No Small Parts: J. K. Simmons in “Break Point”

Though I’m hardly a tennis player, I’ve been wanting to see the much-applauded tennis movie, Challengers. The world in which it’s set reminds me of how many great movies of the past have included tennis in at last one key scene. Just think of the mesmerizing tennis tournament scene in Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train. (The action is on the court, but the audience should be paying attention to a spectator sitting quietly in the stands.) Tennis shows up in movies as different as Annie Hall (Alvy and Annie first meet on a tennis court) and Gigi (Leslie Caron’s girlish character, who cavorts all over the court, stands in joyous contrast to the stiff demoiselles who can’t be bothered to move at all). In Pat and Mike, Katharine Hepburn’s character famously melts down while playing against real-life tennis celebrity Gussie Moran. The recent King Richard is, of course, all about the father who raised tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

The 2014 film Break Point (not to be confused with the 2015 surfing flick Point Break) is an amiable comedy in which tennis takes center stage. It’s written by and stars Jeremy Sisto as a slovenly tennis pro who’s forced to team up with his estranged brother, a wholesome substitute teacher, in order to win a berth in a major tournament. There’s lots of tennis action, but this is more of a human-interest story in which two siblings accept each other’s different choices and a lonely kid finds a substitute family. 

Part of why Break Point is worth watching is the presence of J.K. Simmons, who plays the gruff but loving father of the two tennis-playing brothers. He’s his sons’ biggest fan, always front-row center at their matches. To be honest, I’d never heard of Simmons until 2014. He started making movies back in 1994, and I’m sure I spotted his bald head and his low-register voice in big films like Juno, Up in the Air, and Burn After Reading. He’s pretty well disguised with hair and mustache as J. Jonah Jameson in several Spiderman flicks, which gives me an excuse not to have recognized him there. But in any case he didn’t come into focus for me until the year that Point Break was made. That’s became 2014 was also when Damien Chazelle released Whiplash, in which—playing the leader of a college jazz ensemble—Simmons demands perfection to the point where he’s downright maniacal. The role of Terence Fletcher was Simmon’s first big chance for a truly bravura performance, and he hardly wastes it. The role landed him major critical acclaim, and other more showy roles, like that of William Frawley (the original Fred Mertz) in Being the Ricardos. Still, a guy’s got to eat, and Simmons’ filmography is filled with roles in forgettable films like The Tomorrow War and Ride the Eagle It’s not unusual for him to release six films in a single year. And he also keeps busy using that wonderful basso voice of his in videogames and animated features. He also sings, and has appeared on Broadway as Benny Southstreet in Guys and Dolls

Like J.K. Simmons, there are hundreds of characters actors who’ve long been the backbone of the movie industry. Their names aren’t always familiar to us, but we know their faces and appreciate their reliable professionalism. I interviewed Robert Forster when Whiplash won Simmons an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Forster, an Oscar nominee himself for Jackie Brown, was thrilled for his colleague, a real pro who had truly paid his dues in the motion picture industry.  

 

In Memoriam: After the Parade Passes By

As that exasperating year 2019 wanes, it feels appropriate to look back on the famous movieland folks we’ve lost. TCM has put together a short  but poignant video segment reminding us of some of the indelible faces and voices who now remain only in our movies and our dreams. I’ve written my own Beverly in Movieland tributes to some of these great performers: Doris Day,  Peter Fonda, Valerie Harper, Albert Finney, Bibi Andersson, Machiko Kyo. And I’ve lamented the loss of outstanding filmmakers like John Singleton, D..A. Pennebaker, Franco Zeffirelli, and Stanley Donen. In the field of music (for the screen as well as for the stage and the concert hall) there have been several indelible passings: André Previn, Michel LeGrand, and Broadway’s Jerry Herman, the exuberant composer of Hello, Dolly and Funny Girl.

