By Eleanor Ringel Cater
While waiting for the third shoe to drop – celeb deaths come in threes, as we all know – I decided that the late, great Robbie Robertson of the Band could round out the loss of William Friedkin and Paul Reubens (aka, Pee-wee Herman).
Yep, Robertson made a movie. Well, technically, more than one, his most memorable being the Martin Scorsese documentary, “The Last Waltz.”
But in 1980, he co-starred with Jodie Foster and Gary Busey in an intriguing flop called “Carny.” Foster plays a teenage runaway who joins a traveling carnival. Busey is a “Bozo,” i.e., someone who sits above a water tank and insults passers-by who then pay to toss a baseball and see him get dunked.
Robertson, still lean and sexy, is Patch, the guy who takes tickets and helps keep things smoothed over with the locals. The script, alas, is sloppy and clichéd. But the atmosphere is compelling – a spangled-sleazy world of geeks and freaks, girly shows and spilled snow cones, dominated by that Eiffel Tower of neon and steel, a giant Ferris wheel.
Reubens is something of a similar case in that his fame didn’t come so much from his movie career as from his unique TV show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” What I had forgotten was that his movie, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” about recovering his beloved stolen bicycle, preceded his Saturday morning hit. And that it was the first feature film directed by Tim Burton.
What I remember are two things: Reubens’ talent for divine silliness and his immortal quote about sequels. Asked if there would be a sequel to “Big Adventure,” he shrugged, “What would happen? The bike gets stolen again?”
The comic did make a few other films, in mostly cameo roles: a snarling bloodsucker in Buffy the Vampire Killer,” a drug-dealing hairdresser in “Blow,” the Penguin’s father in “Batman Returns.”
Apparently, he was a lovely man. Those paying tribute to him ranged from Jimmy Kimmel to Natasha Lyonne.
Friedkin is, as they say, a whole ‘nother ball game.
He directed two of the biggest movies ever made – “The French Connection,” starring Gene Hackman, and “The Exorcist,” starring Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair and Satan. Both came out in the early ‘70s and both still hold up as the best of their genres: police thriller and horror film.
Hackman’s hard-boiled performance as hard-nosed cop, Popeye Doyle, was the stuff of legend (albeit grimy legend). The picture is a down-and-dirty, documentary-like look at stakeouts, shakedowns and the overall messiness of a semi-corrupt cop’s life in the mean streets of New York, circa1970 or so. And of course, there’s The Chase, the crazed pursuit through Brooklyn that rivaled “Bullitt” for its heart-stopping, white-knuckled ferocity.
The movie took home the Best Picture Oscar. Friedkin and Hackman won as well.
Friedkin followed “The French Connection” with one of the most famous films ever made: “The Exorcist.” A literally head-spinning (sorry) tale of a little girl (Blair) possessed by the Devil, the picture had audiences shaking before they entered the theater.
Even the production appeared spooked by evil forces. Friedkin later said, “I’m not a convert to the occult, but so much has gone cockeyed with this picture, it makes you wonder. Even my gaffer cut his toe off.”
A monster hit at the box-office, “The Exorcist” fared less well than its predecessor at the Oscars. It was the year of “The Sting.”
Friedkin fared less well in the ensuing decades, too, his career derailed, perhaps, by the problem-laden production of “Sorcerer,” a remake of the French classic, “The Wages of Fear,” and “Cruising,” a picture starring Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover as a gay man to catch a killer. The film was marked as rabidly homophobic and met with numerous protests, which was pretty amazing in a time when queer- bashing was considered perfectly acceptable.
To be blunt about it, Friedkin never had another hit, though “To Live and Die in L.A” in the mid ‘80s was successful enough. The filmmaker freely admitted he let his early success go to his head, becoming arrogant and difficult to work with. Probably the only reason he was even allowed near a set was his marriage to Sherry Lansing, the first woman to have headed a major studio (20thCentury Fox) and later CEO of Paramount Pictures.
“Success is often as difficult as failure,” he once told the New York Times. “To be extremely honest about it, I was arrogant beyond my talent. That’s what it boils down to.”
It could, alas, be his epitaph.
