Check out his website. Winston was an f/x pioneer who specialized in the live-action animatronic puppet end of things. On Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg needed his slow-moving large-scale dinosaurs along with the CGI ones. Winston was at the top of his profession and participated in many of the ground-breaking f/x pics of his day, including James Cameron's Terminator 2, for which he won an Oscar. He was working on Cameron's Avatar when he died.
Winston won visual effects Oscars for 1986's "Aliens, "1992's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and 1993's "Jurassic Park," for which he created animatronic dinosaurs that complimented the film's digitally-animated creatures. "Iron Man" visual effects supervisor John Nelson "Stan was the man when it came to making those kind of prosthetic effects, he was the guy. If you look at the litany of other good people in the business, they tend to be people who worked for Stan."
Now at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Bill Horberg has long considered his former boss at Mirage Entertainment, Sydney Pollack, to be his mentor. Here's his heartfelt tribute:
Sydney
Sydney Pollack was a teacher. How ironic that the character of the African dictator in the last film he directed, The Interpreter, was called The Teacher. That was the kind of contradiction he liked, and as a dramatist and peerless storyteller he always strove to see the good in bad people and the bad in good. Although he was never a Judge of his characters, or of people.
He was like a human geiger counter, or some amazing divining rod, and what he was searching for always was The Truth. I remember him telling me how much he loved the quote "One man and the truth is a majority." I think it was Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren who said that. Sydney had this gold-plated hundred-percent lifetime warranty bullshit detector and he turned it on everybody and everything. He was the self-described “logic Nazi.” It could be painful at times, but you always learned something, as you got to see the world for that moment, or in that scene, or that frame of film, or that edit, the way he saw it - with a kind of x-ray vision.
Pollack's cancer was inoperable because it riddled his entire body and the original site was never found.
Trained as an actor, Pollack enjoyed an unusually long and prolific career as a producer and director distinguished by his uncanny knack for delivering high quality, commercial films in just about any genre, often with notoriously demanding stars, from Barbra Streisand (The Way We Were) to Dustin Hoffman (Tootsie). He also made several films with Robert Redford (The Electric Horseman) and Harrison Ford (Sabrina). Always hard on himself, Pollack never assumed that he had scored a hit; he was in despair in the editing room before audiences fell in love with his Oscar-winning Out of Africa. And the same was true of the challengingly difficult Tootsie, in which he played one of many memorable supporting roles. Pollack also enjoyed acting in other directors' films, such as Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and most recently, Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton.
Crafting quality studio entertainment is a lot harder than it looks: at the end of his long career, Pollack boasts a number of films likely to be remembered as classics. And he is respected, admired and personally revered as one of the more gifted, capable and generous talents to come through Hollywood. He certainly has a place in my own pantheon of all-time Hollywood greats.
Pollack told The New York Times in 1982:
"Stars are like thoroughbreds," he said. "Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best -- whatever it is that's made them a star -- it's really exciting."
..."if you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form."
Pollack Classics:
The Way We Were
Tootsie
Out of Africa
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Three Days of the Condor
The Yakuza
Gabriel Rotello's Huffington Post blog about a memorable meeting with Charlton Heston is hilarious. I have to confess that especially in this photo, Heston was really hot.
My favorite Heston movie, which showcases his skills as a stalwart, sexy leading man, is Orson Welles' 1958 border mystery Touch of Evil. Heston plays Mexican cop Vargas, just married to Janet Leigh; the movie takes them both down some nasty twists and turns before its conclusion. Was Heston underrated, or overrated? I was fond of him as a movie star, more than a great actor. But he acted in the style of the period.
My favorite Richard Widmark performance ever--he's sexy as hell as a tough-guy with a heart--is in Sam Fuller's masterpiece, Pickup on South Street:
Widmark's death last week at age 93 has inspired some terrific obit/tributes from Aljean Harmetz, Richard Corliss, Glenn Kenny, Michael Sragow, and last but not least, the NYT's resident auteurist Dave Kehr--and yes, that critical approach applies to an actor who brought depth and grace to every role, no matter how big or small, mean or creepy. He was always compelling.
