Hollywood and the Death Industry: Remembering Our Loved Ones

Facebook users have doubtless spotted startling notifications on the right-hand margin. Here’s one sample: “We Say A Sad And Somber ‘Goodbye’ To The Wonderful Betty White . . . BREAKING NEWS . . . Betty Is Gone.” There’s a pensive photo of White too, strongly implying that the 93-year-old comedy star has suddenly gone to her eternal reward. Staunch Betty White fans will doubtless click on the accompanying link, only to find that this is a sneaky ad for some kind of skincare miracle-product. I admit I’ve succumbed to my curiosity and checked out a similar link connected with the wonderful (and not very young) Judi Dench.

It’s amazing what we’ll do when we’re lured in by news of dead and dying celebrities.

My mind is so boggled by the carnage of the past week that I can barely focus on the conventional life cycle, from which people depart at an appropriately advanced age. There’s a lot of that in Hollywood movies, often featuring touching deathbed scenes that are far too sanitized to resemble actual life. But Hollywood’s fascination with death also extends to the bizarre and the gruesome demise. When I worked for Roger Corman, we took great pains to pump up the gore in our movies and suggest it on our posters. For some folks a film where no life hangs in the balance is simply not worth watching.

There are even movies where the phenomenon of death and dying becomes its own sort of dark comedy. Quentin Tarantino films like Pulp Fiction know how to walk the fine line between death as tragic and death as funny. But I’m thinking more of the 1971 cult favorite, Harold and Maude, in which an unhappy young man plays at suicide and a wise elderly woman shows him the meaning of life—and death. (They meet because both have the hobby of attending funerals.) And I’m particularly thinking of The Loved One , the outrageous 1965 satire (based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel) of Southern California’s extravagant funeral industry Even a simple listing of the cast of supporting characters—Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle, John Gielgud, Tab Hunter, and Liberace—hints at the skewed perspective in this film. It has just had a major fiftieth-anniversary showing at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre, sponsored by the American Cinematheque along with the Los Angeles Conservancy’s committee on modernist architecture, which appreciates how this film features L.A.’s urban landscape on-screen.

It’s all too easy to think about dying these days. But I’ve also been giving some thought to conventional funerals after attending a simple but dignified send-off for a friend’s elderly mother. It took place at Hillside Memorial Park, a freeway-close cemetery that many Angelenos spot on their way to Los Angeles International Airport. What first catches the eye is a lofty cupola and fountain dedicated to the memory of Al Jolson. There’s also a statue of Jolson down on one knee in a characteristic pose. It’s all very Hollywood, which is apt because many stars of Jewish Hollywood are buried here. Hillside dates from the era where Jews, even famous ones, weren’t welcome in mainstream cemeteries, like the legendary Forest Lawn. At Hillside they’re buried in style, with many of the most celebrated interred inside a massive mausoleum, complete with marble benches and stained glass windows. On a quick stroll I saw the final resting places of comedians Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and Jack Benny (who, despite his tightwad reputation, rests in an imposing crypt). There are younger celebrities too. One who surprised me was David Janssen, known for TV’s The Fugitive. Who knew?   

Al Jolson Memorial, Hillside Memorial Park

 

Al Jolson Statue

The Loved One: Dying in Movies

I’ve just come from a memorial service for a good man who would seem to have deserved a longer stay on earth. He was a husband and a father, with two college-age sons. He wasn’t ill. Instead he fell victim to a cruel twist of fate: he was waiting on the sidewalk to cross a busy street when a driver (distracted or drunk) jumped the curb and plowed into him. I’m told the driver is now in jail. And this good man is dead.

Movies give us a warped perspective on death and dying. When my father succumbed – extraordinarily painfully – to pancreatic cancer, I was relieved that his suffering was over. But I also felt irrationally cheated that we’d been denied the kind of death scene I knew from movies, where the family gathers around their loved one’s bedside for a touching farewell scene. It’s a classic moment, in which wrongs are righted and old grudges dissolve into heartfelt declarations of love. In Love Story, Jenny and Oliver had such a moment, but my father never did. At the end, and for far too many days, he was not a person at all, simply a body waiting to breathe its last.

Then, of course, there are those movies where body count is all that matters. In most action flicks, we don’t get to know the dying: they are nothing but the modern equivalent of cannon fodder. I remember the late David Carradine telling me about the fun he’d had making Stray Bullet 2 at Roger Corman’s studio in Galway: “I think we kill every cop in Ireland.” And, yes, I remember Carradine’s iconic role in New World Pictures’ midnight-movie classic, Death Race 2000. In that outrageous indie (much bleaker than the big-budget Jason Statham remake), race drivers like Carradine’s “Frankenstein” scored points and encouraged fan adulation by running over as many pedestrians as possible. In meetings with screenwriter Chuck Griffith and Corman story editor Frances Doel, I personally helped invent creative ways for Frankenstein to rack up points without striking the audience as unsympathetic. One solution: a scene we called Euthanasia Day at the Old Folks’ Home, in which caregivers wheeled aged inmates into position to be mowed down by Frankenstein. Our script called for him to detour off the road and run over the cartoonishly evil-minded attendants, letting the oldsters live on.

Death Race 2000, like most films of its era, was relatively short on blood. But Bonnie and Clyde introduced two jolly killers whose own bullet-riddled demise -- shot in slow-mo and living color -- made for deliberately painful viewing. Pauline Kael famously wrote that Arthur Penn’s masterwork, “by making us care about the robber lovers, has put the sting back into death.” Maybe so, but Bonnie and Clyde could also be accused of paving the way for the string of increasingly grisly horror films we now call slasher porn, in which the yuck factor is part of the thrill.

Then there’s the notion of death as black comedy. The idea of satirizing the funeral industry goes back to 1965, with Tony Richardson’s darkly funny adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. Richard Linklater’s Bernie can be viewed as an update, but has the distinction of being a true story, about a prissy undertaker (the bravura Jack Black) so well liked by his small-town Texas neighbors that they’d gladly see him get away with murder. To them, the grumpy old lady he shoots in the back wholly deserves her fate. Do we too, as moviegoers, prefer perps to victims? Death, where is thy sting?