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Coming soon to a Fringe Festival near you. As long as you live in Minnesota.
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Coming soon to a Fringe Festival near you...
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Friends, it’s been a long, long time since anything new has happened here at Know Your B-Movie Actors. Let’s just say that things happened, mistakes were made and I can neither confirm nor deny any rumors of my involvement in clandestine operations in Lithuania. However, there is something new about to happen. Know Your B-Movie Actors is making the leap from the digital world and clothing itself in flesh. My flesh, actually. It’s not nearly as gross as it sounds. In August of 2016, KYBMA will be coming to you live from the Minnesota Fringe Festival in Minneapolis.  More details are to come, and they will be posted here. In the meantime, read through some of the back catalog and ponder quietly to yourselves just how the hell this becomes a stage show. Please, you can ponder more quietly than that. No, quieter... That’s better.
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 25: Sam J. Jones
If the movies have taught us anything (and I doubt they have), it's that there's nothing a tall, handsome, muscular, American man can't solve, especially if solving that nothing involves swords, guns or swordguns (and maybe even gunswords).  The Oscars may give out awards to subtle, thoughtful, well-crafted performances that cause the audience to question the very essence of their own lives, but history tells us that the number of tickets sold for a major movie is in direct correlation to the number of explosions and punches said movie contains.  If someone finally had the guts to produce Explosionpunch, it would be the biggest box-office draw in American history (that is, until its sequel, Explosionpunch: Swordgun comes out).
It's a pretty hard and fast rule in Hollywood that nothing really gets sorted out until the protagonist leaves a few smoking craters in his wake, and this has led to some interesting doublethink in pop culture.  Take, for example, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  TV Picard is that great, moral, duty-bound, intellectual leader of the highest character whose heart was saddened by every death and every hard choice; but when it came time to make TNG movies, that Picard was sacrificed to the movie gods and replaced by Movie Picard, a reckless, laser-gun-toting, dune-buggy-driving madman who punches problems directly in the face.
So, what does this have to do with Sam J. Jones?  Well, he happens to live out this dichotomy.  Jones is an upstanding citizen with numerous civic awards for his gosh-darn goodness who just happened to come to fame by playing a sword-and-laser-wielding musclehead in a cartoonish universe where every interaction with every sentient being seems to be resolved with swords and lasers.  I am speaking, of course, of his breakout role in Flash Gordon-
FLASH!  A-AAH! SAVIOR OF THE UNIVERSE!!
What the hell was that?  Anyway, I was talking about Flash Gordon-
FLASH!  A-AAH!  HE'LL SAVE EVERY ONE OF US!!
Oh... Sorry, everyone.  I was fooling around with the settings on Know Your B-Movie Actors, and I accidentally turned on the Freddy Mercury option.  Every time I mention a movie that Queen contributed a song to, it belts a line from the song.  I can't seem to get it to turn off.  Thankfully, this episode doesn't involve Highlander-
WHO DARES TO LOVE FOREVER?!  OOOOOOH-OOOH-OOOH-OOOOOOOOOH!
OK, I'll just have to be careful and only mention Flash Gordon-
FLASH!  A-AAH!  HE'S A MIRACLE!!
-only when it's completely necessary.  It's not that I don't love Queen, it's just that there's only so much epic awesomeness that one episode can contain, and I need to reserve at least a little for Sam J. Jones... who happened to be in Flash Gordon-
FLASH!  A-AAH!  KING OF THE IMPOSSIBLE!!
Sorry.  Couldn't help myself.
Before he became the blonde beefcake who saved the universe from Ming the Merciless, Sam J. Jones was was brown-haired beefcake who saved the beaches from a lack of him surfing.  Born in Chicago in 1954, his family moved to Palm Beach, Florida, where he grew up a tall, tan teen with very little direction in life.  He shipped out for two years of service in the Marines and landed back in civilian life as directionless as before.  Jones' early Curriculum Vitae reads like it was chosen out of a hat:  semi-professional football player, shoe salesman, model.
Some small successes in that last entry caused his friends to finally give the boy a kick in the pants.  They encouraged him to move out to Los Angeles to pursue modeling and acting, which resulted in him becoming Playgirl's Mr. June in 1975, and I really wish I hadn't looked up those pictures.  Still, it would be several years before Jones would break into the film industry, which he did in a pretty big way: playing Bo Derek's square-jawed boyfriend in Blake Edwards' classic 10.
But this is not how Jones would find his way into playing everyone's favorite space-faring adventurer.  Instead, it came about because of The Dating Game.  Jones was a contestant in a 1978 episode and though he failed to win (unlike serial killer Rodney James Alcala, who breezed his way through a different episode the same year), the mother-in-law of movie producer Dino De Laurentiis happened to catch it.  She took a special liking to the hunk who struck out and pushed her son-in-law into auditioning him.  Let this be a lesson, guys: even if you are a rich Hollywood producer, you will still yield to your mother-in-law.
But, let's back away from this seminal moment in TV dating history and take a good, hard look at the terrible time De Laurentiis had in making Flash Gordon.
HE'S FOR EVERY ONE OF US!! STAND FOR EVERY ONE OF US!!
De Laurentiis had snapped up the rights to adapt the old comic and movie house series into a modern movie back in the mid-seventies.  He did it just in time, beating out a young upstart named George Lucas, who had been obsessed with the serial adventures of his youth.  (Lucas would ultimately go off to craft his own little space opera a few years later)  Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr., a veteran writer of the Batman series in the '60s, turned the earnestness of the original serial into high camp.  Unfortunately, it proved difficult to find a director who shared his vision.  De Laurentiis burned through seven directors (including Federico Fellini) before he settled on Mike Hodges, who had mostly directed for television up to that point.  He also burned through several prime choices for the lead, including Kurt Russell, who turned it down due to a lack of "character development".
The production itself was plagued with problems.  The ambition of the film outstripped the actual resources provided for it and Semple's script, while quite possibly charming on funny on paper, proved to be clunky and awkward when spoken by actual people.  Hodges was forced to rewrite, reshoot and reimagine the entire film on an almost daily basis just to keep things moving, which is why he later referred to it as "the only improvised 27 million dollar movie ever made".  Things were so tense that Sam J. Jones, who had been such a positive young man up to that point, refused to do any more work on the movie once the filming was wrapped.  He did not show up to ADR sessions, so Hodges resorted to hiring a voice actor to dub over most of Jones' lines.  Sorry to disappoint, folks.  Though he was the body, Jones was not the voice of Flash Gordon-
HE'LL SAVE WITH A MIGHTY HAND EVERY MAN EVERY WOMAN EVERY CHILD!!
The more or less finished film slouched into theaters in 1980, and though it became an instant cult hit, it was a failure at the box office everywhere except, for reasons that have yet to be explained, in Britain. (This is also the same country where Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell was the best-selling album of all time.  Figure that one out.)  In the end, the movie barely recouped its budget, and a sequel that De Laurentiis had put in the works before the first film was even finished was quietly drowned in a bathtub.   Jones' first outing as the star of a film was rewarded with a nomination for 'Worst Actor' at the very first Golden Raspberry awards in 1981  (Don't worry: that honor went to Neil Diamond for his ill-advised turn in an update of The Jazz Singer).  So much for the glory of Flash Gordon.
FLASH!!  A-AAH!!  HE'LL SAVE EVERY ONE OF US!!
OK.  Seriously.  How do I turn this off?
Jones tumbled out into TV land, landing for a while in the short-lived fireman series Code Red, bouncing around through one-offs in everything from The A-Team to Hardcastle and McCormick, rolling through a TV movie adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit and skidding to a stop in the hard-to-describe action series The Highwayman.  All you really need to know about that last one is that Jones drove a high-tech 18-wheeler that could turn into a helicoptor.  I'm not sure if anything else in the series made any more sense than that.
Through the '80s and '90s, Jones made a living appearing in more straight-to-video action movies than could possibly dare to name and capped that off by starring in Animal Planet's Hollywood Safari, but his passion for acting drifted off and he plowed his energy into other ventures.  Who can blame him, after the searing he got from Hollywood over Flash Gordon-
NOONE BUT THE PURE OF HEART MAY FIND THE GOLDEN GRAIL!!  OH OH OH OH!!
Dammit!  Sorry... Wait, those are really the lyrics to "Flash's Theme"?
FLASH!!  A-AAH!
Hey!  That was the song title, not the movie!
Anyway, Jones began coaching youth football and campaigning for various charities in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas.  His efforts in community outreach, providing safe activities for children and helping the homeless have earned him several civic and humanitarian awards, including Citizen of the Year.  Wait, citizen of where, though?  It's hard to tell, since the award was presented by the California State Senate, the County of Los Angeles, the City of Los Angeles, and the North Hollywood Police Department.  Jones is still out there trying to stay in the running for Citizen of the Year.  Currently he is advocating for Loving Life Foundation, a Christian organization that provides housing and hunger relief in San Diego and rebuilding efforts in poor countries that have been hit by natural disasters.
So, in reality, he's TV Picard: thoughtful, caring, reserved, concerned about the well-being of all those around him. 
But, wait... how can he afford to do all that?  He continues to do the occasional movie or TV spot, but seriously doubt he's receiving a whole lot of residuals from movies like Dead Sexy.  What else has he been up to?  Give me a second to look something up...
Oh...
Sam J. Jones is also the head of a security contracting firm called Inner Cordon that provides armed bodyguards for diplomats and heads of state and also "hostage extraction".  Wait... is a private company allowed to do "hostage extraction"?  Oh, and they're dabbling in border security... and they worked for the Mexican government in Baja California where some accused them of being "mercenaries".  And there's this odd answer that he gave in an interview when someone asked him what his dream acting gig would be: "Our American youth and the youth of the world need to be encouraged and influenced by good - in it's pure form. Not a perversion of that purity. My dream, would be to make films that re-establish the basic doctrine - good is actually good and bad is really bad."
OK, maybe he's Movie Picard after all.  Real life is complicated.  Not like Flash Gordon.... 
Huh... the Freddy Mercury option hasn't kicked on.  Let's try again... Flash Gordon...
Nothing.  Huh...  Must have burnt out...  I guess it's safe to mention Highlander again-
HERE WE ARE!!  WE'RE THE PRINCES OF THE UNIVERSE!!
Dammit, I didn't mean-
WE'VE COME TO BE THE RULERS OF YOUR WORLD!!
Wait, I didn't say it again-
I AM IMMORTAL!!  I HAVE INSIDE ME THE BLOOD OF KINGS!!
I can't get it to shut off-
I HAVE NO RIVAL, NO MAN CAN BE MY EQUAL!!
Great.  Now I have to find the manual-
TAKE ME TO THE FUTURE OF YOUR WORLD!!
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Hi, I love your biographies and am gradually making my way through them. I wanted to point out a minor error in Rowdy Roddy Piper's episode: Piper is trying to get Keith David to wear the sunglasses in the famous fight scene in the alley, not the other way around. Also, I was wondering if you've read (or even heard of) Jonathan Lethem's book "They Live (Deep Focus)" which is a way-too-deep reading into the movie. I think that you might enjoy it based on the sense of humor you've displayed here.
Well, I'll be hornswaggled, you're right!  I haven't watched the movie in a few years, and I guess my brain decided to remember it wrong.  I'll fix that in a jiffy.
I hadn't heard of Lethem's book before, but I'll definitely have to check it out.  I love it when people delve too far into John Carpenter films!
Thanks for reading!
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 24: Jay Silverheels
In the early 1970s, the Keep America Beautiful campaign released the most iconic environmentalist TV ad campaign that Americans have ever been able to stomach.  In the now-famous ad, a bag of garbage is thrown to the side of the road.  The camera pans up from the refuse to an aged Indian, who sheds a single tear down his stoic face.  The “Crying Indian” was Iron Eyes Cody, a long-standing staple in Hollywood Westerns.
Cody performed as Native American characters in at least 180 different films, designed costumes for major productions, and performed traditional chants and dances for anyone who would pay attention in the hopes of keeping his traditions alive.  In his 1982 autobiography, he relayed his harrowing journey in growing up destitute on a reservation, and in 1995 the Hollywood American Indian community officially honored him for his film legacy and fierce advocacy for Indian rights, especially in the film industry.  Cody was… wait, I see a hand up… yes?  Uh-huh… Really?!  Oh…
OK, so, according to research that I really should have done in advance, “Iron Eyes Cody” was actually Espera Oscar DeCorti, the son of Italian immigrants in New Orleans.  A Louisiana newspaper outed him in 1996 soon after the official honoring I mentioned earlier.  Um... sorry, everyone.
America has a long, convoluted history with its Native people.  On the one hand, the United States decimated hundreds of indigenous groups and systematically dismantled the sovereignty, land and culture of those who survived over the course of centuries.  On the other hand, we let them have casinos, so everything's cool now, right?
Everywhere I look in Hollywood's past, I see Native American characters played by white guys.  Before he became a gritty action star, Charles Bronson made a living masquerading as an Indian.  The great Native American sports star Jim Thorpe was played by Burt Lancaster.  Irishman Daniel Day-Lewis was the last of the Mohicans.  The Indian chief on F Troop was New York Italian Frank Dekova.  Comedies, dramas, action pictures, it didn’t matter: the real Native Americans played extras while white people in red-face played the leads.  I bet even the most iconic Indian character of all, Tonto from The Lone Ranger, was some white guy from…. Wait… again, I see another hand… What’s that?  He was?  He was?!  Oh, thank god!
Ladies and gentlemen, five paragraphs in, and we’ve finally found our hook!  Allow me to introduce to you the first Native American character on television who was actually played by a Native American… and, what’s with the hand now?!  Oh, he’s from Canada?  And they're called First Nations people?
Fuck it, close enough.  This week, we celebrate the life of Jay Silverheels, who was definitely not an Italian masquerading as an Indian.
Harold J. Smith was born on the Six Nations Reservation in Ontario in 1912.  If you’re wondering why his real name wasn’t Running Eagle or Standing Bear or something of that ilk, then it’s obvious that everything you know about Indians you learned from watching them being played by Italians in fiercely racist Hollywood productions, and Harry Smith doesn’t have time for your bullshit.  His father, George, would have had even less time for it.  Aside from being a chief in the Mohawk nation, he was also a Major in the Canadian army (yes, that’s a real thing and not a euphemism for hockey).   After serving in World War I, the elder Smith emerged as the most highly decorated First Nations soldier in the history of Canadian combat (also not a euphemism for hockey).
Young Harry became extremely athletic, excelling in boxing, wrestling and especially lacrosse.  It was on the lacrosse field where he was given the nickname “Silverheels” for his speed and endurance.  In his 20s, he hopped over the border into New York, but he soon found out what Americans think of lacrosse, in that we don’t actually think about it all that much.  Instead, Smith traveled the country competing in wrestling and boxing tournaments to support himself, eventually placing second in the middleweight division of the national Golden Gloves boxing tournament in 1938.
At about the same time, he befriended actor and comedian Joe E. Brown, who was forward-thinking (or naïve) enough to believe that this good-looking, athletic Indian could have a bright future in the moving pictures.  Brown convinced Smith to move to California, where he started his first foray into motion pictures as a stunt man, riding horses and taking death-defying falls for low-budget productions in an era where “safety” wasn’t even a concept yet, let alone a well-respected practice.  Do you see now why the men of the Smith family didn’t feel the need to adopt names like “Strong Bear”?