Anthony Minghella died of an unexpected cerebral hemorrhage on Tuesday after the removal of a growth in his neck last week. He was 54. Minghella had been finishing up the BBC/HBO series "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," which he co-wrote and co-produced with Richard Curtis, before its debut March 23. Minghella was always putting in long days on numerous projects. Here's the Variety obit. UPDATE: And the NYT.
I got to know Minghella, who was always accessible and charming, on the Oscar campaign circuit for The English Patient (which I somehow intuited was going to win best picture), and then again with Oscar contenders The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain.
I had fallen in love with his first film as a writer-director, the intense tale of ghostly love, Truly Madly Deeply, starring the incomparable Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman. Minghella's films are literate, beautiful, often a tad British and remote (which sometimes hurt their boxoffice performance). But I've always been a hopeless smart-house Anglophile.
In September 2006, I conducted video interviews with Minghella and his long-time producing partner at Mirage, director Sydney Pollack, as part of an "Anthony Minghella Night" fundraiser at Long Beach's University Art Museum. (It is available for VOD download on Charter On-Demand.) Minghella talked about technology and culture in modern cinema: "films haven't changed, they've just gotten faster," Minghella said, predicting that "the current leaps in technology, the digital age, will have a radical and convulsive impact on cinema as we know it, not the least in making it available to anybody and everybody, giving cinema the opportunity to grow, change, and perhaps dwindle as a commercial enterprise, while flourishing as an art form."
No slouch himself, Pollack said Minghella was a brilliant, articulate, generous, and hard-working collaborator, who he leaned on for advice and feedback. For his part, Minghella took nothing for granted and cared deeply about making intelligent movies. In that regard, Pollack, English Patient producer Saul Zaentz and Harvey Weinstein were his great champions.
Minghella had more great work in him. "He seemed like someone who'd do art for another 40 years," said producer Albert Berger, who with his partner Ron Yerxa worked with Minghella on Cold Mountain, which shot for over 100 days in wintry Romania.
Berger and Yerxa found Minghella unusually collaborative. "He didn't want to be the only voice in the room. He liked being challenged," Berger said. On Bee Season, which marked the acting debut of Minghella's son Max, Minghella came in as a friend of the court and opened doors at Mirage so that filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee could work with his editor there, and gave the directors guidance when needed.
Minghella lost weight, stopped drinking and trained like a prizefighter to get into shape for the long marathon in severe conditions on Cold Mountain. "I couldn't believe how much work he got done in one day," said Yerxa. "He had no assistant, people walked in and out of his trailer. He had no filter. He answered everyone's email within hours with a thoughtful reply. He was writing every night. He must not have slept." Minghella's work ethic infected the cast and crew, including Law and Nicole Kidman, who were willing to put in the same long hours with short turnarounds.
At the film's end Minghella and his associate producer stayed up all night signing personalized photo tintypes as gifts for the crew.
Here's Minghella's appearance on Charlie Rose for The Talented Mr. Ripley:
And now comes the announcement that 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke has died. (Rendezvous with Rama is another fave.) My college friends never let me live down calling my boyfriend Peter (who played Buster Keaton in my first short) "a movie moron" because he had not seen 2001.
From CNN:
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, died Wednesday at age 90, an associate confirmed.
Clarke died early Wednesday at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.
"He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit," Chase said.
Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick shared an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay for "2001."
The film grew out of Clarke's 1951 short story, "The Sentinel," about an alien artifact left on the moon.
A friend writes: "Someone is killing the great modernists of Europe. Antonioni. Bergman. Now..." I confess that aside from writing the great screenplay for Alain Resnais' classic Last Year at Marienbad, nouveau roman novelist/screenwriter/director Robbe-Grillet was never my cup of tea. I encourage fans of Robbe-Grillet to post comments about what made him great. Here's Glenn Kenny.
This Last Year at Marienbad clip gives you the general idea: gliding camera, voiceover, narrative disjunction:
Chris Nolan tributes his Dark Knight star Heath Ledger in Newsweek.