Of course deaths don’t stop when the memorial video is posted online. Jerry Herman, who died last Thursday at the age of 88, didn’t make the final cut. A recent edition of The Hollywood Reporter also lists a few passings that TCM overlooked. One was D.C. Fontana, the very first female writer on Star Trek. (In an era less politically correct than our own, women writers found it smart to conceal their gender by turning their given names into male-sounding initials.) Another was Carroll Spinney, the gentle, spritely puppeteer who impersonated Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch and wore the feathers of Big Bird for nearly half a-century. I was particularly moved when Karen Pendleton passed on in October at the age of 73. Pendleton, one of the original Mouseketeers, was a regular on The Mickey Mouse Club for its entire nine-year run.  Though several of the Mouseketeers led tawdry adult lives, Pendleton was a major exception. After the show ended, she devoted herself to her education. When a 1983 car accident that damaged her spinal cord left her paralyzed from the waist down, she went back to college, earning a master’s degree in psychology. Putting her academic training to work, she served as a counselor at a shelter for abused women, while supporting the rights of the disabled by joining the board of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped. A life well lived, indeed.

I was sorry to read about the loss of masterful actors like Ron Leibman (so moving in Norma Rae) and Moonstruck’s Danny Aiello. And I shook my head ruefully at the passing of Jan-Michael Vincent, a talented action hero but one who cut his career short because of his personal weaknesses. (In later years he was reduced to appearing in Roger Corman war epics, like my own Beyond the Call of Duty, flying off to Manila to star in quickie flicks undermined by his drinking habits.)

But of courses the deaths that most moved me were those of celebrities with whom I’ve personally interacted. It seems like yesterday that I, as a writer of profiles for Performing Arts magazine, was welcomed at the home of the versatile character actor René Auberjonois, who lit up stage and screen with his eccentric portrayals. I will always think fondly of the late Dick Miller, my buddy in my New World Pictures days and years later a valuable source of information when I was researching my Corman biography. How wonderful that Dick          inspired both the loyalty of some of Hollywood’s finest directors and an affectionate 2014 documentary (That Guy Dick Miller) summing up his long career  And then there is good-guy Robert Forster, whose resonant baritone is—and always will be—on my answering machine. Hail and farewell. .

Reflections on My Breakfast with Robert Forster

I first met the late Robert Forster under a marquee on Hollywood Blvd.. We’d both just emerged from the screening of a 2014 documentary called That Man, Dick Miller, a tribute to the diminutive actor who’d spent six decades playing oddball movie roles, mostly for Roger Corman and his famous alumni. Forster was featured in the documentary, talking about a longtime friendship with Miller. Afterwards, I saw him standing alone as well-wishers swirled around Dick and his producer-wife Lainie, and I couldn’t resist introducing myself.

I think Robert liked the fact that I praised not his Oscar-nominated performance as bail bondman Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown but rather his small, crucial role as a grieving father in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011). Actors usually appreciate being noticed for their more subtle work. And I think he was pleased that I knew his largely silent but hugely symbolic role as a young soldier who’s the object of Marlon Brando’s unrequited lust in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. This film, released back in 1967, was his very first movie: it required him to  look soulful while riding through the countryside, stark naked, on a big white horse. For those who’ve seen this fascinating, exasperating film, Forster (then a chiseled raven-haired Adonis) is not easy to forget. The part led to him playing a cunning Apache hunted down by Gregory Peck in The Stalking Moon and then Haskell Wexler’s cameraman alter-ego on the streets of Mayor Daley’s Chicago in the timely Medium Cool.

I must have made a good impression, because when I told Robert I’d be happy to feature him in a Beverly in Movieland blogpost he invited me to breakfast at his favorite West Hollywood café. With my usual talent for underestimating L.A. traffic, I arrived some fifteen minutes late, while he was happily consuming his daily bacon and eggs special. But he warmly forgave me, and seemed glad to describe for my tape recorder a career that was not short on ups and downs. He’d fallen into acting in college, as a way to get to know an attractive classmate he later ended up marrying (and, years later, divorcing). While riding high, he’d shared scenes with some of  Hollywood’s biggest movie and TV stars. That’s when he found it easy to dream about someday owning a home on the beach in Malibu. Then came a low period, one in which Roger Corman flicks seemed his best hope. (In 1994 he played a featured role in a film I actually worked on in my Corman days, the trashy but enjoyable Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction.) Hardly a snob, Robert had fun with this sort of shlock. But three years later, Quentin Tarantino rescued him from the B-movie world with Jackie Brown, and Hollywood discovered all over again how appealing he could be on screen, even now that his once-black hair was fast receding.