Smith survived to graduate up to bit parts with actual lines, mostly working in B pictures for the likes of middleweight studios like RKO and Poverty Row producing houses like PRC.  He eventually relented a little to the expectations producers had for his culture and adopted his old lacrosse nickname as his stage name.  Soon after, he ascended up another rung in Hollywood as Harry J. Silverheels and up one more as simply Jay Silverheels.  He briefly hoofed it out of the B movies and into high-grade classics like Key Largo (alongside Humphrey Bogart), Captain from Castille (next to Tyrone Power) and Broken Arrow (somewhere in the vicinity of Jimmy Stewart).
Of course, this was still the 1940s, so “ascending” was a very relative term.  Despite his rising notoriety, he ran smack into the so-called “buckskin ceiling”.  Producers and directors still believed that leading roles were for leading (or “white”) men.  So, Silverheels found himself bouncing up and down the Hollywood ladder, acting next to Errol Flynn one day and scraping bottom as the character “Indian” in a B-list Western the next.
In the heyday of the Westerns, there were quite a few Native American actors scraping a living out of playing whooping warriors and huddled masses with no lines, and they crossed paths many times.  Silverheels ended up on the set several times with old Iron Eyes Cody himself, who was always hanging around Hollywood dispensing Armenian Bole.
A word on Armenian Bole: first of all, that is not a drug reference (well, not entirely; read on and be enchanted by my knowledge of obscure clays, won’t you?).  Armenian Bole was a clay compound with a reddish-brown tint, and somewhere along the way, makeup artists discovered that it was perfect for darkening an actor’s skin to give him just the right amount of redskin savagery.  (Keep in mind, this was years after everyone had already agreed that applying burnt cork to their faces to play black men was incredibly insensitive)  Iron Eyes Cody got his start in Hollywood as a makeup consultant for the Westerns, touting his credentials as a full-blooded Indian as the perfect qualification to personally supervise the painting of acres of pale skin.  The irony of his credentials being entirely fictitious is not lost on me.  Also, before Armenian Bole was put to use as an agent in nauseatingly racist portrayals, it was commonly sold as a patent medicine for indigestion.  This irony is also not lost on me.  Needless to say, Silverheels was no fan of Cody or the Armenian Bole he peddled.
While bouncing around the B-grade Bole world, Silverheels fell into what was probably the most cut-and-paste cowboys and Indians script ever produced: The Cowboys and the Indians.  Even though it was a forgettable flick, it was a Roy Rogers film, which brought out money, which brought out lots of extras.  On the set Silverheels met a white B-list actor by the name of Clayton Moore, who was, thankfully, not smeared in clay.  Both men had come up through the studio system as stunt men, and they formed a fast bond.  A few weeks later, they ran into each other again as they auditioned for roles in a new TV show, an adaptation of a popular radio drama, and very soon after that, they found themselves both cast in that new TV show.
That radio-drama-turned-TV-show was The Lone Ranger, and its debut in 1949 introduced Moore as the Lone Ranger and Silverheels as his faithful sidekick, Tonto.  (We’ll save the argument over how the ranger could be “lone” if he had a sidekick for another time)  The Lone Ranger was an instant success and became one of the first big hits on that newfangled picture box that was popping up in everyone’s houses in the 1950s. 
Tonto was the very first Native American character on television that was played by an honest-to-god Native American, and Silverheels found himself picking up steady work in the movies thanks to the attention it brought him.  Off-camera, though, he began to hate his job.  He was thoroughly annoyed at the barbaric broken English that the series’ writers threw at him, and his constant protestations and outright refusal to memorize the more egregious lines almost brought him to blows with director Wilhelm Thiele.  Clayton Moore stood up for Silverheels, and, had it not been for the immense popularity of the show, the director would have gladly canned them both. 
To make matters worse, the producers of the show were a miserly bunch, running the show on such a tight budget that the actors were not even afforded dressing rooms.  For several years, television’s two biggest stars were changing their costumes in the bathroom of a gas station down the street from the film lot (and that is not a whimsical invention on my part; that is literally true).  Silverheels eventually revolted by showing up to the set and refusing to change into his costume until proper facilities were provided, which brought production to a halt until producers could be called out of whatever darkened room they sat in counting their dollars.
Even though he won his dressing room, Silverheels was growing weary of the Indian stereotypes that he was reluctantly helping to further.  By 1953, he began openly complaining to anyone who would listen about the insult to Native actors represented by Iron Eyes Cody’s redface makeovers.  Of course, this was the 1950s, so no one was listening.  Silverheels’ protestations cost him movie gigs, and a heart attack took him out of service for one of the last seasons of The Lone Ranger.  Soon after he recovered in 1956, the show was cancelled. 
Released from the constraints of television, some more liberal-minded producers picked up the characters (along with Moore and Silverheels) to create the movies The Lone Ranger in 1957 and The Lone Ranger and The Lost City of Gold in 1958.  Remarkably, both films featured the duo defending Native Americans (played by actual Native Americans!) from the trickery and violence of whites. 
Moore decamped to spend most of the rest of his life touring the country in a camper van, making appearances as the Lone Ranger, and happily jeering the production house that owned the rights to the character as they tried repeatedly to make him stop.  He eventually lost a lawsuit that forced him to stop wearing the mask as the studio moved forward on a 1981 remake of the Lone Ranger movie.  The new film was a flop, which pleased Moore to no end.
Silverheels struggled on in the movies, this time finding himself hampered not by the prejudices of white directors and producers, but by social crusading.  As the 60s wore on, and more bands of Native Americans began openly protesting their treatment at the hands of the American government, the character of Tonto became the go-to “Uncle Tomahawk” for growing complaints about the unfair portrayals of Indians in popular culture. 
His career limped through the 60s and 70s as Silverheels fought to disentangle his legacy from Tonto.  Even though he became the first Native American with a star on the Hollywood Walk and the first Native American to serve on SAG’s board of directors, and even though he sunk all his time and effort into creating the Indian Actors’ Workshop, a theater school for aspiring Native performers, Silverheels still found it hard to get work.  Finally, a severe stroke in 1975 forced him to retire.
Jay Silverheels died of a second stroke in 1980.  Even though he never got to see the day when Native American actors and characters were treated with an equal level of respect as their white counterparts, he helped pave the way for it.  Today, no self-respecting actor would be caught dead doing redface, and portrayals of Indians have grown a bit more nuanced than "wise elder" and "noble savage".  Now, if we could just stop white people from wearing buckskin jackets and saying "I'm 1/32 Cherokee on my mother's side"...
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 23: Brinke Stevens
Quiz time!
Question (1): Charlene has a Bachelor's degree in psychology and a Master's degree in marine biology.  She has worked in studies on dolphin communication and ozone depletion and in advising the nuclear power industry.  She is widely regarded by her peers as extremely intelligent, studied in seven languages and is a former Mensa member.  If Charlene were to have a career in movies, how would her talents be put to use?  Please answer in short essay format, and use citations:
_________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________
If you answered anything other than "nudity and screaming", then you have already failed this quiz (also, the only citations accepted are breasts).  Welcome to Hollywood, baby, and welcome to Brinke Stevens.
Charlene Elizabeth Brinkman was born in San Diego, California in 1954.  She was a precocious child who was already well-studied in dancing and acting before she graduated from high school; but when it came time to decide on a career path, she followed where her brain led her.  She earned dual degrees in biology and psychology at San Diego State University and went on to do her graduate work at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. 
After gaining her Masters at Scripps, Brinkman was all set to work on a doctorate studying dolphin communications; but this was the 1970s, and the only people talking to dolphins at the time were also the ones who covered themselves in crystals and declared that they could channel aliens through meditation.  (The '70s was a really weird time)  The Institute tried steering her into studying the visual systems of seals, but she refused to change course and was unceremoniously dumped from the program for "forbidden research", which was the remarkably draconian way of saying "Lady, you're spending our research money trying to have a conversation with a dolphin."  Since then, of course, marine scientists have discovered that dolphins actually have a very complex communication system, and, trust me, you don't want to know what they have to say about us.  Turns out, dolphins are jerks.
Brinkman moved on to stints as an ecology advisor with the National Marine Fisheries and the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station, but by the end of the '70s, America's enthusiasm for funding science that had nothing to do with making things explode began to fizzle (our national understanding of science having long since been replaced with "USA! WOOOOOOO!").  Consequently, work as a marine biologist became harder to find.  To earn a living, she turned to modeling and began a modestly successfully career not only for her looks, but for her complete lack of embarrassment.  She was not ashamed to do exotic nude modeling, and a quick image search on the internet for her will turn up more Betty Page inspired shots than your workplace could possibly approve of.
In 1980, she married her long-time sweetheart Dave Stevens (the Kirby-award-winning comic book artist who would go on to create The Rocketeer) and took the opportunity to legally change her name to 'Brinke'.  She had always hated her given name, because, as she said, "It sounds like some pre-Raphaelite poet."  At the time, Stevens was most noted for doing pinup drawings, and his new wife served as a model for many of them.  The marriage ended after six months, but they remain friends to this day.
In 1981, her modeling work transitioned into film work.  She began modestly (or rather, immodestly, since much of her work starting out was doing nude body doubling for lead actresses who were more demure).  Her early credits include such illustrious roles as "Girl", "Girl #3", "Girlfriend" and "Shower Girl", and it probably would have stayed that way had it not been for a certain producer whose name we all know and love (or loathe) by now, so let's all say it together so we feel a little less icky: "Roger Corman".
1981 saw the release of Friday the 13th, which had perfectly crystalized the slasher genre of horror films.  (Don't worry.  Corman wasn't a part of that.)  Slashers had been messily bubbling up through the cracks in the 70s by way of such classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Halloween (1978), but the early 80s was when it reached its grimy, blood-slicked renaissance.  Roger Corman sat on the sidelines of this trend until he found the right time to strike, snake-like, with a cheap, dashed-off cash-in. 
He found it in the form of a script that was kicking around Hollywood entitled Sleepless Nights.  Screenwriter Rita Mae Brown had written it as an outright parody of the burgeoning slasher genre, but Corman picked it up on the cheap and failed to realize that the whole thing was a joke.  He filmed it as if it were serious, and the end result was the shambling, uneven and unintentionally funny Slumber Party Massacre.  Brinke Stevens showed up to audition as an extra, and wound up landing her first speaking role as one of the first nubile teens to be viciously killed by a power drill wielding maniac.  Like so many other Roger Corman outings, the movie was so inexplicable that it couldn't help but develop a cult following, which led to several sequels and a whole slew of cheap slashers with "Massacre" appended to the end of their titles.
Thus, Stevens entered into schlocky the world of B-horror.  Over the years, she has appeared in over one hundred low-budget productions, including such gems as Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Nightmare Sisters, Teenage Exorcist, Hybrid, The Frightening, Dead Clowns and Slaughter Party.  Some of these films were genuine attempts at horror; others were attempts at humor; often it is impossible to tell the difference.  She was so prolific in the horror genre's underbelly, that she has rightly earned the title of a Scream Queen (an actress who repeatedly plays the frightened protagonist/victim of a horror film) alongside other luminaries as Jamie Lee Curtis (a veteran of horror staples Halloween and Prom Night who people now view as a "serious actress") and Debbie Rochon (a veteran of dozens of Troma pictures who no one could ever mistake for a "serious actress").
Stevens got cult attention very early in her career.  By 1987, she was receiving over a hundred letters from fans every week, and the volume escalated so much that she had to form her own fan club and hire a secretary just to handle the mail.  Despite all of her fancy education, she completely embraced the Scream Queen role.  After she appeared on the cover of the first issue of Femme Fatales, a magazine devoted to women in horror (clad only in a pair of strategically placed gloves), she solidified her role as one of the figureheads of the genre and became a fan favorite at horror and sci-fi conventions.
Odds are pretty good that she would have been at the conventions anyway (Stevens had been a regular patron of the Star Trek conventions in the 1970s). As she said in an interview once, "I definitely know what it's like to stand on both sides of that autograph table. A big part of me will always be that "nerdy fan-girl" waiting to speak to her idols."
So, let's take a moment to discuss conventions, shall we?  (Because nobody does that on the internet anymore) Specifically, one feature that consistently receives an equal mixture of drooling and disgust: Con Girls.  At modern sci-fi, horror and comic conventions (which are all rapidly becoming the same thing, anyway) CosPlay (that's "Costume Play" for the uninitiated, not "Cosby Play", which only a few very sad people take part in) has taken hold in a crazy way.  Convention goers have always been into dressing up as their favorite characters, but as conventions have grown in prominence, the dress-up competetion has turned into a massively escalating arms race of nuclear proportions.  What was once a shy nerd showing off his homemade light saber has, in the course of one generation, exploded into vivid, uber-detailed, 9-foot-tall recreations of demons from obscure video games.
Then there are the Con Girls.  In recent years, the number of beautiful ladies trouncing around Cons wearing the skimpiest superhero outfits every created has increased exponentially.  Since the main audience of science fiction, horror and comic books has always been shy, unathletic males, you might already have guessed that the industry has hit on something that Budweiser discovered decades ago: pretty girls in skin-tight outfits make men close their brains and open their wallets.  A great deal of modern Con Girls are actually models hired for the event, models not all that familiar with the genre that they're embodying.
On one hand, this should be pretty offensive to hardcore fans, who normally seek purity in their love of nerdery, and who hate, with the fury of a thousand burning suns, the fact that people who clearly have no knowledge of whether or not the character they're playing is canon dare to tread on the Con's hallowed grand.  On the other hand, boobs.  So, an entire sub-industry has evolved at the Cons, aided by an army of nerds who desperately want to believe that all of these professional models are also secretly into Warhammer and intimately familiar with the Toxic Avenger and will, of course, be charmed and impressed by their encyclopedic knowledge of The Dresden Files.  I hate to break it to you, boys, but that chick with the huge cleavage dressed as the Scarlet Witch is only there to push you over to Marvel's pavillion.
So, you there, average nerd of the world, stop following that Chun Li impersonator around and allow me to usher you over to the horror section of your local Con.  Meet Brinke Stevens.  She's appeared in Playboy and Penthouse, she has a Master's degree, she'll sign your 8x10 full-color glossy photo of her posing in latex bondage gear, and she'd love to talk to you about Star Trek.  Your brain just froze up, didn't it?
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 22: Rowdy Roddy Piper
Professional wrestling gets a bad rap in America.  The college-educated intelligentsia of this country loves to deride this form of entertainment as a dumb, brutish spectacle based on the most childish and purile impulses.  What those people fail to realize, though, is that dumb, brutish spectacle based on the most childish and purile impulses is about 50% of being American (for comparison, driving wasteful cars is less than 10% and cheese filling is only 5%).  It's what we do well.  Try as they might, no other nation seems quite as adept at elevating patently stupid things to the level of Greek tragedy.
And so we created the WWE (formerly the WWF and partially the WCW and also briefly NWO, but not really... it's, uh... it's complicated).   Astute readers of this series may have noticed that I have name-checked a few professional wrestlers in my day.  You might ask why, if I seem to like overbuilt men slapping each other around while wearing spandex, don't I write a series about them instead?  To which I would respond why, if you seem to enjoy walking upright so much, do you insist on asking me dumb questions?  But, that's probably because I watched a little too much wrestling as a kid.