One night, as I'm standing on LaSalle Street in Chicago, trying to line up a shot for "The Dark Knight," a production assistant skateboards into my line of sight. Silently, I curse the moment that Heath first skated onto our set in full character makeup. I'd fretted about the reaction of Batman fans to a skateboarding Joker, but the actual result was a proliferation of skateboards among the younger crew members. If you'd asked those kids why they had chosen to bring their boards to work, they would have answered honestly that they didn't know. That's real charisma—as invisible and natural as gravity. That's what Heath had.
Heath was bursting with creativity. It was in his every gesture. He once told me that he liked to wait between jobs until he was creatively hungry. Until he needed it again. He brought that attitude to our set every day. There aren't many actors who can make you feel ashamed of how often you complain about doing the best job in the world. Heath was one of them.
The LAT's Reed Johnson did a nice job on Ledger as well, placing him in the context of vulnerable male actors. He's right: Ledger will inevitably be compared to James Dean. UPDATE: Here's a photo gallery in VF.
And here's Daniel Day Lewis from the SAG Awards, which made me cry:
Here's an update on the Heath Ledger autopsy report. Warner Bros. is still trying to come to grips not only with his death, but how to proceed on finishing and marketing The Dark Knight (below). He was in the midst of filming Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (right). Ledger had starred in Gilliam's Brothers Grimm. UPDATE: Glenn Kenny's eulogy.
NEW YORK (AP) — Heath Ledger was found dead Tuesday at a downtown Manhattan residence in a possible drug-related death, police said. He was 28.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said Ledger had an appointment for a massage at the Manhattan apartment believed to be his home. The housekeeper who went to let Ledger know the masseuse was there found him dead at 3:26 p.m.
The Australian-born actor was an Oscar nominee for his role in "Brokeback Mountain" and has numerous other screen credits.
How horrible. Sad. Regrettable. Ledger was just moving into the height of his powers. His work in the trailer to Dark Knight looks creepy and good. His Oscar-nominated performance in Brokeback Mountain revealed a deep sadness that must have been inside him. It's a terrible waste of a major talent who should have had a long career ahead of him. He had broken up with Michelle Williams, with whom he had a daughter. I've always been fond of this paparazzi shot from happier days.
Irv Letofsky was entertainment editor of the LA Times Calendar when I first met him in the early 80s. And during my recent stint at The Hollywood Reporter, he used to come into the newsroom every week to file his TV reviews. Letofsky was a warm, wise, Lou Grant-style editor, gruff but generously supportive to younger writers like me. He will be missed.
Pulitzer-prize-winning author Norman Mailer has died. He was 84. Here's the NYT obit (and photo). Mailer was a fixture in New York as I was growing up, a bigger-than-life personality around the city, always on the talk shows promoting his latest book or literary rivalry with the likes of Gore Vidal, always in trouble for something. He infamously ran for mayor.
Only three weeks after his wife Deborah Kerr died, raconteur and author Peter Viertel, who wrote the must-read Hollywood novel White Hunter, Black Heart, also passed away.
Deborah Kerr, star of The King and I, An Affair to Remember and From Here to Eternity (right) has died. I loved this actress, always. One of my favorite of her movies is John Huston's underappreciated Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. She was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a nun stranded on a Pacific Island with marine Robert Mitchum. He falls in love with her, of course.
Robert Garlock, New York-based press agent and partner at 42West, took a sudden turn for the worst and Robert Garlock died on Sunday. He had been suffering from complications from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He had been very ill for months but had recently been improving, walking and talking and enjoying his 41st birthday celebration on Saturday.
I had known Garlock since his PMK years, and always enjoyed his company; he was a total pro. He was passionate about the movie business. He loved repping such clients as Clive Owen and Uma Thurman. He will be missed.
The media are hunting down details of the tragic but fascinating double suicides of artist couple Theresa Duncan annd Jeremy Blake. According to the LAT's Chris Lee, paranoia about Scientology plus Hollywood disappointment brought the beautiful art-world celebs down.
Jon Swift, a proponent of the new school of film criticism called Derrierism, has a contrarian take on Bergman and Antonioni, which while I disagree with it, is provocative, well-written and represents to some degree the thinking of the younger male online film community that recently voted for their Top 100 films.
