by Linda Holmes

I was sixteen when Dirty Dancing came out. I had just started driving -- to the point where, the first time I went to see it with my friend Erin, we didn't get to see it because I locked my keys in the car at the theater with the car running. I was young; I was the target demographic. Somebody was always trying to put me in a corner. Sixteen feels like that.

So it may be an accident of timing that I was disproportionately attached to Patrick Swayze, whose death, while not at all unexpected, hits surprisingly hard. I could say I admired the way he kept working even after he was diagnosed with cancer, which is true. Or that I admired the fact that unlike a lot of famous actors, he stayed married to the same lady from 1975 until today, which is also true. Or that I admired the sense of humor about himself that he demonstrated in a famous sketch on Saturday Night Live where he and Chris Farley played aspiring Chippendales dancers -- that's true, too.

But while those things are true, much of it is the amiable and easy familiarity of a good movie star. Between Ghost and Dirty Dancing, the guy made films I have seen a preposterous number of times. Not usually giving my full attention, never studying them like I would with really serious movies. But with a cup of tea on the first really cold day in November, with a plaid wool blanket? Or late at night when something worrisome is happening and sleep is oddly elusive? You should be so lucky as to find Dirty Dancing on television.

Ghost, simple pleasures, and keeping company, after the jump...

Continue reading "Patrick Swayze And Pangs Of Familiarity" >

As Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Matthew Broderick was one of John Hughes' many flawed but very human high-school students. (The Kobal Collection)

by Linda Holmes

UPDATE: If you haven't yet read this great story about John Hughes that's been kicking around Facebook and Twitter all day, I highly recommend it.

John Hughes never won an Oscar. He really never won awards at all. He made mainstream, popular entertainment. But for a period of time in the late 1980s, he made a series of movies, mostly about teenagers, that people still watch, still love, and still quote. And those movies have never really been replaced, because the guy knew something. These five moments are the best explanation I have of what it is he knew.

1. "Never had one lesson." There are many more famous moments in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but none is as important as Ferris (Matthew Broderick) squeaking incompetently away on a clarinet shortly after getting rid of his parents for the day, then leaning forward and declaring — in the fourth-wall-breaking style of the film — "Never had one lesson!"

Unlike a lot of the kids at the center of Hughes films, Ferris Bueller isn't an outcast; he's at ease everywhere. So if he'd conned his way into staying home to make trouble or play video games — or, for that matter, to do nothing — he would just be a brat.

But from the start, he is skipping school because he genuinely believes he has better things to do than attend high school, which is an awfully difficult premise to entirely deny. Skipping school so you can stay in your house isn't really a quest; it's just skipping school. Ferris wants something bigger than school.

John Hughes movies were very good at putting school in its place. Everything isn't about yearbook and cheerleading; kids have inner lives of legitimate importance, and not only with regard to dating. Sometimes those inner lives demand a day spent with your friends, watching baseball and seeing great art, instead of answering to your name in homeroom.

Four more, after the jump...

Continue reading "Five Great John Hughes Moments" >

by Marc Hirsh

If you grew up in the 1980s and had cable (or a friend with cable), then there's a good chance that you spent your afternoons with a Canadian actor whose name you almost certainly didn't know. But you knew Barth, and you knew El Capitano, and you knew Senator Lance Prevert, and you knew Ross Ewich.

In other words, you knew Les Lye, who died yesterday at the age of 84. Lye may have started out as the only cast member of You Can't Do That On Television whose age didn't start with a 1 (at least until Abby Hagyard was brought in to play the female characters), but he fit in perfectly. In a show ostensibly run by kids, adults were hypocritical, disgusting, tyrannical and just plain ineffective, and Lye jumped into his role with gusto.

It's not something just anyone would have gotten right.

A weird show, just the right approach, that young Canadian in the clip above, and more, after the jump...

Continue reading "Les Lye of 'You Can't Do That On Television' Dies At 84" >

by Linda Holmes

I'm not going to beat around the bush: I can't remember the last time I wrote so much about death over a five-day period. But interestingly enough, of all the celebrities who have died recently -- Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson being the most noted ones -- the one I was watching in a current project was Billy Mays.