I could wax on philosophically the way that most highbrow WWE apologists do about how wrestling is like a violent ballet for men (which makes The Nutcracker take on an entirely different meaning) or how it's like an extreme improv troupe ("Can I get a suggestion from the audience on what to hit him with?  Chair?  C'mon, you guys always say "chair".).  Those things are technically true, I guess, in the same way that it's also technically true that wrestling is the only socially-acceptible way for straight dudes to watch a couple of glistening, muscular men grapple with each other in a way that can be plausibly denied as not gay.
But, I'm generally inclined to be a realist, so I'll put aside the artsy-fartsy, philosophical whoop-de-doo and say that the real appeal of wrestling is the eight-year-old kid in all of us who just wants to break something to see if they can.  That's it.  That's all.  It's childish and stupid, sure, but it's an indelible part of all of us; you can't just ignore the things that make people childish and stupid, because it's also what makes us human.
(Damn.  I started getting philosophical again.  Let's get this thing back on track before I start recounting the history of Wrestlemania and socio-political construct that produced it.)
So, to make a tenuous connection back to the subject at hand: B-movies.  They're out there.  You've seen them.  Most of them are also childish and stupid, transparently constructed to play to the most purile interests.  They're often full of testosteroney swagger and incomprehensible action, so it should come as no surprise that many wrestlers have come out of the ring and onto the screen.  (Sadly, it doesn't seem to work the other way around, because I would really like to see John Turturro get in the ring for some reason.)  One of those wrestler-turned-actors has the distinction in appearing in one of the longest, dumbest, most incomprehensible (and also awesome) fight scenes ever put to film.  I am speaking, of course, about Rowdy Roddy Piper.
Roderick Toombs hails from Canada.  He was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and his father was even a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer.  (After that sentence, I have a sudden urge to don a tuque, down some bacon and shoot a moose.)  His junior high expelled him from school, and after an argument, his father expelled him from home.  Young Roderick spent his teenage years fending for himself and bouncing around youth hostels in the Winnipeg area.  He also studied boxing and martial arts, which led to him winning a local Golden Gloves competition and nabbing a black belt in Judo.  At the age of 15 he decided he was tough enough to step into the professional wrestling ring for the first time and was wrong.  Toombs was promptly trounced in ten seconds by Larry "The Axe" Henning.
He kept at it, though.  By the 1970s, Toombs was under contract to the National Wrestling Alliance in California, where promoters figured out that his natural motormouth wit could be put to good use.  He was taken from being a mere 'jobber' (a low-profile wrestler called in to fill in for injuries or to do low-stakes matches before main events) and rebranded as a 'heel' (a high-profile villain who provides drama by antagonizing other wrestlers).  During his time in the LA circuit, he became the main antagonist of the famed Mexican wrestling family, the Guerreros, eventually wrestling under his first major persona, The Masked Canadian (sounds terrifying, eh?).
In the early 1980s, Toombs was called up to the WWF to flex his villain muscles on a massive scale, but this time, promoters were wise enough to realize that no one is afraid of Canada.  Toombs built a new persona around his Scottish heritage, and The Masked Canadian was rechristened "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (also called The Rowdy Scot, Hot Rod, and Hot Scot) in a trademark kilt and white t-shirt combo.  At this time in wrestling history, most of the villains of WWF were built around caricatures of foreign nations good Americans were supposed to hate: Nicolai Volkoff represented those godless commies in Russia; and The Iron Sheik stood in for those terrorist oil barons in the Middle East.  Piper's brogue-less Scot (he was supposed to be from Glasgow, but couldn't help sounding slightly Canadian most of the time) quickly became a fan favorite.  He wasn't the biggest or fastest wrestler, but the man knew how to work a crowd.  In a field of glowering villains, he stood out because he seemed to be having a genuinely good time mouthing off to his opponents and finding creative (and painful) ways to insult them.
Piper's career at the top level was long and storied (and actually still sort of going on, since he's "semi-retired"), but I've already spent enough time talking about wrestling, so let's slam right into the movies, shall we?
Piper made his move into being an actor by appearing as a wrestler (of course) in the 1986 film Body Slam, a film that can be summed up with "Here is a movie.  It has wrestling."  In 1988, he played the lead in Hell Comes to Frogtown, a cheap post-apocalyptic film featuring giant frogs holding the last fertile women on earth hostage.  Or something.  There was a plot, I think, but the mixture of horrid scripting, disturbing frog genitalia, and scary '80s hair makes this movie far too scarring to start recounting.  Hell Comes to Frogtown spawned three sequels, which means enough people liked it to make it a cult film (which is sad) or this was director Donald G. Jackson's passion play (which is even more sad).
In the 1990s, Piper took a two-pronged attack at the entertainment industry.  One prong was a full-frontal assault on the low-budget action genre.  He starred in as many two-word-titled movies as possible: Immortal Combat, No Contest, Dead Tides, Marked Man, Hard Time, Terminal Rush.  These are movies that didn't need scripts, plots, or even premises.  The director simply put a gun in Piper's hands, muttered "fuck it, just film anything" and crawled behind the camera with a vial of coke and no regard for continuity.  If you had Cinemax or a crappy local video store, odds are pretty good that you've seen one or two of them.
The other prong was a much more subtle insinuation into what passed for action on television at the time.  If there was a crummy TV adaptation of some beloved franchise ready to sully the memory of the original, chances are good that Rowdy Roddy Piper showed up in at least one episode.  Zorro series?  Yep, there he is.  The Adventures of Superboy?  You know it!  The short-lived RoboCop series?  Hell yeah!  Highlander: The Series?  Do you even have to ask?
After all that, it probably won't surprise you to know that he also showed up in episodes of Silk Stalkings and Walker, Texas Ranger.
But enough of all that silly talk.  I know what you're waiting for me to talk about.  I can practically see you salivating at the thought of it, so I'll get right to it:
They Live.
Yes, They Live: John Carpenter's gloriously odd 1988 action film that doubled as an off-kilter satire of politics and economics.  It featured Piper playing an unnamed drifter who is given a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the truth: that the rich and powerful are actually cadaverous aliens in disguise who have been controlling humanity through post-hypnotic suggestion.  If you haven't seen it before, it makes a lot more sense when you watch it.  Also, if you haven't seen it before, what is wrong with you?  Watch it now.  I'll wait.
Carpenter cast Piper, not through an audition, but after watching him take on Hulk Hogan in Wrestlemania III.  I can't pretend to understand how John Carpenter's thought process works, but something in his head decided that the guy in a kilt mercilessly taunting Hulk Hogan was the perfect man to play a simple drifter who stumbles through the looking glass, and that something in his head was right. This is not to say that Piper presented any great skill at acting.  He didn't.  What he did bring, though, was an incredible enthusiasm for trying any seemingly dumb thing Carpenter wanted to do, and adding a few more tricks of his own that sent it over the top.  For example, the famous line "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum," was ad-libbed by Piper.
Other than being a relentlessly odd film, They Live is famous for one scene in particular: the alley fight.  Actually, that should be The Alley Fight.  No, still not quite right... THE ALLEY FIGHT!  (That's better)  Early in the movie, Piper tries to get Keith David (who had previously been in Carpenter's The Thing) to put on the magic sunglasses for the first time.  He refuses, and an inexplicable fight breaks out as Piper tries to force him to wear them.  This is not the amazing part.  The amazing part is that THE ALLEY FIGHT continues, unbroken with no pauses, lines or dramatic action, for five minutes and twenty seconds. 
It was originally scripted as a short 20-second scuffle, but Piper and David decided on their own to "make it real."  Carpenter just followed them along as they tore through every conceivable way to turn it into a glorious, pointless melee.  In a lesser film with more regard to traditional dramatic structure, this would have stopped the plot cold.  Instead, it set the entire tone of the movie.  They Live turned out to be a smart movie that knew exactly what it was doing, disguising itself as dumb noise.  It was the apotheosis of wrestling, where brutish spectacle transmuted into intelligent subtext.  Maybe they didn't know that's what they were doing at the time, but who cares about intentions?  It happened.
Since They Live, Piper has made many more movies and wrestled many more times, but THE ALLEY FIGHT is, for me, the greatest achievement in his career.  Today, he's a sort of elder statesmen of professional wrestling, providing commentary, guest refereeing and, quite often, being taunted out of retirement by up-and-coming heels.  And, long may he continue to kick ass.
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 21: Mark Hamill
I'll get it out of the way right now: Star Wars.  Yes, we know.  We all know.  Star Wars.  If you're an American under the age of 40 you've had Star Wars continually cut, processed, cooked and injected straight into your cultural veins for the entirety of your life.  You know it already, so let's just say it together and get it out of the way:
ALongTimeAgoLukeHanLeiaYodaDarthVaderDeathStarPowerConvertersAlderaanForce JediLightSaberObiWanTatooineDagobahWookieSarlaacJabbaMotherlovinBobaFett C3POR2D2ThatStupidCubeRobotThatWasSomehowLicensedAsAToyBecauseGeorge LucasLovesToTakeYourMoney
Also, Jar Jar Binks, because it happened, and you're going to live with that the rest of your life.
But we're not here to talk about Star Wars.  I'm sorry if that's what you were hoping for, because I know it's hard to find a place on the internet where someone is willing to just lay it out on the table and talk about Star Wars.
No, today is a tribute to an entirely different geek legend that Mark Hamill helped birth into the modern era, and, no I'm not talking about that scene in Guyver where he transformed into a giant mucous-covered crab.
Born in 1951, Mark Hamill was one of seven Navy brats who spent their childhoods being carted around the world behind their Captain father.  After living in California, Virgina, New York and Japan, he set off to study drama at Los Angeles City College.  At the age of 19, he made his first foray into the entertainment business on The Bill Cosby Show.  (For the sake of my readers who grew up in the 80s and think that all culture started there, this was the Cosby show before The Cosby Show)  Hamill moved on to recurring roles on General Hospital (way before James Franco thought of it) and The Texas Wheelers (which featured Gary Busey way before he thought of going completely bonkers).
And then, yes, in 1977: Star Wars. 
Also, in 1978: The Star Wars Holiday Special.  Mark Hamill was in that, too.  If you really want to hurt yourself, track down a copy of it.  On the other hand, may I suggest running a belt sander across your eyes?  It will have the same effect.
(From here on out, I will no longer mention Star Wars, because LucasArts will probably start charging me for it.  If I absolutely have to refer to the movies in any way in order complete this article, I will substitute Give George Lucas $20 instead.  Allow me to demonstrate by using it in a sentence: "Hey, did you see that they're releasing new updated, restored, 3D, director's cut versions of Give George Lucas $20?!")
Give George Lucas $20 was actually a pretty sweet deal for Mark Hamill.  Aside from making him famous for playing a lonely, whiny, pasty white guy who morphs into the greatest laser-sword-wielding hero in the galaxy (I wonder why nerds love this movie so much), his agreement to do the first film for a tiny fraction of the profits netted him over half a million dollars.  Even though the Oscars are too "serious" to look at scifi, Hamill was able to nab two Best Actor awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films.  And George Lucas made sure Hamill's face was on posters, action figures, t-shirts, lunchboxes, pencil cases, notebooks, stickers, legos, children's underwear, commemorative plates, creepy adult underwear, badly-rendered tattoos, wedding cakes and sci-fi-themed brothels.
Between the episodes of Give George Lucas $20, he was able to squeeze a few other respectable films, including The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia and the great Samuel Fuller war film The Big Red One (whose title is far too easy to make a joke about.  Write your own here: _________________________________________________________________). 
Also, he was in a 1978 film called Corvette Summer, which is about a dude who fixes cars and bums around the country in his Corvette, and I can think of no film that better exemplifies the 70s than that (well, other than Convoy).
However, after the third installment of Give George Lucas $20 came out in 1983, Hamill's movie career sputtered.  For a man who had one of the starring roles in the biggest science fiction epic of all time, he did relatively little work through the 80s, aside from a few walk-on TV roles and a handful of voiceovers. It wasn't until the end of that decade that he started doing movies again: the decent but unimpressive WWII film Fall of the Eagles, the slapdash dystopian scifi film Slipstream, and the generic thriller Midnight Ride, which is so forgettable that I'm still writing the same sentence and I've already had to go back and read it twice to remember that I referenced it.
Then there was the aforementioned Guyver (you know, the one where Hamill mutates into a crab). It was an attempt to adapt an anime series that was popular in Japan and unknown in the US.  It was a big, confusing, latex-covered mess, and I am delighted that there was someone crazy enough to try to pull it off.  When you see a movie that begins with an opening scroll like "At the beginning of time, aliens came to the Earth to create the ultimate organic weapon. They created Mankind. By planting a special gene into man they created the ZOANOIDS - Humans who can change at will into super monster soldiers." you know you're in for a weird ride.  That's when you know you're watching something truly special: a movie that flies so hard in the face of reason that it actually punctures reason and creates a pocket universe of "Huh?" on the other side. 
But, even as much fun as it is to chat about Mark Hamill slowing dissolving into a burbling, chitinous, gel-covered mess (That's not a metaphor; I'm still talking about that scene in Guyver), the reason I came here today is to talk about the Joker.  Yes, The Clown Prince of Crime, the only guy who gets away with wearing purple besides Prince, Batman's eternal nemesis, that guy.
Pop quiz: Who played the Joker?  What a silly question!  Why, the Joker is in all of us!  But, seriously, if I asked you that right now and demanded your immediate answer at knifepoint, who would you say?
"Heath Ledger?" you might sputter as the knife edge wavers by your throat.  Yes, Ledger was absolutely brilliant, redefining the character as a grim visage of uncontrollable chaos; but I'm sick of people trying to dress up as him at Halloween, so I will reject that answer and demand that you try again.
"Jack Nicholson?" you might moan pitifully, horrified at the thought of the uncaring God that has allowed to fall in this situation.  True, Nicholson did pave the way for the current iteration, deftly weaving the camp antics of the original character with a more real, human psyche, but, NO!  NO!  Not the answer I'm looking for!
"Cesar-" I swear to God if you mention Cesar Romero, I'm going to cut you right now!!!  Wait, why are you fainting?  It's just a joke!
For those of you playing along at home, the correct answer is, of course, Mark Hamill.  
Tim Curry was originally slated to voice the Joker in the 1992 animated Batman series, but had to back out at the last minute.  The producers cast Mark Hamill instead, and they have not stopped doing it since.  Hamill has voiced the Clown Prince in cartoon form for Superman, The New Batman Adventures, Justice League, Static Shock, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, and Batman: New Times.  He also lent his Joker talents to the video games Batman: Vengeance, Batman: Arkham Asylum, DC Universe Online and Batman: Arkham City.  Also, have you ever seen a Joker talking toy?  Odds are pretty good that Hamill did that.  Batman-themed amusement park rides?  Again, Mark Hamill.  There was even a short-lived live-action series Birds of Prey in which the actual actor playing the Joker had his voice dubbed over by Hamill.
Sure, we all remember Heath Ledger's pencil trick, Jack Nicholson pulling the three-foot-long gun out of his pants and Cesar Romero refusing to shave his moustache for the role, but no one in the history of Batman has done more to refine the essence of who the Joker really is than Mr. Mark Hamill.  So, forget Luke Skywalker.  That was merely a blip in Hamill's career, a mere five years or so.  He has played the Joker for nearly two decades.