When I breakfasted with Robert in late 2014, he was full of gratitude that Jackie Brown had resuscitated his career, leading to important roles in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and on the final episode of TV’s Breaking Bad. The day he died of brain cancer, Netflix broadcast El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, in which he reprised his TV role of Ed Galbraith, enigmatic vacuum repairman. I know such meaty parts brought him a lot of joy. Not that he was still fantasizing a Malibu beach-house. As he told me, he was quite content to know that acting had bought him a West Hollywood condominium.

Robert Forster’s Movieland ABCs: A is for "Alligator"

Robert Forster has co-starred in films directed by John Huston (Reflections in a Golden Eye),  Robert Mulligan (The Stalking Moon), David Lynch (Mulholland Drive), and Alexander Payne (The Descendants). He was the top name in Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s landmark feature film debut, Medium Cool. For Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Forster nabbed an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. So what film does he remember most fondly? Forster told me, over breakfast last December, that “Alligator is as good a picture as I have in my career.” 

Alligator, directed in 1980 by Roger Corman alumnus Lewis Teague, has many familiar Corman components. There are car crashes, explosions, wry humor, and (oh yes) a large, scary alligator that  bares its fangs and reduces people to a bloody pulp. The film’s screenwriter, now a respected indie filmmaker, also got his start at Corman’s New World Pictures. Of course I mean John Sayles, who was discovered by my good friend Frances Doel when he was publishing short stories in Esquire. This was the era when Jaws, the biggest hit movie around, was called “a Roger Corman movie on a big budget.” Roger being Roger, he wanted to capitalize on Jaws’ box office success. But for Roger’s cheapie sensibilities, a movie about a giant scary fish was too expensive to contemplate. That’s why he put his money (all $600,000 of it) into a movie about small scary fish. He asked Frances, his ace assistant, to find a promising screenwriter, and she came up with Sayles. In-house Corman editor Joe Dante was drafted to direct, and the result was Piranha, a potent combination of horror and humor, scares and laughs.

Alligator, shot two years later, has more of the same, though it was not made on Corman’s dime. As a Jaws spoof it got extremely strong reviews: the New York Times chose it as one of the summer’s three best movies. And it did especially well on television. For Forster it proved to be “the only movie in my entire career I got paid a back end.”  In civilian speak, this means that ABC-TV (which bought and then did a great job of publicizing the film) earned enough on it that Robert was entitled by contract to reap some of the profits. As every actor in Hollywood knows, a profit participation pay-off is something that’s hugely coveted, but only rarely collected.

Forster’s affection for Alligator is not purely mercenary, though. As an actor who enjoys playing good guys, he’s fond of his character, a down-and-out police detective whose partners keep meeting a bad end. Despite the workplace trauma with which he grapples, he’s capable of wit and humor, though not about his thinning hair. (According to Sayles, it was Forster who suggested that his personal struggle with male pattern baldness be used as a running gag.) Sayles’ trademark social commentary makes an appearance, as do some of Hollywood’s best character actors: Michael Gazzo, Dean Jagger, Jack Carter, and Sydney Lassick (someone I’d worked with decades before he was featured as Cheswick in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). There’s a budding love relationship with a pretty herpetologist played by Robin Riker (later to star in Corman’s Stepmonster). And there are some genuinely scary  moments, like the alligator exploding out of a manhole to terrorize pedestrians. 

One of my favorite characters, aside from Forster’s David, is a self-styled Great White Hunter (Henry Silva) who treats local ghetto kids like native bearers as he stalks his prey—with predictably tragicomic results. No wonder Stephen King once told Forster at Cannes that Alligator was his favorite horror film.