The more I think about it, the more depressed I am that so many ardent film fans will never watch the old classics, the silents, the great foreign films of Bergman, Antonioni, Murnau, Fassbinder, Dreyer, Eisenstein at al because they didn't grow up with them, their minds weren't shaped by them. They're too far away on some level.
Antonioni is an acquired taste. I certainly understand how tedious the films may seem to some. But Bergman is another matter. He's telling accessible and disturbing stories that probe and dissect human nature. And the films stand the test of time. Some Bergman films are impenetrable, while others have enormous impact. For me, The Magic Flute is sheer bliss, while Autumn Sonata hits me hard in my mother-daugher plexus. The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander boast the widest appeal, I think--I defy anyone to completely dismiss these films.
So I ask. Have the people making fun of Bergman actually watched the films?
And here are Michelangelo Antonioni obits from the AP, the NYT and Michael Wilmington. When I booked Antonioni's existential masterpiece L'Avventura at my college film society, only a few people came. Antonioni's La Notte, Red Desert, Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, L'Eclisse, The Passenger: at NYU I read long treatises on what was going on in those long, languid shots. Never a populist whose films were easy to comprehend, Antonioni rewarded careful study and frequent viewing. Improbably, the director hit the pop culture zeitgeist in the 60s and 70s with the gorgeous English-language Blowup, starring Vanessa Redgrave and David Hemmings, the incomprehensible desert-wandering Zabriskie Point, which was a popular title to watch on acid, and The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, with its astonishing independent camera moves.
One of the greatest directors of all time, Ingmar Bergman, has died. Smiles of a Summer Night. Persona. Scenes from a Marriage. The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries. Autumn Sonata. Fanny and Alexander. Cries and Whispers. The Magic Flute. All are extraordinary in their own way. But the list is long. Here's the trailer for 1957's The Seventh Seal. I herewith commit to watching at least one Bergman film this week in honor of this monumental talent.
Here are some links: The Variety obit The NYT obit Woody Allen on Bergman Bergman's official site Bergman clips
DVD Spindoctor has a status report on available DVDs and the hilarious Bergman parody, De Duva, starring Madeline Kahn as Ingrid Thulin: "Phallic un symbol?"
Ulrich Muhe, the star of the Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others, has died of stomach cancer. He was 53, and was suffering from the disease when he attended this year's Oscar ceremony. I sat next to him at a dinner thrown by Sony Pictures Classics at September's Toronto International Film Festival. As an East German, his English was not fluent, but we did fine. He was sensitive, sweet, lovely. He lived through many of the things that the movie depicts, and when he was a young man, was even posted as sentry guard at the Berlin Wall, a duty he hated.
Shot in 38 days, the film stars top East German theater actor Ulrich Muhe as the Stasi listener who is changed by what he learns about relationships, art, love, deception, corruption, power and betrayal. According to Henckel von Donnersmarck, Muhe was one of the first East Germans to claim his own 500-page Stasi file, and the actor learned that he had been under tight Stasi surveillance from the time he was in high school.
"They knew he was going to be a big star before he knew it," Henckel von Donnersmarck says. "When he did military service, they positioned him on the Berlin Wall with orders to shoot. He collapsed on duty with stomach ulcers. They treated him, released him, and threatened him. He found out that his wife, a famous actress, was a Stasi informant. Playing the part was a journey of self-discovery for him."
What a loss. Did those stomach ulcers lead to the cancer that killed him?
Critic John Anderson knows a lot more about director Edward Yang than I do. Here's his appreciation of the man and his films:
“The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away,” Edward Yang once said. One might answer that in his epic, expansive movies, Edward blasted apathy to bits and turned complacency to rubble.
It was less of a bang than a whimper that accompanied the news of Edward’s death last week: Only 59, he was defeated by complications of the colon cancer he’d been fighting for the last seven years. His death was a shock, naturally. But the fact he’d been sick, and so few seemed to know, seemed no surprise at all.