Until 2011, that is.  After the release of Arkham City, Hamill declared that he was giving up the mantle.  He was, and still is, providing voice work for more cartoons than a single human being who is not constantly stoned could possibly see in a lifetime, and he will henceforth cease to voice the clown-themed psychopath.  That is, of course, unless someone decided to do an adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel The Killing Joke... But that would be too awesome of a thing for you to actually do without screwing it up, wouldn't it, Hollywood?
So, short of picketing the greater Los Angeles area demanding The Killing Joke, I urge you to do your part: tune into Cartoon Network and support your local Mark Hamill.  The Joker will thank you for it.
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Episode 20: Duane Jones
For a while in, like, 2002 the Undertaker totally owned the Rock.  There was that SmackDown where the Rock was talking shit about the Undertaker losing to Maven, and I don't care who you are, you don't piss off a 7 foot tall sonofabitch wearing leather!  Anyway, they had this match in Raw a month later, and you know that fucking black motorcycle the Undertaker used to ride to the ring in?  He had a fucking lead pipe stuck up in it, and when the Rock was in that tag team match, BOOM!, the Undertaker smacked him in the fucking head!  I was laughing my ass off, man, I tell you what!  Anyway, so now the Rock and the Undertaker have this feud, right?  And the Hardcore Championship is coming up-
Whoa, whoa, whoa!  What the hell is this? 
Uh, it's Know Your B-Movie actors, dude.  What the fuck?
Yes, I'm aware of that.  That's my column.  Who the hell are you?
I'm you, man.  Like, in another universe and shit.  You know, the one where you were popular and good at sports and didn't do gay shit like read the dictionary for fun?  Also, I'm taller than you and had girlfriends in high school instead of friends-who-are-girls.
So, this is the conceit we're going with this week?  Alternate universes?
Yeah, it's extra-dimensional as shit, dude.
Is this like the mirror universe episode of Star Trek: TOS?  Is there an ion storm going on?  Oh!  Does Spock have a goatee where you come from?
Who let you out of ComiCon, nerd?
I'm afraid to ask this, but we're already this far into the episode, so I might as well go with it: what's up with all the "lead pipe to the head" stuff at the beginning?
What the fuck, dude?!  It's about the Rock!
The Michael Bay movie with Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery?
No!  But that movie was tits, though, right?
I agree... I think.
You know, the Rock?  This guy?
What is that?  What are you doing with your eyebrow?
It's the People's Eyebrow!  Didn't you watch wrestling?
Not really...  Wait... Do you think this episode is about Dwayne Johnson, the wrestler who played-
Then there was the People's Elbow!
Ow!  Shit!  What the hell?!  You just jumped at me with your elbow!  Who the hell does that?  Listen, this episode is about Duane Jones!  The lead actor from Night of the Living Dead!  Not Dwayne Johnson, the wrestler turned actor!
Shit, dude, I was all set to talk about Fast Five!  I just saw that shit in the theater, and it is fucking LOADED with action!  And there's this chick in it, Jordana something, who is fucking SMOKING hot, dude.  But I'm not even gonna talk about Tooth Fairy, 'cause that movie was retarded as shit.
Every time you open your mouth, I feel myself getting dumber.
Who the fuck is Duane Jones?
Thank you for that segue.  Now we're back on track... Duane Jones studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and was teaching acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when (for no reason that I can discern) he auditioned for a low-budget film called Night of the Living Dead.  Though the lead role in the film was originally intended to be an angry, white, truck-driving redneck, writer-director George Romero was so impressed with Jones' audition that he immediately rewrote the role of Ben to fit him.
Wait, he was that black dude in Night of the Living Dead?
Yes, he was the African-American man who played the lead role.  Jones was the first African-American to play the lead in an American horror film. 
So?  Didn't you see I Am Legend?  Will Smith's black.  That was a horror film.  Those vampires were ugly as shit. 
This was back in 1968, though.  It was a big deal at the time (even though Romero swears he never thought about it).  Producers were wary of putting black people in lead roles at all, especially in horror films.  I'm guessing you watch a lot of horror films.  Besides Will Smith, do you recall any black lead actors?
Easy.  Candyman.
He was the villain.
Blacula?
Also the villain.  Plus, it was a Blaxploitation film.  Doesn't count. 
Land of the Dead.
He was the lead zombie!  
But, aren't, like, zombie movies metaphors and shit?  Like, you know, "The zombies aren't the real villains.  The real villains are us."  That kind of makes him the good guy, sort of.
I'm still not counting that.
Shit, I don't know!  When I watch a horror film, I just wanna watch some dudes get ripped open with a machete by some dude in a mask.  I don't care if they're black or not.
That's very progressive of you.  But, for a long time, horror movies were written with only white audiences in mind.  If a black character was included at all, he almost inevitably died first, meaning he was either unimportant to the plot or he had some great weakness that caused him to be picked off first.  Neither case really counts as good representation.
Oh yeah!  "The Black Dude Dies First".  That's, like, one of those rules of horror movies and shit.  But, come on!  Horror movies are full of that shit.  Like, why is it that having sex in a slasher film means you're gonna get stabbed?  Why can't I see a chick's tits in a horror movie and not have to think about how they're gonna be covered in blood like a minute later?  That's not fair, either.
You're right.  That's devastatingly unfair to women everywhere.
Thank you. 
The reason I want to talk about Duane Jones and Night of the Living Dead, though, is that we didn't need to wait until the 21st century for Will Smith to become a star and break the color barrier to leading man status in horror.  Duane Jones already did it back in 1968.  And he did it with quiet dignity.  He made the character of Ben a resourceful, noble guy who steps up to be a leader in a time of crisis.  Before that (and for decades after) horror movies usually set up black characters as jive-talking stereotypes only good for getting sliced into lunch meat.  Jones' character wasn't a "black man".  He was man, a stand-in for all of us, the very model of grace under pressure.  He was a fully realized person striving in the face of chaos while everyone around him fell apart and turned on themselves.  He was a real hero.  It doesn't matter what color your skin is; that's something everyone can admire.
Wait, though... I saw Night of the Living Dead.  That guy dies in the end.  A bunch of redneck dudes think he's a zombie and shoot him in the face.  So it's better 'cause he died in the end and not the beginning?
Well, it's about the context-
Fuck context, dude, I want chainsaws!  Did you play Dead Rising?  You can tape a chainsaw onto a pole and fucking mow down whole crowds of zombies!  That's how Night of the Living Dead should have ended.
Ben should have stormed out of the house wielding a chainsaw?
Two chainsaws!  That'd be fucking sweet!
And this would be a significant step toward equality how?
Black?  White?  The chainsaw don't fucking care.  Nobody cares about the color of your skin when you're carving up zombies.  They're all like, "Fucking sweet!  A chainsaw!"
You're... you're right, actually. 
Fucking A right I am!  Oh!  Predator 2!
What?
Predator 2!  Danny Glover's the lead, and he's all noble and shit and doesn't die.  He cuts the Predator's fucking arm off with its own blade!  That's badass. 
Duane Jones would be proud.  He paved the way for that moment.  As he said, "It never occurred to me that I was hired because I was black. But it did occur to me that because I was black it would give a different historic element to the film."  And he was right.  Too bad he couldn't live to see the day that an African-American would kill a Predator.
Shit, what happened?
He did a few more B-horror films and went back to teaching.  Jones wound up being the head of the Theater Department at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, running the Black Theater Alliance and teaching a select, elite group of acting students of diverse backgrounds in New York.  He did an amazing amount of work encouraging young students of all races to go into acting, had a theater named after him at SUNY, and was enormously respected.  Then, just as unfairly as Ben was cut down in Night of the Living Dead, Duane Jones died of sudden heart failure in 1988.
Fuck.  That sucks.
Yeah.
But, like, things are getting better now, right?  I mean, there's horror movies made specifically for black people now, like-
Please don't mention Leprechaun in the Hood.
-Leprechaun in the Hood.  And Snoop Dogg had some horror thing he hosted.  And Bloodz vs. Wolvez.  Shit.  Looks like they're just gonna do it themselves if Hollywood won't.
I guess equality is found on the Direct-to-DVD shelf at Blockbuster.
So, this episode's about done, right?  How do you usually end it?
Oh, I usually have some pithy parting joke before I sign off.  How's it work in your alternate universe that I have failed to mention again since the beginning of the episode?
Me?  Usually with whiskey.
Seriously?  You have some now?
Fuck yeah, dude.  Oh!  Another one: Blade!  Black man in the lead, and it's fucking sweet.  You wanna get hammered and watch Wesley Snipes tear shit up?
Yes.  Yes I do.
Fuck it, dude.  Let's do it.
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 19: Steve Reeves
BEHOLD AND TREMBLE, MERE MORTALS, FOR YOU ARE NOW IN THE PRESENCE OF THE GODS!
Well, one god, anyway...
Well, demi-god, technically...
Well, one guy who played that demigod in two movies...
Still...
BEHOLD!  BASK IN THE GLORY OF THE GLITTERING LIGHT THAT REFLECTS FROM HIS WELL-OILED PECS, FOR OUT OF ALL THE SWEATY, BULKY, HEAVILY-BRONZED ACTORS WHO HAVE DARED TO TAKE UP THE MANTLE OF HERCULES, HE IS CERTAINLY ONE OF THEM!
Allow me to explain:
The existence of the modern Schwarzeneggar is well documented in movie archeology.  Arising from humble roots, a grotesquely muscled body-builder slices through the competition to win Mr. Universe, transforms into a grotesquely accented actor who amasses a fortune killing lots of people on screen and ends his life cycle after a metamorphosis into governor of a major American state. 
Aside from the occasional Ferrigno sighting, however, most people are unaware that the spectrum of fauna under the genus musclari includes many more specimens than the common Schwarzeneggar.  In fact, it has been documented that there was an earlier predecessor to the Schwarzeneggar, from whom the modern Schwarzeneggar derives much of its traits, career trajectory and penchant for protein shakes.  This proto-Schwarzeneggar is the now-extinct Steve Reeves.
Steve Reeves was born on a cattle ranch outside of Glasgow, Montana in 1926, and had already won his first title by the time he was six months old (Healthiest Baby in Valley County, 1926).  Reeves' father died in a farming accident when the boy was only a year and a half old, and his mother, a nutritionist, moved the family off the farm and onto the mean streets of Oakland, California.  OK, so Oakland wasn't really that mean in the 1930s, but, still, something compelled the boy to begin bulking up.  A friend introduced him to the local gym and the local body-building coach.  (By the way, when was the last time you visited your local body-building coach?)  Reeve's life would change forever.
In 1944, the top-heavy teen graduated from high school and jumped right into World War II.  He was assigned to an Army Infantry unit fighting in the Pacific theater, but most of his on-duty time was spent loading and unloading freight going to the front.  Combined with his continual devotion to lifting weights in his off-hours, he grew from a mere strongman to a living mass of muscle his fellow soldiers nicknamed "Shape" (as in, "Oh my God, what is that giant, hulking shape blotting out the sun?!")
After that little scuffle in the Pacific was over, Reeves returned to the country with major conquering on his mind.  In 1946 he entered and won his first body-building contest and was crowned Mr. Pacific Coast; but he was not satisfied with merely possessing the coast.  In 1947, he was crowned Mr. Western America.  Still not content with only a portion of the USA, he went on to win Mr. America later that year; but that would not be the end of his march to glory.  In 1948, he conquered the globe as Mr. World, and, finally, he made his conquest ultimate by winning Mr. Universe in 1950 (though, to be fair, this was during a less-enlightened time when the contest was limited only to people from Earth).
Having no physical realm left to conquer, Reeves set forth to attack imagination itself by moving into the movies.  He took some (brief) acting classes in New York and moved to California, where all of the accolades he accumulated in the body-building world translated into not much of anything.  His work in Tinseltown mostly consisted of standing around looking buff and taking his shirt off for bit parts in variety shows and the occasional TV series.
It didn't help that Reeves was a horrible judge of what would and wouldn't advance his career.  The famous Cecil B. DeMille (a director who could turn an unknown actor into a national sensation faster than you could eat a bagel; hell, he probably could have turned the bagel into an overnight sensation as well) offered Reeves the title role in his biblical epic Samson and Delilah; but Reeves turned it down because DeMille asked him to drop 15 pounds of muscle.  Yes, Steve Reeves was too muscular to play the strongest man in the Bible!
After that, Reeves made another horrible lapse in judgment that ushered him through the official entrance into B-Movie hell: appearing in Ed Wood's cringe-worthy attempt at detective noire, Jail Bait.  It's a given that no one looks good in an Ed Wood film, but Reeves gives a wooden performance as a hard-boiled police detective, except for an inexplicable scene where he is shirtless in his office.  His ability to flex shockingly-defined muscles kept him in his comfort zone in that one.
Reeves' acting career was already circling the drain by 1954.  In his last American film, the mediocre musical Athena, the producers couldn't even be bothered to spell his name correctly, listing him in the titles as "Steve Reves 'Mr. Universe of 1950'". 
The movie, however, put Reeves on the radar of Roger Corman's cheap Italian knockoff, the director Pietro Francisci.  Francisci had made a career in Europe delivering epic stories at rock-bottom prices by abusing the fractured tax and labor codes of post-war Italy, and he had his sights set on creating the most confusing mish-mash of Herculean legend ever put to film (until decades later when Arnold Schwarzeneggar washed up on America's shores in Hercules Goes Bananas).  It would go down in history under its American name, but for now we'll name it in the original Italian Le fatiche di Ercole.
Le fatiche was a slapdash cobbling-together of various Greek and Italian Hercules myths with enough of Jason and the Argonauts to render it senseless.  Reeves, having no real options in Hollywood, hopped on a plane for Europe, and in a matter of weeks found himself doused in gallons of skin bronzer and speaking phonetic Italian while he strutted his stuff as the mythical Greek demigod.  Did he understand what the movie was about?  Who cares?!  Reeves was finally earning a decent paycheck as an actor, and nobody was telling him to stay off the weight bench.
The finished product did respectably well in Italy and earned a few extra bucks in re-dubbed releases throughout Europe, but it took an American to add in just the right amount of crazy, balls-to-the-wall audacity to skyrocket this low-budget gem into the stratosphere.
Enter Joseph E. Levine.  Levine was the undisputed King of Hype.  His modus operandi was to scour the globe for foreign films to pick up on the cheap.  He would quickly re-edit and re-dub them for America and carpet bomb the country with so many ads and promotional gimmicks that the average film-goer was pummeled into submission.  Godzilla, anyone?  That was Levine.
Levine was one of the first in Hollywood to realize that he could take a B-picture and sell it for A-list prices as long as the advertising was omnipresent.  Good writing?  Great Acting?  Beautiful cinematography?  Forget it!  By the time he was done Levine dumped more money on advertising the newly chopped and channeled Le fatiche (released in the US as simply Hercules) than had been used in the entire production of the film itself.
"Surely, this failed," you are probably telling yourself, hoping there is some light of quality in this hopeless world, "There's no way millions of Americans would be bamboozled into elevating a low-budget Italian film with a confusing script and an expressionless body builder in the lead into a runaway success.  It simply cannot be!"