Mays, who died on Sunday, was one of the two stars of Discovery's Pitchmen, which followed the adventures he had with Anthony "Sully" Sullivan, another ubiquitous infomercial star. Each week, they'd find a new product and try to help develop it for direct-response sale on television (that's pitchman-speak for "infomercial"). Last week, Billy and Sully helped Survivor winner Ethan Zohn develop his idea for a two-chambered cereal bowl that holds the milk separately from the cereal to keep the cereal from getting soggy. Seeing a guy get all excited about how his invention is going to revolutionize cereal eating, only to test-market it and find that everyone says, "Looks like a dog bowl"? It's not meaningful, but it's a little entertaining.

I'm not trying to make Billy Mays more than he was; he made ads for OxiClean and the Awesome Auger, and he yelled, and he was sort of goofy and obnoxious. He was a huckster, but an unapologetic and good-humored huckster. In the above clip from The Tonight Show just last Wednesday night, he has great fun with Sully and Conan O'Brien demonstrating his total faith in the stuff he sells, along with his touchy feelings about the Shamwow.

Not an artist, but a guy I'd grown sort of fond of, and one I'll miss watching.

by Linda Holmes

The death of Bea Arthur on Saturday broke my sitcom-watcher's heart, and also got me thinking about this fact: The Golden Girls ran from 1985 to 1992; Designing Women ran from 1986 to 1993; Murphy Brown ran from 1988 to 1998. That means that from 1988 to 1992, all three of these shows were on at the same time.

Ninety minutes of prime time given over to comedy driven by a total of nine mouthy women (that's a compliment), six of whom were over 40. (All the Girls, Candice Bergen, and Dixie Carter.)

How things have changed, after the jump...

Continue reading "Missing Bea Arthur" >

by Joe Reid

Leading a post with "Sad news for Joss Whedon fans" is usually a harbinger for the latest on the programming woes of a low-rated cult series. (Viz: Whedon's currently struggling Dollhouse.)

Sadly, today that preface has to accompany the news that former Angel star Andy Hallett passed away Sunday of congestive heart disease. He was 33.

Andy Hallett's contributions to Angel, and where to find some of his best work, after the jump...

Continue reading "Remembering Andy Hallett, Karaoke Demon Of TV's 'Angel'" >

Ricardo Montalbán, (seen here in 2004): A career that went far beyond Fantasy Island. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images Entertainment

 

by Linda Holmes

Did you see what I did? I did it to him right in the headline. I made Ricardo Montalbán, who died yesterday, all about Fantasy Island, even though his career as a movie and television actor adds up to 167 listings in his Internet Movie Database entry, and that doesn't count his work in theater.

But to me, and to a broad swath of people who were young when Fantasy Island bowed in 1978, he is the white-suited Mr. Roarke, who welcomed guests to his private island, where he had the ability to...well, make fantasies come true. Kind of. Often ironically. You can see full episodes online -- here, for instance, is one where the two stories are a man who wants to find the perfect woman and a woman who wants to learn about the criminal mind.

"Khaaaaaaan!", after the jump...

Continue reading "Ricardo Montalbán: 'Smiles, Everyone, Smiles'" >

Patrick McGoohan: The Prisoner was a mystery show not for the faint of heart. Authenticated News/Courtesy Of Getty Images

 

by Marc Hirsh

Yesterday was a tough one for sci-fi fans, as the news hit that both Ricardo Montalbán and Patrick McGoohan had died. While Montalbán's performances in Fantasy Island, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and the thickly cushioned front seat of a Chrysler Cordoba gave him fame across multiple audiences and generations, McGoohan's renown was more limited, as it hinged primarily on a single thing: The Prisoner, the landmark television show he helped create in the late 1960s.

I first came across The Prisoner in college, when I stumbled on it one Sunday evening on the television in the common room of my dorm. I had no idea what to make of the thing, and neither did the other guy who happened to be in the room. We watched with befuddled glee as Number Six foiled the plans of what we would soon learn was one of many Number Twos.

And we were hooked. The two of us never really spoke outside of that (not that talking would have helped), but every Sunday, it was just him, me and the local PBS station freaking our minds out but good. Pre-Internet, we had no idea what it was; pre-DVD, we had no way of catching up on any episodes we'd missed. It was just this weird, amazing anomaly that we had to catch while we could or be left wondering.