The world should, and will, remember Edward as a filmmaker equally influenced by the spare aesthetic of Antonioni and the teeming, novelistic inventions of Joyce; the humanity of a Jean Renoir, and the rigorous perspective of a Claude Chabrol. But those fortunate enough to have known him personally probably recall, much more immediately, a gentle, self-conscious soul, who greeted you with hands in a prayerful Buddhist salute, even while his mind was scrambling along the precipices of new technologies, globalization, worldwide avarice, Japanese anime, the delicate architecture of his own cinema and a world that played discordant counterpoint to the divine harmonies he heard in his head. And which were reproduced so adroitly on screen.
Born in Shanghai, Edward always seemed at least half American – he’d earned his degrees here, worked in Seattle for years and, when he died, was living in Beverly Hills. Although Taipei was his city, the way Delft was Vermeer’s, Edward’s films always betrayed the kinship he found between his two countries – histories umbilically connected to immigration and checkered by a lack of racial unity; countries both blessed and haunted by the variegated ethnic backgrounds of their peoples. He threw us clues: “Yi Yi” had a McDonald’s; in “Taipei Story,” Edward’s star, Hou Hsiao-hsien, wore a Yankees cap.
Significantly, Edward found in both Taiwan and the U.S. confounding streaks of anti-intellectualism, and an institutionalized allergy to creativity and culture that made his own life so conflicted. He was compelled, he said in 2002, to be “a good Chinese son” and pursue a career in engineering, even though his instinct was for art. That he ultimately found his footing – abetted by the cinema of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and William Holden -- is something we can only be grateful for.
With seven feature-length films to his credit, Edward may have the highest ratio of influence and stature per screen minute of any director since Jean Vigo. It is impossible, though, to watch either of his two unqualified masterpieces – “A Brighter Summer Day” of 1991, or his final work, the incomparable “Yi Yi” – without receiving the entirety of human experience, the joy, the woe, the inescapable weight of cosmic solitude and an ineffable sense of hope. There have certainly been filmmakers with filmographies larger than Edward Yang’s, but very, very few as eloquent, or inescapable.
I am feeling very guilty that I have not seen more of this man's work, and will remedy that as soon as I can.
ABC film critic Joel Siegel has died at age 63 of colon cancer, which he had been fighting for six years. I got to know Siegel two years ago on the Red Carpet at the Academy Awards when he, Leonard Maltin and I dished about the Oscar race for the Road to the Oscars preshow. The three of us had a blast as we hung out and rehearsed and then went live on Oscar night. He was very kind to me. Damn.
I first met Andy during an audition for a cable movie review show hosted by Chris Gore. The ones we taped included Jones and KROQ movie maven Ralph Garman. Jones was a big, joyous, flamboyant, funny, charming, and fearless presence, fast on his feet. And he loved movies. He was better than all of us. It made sense to me that he was an online pioneer who thrived at TNT's Rough Cut and then E! Online, and loved opining about the Oscars on the live E! Oscar pre-show.
An ill-fated holiday trip to Mexico three years ago, when losing his laptop and ID delayed his return to work, ended his stint at E. After that, he seemed unmoored. Career disappointment and bad luck dogged him. He freelanced for Emmy Magazine, The Advocate and Lavender. He stayed with each of his separated parents. I'd see him at screenings and parties leaning on a cane after his ankle was shattered when he was hit by a car as a pedestrian.
I've known too many people in the entertainment business who have died young. There's a pattern. Sometimes when people don't find their niche, can't do what they want to do, or don't consider themselves successful, their disappointment and depression render them too unhappy to thrive.
Jack Valenti, the colorful, charismatic head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America for almost four decades and the prime mover behind the movie ratings system, died Thursday. He was 85.Valenti had checked out of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center on Wednesday where he was hospitalized after suffering a stroke.
A private mass celebrating the life of Jack Valenti will be held in Washington. The family will announce details in the coming days.
UPDATE: Here's Variety's political blogger Ted Johnson on on Valenti. He has several posts--and one on Barack Obama's clubbing plans this weekend. And Valenti's memoir stays on track. My favorite thing about Valenti was his old-fashioned, florid, oratorical use of language. They don't make them like him anymore.
F/x master Stan Winston has died. He was 62. 
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