If you are currently rationalizing that to yourself, you have obviously not met many Americans. So, continue to weep softly for the death of the spirit and soul while I tell you that Hercules was a smash success in the US, earning millions of dollars over night.  As Joseph E. Levine always said, "You can fool all the people all the time if the advice is right and the budget is big enough."  It's a mantra that Hollywood lives by to this day.
Hercules was so successful that it launched an entire industry of "Sword and Sandal" films in Italy.  Every cheap distributor in the US started scanning Europe for every cheap filmmaker who could put an old legend to celluloid.  For almost a decade, this genre comprised over 10% of the entire output of the Italian film industry.
Reeves emerged as a king in the Sword and Sandal epoch.  He starred in a quick cash-in sequel, Hercules Unchained and left the series for further adventure.  Reeves appeared in 14 of the Italian epics, playing everything from Romulus, the founder of Rome, to Welsh privateer (and guy you probably only know from liquor bottles) Captain Henry Morgan.  Even though he never really got the hang of the whole "acting" thing, Reeves looked damn good in the manly, muscular, two-fisted world of legend, riding horses, performing his own stunts, grappling with other half-dressed, hard-bodied, sweating men.  He was in high demand in Italy: by 1960, Reeves was the highest paid actor in Europe, and the whole of Italy developed a cloud of manly musk.
However, Reeves failed to see the end of Sword and Sandals coming; and, again, he showed his ferociously bad judgment in picking roles.  Reeves reported that he was offered the role of James Bond in Dr. No, which he turned down.  After all, how well was some spy picture going to do, really?  Some no-name Scot took the role instead. 
Sergio Leone offered Reeves the lead in A Fistful of Dollars, but he turned it down, because, as he said, "It seemed to me impossible that the Italians could make a western."
Of course, he was wrong.  America went crazy for the Spaghetti Westerns and the Italian film industry quickly switched over from swordplay to gunplay.  A shoulder injury that Reeves incurred in a chariot accident in 1959's The Last Days of Pompeii had been continually re-injured by stunts in subsequent movies, and it was getting harder to find any more of the action epics that had made him famous.  A little too late, he tried jumping into the spaghetti westerns with A Long Ride From Hell, a film that he both starred in and co-wrote, but Reeves as a gunfighter never took off.
Rather than swim against the changing tides, Reeves retired from acting in 1968.  He bought a ranch near Escondido, California and spent his last three decades as a horse breeder and advocate for drug-free body-building.  Occasionally, he would moonlight as a personal trainer for a film actor looking to bulk up for a role, but, for the most part, his separation from the film world was complete.  He had his run, and he was happy to have the open country and his horses.
Steve Reeves died of complications from lymphoma in 2000, but his legacy lives on.  In the 1960s, a young Austrian man would look up at the silver screen, see the bulging pectorals of Steve Reeves and think to himself, "Yes, that will be me one day."  Today, that young man is governor of California.  So, thanks, Steve... I think.
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 18: Pam Grier
It's hard to make it as a working actor.  The glitzy glamor that Hollywood drizzles over itself like sparkling gravy is damn difficult to come by.  It arrives on only a few actors' doorsteps and usually only by the oddest of circumstances.  The vast majority of actors never make a dent in Hollywood, let alone make a decent paycheck. 
It's harder to make it if you have any melanin in your skin.  Hollywood has an abysmally bad history of both accidental and carefully crafted racism, owing mostly to its eternal fear of alienating middle-class white people.
It's even harder to make it if you have a vagina.  The major studios were mostly founded and staffed by shrewd, egotistical, hard-driving men who allowed very few women to become more than set dressing for their money-making schemes.  The majority of writers, directors and producers are still men, and male lead actors still receive more attention and money and generally enjoy longer careers.
So, what are the odds that in the 1970s a black female actor could rise up from out of nowhere and not only because successful in Hollywood, but become an icon of an entire genre of film making?  I can't even calculate them, and not just because I haven't had to take a math class since I was 18.
Well, Pam Grier did it, so the odds are at least one to something.
Pamela Suzette Grier was born in Winston-Salem, NC in 1949.  Her father was a Technical Sergeant in the Air Force, so the Grier family hopped from location to location throughout most of her childhood.  The family eventually landed in Denver, Colorado, where, as a high school student, Grier started acting in local theater productions.  Even as a teenager, she had a striking, confident beauty, whereas the rest of us had to make do with mothers promising that we would "blossom" some day (still waiting on that, Mom).  She put that beauty to work, earning money to pay for college by competing in beauty pageants.
Before we send Ms. Grier winging off to California to start her career, I have to address something that is not going to make you feel very good (unless you're a terrible, terrible person).  When she was six years old, Grier was left unattended for at time at her aunt's house, where she was accosted and raped by two boys.  Six.  She was only six.  Many years later she said of the incident "It took so long to deal with the pain of that.  You try to deal with it, but you never really get over it... And not just me; my family endured so much guilt and anger that something like that happened to me." 
I want to get that out there right now, because you should be thinking about it whenever you hear about Grier's early movies.
Grier made the big move to LA in 1967 and went through the requisite rounds of not being hired by anyone to act in anything (except for Russ Meyer, who put her in a bit role in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, because, well, Meyer loved tits).  She took a day job to pay the bills, and it turned out to be the luckiest day job in the world: a receptionist and switchboard operator at AIP. 
That's "AIP", as in "American International Pictures," as in "The Lair of Corman".  In the land of B-movies, all roads lead to Roger Corman eventually. 
One of AIP's in-house directors, Jack Hill, noticed Grier right away and thought, "Damn, she'd look good in a cage!"  So, it came to pass that Grier received her first major film role in The Big Doll House, another entry in the long, weird tradition of "women in prison" movies.  Hill is occasionally noted as being a very "feminist" director, an idea I can only assumed was arrived at while high, being as how the film's tagline was "THEY CAGE THEIR BODIES BUT NOT THEIR DESIRES."
For the first few years of that shameful decade known as the 70s, Grier worked under and AIP contract and appeared in a number of these movies about women in cages, most notably Women in Cages and Hill's own followup, The Big Bird Cage (tagline: "WOMEN SO HOT WITH DESIRE THEY MELT THE CHAINS THAT ENSLAVE THEM!").  The current generation of film buffs bends over backwards to look at these films as pieces of art, but they seem more like excuses to watch well-endowed women, sweaty and oily, nearly busting out of their flimsy, tattered clothes and frequently wrestling each other.  I'm not saying that Hill didn't set out to make high-concept camp using over-the-top metaphor to question the establishment and its treatment of women, but I can't shake the feeling that most of his movies were conceived, written and directed by his penis.
Through these early exploitation films, Pam Grier gained a reputation as a tough, sexy, no-nonsense actress; but locking women behind bars was only going to carry AIP's exploitation factory so far.  Luckily, a little film about a black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks came along, and it was a bad mother- (shut your mouth)  I'm just using the most cliched way possible to talk about Shaft. (we can dig it)  It scored a major hit at the box office in 1971, and Hollywood realized they could make money not just by targeting movies at everyone, everywhere, but by pinpointing them directly at  niche audiences (in this case, America's urban African-American population).  Though Shaft's director Gordon Parks went on record saying "I don't make black exploitation films," all Hollywood heard was "blah blah black exploitation blah blah MONEY!" and the floodgates of the 1970s blaxploitation genre officially opened.
Despite the fact that he was a college-educated, middle-aged white guy whose dad had worked at Disney, Jack Hill decided he was just the man to tell gritty tales of black urban crime.  He pushed his boat into that river and paddled like mad, putting Pam Grier squarely on the prow.  Their first foray in the genre, Coffy, made history with Grier as the first black woman to headline an action film, turning her into (as the film posters said) "the baddest one-chick hit-squad that ever hit town!"  And it was a hit.  Coffy beat all expectations at the box office and put Pam Grier's name on everyone's lips.
For the next few years, Grier was the supreme queen of blaxploitation, appearing in such films as Sheba, Baby; Friday Foster; Drum (the sequel to Mandingo); Black Momma, White Momma; and the movie she would become most associated with, Foxy Brown ("A chick with drive who don't take no jive!").  She quickly catapulted into glitzy Hollywood stardom, posed for more photo shoots than anyone can remember, dated Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor, and, through it all, maintained the idea that she was tough, sexy, smart and in total control of all around her.  (Girls of today: if you're looking for a role model, I urge you to forget you ever heard the word 'Kardashian' and turn your eyes toward Grier).
But like all film trends based on a cynical cash-in, the blaxploitation wave rose and crashed within a few years, leaving Pam Grier stranded on the beach of obscurity once again.  By 1980, American International Pictures had been sold off and dismantled and the era of high camp and exploitation was over.
In 1997, Quentin Tarantino cast Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch with a heaping helping of blaxploitation nods thrown in because Tarantino can't make anything without ripping off (or "referencing") a film made in the 70s.  Suddenly, Hollywood acted as though Grier had reappeared out of thin air, as if she had disincorporated in 1979 and had been busily working on reassembling her molecules ever since like Dr. Manhattan (and, yeah, I just threw an extremely strained reference to a a piece of entertainment which I encountered as a kid and which hardly anyone I meet today will immediately recognize, but I would be happy to explain its incredible significance in a long, self-absorbed and possibly coke-fueled rant because I'm so amazingly hip just like Tarantino, man).
Actually, Pam Grier didn't go anywhere, and she certainly didn't stop working.  Jackie Brown wasn't the career-reviving miracle that entertainment magazines made it out to be.  In reality, Grier had continued to work steadily in character roles in television and movies, and she continues to do so to this day.  When fleeting fame left her, she didn't crash and burn in an alcohol-tinged depression like so many Lindsey Lohans.  Instead, she put her nose to the grindstone and continued on, carving a modest but admirable living out of Hollywood's rocky hills.  In my mind, this is even more inspirational than her as a tough sex-bomb with a gun sticking it to the Man; when the party was over, she soldiered on, level-headed and clear-eyed, and there's a lesson in there for all of us.
So, here's some real words of wisdom for all you aspiring actresses out there, from Pam Grier herself:
"I can't talk about myself. I just can't. I know I've influenced people, and I'm proud of that. But as I see it, I really haven't done anything. I haven't saved anybody from a burning building. Foxy Brown actually approached me at the start of her career to ask if she could use the name. I told her, 'You didn't need to ask.' If you're an independent woman, every woman is Foxy Brown."
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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DeForest Kelley update
After some feedback and consultation with a tumblr reader who knows an awful lot about DeForest Kelley (I'm sorry, elephantfootsteps, I never got your actual name), I've amended my entry about him a bit.
So, you can go back and read an old article with some new changes.  It's like when George Lucas re-releases Star Wars movies, except in this case the changes are good things:
http://knowyourbmovieactors.tumblr.com/post/13832797477/episode-16-deforest-kelley
And, while I've got your attention, readers, I want to commend elephantfootsteps (again, sorry I didn't get your name) for finding fault in an article and addressing it in a thorough, informative and ultimately respectful manner instead of slinging whatever juvenile insult is popular with the kids on the intertubes these days.  I don't allow open comments on this tumblr page, but I do read messages people send me, and I'm always open to suggestions. 
So, send me a message if you've got another forgotten actor you want to see an episode about.
However, I will not accept messages correcting my grammar in that last sentence. 
Thank you.
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 17: Charles Chaplin, Jr.
The producers of Girls Town really tried to stack the deck in their favor.  They rounded a group of up-and-coming pop stars (and Dick Contino) in a teen/murder/crime caper, got John Williams to write a hep, jazzy score, and cast a lead actress who once described her breasts by saying, "I don't even want to say double-D, because they're even bigger than that."  They threw in everything they could think of to grab the attention of the hot-blooded teenage youth of 1959: a gang rumble, Mamie van Doren in a nightgown, a drag race, judo girl fights, Mamie van Doren in a nightgown, everything a teenage boy wants to see!  Plus Mamie van Doren in a nightgown!
Sounds pretty awesome, right? 
Then they undid all of that awesomeness by pegging the emotional climax around Paul Anka singing "Ave Maria" (Because nothing gets teen boys going like Catholic piety!) and trying to force the audience to accept chinless Mel Torme as a dangerous thug.
Sounds seriously less than awesome now, doesn't it?
I bring this movie up, because there in the background, playing a bit part while the crooners did their thing, was a luckless actor who just happened to be the first-born son of one of the most famous people that filmdom had produced up to that point: Charles Chaplin, Jr.
Just as Girls Town looked promising on paper and pretty crappy in real life, so too did this young man's prospects in Hollywood.
Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr. should not actually have been called "Jr." since his father, Charles Spencer Chaplin was already named after his own father, Charles Spencer Chaplin.  Chaplin, Jr. (actually, III) was officially born on May 5, 1925.  I say "officially" because his mother stated on several occasions that the date was a complete fabrication and offered two contradictory accounts of the boy's birth in the two different books that she wrote about her ex-husband...
OK, this is getting confusing already. Let's back up a bit.
It was 1924.  35-year-old Charlie Chaplin had Hollywood by the balls.  He was arguably the most famous living person in the world and had just recently founded the most exciting new production company in town, United Artists.  Chaplin was well-known for his sexual dalliances with just about every starlet who wandered his way, but, so far, the press was giving him a free pass, because, damnit, the little scamp was so damn charming.  Is anyone surprised that this man would be portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr. later on?
Then Lita Grey came, and she brought hell with her..
Grey was a 15-year-old actress who looked ten years older than she had any right to.  Still, her real age was known, and God only knows what Chaplin was thinking when he steered her into his bed.  Young Lita came down with a bad case of pregnancy, and suddenly Chaplin was worried about his image.  Not only had he fathered a child out of wedlock, but the mother of said child was decidedly underage.  The English native Chaplin found himself staring down a statutory rape charge, which would have landed him in a very American jail and destroyed his career.
So, Chaplin, ever the gentleman, whisked her off to Sonora, Mexico in secret and married her.  He brought his child bride back to Hollywood and installed her in a nondescript bungalow hidden in the Hollywood hills until she finally turned 16 (the legal age for consent, apparently).  During that time she gave birth to Charles, Jr. and she insisted that a doctor, paid off by the boy's father, forged the birth certificate to make it seem that the child had been conceived just after their nuptials and her 16th birthday.
It wasn't a good way to start life.  Chaplin and Grey had another child, Sydney, soon after, but the marriage had all the staying power of a soap bubble.  They divorced by 1926, and Lita Grey faded quietly into obscurity.
OK, that was a lie.  She went kicking and screaming into obscurity.  She beat obscurity into a pulp with a ball peen hammer.  Then she doused obscurity with lighter fluid and fired a roman candle into it.
Grey dragged up every piece of dirt on Chaplin she could find (and probably fabricated many more), and the divorce became the biggest event in Hollywood that year.  Grey's divorce complaint reached novel-length and was actually published as a book while the trial was still going on.  After hearing numerous charges of adultery (some wholly invented, many sadly real) the judge ordered Chaplin to pay the largest divorce settlement ever rendered up to that time, over $700,000 to be put in trust for each child.
