Character actor Louis Perryman was found dead in his South Austin home on April 2; he was 67 years old. The circumstances of his demise are bizarre and saddening. According to a report on the Fox Austin website, a troubled young man named Seth Tatum, reportedly “bi-polar, off his meds and drinking” went on a rampage, attacking his stepfather with a pair of hedge clippers and fleeing on foot. He travelled three miles and happened to end up at the home of Perryman. “Witnesses there say he struck up a conversation with the homeowner and went inside. A few minutes later, from across the street, Henry Barta, says he spotted his neighbor's car pull away.” The next morning Tatum turned himself in at the Travis County Courthouse, announcing that the car he’d arrived in was stolen and that he was pretty sure he’d killed the owner. When police arrived at Perryman’s home, they determined the story was true: “Perryman was dead. Investigators say his body was covered with multiple slash marks.”

Perryman was a familiar face in movies ranging from The Blues Brothers to Poltergeist to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but he did his finest work in three films by the late Eagle Pennell: A Hell of a Note, The Whole Shootin’ Match (recently issued for the first time on DVD) and Last Night at the Alamo. Along with co-star Sonny Carl Davis, Perryman typified the new breed of laid-back, hard-drinking, always scheming Texas good ol’ boy of the ‘70s and ‘80s, bringing a knack for improvisation and wicked sense of humor that helped make Pennell’s early work so special. Around the time of the brief Shootin’ Match theatrical re-release in 2008, Perryman and Davis did a raucous interview with the Onion AV Club conducted by Sean O’Neal, who remembers the actor thusly: “That interview remains a career highlight for me: Perryman especially was hilariously candid about his experience with being fed through the gears of the moviemaking machine (you might recall that he had no qualms about calling Chuck Norris a 'pussy motherfucker') and he was cautiously optimistic about what the future held for both he and Davis, including a possible sequel for Shootin' Match that he was scripting and a long-in-the-planning adaptation of The Hawkline Monster. Since our interview, Perryman had remained a somewhat avuncular presence in my life, dropping the occasional e-mail or phone call to check in and chat with me about the state of this or that, or to compliment or chide me about something I'd written, and it goes without saying that I'm really, really going to miss him.”