How you, too, can have your mind blown, after the jump...

Continue reading "Sad News From The 'Tally Ho'" >

Robert Prosky The veteran actor died Dec. 8, just five days shy of his 78th birthday.

 

by Trey Graham

If you ever watched Hill Street Blues, you probably have fond memories of Robert Prosky, who played the endearing, avuncular Sgt. Stan Jablonski in later seasons. (And you probably regretted it, a little, when he turned up later on the feeble NBC sitcom Veronica's Closet, playing the Kirstie Alley character's father.)

Those weren't his only credits, of course, not in a stage and screen career that spanned more than 35 years. He played a pro-bono lawyer in Dead Man Walking, and a TV-studio boss in Mrs. Doubtfire, among many other parts.

But Prosky, who died yesterday in the wake of emergency heart surgery, was best known as a theater actor, and a fine one. He earned his second Tony nomination in 1989, playing a gregarious Soviet negotiator — opposite Law & Order's Sam Waterston — in the glasnost-era arms-control drama A Walk In the Woods.

The first had come just a few years earlier, when he played an aging salesman in the Broadway premiere of David Mamet's brutal Glengarry Glen Ross.

And in Washington, D.C., where Prosky was a longtime company member at Arena Stage, he'd played that other, most iconic salesman, Willy Loman, in a Death of a Salesman that Arthur Miller himself reportedly called "unforgettable."

I can believe it. Prosky was an easy, unfussy actor, but he sure knew how to inhabit a character. I saw him in fine form a couple of years back in an Arena production of the Depression-era drama Awake and Sing!, playing the curmudgeonly Marxist grandpa of a squabbling Bronx clan.

"If this life leads to a revolution, it's a good life," that cranky old character growls, famously — "otherwise it's for nothing."

The D.C. theater community, from what I'm hearing today, would probably beg to differ. He may not have started any big revolutions, but as the news of Prosky's death spread, on Facebook and via e-mail, the stories came back, affectionate and warm. Everyone, it seems, had a Bob Prosky memory, and in so many of them he seems to have been an inspiration.

Word's getting around about the death of Jurassic Park author (and ER creator) Michael Crichton, who'd been battling cancer but had kept it mostly quiet.

The news was announced earlier today at Crichton's Web site. (Which is apparently crashing under the traffic hit -- as I'm typing this, it's timing out and refusing to load.)

We'll have an appreciation in a little bit Here's an appreciation, courtesy of our guy Linton Weeks.

Also, here's this:

by Trey Graham

We've lost Studs Terkel, that magnificent animal. You'll find Cheryl Corley's story on him over here.

And because there's no point in parochialism at times like this, I want to make sure you see this, from the Chicago Tribune:

There's much more, including several more videos, from the Tribune on this page.

Need more? Try Studs On a Soapbox, a half-hour bio that originally aired on WTTW's "Chicago Stories" back in 2000. (Credit Tom Weinberg and the online video archive MediaBurn.)

And because no good sendoff is complete without a little Patti LaBelle, here's the number "Cleanin' Women," from the Broadway musical based on Terkel's quietly marvelous here's-what-we-do-all-day book Working. This take is from a 90-minute version that aired on PBS in 1982, in the first season of American Playhouse:

Pimpin' it Godfather style: Rudy Ray Moore rocks the snakeskin-and-glitter-frames look. Getty Images

 

by John Ridley

Most of the obits for comedian Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away last Sunday at the age of 81, tended to note his extensive list of party albums, his penchant for working bluer than blue. They pointed out that Dolemite, his stage and film character, was an influence on any number of pimp- lovin' playas from Big Daddy Kane to Snoop Dogg.

But for those of you who've never heard of Rudy Ray Moore — and I'm guessing that's a lot of you — I'd like to recall none of that today.

Rather, in eulogizing the man, I'd like to remember his unforgettable 1979 film Disco Godfather.

Disco Godfather is one of the worst movies ever made. It also has a permanent home in my DVD collection. If you appreciate what Rudy was all about, you can't help but appreciate the film.

The allure of Disco Godfather explained, after the jump ...

Continue reading "'Disco Godfather': Remembering the Remarkable Rudy Ray Moore" >