Grey moved on to a career of anger and itinerant alcoholism.  Young Charles, Jr. and Sydney spent a childhood being bounced around between family members and boarding houses.  They visited their father irregularly on weekends, and though the elder Chaplin sincerely tried, he was mostly lost as a father.  Charles, Jr. would eventually write the book My Father, Charlie Chaplin, which painted a picture of his dad as well-meaning, but bumbling, a view that Chaplin's own autobiography would confirm many years later.
Charles, Jr. ended up in a military school in Hollywood, then a prep school in New Jersey, and finally took up a four-year program with his brother in the University of World War II.  After the Army released them, Charles and brother Sydney returned to Hollywood determined to be famous actors like their old man. 
As it turns out, the elder Chaplin's talents as a comedian, physical performer and director did not filter down to his eldest progeny, and the talent of "being Charlie Chaplin's sons" wasn't wowing any producers in town.  The Chaplin boys didn't seem to mind too much, though.  Armed with the small fortune granted to them by their parents' divorce settlement, they become a fixture on the social scene in Hollywood, proving that they had at least inherited their father's talents at picking up chicks (and their mother's talent for drinking).  The boys shared an apartment and set about charming the pants off of every star-struck starlet they could sling a drink at.
Somewhere in the middle of all the cocktails and carousing, Sydney got the sort of idea that I'm guessing happened on about drink number five for the evening: "Charles," (I'm imagining) he said, "You know what a town founded on and devoted entirely to producing movies needs?  A theatre troupe! Hic..."
"Yesshh!" Charles slurred, well into drink number six (in my mind), "And the first show must be something depressing that ends in a suicide pact.  Has anyone done Ethan Frome yet?"
So it came to pass that Sydney sobered up enough to plow his money into creating The Circle Theatre.  He and a group of friends started off putting on shows in their living room and quickly moved into an abandoned grocery store on El Centro Avenue in Los Angeles.  Charles, Jr. tagged along and finagled himself into a role in the new space's premier production of Ethan Frome.  The arts scene in LA was all atwitter over the plucky little theater, and the hijinks of the young actors in then new space made sure that they were the talk of the town.  (The Circle Theatre still exists, though it has changed hands and names many times and is now called El Centro Theatre.)
During this time, Charles, Jr. met a cute young brunette by the name of Norma Jean Mortenson.  Young Norma Jean was an aspiring actress and model who was fairly new to town, and Chaplin fell in love.  She would often spend the night with him in the cramped apartment that Charles and Sydney shared, with Sydney sleeping in a bed across the room from them.  Charles was surprised the day that Norma Jean dyed her hair platinum blonde and announced that she would henceforth be known as Marilyn Monroe.  He was even more surprised when he came back to that cramped apartment and found Marilyn in bed with Sydney.
From that moment on, Charles Chaplin, Jr. found himself living under two different shadows: his famous father's and his freewheeling brother's.  In 1952, their father decided to give them both a leg up by sticking them in one of his last films, Limelight.  Sydney received a plum role, billed just below Buster Keaton, while Charles, Jr. made a blip as an uncredited clown.  Sydney parlayed the Circle Theatre's success into a long, Tony-award-winning career on Broadway, while Charles, Jr. struggled in Hollywood and landed in a short string of B-grade teen crime films.  Sydney gained a reputation as a witty, urbane, social-drinking bon vivant who should also be played by Robert Downey, Jr. some day, while Charles, Jr. descended into the same ugly alcoholism that had claimed their mother.
By 1959, Charles, Jr. fell in with Albert Zugsmith Productions.  Zugsmith had at one time been a well-regarded director, screenwriter and producer.  At his height, he produced Alfred Hitchcock's Touch of Evil, but after the surprise success of an inexpensive exploitation flick called High School Confidential, the quick money bug dragged him down to the B-lands.  Charles, Jr. spent his last productive years with Zugsmith's group working on laughably bad movies that were cynically designed to create controversy among ignorant, fearful, white, middle-class parents.  Chaplin went along for the ridiculous ride on High School Confidential, Night of the Quarter Moon, The Beat Generation, Sex Kittens Go to College, and, of course, Girls Town.
By the time Girls Town premiered, he was 35 years old, the same age his father had been when the junior Chaplin was illicitly conceived.  Charles, Jr. did not have Hollywood by the balls.  On the set of Girls Town, he met another famous silent actor's son: Harold Lloyd, Jr., who also appeared in a brief role.  Nearly the same age, just as luckless and unknown, just as much a drinker, Lloyd, Jr, and Chaplin, Jr. must have taken one look at each other and seen their dark reflections.  Both of them withdrew from the moving pictures soon after.
Charles Chaplin, Jr. died of a blood clot in his lungs, most likely brought on by several decades of heavy drinking, in 1968.  He was only 43.  Before he left this mortal coil, he wrote an alternately sad and humorous book about growing up with his famous dad, and it managed to shine some off some of the tarnish that his own mother's books had done to the elder Chaplin.  In between the lines of My Father, Charlie Chaplin an astute reader can see an author who realizes perfectly well that he had been kicked around in life by forces that he could never get a grip on.  After it was all said and done, though, he refused to blame anyone, and he tried to get out of Hollywood with as much dignity as he could muster.
So, yeah... It's a pretty sad story, all around.  I went into this assuming that Charlie Chaplin's kid ending up in the B-pictures would be a laugh riot, but now that I know the whole story, I'm pissed off for him.  On paper, his life was set up perfectly, but, really, he never had a chance.
Unfortunately, everyone who ever stomped casually across Charles, Jr.'s dreams is long dead, and I have nowhere to place my rage; so I'm choosing to vent that anger in the only place I know: Joyce Carol Oates.  Yes, you read that correctly:  Joyce Carol Oates.  In her Pulitzer-prize-nominated book, Blonde, she portrayed Charles Chaplin, Jr. not as a luckless schmuck who Miss Monroe cheated on and dumped for his brother because he was marginally more successful at the time, but rather as a scheming closeted homosexual who maliciously manipulates the poor, naive actress for his own gain and then cheats on her with Edward G. Robinson.
So, lacking any other satisfactory ending to today's episode, I'll leave it with a closing line that hopefully make Charles Chaplin Jr. smile a little in his grave:
Fuck you, Joyce Carol Oates.
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 16: DeForest Kelley
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At the outset, I would like to address the obvious: I realize that DeForest Kelley is an instantly recognizable actor who originated one of film and television's most iconic roles.  But, please, temper yourselves, you raging DeForest fans.  I did not come here to impugn the honor of this actor's great legacy; rather, I came here to explore the trap of success.  You see, before his star rose in 1972, DeForest Kelley had an established, if humble, career in Hollywood.  He had worked solidly for 20 years.  After the role that flung him into stardom came and went, it was impossible for him to find work.  Typecast, forever bound to the character he created, he was thrown back into the hinterlands of Hollywood, never to be heard from again.  
Of course, we all know what famous role I'm speaking of, so let's all say it together everybody: "Elgin Clark in Night of the Lepus."
Oh, and he was in something called Star Trek, too.  I don't know.  Sounds like some nerdy science fiction thing to me.  Isn't it interesting how actors can do lots of quirky things you might not have heard about before?  
But I know you're just as eager as I am to talk more in depth about Night of the Lepus, so let's get on with the show.  
Jackson DeForest Kelley was born to his uncle in 1920 in Atlanta, Georgia.  Wait... without context that sounds odd, like his uncle gave birth to him.  I mean, the South is weird, but not that weird (except for Florida).  Kelley's uncle was a local doctor who handled the delivery (does that sound better?).  His father was a Baptist minister who moved the family from town to town many times during the boy's childhood.  Young Jackson initially wanted to be a doctor, just like the uncle who brought him naked and screaming into this world; but at the time the Great Depression was on and the family didn't have enough money to send him to school.
Instead, Kelley graduated early from high school and started a minor singing career.  At first he was the featured soloist at his father's church, which led to local appearances outside of the church, which led to regular appearances on radio station WSB in Atlanta, which eventually led to a singing engagement with the Lew Forbes Orchestra.  This was all in the year he turned 16.  Remember when you were 16 and hoping that your job at McDonald's would lead to an assistant management position so you could earn more than $4.75 an hour?  Yeah, it was nothing like that.  Without any kind of training, Kelley discovered that he had a natural knack as an entertainer, whereas you discovered you had a natural knack for unclogging the ice machine near cash register 12.
At 17, Kelley sojourned out to California for the first time to stay with an uncle who lived in Long Beach.  Unlike his doctor uncle in Atlanta, no one seems to know for sure what this uncle did for a living, so I'm just going to assume that it's like a wacky sitcom situation where the uptight brother became a stern doctor in Georgia, while his cooler brother lives on a beach, doesn't have a real job, but always seems to have money for weed.  Then somehow they end up having to raise their singing teenage nephew together... Hold on, I need to write this down.  I've gotta pitch this for a pilot.  This is golden. I wonder if Charlie Sheen is available?
At any rate, Kelley fell in love with California and never looked back.  He jumped in immediately trying to be an actor, which meant that he spent a good number of years mopping floors, operating elevators and working on an oil rig.  He did local theater, which, just like today's theater, no one watched.  He appeared in a 1938 silent film that was never released.  Like so many young actors before and after him, his career was dying before it was starting, and fate seemed damn determined to kill it.  Just as he was about to be cast in what would have been a breakout role in This Gun For Hire, he was drafted into the US Air Corps,  Alan Ladd was more than happy to take the part in his place.
Military service turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though.  In 1946, a scout from Paramount Studios happened upon him while he was doing a Navy training film, and within a year, Kelley was in his first actually released movie, a low budget thriller called Fear in the Night.  It was a cheaply shot movie with a confusing plot involving hypnotism and ritual murder, but it struck a strange chord in 1947 when it was released and sold incredibly well.  Overnight, DeForest Kelley went from being an actor demonstrating how to properly inflate a life vest to being the lead actor in the sleeper hit of the year.  
Sensing money to be made the way a shark smells blood in the water, Paramount decided to go all in on Kelley and cast him as a leading man in Variety Girl, a movie musical that was supposed to turn him into the next Bing Crosby or Bob Hope.  Unfortunately, Paramount hedged its bets a little too much, undercutting that ambition by actually putting Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the picture.  In fact, the studio called in just about every famous actor, dancer and singer under contract to them--Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour, Burt Lancaster, William Holden, George Reeves, Barbara Stanwyck, the list literally goes on and on and on--to the point at which the movie featured more cameos than actual plot.  Variety Girl was remembered for its fantastic song and dance numbers, but somewhere in the mix of all those outsized egos and personalities (and booze; do you have any idea how much alcohol a cast like that must have consumed?), leading man DeForest Kelley was forgotten.  The current DVD re-release of the film prominently features Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on the cover and fails to mention that neither one of them was a main character.  DeForest Kelley is not pictured at all.
With his leading man dreams dashed and Paramount Studios suddenly saying "Sorry.  DeForest who?" Kelley moved on to the place where just about any male actor could find refuge in Hollywood in the 1950s: The Westerns.  Over the next decade, he built a career out of being not the handsome lead, but the brutish heavy, starting with a short stint on The Lone Ranger.  He would go on to appear in dozens of TV shows and movies throughout the 50s, playing so many Western characters that he actually appeared on both sides of the famous OK Corral incident (first as Ike Clanton in the series You Are There, then as Morgan Earp in the great Burt Lancaster/Kirk Douglas film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral).  
He was so successful in the Westerns that he began to get nervous about typecasting.  After all, what would happen if audiences and studios so identified him with one particular genre that it became impossible to escape it?  Certainly, that couldn't be allowed to happen.  He looked around for other work and was cast in the pilot episode of a new crime series, 333 Montgomery, written by an ex-police officer by the name of Gene Roddenberry.  It didn't make it to series, but that didn't stop the former policeman from pushing another crime pilot, Police Story, which also featured Kelley and also didn't make it to series.
Roddenberry was eventually able to convince a studio to back another series of his, this time having nothing to do with police or crime, and, once again, he asked Kelley to be on board.  Kelley turned down the original role he was offered, because he thought the series would be quickly canceled and he didn't want to be remembered as playing some silly thing called a "Vulcan", even if it was a major role.  As a backup Roddenberry offered him the role of a doctor, which Kelley took, because even if it was some silly Buck Rogers stuff, he needed the money.
Kelley was mostly right about the show.  Star Trek was not a big hit in its time and only survived because Gene Roddenberry proved himself remarkably good at charming and befuddling the people who paid the bills.  During the course of its two and a half seasons it received critical acclaim but only miniscule ratings, and its producing company, Desilu Productions, lost money on almost every episode.  After Desilu closed up shop and sold its holdings to Paramount Television, the new corporate overlords quickly pulled the plug.  Kelley went back to looking for television work and found it only sparingly, since even though few people had actually watched Star Trek in its original run, hardly anyone would see him as anything but Doctor "Bones" McCoy.
By 1972, he was desperate and filing for unemployment.  So, reluctantly, he accepted his only role of the year, one that would cement him in B-Movie stardom.  It was, of course, the sublimely ridiculous Night of the Lepus, one of the most unintentionally hilarious movies ever put to film.
Originally titled Rabbits, it was a disaster from the start.  Producer A.C. Lyles had never worked on a horror film before, so he almost exclusively cast regulars from the westerns he used to make back in the 50s, including DeForest Kelley.  Actress Janet Leigh stooped way below her pay grade and unexpectedly signed on, because it was being filmed near her home and she didn't want to have to travel just to make a dumb old movie.  Director William F. Claxton was another holdover from the Westerns and knew nothing about film techniques for horror, choosing instead to shoot in the same quiet, simple, completely non-threatening vistas he used to shoot in the old days.  MGM gave the whole project the go-ahead thinking it could be a quick cash-in and put all the money behind it that "quick cash-in" suggests, so there was precious little money left over for special effects.  
And did I mention it's a film about bloodthirsty bunnies?  It called for cute little bunnies mutated into vicious killers, and that's where that whole "lack of a budget" thing really hurt.  Remember the "killer rabbit" scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?  That had better special effects.  Harvey had a more convincing giant rabbit.  The stuffed Bugs Bunny my mom gave me when I was five is more terrifying than the bunnies in Night of the Lepus.  For many scenes, the "giant" rabbits were just regular pet rabbits with ketchup smeared around their mouths plopped down amidst HO-scale models.  A few other scenes were filmed with actors in rabbit costumes with ketchup smeared around their mouths.  Yes, I said "ketchup" both times, and that was deliberate.  This was a horror movie that couldn't even afford fake blood, but for DeForest Kelley it was either this or another day standing in line at the unemployment office.
After the requisite rounds of one-take shots, poor ADR, bad editing and the insertion of random bits of stock footage, the monstrosity was released to the world.  MGM decided to try to surprise the audience by hushing up the fact that the killers were bunnies.  They changed the title to Night of the Lepus (since "lepus" is Latin for "rabbit"), and cut out all images of rabbits from promo posters; but they shot themselves in the foot on that by handing out lucky rabbit feet as part of the promotional material.  The movie died a quick death in theaters, because, as one critic astutely put it, "fluffy bunnies just aren't scary."
Kelley's career would have pretty much been over at this point.  He was getting too worn down by the constant struggle to find work in Hollywood, he was getting too old to continue doing 12-hour shoots in the desert for meager pay on B-films and westerns, and his wife's failing health was requiring more attention and a more stable life for the both of them.  He probably would have settled out entirely right then, had it not been for the power of nerds.
