollywood community. We can’t call them men who died before their
time: each lived to a ripe old age, and enjoyed honors and accolades galore.
Still, the film industry will long feel their loss.
Nicolas Roeg, born in 1928, is
said to have decided on filmmaking as a
career mostly because he lived across the road from a British movie studio. He
started as a tea-boy (a job that doesn’t exactly exist in America), and moved
up to be a clapper-loader, which is the lowliest of cinematography jobs.
Eventually he was hired as second-unit cinematographer on David Lean’s classic Lawrence of Arabia, but the relationship
with Lean went south when he was fired from Lean’s equally monumental
follow-up, Dr. Zhivago. He served as
cinematographer, though, on films by such greats as François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), John Schlesinger (Far From the Madding Crowd), and Richard
Lester (Petulia).
But for me Roeg’s
most meaningful cinematography credit was on Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death. By the time
my former boss shot Masque in 1964,
he had already made a name for himself by way of several features based on the
eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Starting with House of Usher in 1960, Corman directed and produced such chillers
as Pit and the Pendulum, Premature
Burial, and The Tomb of Ligeia.. But
I’m not the only Corman fan who’s convinced that Masque of the Red Death is the very best of Corman’s horror epics,
and part of the reason is that Roeg’s camerawork perfectly captures the kaleidoscopic
yet somber mood.
Roeg of course moved beyond
cinematography to put his directorial stamp on a particular kind of otherworldly
feature. His films are bleak: even the one intended for children (an adaptation
of Roald Dahl’s The Witches) has
nightmarish implications. Roeg fully exploited the dark charisma of Mick Jagger
in Performance as well as the
unearthly quality of David Bowie in The
Man Who Fell to Earth. Don’t Look Now
(1973) was once notorious for its fairly explicit sex scene between Donald
Sutherland and Julie Christie, but at its heart this is a film about vain hope,
as played out by grieving parents.
William Goldman, who died on
November 16 at the age of 87, left us a body of work that was less exotic and
more down-to-earth. What stands out is his versatility: he was a novelist, a
playwright, and a screenwriter, responsible for such major hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride (a family favorite
adapted from his own novel), Misery (based
on the work of Stephen King), and the historically important All The President’s Men. (As a young
writer, he bypassed a golden opportunity when he declined to work on the screen version of The Graduate.) Whole generations of screenwriters have learned from Goldman’s
Adventures in the Screen Trade, with
its sage insistence that in the film biz “nobody knows anything.”
Goldman sometimes went far afield
from Hollywood, as when he published The
Season (1969), a candid assessment of the state of Broadway in the years
1967-68. I personally treasure his 1990 memoir, Hype and Glory, about the year he judged both the Cannes Film
Festival and the Miss America Pageant. Here’s one characteristically pragmatic except: “Narrative is
only a piece of string and it’s where you choose to cut it that’s essential.
Where you choose to cut it. I might pick a piece further along, or
earlier. No one is right. There is no right way to tell a story, only your
way.”
Since I wrote this post, I’ve learned of the deaths of
film director Bernardo Bertolucci and actor/magician Ricky Jay. And so it goes.
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