A small, rabid following of Star Trek fans refused to accept the fact that their favorite series was long since canceled.  They didn't just meet and talk about the show.  They organized conventions.  They tracked down even the most minor character actors from the show and peppered them with unnervingly specific questions. They started writing their own stories and scripts about the Star Trek universe, and they were not going to take no for an answer about anything.  In short, they became the most insufferable nerds the world would see until the invention of the internet, and Star Trek got a miraculous second lease on life.  A short-lived cartoon series gave way to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which eventually spawned five sequels and four more spinoff TV series; and DeForest Kelley, the man who had been afraid of being typecast as a cowboy, took the last road open to him: being typecast as a space doctor.
The Star Trek movies were the last things Kelley did as an actor (aside from The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, and, yeah, that's a real thing that happened).  Between those films and appearances at Star Trek conventions, he was finally able to find a stable, comfortable life away from all the Hollywood scrabbling.  Fate kept him from ever being the leading man, but he left the entertainment world with a legacy he could be proud of.  Kelley retired and lived out the rest of his days with the same woman he had married in 1942 to a quiet life of raising roses and writing poetry.  
In one of his last interviews, he said that he was proud that "Bones" McCoy had inspired many fans to become doctors, but that his biggest fear was that "He's dead, Jim," would be etched on his tombstone.  Before he died of stomach cancer in 1999, he specifically asked people not to use the famous Dr. McCoy phrase in reference to him.  Showing the level of dignity and respect that normally goes with Hollywood reporting, Newsweek ended his obituary with "We're not even going to try to resist: He's dead, Jim."
So, in honor of DeForest Kelley's wishes, I am hereby placing a curse on this week's episode.  Let it be known that anyone who laughed when they read "He's dead, Jim" in one of Kelley's obituaries will be haunted by the specter of Leonard Nimoy singing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" forever and ever and ever.  I guess I probably should have mentioned that earlier.
Special thanks to Shad Cooper for suggesting this episode.
Also, many thanks to tumblr user elephantfootsteps for feedback on the article and additional information.
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 15: Tor Johnson
A successful movie actor has to be more than merely a competent performer.  And, sometimes, not even that (yes, Shia Labeouf, I'm talking directly to you).  No, to make a splash in Hollywood, an actor needs something more, something almost indefinable, a kind of magnetism, a certain je ne se quois that sets him or her apart from the rest of the people standing around on the set while the Director of Photography yet again argues with the Director on the framing of yet another talky two-shot.  
Every successful actor in movie history had this.  Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, John Wayne; all of these greats had something about them that rendered the audience incapable of taking their eyes off of them, even when said actors were very clearly sleepwalking through their scenes to collect a paycheck.  It's an awe-inspiring, almost mystical trait that few humans possess, something that can't be learned in any film school.  Tor Johnson had this in bulk.
Well, to put it more precisely, Tor Johnson had bulk.
Karl Oscar Tore Johansson was born in Kalmar, Sweden in 1903.  He was not a good-looking man.  He was not an eloquent man.  But he was big.  Standing 6'3" tall and topping out at over 400 pounds at his heaviest, he was an implacable mountain of manhood with the kind of casual, lumbering strength usually reserved for giants in fairy tales.  The genetics of a hundred Vikings swam down his line of ancestry and pooled into a pile of flesh big enough to exert its own gravitational pull.
Growing up in Kalmar, a small industrial town on the Baltic Sea, his job prospects were mostly limited to "forklift driver" (or maybe just "forklift").  Lacking much in the way of education, he turned his great strength into his... uh... greatest strength.  He shaved off his thick mane of Viking hair to became a professional wrestler and quickly worked his way up the ranks.  By the time the Depression hit, he was in the United States, barnstorming across the country, winning match after match as the "Super Swedish Angel."  He was internationally recognized as one of the greatest wrestlers in the world, and his success should be no surprise, considering that the only living man who had the strength to pick up Tor Johnson and throw him was Tor Johnson.
Tor's terrifying bulk and grim, bald visage made him a popular attraction in the wrestling circuit, which itself was rapidly becoming popular in America.  It was just as true then as it was today: anything popular, however fleetingly, will be put into a movie by a cynical producer.  He showed up in W.C. Field's Man on the Flying Trapeze as the circus wrestler Tosoff, in the original Mighty Joe Young as a wrestler hired to grapple the eponymous ape, in Frank Capra's State of the Union as--you guessed it--"Wrestler."
For two decades, he hovered around the fringe of Hollywood, always ready when the studios needed a mute, hulking mass to intimidate someone, and he had the chance to rub elbows with a lot of movers and shakers.  He showed up in the Thin Man series, Jack Benny's The Meanest Man in the World, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's road movie Road to Rio, the original movie version of Carousel, Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, and Bob Hope's big budget project The Lemon Drop Kid (along with fellow Know Your B-Movies Actors alum Sid Melton).
I could just spend the rest of the article listing Tor Johnson's movie pedigree.  He was in at least 43 films, many more of them actual, respected projects like those in the preceding paragraph; but, let's be honest, you didn't come here for that.  You came here for the dirt, the shame, the humiliation, the cheap sets and stitled dialogue.  You came here to see how his career ground into grimy dust under Ed Wood's sensible high heels.  You came here because of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and you're all sick, depraved people for that.
*sigh*  OK, here we go...
There is one word that neatly sums up the last decade of Tor Johnson's film career: "Lobo."  Spanish for "wolf"?  Yes, but in the hands of Ed Wood, it is so much less.  In 1955, Wood somehow managed to wrangle Johnson, who should have known better, into a no-budget picture called Bride of the Monster, which featured a drug-addled Bela Lugosi, lots of stolen stock footage, a foam rubber octopus and not much else.  Johnson played the monster of the title, a work-in-progress superman created by Lugosi's mad scientist and named simply "Lobo.'  The part featured no dialogue and mostly consisted of single takes of Johnson shuffling across various cardboard sets and occasionally being whipped by the frail, morphine-ravaged Lugosi.  In the end, the monster Lobo redeems himself by saving the heroine of the film and tossing the mad doctor into his own fiendish experiment.  A few continuity errors later, the movie resolves itself with classic, inexplicable line "He tampered in God's domain."  Let that be a lesson to you all: do not tamper with Tor Johnson, for he is God's domain.
Saying that Bride of the Monster is not a good film is the one of the greatest understatement of all time, right up there with "Hey, ya know the Universe is pretty big."  It was cheap, lifeless and derivative in every possible way, and somehow it even fails to entertain on a campy, so-bad-it's-good level.  It's as if everything in this film is designed to make the viewer sad and apathetic; yet, it laid down the foundation on which Tor Johnson's legacy would rest, right on the sagging shoulders of the mute Lobo.  And, inexplicably, it would be ripped off by at least two other production companies.
After that, every part that Johnson played was more or less modeled on Lobo.  The following year, both Lugosi and Johnson were picked up to appear in a bigger budget, less sadness-inducing horror film, The Black Sheep, featuring the much more respected actors Basil Rathbone, John Carradine and Lon Chaney, Jr.  The movie, though produced by a better company and not featuring Ed Wood in any way, shape or form, was depressingly similar to Bride of the Monster, with Tor Johnson again playing a shuffling abomination created by a mad scientist.  This time around, Rathbone got to be the misunderstood genius while Lugosi took a demotion to play his mute servant.
In 1957, yet another production company put together The Unearthly, another mad-scientist-makes-Tor-Johnson-a-monster outing.  This time, John Carradine played the mad scientist and, in the least original turn in this sordid series, the screenwriters didn't even bother pretending that Johnson was a new character.  He was named "Lobo" once again.  And, so it goes...
I won't get into Plan 9 From Outer Space, since Tim Burton's Ed Wood explains it better than I could, but I would like to throw this juicy tidbit out there for your consideration: Ed Wood made a damn sequel to it!  I know you're gluttons for punishment, so read on.  Immediately after finishing Plan 9 the easily deluded Wood figured that the public would be clamoring for more, so he produced, wrote and directed Night of the Ghouls, the film that Plan 9 wished it would never be.  Once again, Tor Johnson played a lumbering monstrosity (his character from Plan 9, accidentally resurrected by a fake spiritualist), and, of course, hilarious hijinx ensue!
Actually, I don't know what happens in Night of the Ghouls.  Wood's final cut sat unreleased and unknown in a warehouse for 25 years, because he didn't have the money to pay the developer for the finished print.  All I can do is guess at its contents, and now that I've pondered over it for a while, I'm feeling a heady mix of fatigue and nausea, and I can kind of taste copper. I should go lie down for a while...
At any rate, Tor Johnson's association with Ed Wood was 400-pound piledriver off the top rope out of the ring, and it neatly broke the back of his film career.  Johnsons dragged himself along through the sixties with occasional bit parts on television--including You Bet Your Life and The Red Skelton Show--and a smattering of commercials.  
In 1968, producer Anthony Cordoza, a former associate of Ed Wood, offered him $300 to star as one more mutated monster in Coleman Francis' The Beast of Yucca Flats.  Shot in muddy black and white with badly-overdubbed dialogue in the ugliest stretch of Southwest landscape Cordoza and Francis could find, the film was a depressing, nihilistic parade of pain whose only redeeming feature should have been in delivering the mercy blow that finally put Johnson's film career out of its misery.  Unfortunately, even that honor was denied it; the Monkees movie Head did the deed instead.  Johnson's final film role saw him right back where he started in the movies: as an uncredited, intimidating guard standing around while the film goes on upstage of him.
Of course, you know that Ed Wood's films would eventually find their place in cult fame; and so, the legacy of Tor Johnson, once the greatest wrestler in the world, was forever entwined with Lobo, the slow-witted monster of the backwaters of Hollywood.  He himself became a cult icon along with Wood.  Cartoonist Drew Friedman created an entire comic series featuring Johnson as his Lobo character.  Mask maker Don Post, the "Godfather of Halloween," fashioned a famous latex mask of Johnson that would go on to be one of the best-selling Halloween masks of all time.  During his weird wrestling phase, Andy Kaufman--in an homage to Johnson's first career--hired a wrestler to act as his henchman while wearing the Johnson mask.
Though Tor Johnson made his living portraying hulking, intimidating monsters, he was reported to be (like just about every other monster-portrayer we've discussed) the nicest man in the world.  His wife, Greta, was dismayed by him playing monsters all the time, as she claimed he was the opposite of that off camera.  Actress Valda Hansen, who worked with him on the unreleased Night of the Ghouls, said, "Tor was like a big sugar bun."  Another associate said of him "Tor had such warmth! He was so cooperative-- just a lovely man. As you know, he was a former wrestler ... he would go and have drinks with his opponents after a wrestling match."  Johnson and Bela Lugosi became very close toward the end of the aging actor's life, and Johnson spent a good deal of time helping him to fight his drug addiction.  At one point, he ironically prevented Lugosi from committing suicide by threatening to throw him out of a window.
In life, Johnson was actually a sweet, down-to-earth, somewhat bumbling man.  He had a habit of accidentally breaking toilet seats with his girth, and he drove nothing but tiny European cars that could barely carry his bulky body.  He had an easy and incredibly rumbling, joyous laugh that endeared him to his friends.  He consumed huge amounts of food to keep himself going and maintained an unmatched zeal for eating.  He could apparently drink down an entire case of beer on his own and consume several gallons of ice cream in one sitting.
All that food would have to catch up with him eventually.  Johnson developed cardiovascular problems in his later years and eventually succumbed to heart failure in 1971.  His son, Karl would go on to be a massive man himself, but he applied himself to being a police officer instead (probably the most terrifying officer on the force).  Tor Johnson barely missed the 70s cult horror wave that would pick up his image and carry him forward as a banner for the horror B-movies, but that's probably for the best.  There's a lot of irony that goes into celebrating bad pieces of art, and Johnson was a deeply sincere man who had little use for it.  So, instead, let's raise a gallon of beer for a hell of a wrestler who also happened to be a heck of a nice guy! 
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 14: Joe Estevez
Let's say you're settled in for a late Thursday night movie.  Let's also say that your cable connection isn't working well, and the only movie channel that's coming in properly is Cinemax.  Being that you're not a 13-year-old boy hoping for soft-core pornography, your first instinct is to switch the television off and do something productive with your life, like sorting out your personal finances or taking another crack at that novel you started working on in Creative Writing I in college.  But, you are already huddled on the couch, and the fact that you have a Domino's pizza being delivered to you shortly proves that you have questionable priorities anyway, so you decide to soldier on and see what Cinmeax has to offer.
Taking this hypothetical situation further, let's say that the movie that comes on is a questionable 2002 remake of the already questionable Deathbed (helpfully subtitled: The Bed that Eats).  Early on in this experience, two thoughts plague your mind: (1) "Which decision was worse--Watching this movie or eating this pizza?"; and (2) "What the hell is Martin Sheen doing in this?!"  (The answer to #1 is easy: they were both equally terrible decisions.)
Yes, unbelievable as it may seem, right there before your eyes is an actor who walks, talks and acts exactly like the Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning actor from Apocalypse Now, Badlands, Wall Street and The West Wing!  Surely, his finances couldn't have been in bad enough order to need this paycheck!  Either you are watching a film from an alternate dimension where Martin Sheen is a failed actor (and, presumably, The Rock is a celebrated Oscar-winner) or Domino's has given up merely assaulting your intestines and has moved on to more insidious mind-altering experiments.
Finally at about two in the morning, your brain ground to fine powder by Deathbed, you find yourself, bleary-eyed and full of regret, searching in vain for Sheen's name in the credits.  You finally see the cast list scroll by, and you vaguely remember that the actor in question played someone named "Al."  As "Al" rolls past your bloodshot eyes, your face twitches, your palms sweat, your stomach aches, and you lean forward in intense anticipation only to find the name "Joe Estevez."
You just got Joed.
It's no mere coincidence that Joe Estevez looks shockingly similar to Martin Sheen.  Joe just happens to be the younger brother of Martin, and his life and career are strangely warped reflections of his older brother's life.  It's a real-life version of Star Trek's mirror universe, though I'm not sure either one of them should grow a goatee.
Both boys, along with eight other siblings, were the children of Spanish-born Francisco Estevez and Irish-born Mary Anne Phalen.  As you can guess, it was a very Catholic household.  Martin (real name: "Ramon Gerardo Antonio") was the first of their children born in the US, while Joe (real name: "Joseph") was one of the last.  Their father worked as a machinist for a cash register manufacturer, while their mother was pretty much committed to making and raising babies for about 30 years.  All of the Estevez children attended a private Catholic school in Dayton, Ohio, where they lived for most of their childhoods, though the family did move to Bermuda for a while before Joe was born.
From the start, the brothers couldn't have been more different.  Martin was a rabble-rouser who organized a golf caddy strike at the age of 14 and sabotaged his college entrance exams so that he could run off to New York against his father's wishes.  In New York he met Dorothy Day, the famous liberal Catholic activist, which further honed his political sensibilities, and started his promising acting career, which led directly to the award-winning actor/liberal political crusader that we know today.  Joe, on the other hand, was an obedient child who participated in the White House Easter Egg Roll and met Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Immediately after high school, he joined the Navy, where he developed distinctly conservative political beliefs.
By the time Estevez left the Navy and decided to go into acting himself, Sheen was already a well-established television actor who had jumped to A-list after starring in the Oscar-nominated The Subject Was Roses and Terrance Malick's acclaimed film, Badlands.  Estevez, unfortunately, received a pretty cold welcome from Hollywood.  Throughout the 1970s, he appeared sporadically in cheap made-for-TV movies where he vacillated over his stage name, sometimes using "Estevez," sometimes using his mother's maiden name "Phalen," and, at least once, co-opting his famous brother's name of "Sheen." After 1975, he hit a dry spell and wouldn't work again for most of the decade.
Then, Apocalypse Now happened, and, yes, I know you're muttering to yourself "Idiot!  That was Martin Sheen, not Joe Estevez," but please let me finish.  Crazy shit is about to hit the lunacy fan, so strap in and try not to get too much on you.
It's difficult to understate how deeply screwy the production of Apocalypse Now was.  Francis Ford Coppola's blistering adaptation of Heart of Darkness marked the zenith of the 70s auteur director movement, and it very nearly killed everyone involved.  Shot in the Philippines while an actual military revolution was under way, the movie ballooned from a proposed $2 million small-scale project to be filmed in a few weeks into a $12 million monster that lasted almost three years.  Everything that could have gone wrong--from major script revisions, to military interventions, to Coppola catching malaria, to Marlon Brando showing up for work 100 pounds overweight not even having read the script, to lead actor Martin Sheen dealing with a serious alcohol problem--plagued the production from beginning to end.  Whole sets were destroyed in a hurricane, frightened financial backers threatened to pull out, and Coppola started to look like a raving lunatic.  The first rough cut of the film won the Palm d'Or at Cannes but received enthusiastic boos from the audience, and the initial full release appeared in only 15 theaters.  Now pile on top of that the fact that Coppola earned black marks from environmentalists for willfully napalming huge swathes of Philippine jungle and incurred the wrath of the Humane Society by filming the actual slaughter of a living water buffalo.  It was an absolute miracle that the movie would eventually be edited into shape to become the well-regarded classic that it is today.
"But what about Joe?!" you may ask.  Well, pipe down, I'm getting to that.  You see, Martin Sheen, in addition to being an alcoholic at the time, was having a hard time dealing with the heat, humidity, and disturbingly high bacterial count in the craft services table.  He suffered a heart attack near the end of filming and had to miss out on almost all of the pickup shots and recording of the film's narration.  What's a desperate director like Coppola to do?  It's not like there was a young, fit non-alcoholic near-twin of Martin Sheen who also happened to be an actor... wait a minute...
So it came to pass, after four years of not working Joe Estevez was flown halfway around the world to take his brother's place in the biggest production he would ever take part of in his life.  At this point, almost all of the major scenes had already been filmed, so most of Estevez's work involved what I like to call "bacting," where he is shown only from the back as other characters are filmed.  Very little of Estevez's actual face made it into the final film, but if you want to partake in an especially frustrating drinking game, trying taking a drink every time you are sure you can tell that the shot is Joe and not Martin.  Trust me, you will not be drunk.  That's how powerful Joe Estevez's bacting is.
The more important part is that Estevez was later called in to fill in a lot of the narration of the film.  His voice and speaking style were (and still are) so eerily similar to his brother's that it was a snap to weave the two together seamlessly.  Alas, poor Joe, we knew you not.  He appeared nowhere in the original credits
His career was revitalized, though.  Slowly, but surely, he worked his way back into TV movies as "Joe Phalen," and then worked up to (or down to) appearing in a long string of low-budget, straight-to-video movies like Lockdown, Soultaker and (my personal favorite) The Legend of the Roller Blade Seven, a movie about a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled over by skateboarders and rollerbladers.  Even as Estevez's young nephews Charley and Emilio became rising stars in Hollywood, old Joe kept right on cranking out the non-hits.  
It was like he was out to win a bet to appear in the most ridiculously titled thing he could find.  Let's play another little game.  I'll make a list of movie titles that Joe Estevez was in, just in the 1990s, and you try to tell which one I just made up: Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf; Beach Babes from Beyond; Toad Warrior; Rollergator; Karate Commando: Jungle Wolf 3; Guns of El Chupacabra II: The Unseen.  
Can you guess?  HA!  Trick question!  They're all realmovies that Joe Estevez was in!
If you wrote a role with Martin Sheen in mind (like say you thought it would be cool if the President had to fight a gang of ninjas), but only have the budget to film your movie in your uncle's warehouse on the weekends, then you've got to get Joe Estevez.  Actually, you probably could.  You should give him a call.  Estevez has built a filmography just as long as his brother's with ten years less time, so you know he's not one to turn down a part.  In fact, at the time this was written, he had over 15 movies in some stage of production.  Not to mention that he makes quite a good living doing voice-overs for commercials and video games.  After all, everyone wants the solid, leaderly gravitas of Martin Sheen's voice, and Joe Estevez long ago cornered the market in selling it to them.
Estevez isn't just a cheap stand-in for his brother, though.  He's produced several films, and 2011 will see the release of his directorial debut: Horroween.  The film has something to do with someone creating a Chinese knock-off version of Windows software called (I am not making this up) "Chindows."  Also, there is something about a multi-million dollar haunted house and someone trying to kill someone for some reason.  Details are sketchy.  Alice Cooper, Flava Flav, William Shatner, Donald Trump and Jenna Jameson all make cameos.  And it's for kids!  My brain already hurts at the prospect of trying to comprehend this.  On a sadder note, ever-expanding comic actor Dom DeLuise died in the middle of filming.  I'm not saying that the movie is so bad that it killed Dom DeLuise, but you never know.
It's far too easy to keep mocking the bizarre parade of modern B-movies that Joe Estevez has worked on, so I'll spare him more of that (OK, one more, just because it sounds like it was made up by someone while high: Max Hell: Frog Warrior, or "Mad Max WITH KILLER FROGS!").  Poor Joe was caught in the same spot that Peter Graves was before him.  Just as Graves toiled away in the shadows of an older, more famous brother who was, objectively, almost exactly like him in every way, Estevez was doomed from the start.  Onscreen, there is very little difference between the two.  They share nearly identical voices, faces, bodies and mannerisms; and Estevez may very well be just as good of actor as his brother (it's hard to tell, due to the overwhelmingly terrible nature of most of the scripts he's been handed).  Martin just got to the party sooner, and there is only room for one "Martin Sheen type" in the A pictures.
But the B-movies just don't give a damn.  That's their power.  They keep right on rolling, and Joe Estevez is going to keep right on rolling with them; and I would submit that Joe Estevez doesn't think of himself as being doomed at all.  If anything, he's damn lucky.  So, all of you out there who grew up in the shadow of an older sibling, go order another pizza and get Joed all over again, because he's not going to stop, and neither should you!  May I recommend Zombiegeddon this time?
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knowyourbmovieactors · 12 years
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Episode 13: Yvette Vickers
Americans like their happy endings.  By the time we leave those theater seats, we want the plot wrapped up in a bow, the good guy to win, and the bad guy to get his just punishment.  We'll settle for the good guy losing in a morally upright way, and we'll go along with the bad guy coming around to the good side, but ultimately, we like to think that the universe has an innate sense of justice that swoops in to set things right by the time the closing credits roll around.  During the heyday of the B films, there was a tacit (and sometimes contractually-obligated) agreement that the monster would be destroyed by the end of the picture and that the good guy would usher in a denouement that would leave us feeling that, somehow, justice is sewn right into the fabric of real life.
We don't handle real life very well, so neither does Hollywood.  We pore over every nasty tidbit of Hollywood gossip, salivating at the notion that the rich and famous will pay for their decadent lives, but we seem to cherish even more the real-life happy endings: the life saved by rehab, the celebrity son making amends with his celebrity dad, the rise from poverty and obscurity to humble fame.  We desperately want real life to mimic the dramatic action of our favorite movies.
Hollywood is not real life.  It's not even a decent simulation of real life.  Real life is messy.  There is no universal force of justice.  Bad guys often get away with it.  Good guys often lose.  There's never really a convenient monster to destroy.  People are people, no matter how rich or famous they were in life.  And death is often confusing, mundane and unsatisfactory.  Foreign cinema has always been much better at capturing this aspect of life than Hollywood, which is why the vast majority of Americans puzzle over European films, with all their vague, unhappy endings.  They violate some of the founding myths of America: that anyone is capable of success, that hope is always possible, that happiness exists forever and ever once the screen fades to black.
I came here today to talk about the life of a mostly forgotten actress, a beautiful woman whose life seemed to mirror the pulpy world of the movies she acted in.  Yvette Vickers appeared in relatively few films, only one of which was really of any lasting quality; but for a while her sexuality, her romances and her scandals captured the public eye.  She was a prime target for the late-in-life redemption story.
Instead, she ended with this sad, muddled picture: a dilapidated house in Los Angeles, months of unopened mail yellowing on the front porch, cobwebs creeping across the front door; and inside, an even more confusing picture: the decomposed body of the 82-year-old actress, curled up and mummified, forgotten.  The lights were still on.  A space heater ticked away in working order, still combating the drafts from the broken windows.  The coroners speculate that she could have been there for almost a year.  No one noticed.
She was born as Yvette Vedder in Kansas City, Missouri in 1928.  Her parents were the well-regarded jazz musicians Charles and Iola Vedder, and she spent much of her childhood on the road with them.  Young Yvette didn't plan on being a performer.  She settled on UCLA for a journalism degree, but her life changed forever when she took an elective acting class.  It wasn't long before she switched her major to drama.  
Even that didn't last long.  An executive for an advertising agency discovered her and whisked her off to New York in 1948 to make commercials for White Rain shampoo.  The "White Rain Girl" appeared in a long series of national commercials and dabbled in a few plays in New York, but dropped everything and winged her way back to LA in 1950 to land her first movie role, a brief appearance in the 1950 noire classic Sunset Boulevard.  It wasn't much.  She giggled on a phone at a party.  She wasn't even credited.  Another uncredited extra bit and a few sporadic appearances on television were her only acting gigs in the early 50s. She married and divorced her first husband in quick succession.  In every sense, she was living the real-life Hollywood story, the one that Hollywood doesn't like to tell: young, pretty woman comes to LA with stars in her eyes and ends up broke and unknown.
In 1957, though, she landed a role in one of the many teenage crime films of the era, Reform School Girl  Like just about every movie ever made with "reform school" and "girl" in its title, it was mostly an excuse to show busty 20-somethings masquerading as teenagers beating each other up and ripping one another's clothing.  It was produced by B-movie heavy Samuel Z. Arkoff, another in the long list of movie producers who turned profits by churning out cheaply-made exploitations of whatever cinema fad was raging through Hollywood at the time.  Arkoff had been a lawyer who specialized in winning minor cases out of court through sheer intimidation (the word "shark" can often be found nestled next to his name in sentences), so it was no surprise that he bullied his way into movies by taking over a low-rent releasing company and renaming it American International Pictures.
Reform School Girl ushered her into the world of the B-films.  She was cast as a lead in another noir crime drama, Short Cut to Hell, a fairly respectable film directed by James Cagney; but soon she would be recommended to another infamous B producer.  If you've been reading this series for a while, you can probably guess who it was.  Did you guess Roger Corman?  Of course you did.  Corman was a silent partner in American International Pictures, and he was quick to snap up the blond bombshell.  In 1958, he put her in I Mobster, a flimsy carbon copy of a real crime picture; and the following year she played a home wrecker killed by the eponymous blood suckers in Corman's Attack of the Giant Leeches.  But it was Attack of the 50 Foot Woman that put Vickers in the national spotlight.  No, she was not the 50-foot woman, but she did play Honey Parker, the woman who was having an affair with the husband of the 50 foot woman.  (Spoiler: it doesn't end well for Honey Parker.)  Produced by Woolner Brothers Pictures (that's "Woolner," not "Warner"), another B house associate of Arkoff and Corman, the film suprised everyone by becoming a hit across the nation.  Vickers was able to parlay that success into a string of TV appearances and another quick marriage/divorce.
Then Vickers started taking off her clothes for money.  She appeared in various men's magazines like Adam, but she leaped to the top of the pinup girl pack as Playmate of the Month in the June 1959 edition of Playboy.  The spread was photographed by future smutty filmmaker Russ Meyer (though he was never able to convince her to "act" for him), and it introduced her to a new level of scandal and fame.  Vickers nabbed a spot in a highly-anticipated Broadway play (whose producers were no doubt hoping for people to show up looking for her to doff her clothing) and kept her name in the tabloids by dating a string of Hollywood actors, including Lee Marvin and Ralph Meeker.
By the time she found herself in a scandalous affair with Cary Grant in 1961, Vickers had become a celebrity who neatly transcended the need to do any movies at all.  She made a cozy living doing photo spreads for fashion magazines and interviews for TV and radio.  However, Grant ended the affair by proposing marriage to another woman.  She landed a role in the acclaimed Paul Newman film Hud, but found almost all of her scenes reduced to scraps on the editing room floor.  
Vickers did a string of critically-acclaimed stage plays in LA, but Hollywood was, as always, fickle.  She was getting close to 40 by this point, and standards of beauty in film were changing.  This busty blond with a Marilyn Monroe figure (35-22-35 according to most reckonings) found herself being steadily supplanted by younger, more stick-like models as the 60s wore on.  She was no longer able to keep her name in the tabloids.  After another quick marriage/divorce, she settled into a long-term relationship with actor Jim Hutton and, by 1970, settled out of performing altogether to work in real estate investment, where she reportedly did quite well.
So, after all this, how did her body wind up alone, barricaded behind a closed door in a run-down building?  For a while, it seemed like she was making a minor sort of comeback.  She had recorded a few albums of jazz standards in honor of her parents and started making the rounds at sci-fi conventions as the B-movies of her youth were re-discovered by new generations.  She maintained long, loving correspondences with fans and was reportedly working on her autobiography as recently as 2003.  Then, suddenly, she dropped off the map.  She neglected both friends and family.  She started drinking heavily.  Her neighbors in Benedict Canyon knew almost nothing about her, certainly not that she had been an actress and model with multiple heavily-publicized romances.  She rarely left her house.  Tom Weaver, a horror film historian, tracked her down for an interview once and reported that she was a sweet woman who talked a mile a minute, but that she exhibited some strange signs of paranoia.  Margaret Netcell, who had once been a close friend of Vickers said Yvette thought someone was stalking her.
It took a long time for coroners to figure out the cause of death.  There was no sign of foul play, only neglect.  They finally decided that her heart had simply given out.  Somewhere along the line, she retreated from the world, hid herself away from the fame that she had sought in her younger days, and died as alone as any person could be.  There was no cinematic ending, just a long slow fade that took so long that no one noticed it happening until the spiders started spinning their webs across her door.
What does it all mean?  Maybe it doesn't mean anything.  Maybe searching for a reason is pointless, because, whatever the real reason is, it will never satisfy.  How?  Why?  There will probably never really be a good explanation, and that's going to gnaw at us if we think too hard about it.
So, you out there, take a moment to watch one of Yvette Vicker's movies,  Even the Roger Corman ones.  Just remind yourself that there is a real person behind that moving image, and you will never really know what's going on there beyond the camera.
   Thanks to Chris Kidder for the suggestion.
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