The Screengrab : james dean

The Three Catastrophes of Terry Gilliam

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is set to receive the Bafta Fellowship, the most prestigious award bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television, during the “British Oscars” ceremony this Sunday night. Presumably this is a lifetime achievement award for his unique body of work, although in an interview with The Guardian, Gilliam himself speculates otherwise. “Voters must, he assumes, have felt sorry for him because his latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, has been hit by three catastrophes.”

That seems about par for the course for Gilliam, who should be able to knock off three catastrophes over lunch break, but these circumstances have been particularly trying. First, of course, was the death of the movie’s star Heath Ledger. “"It just isn't possible that he's dead," he says. "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense."

The film’s producer, Bill Vince, also died, leaving Gilliam’s daughter Amy to take the reigns. And this past fall, Gilliam was hit by a car, breaking his back. (He got better.) Gilliam came up with a unique solution to the problem of losing his lead actor, adding three additional actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to play the same character following various trips through a “magic mirror.”

Dr. Parnassus is due this fall, assuming no further catastrophes befall it. Read the rest of The Guardian piece here.

Related:
Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm

Morning Deal Report: Jackie Chan Kicks Around “Karate Kid”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We already knew a Karate Kid remake was in the works, with Will Smith’s son Jaden set for the lead role. Now it looks as if the new Kid has his Mr. Miyagi – and, really, could it be anyone other than Jackie Chan? The Hollywood Reporter confirms that Chan is in negotiations to take on the role “made famous by Pat Morita in the original franchise…Like the original, which starred Morita and Ralph Macchio, the movie will examine the relationship between a martial arts expert and a boy who is picked on by bullies.”

Speaking of remakes, here’s one of the more bizarre Variety stories in a while. It’s not that I’m surprised to read that “Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer have set John Adams helmer Tom Hooper to direct and Christopher Hampton to write East of Eden, an adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel.” No, what surprises me is that nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a rather famous adaptation of this novel already exists. James Dean? Elia Kazan? Do these names ring a bell? Instead, Variety notes that “U and Imagine first optioned Steinbeck's book in 2004, when it shot to the top of the bestseller lists right after Oprah Winfrey chose it as the first selection when she revived her book club.” OK, so it took Oprah to bring this obscure work to their attention. Gotcha.

A Steve McQueen biopic is on the way, based on the book Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, which “delves into McQueen's offscreen penchant for motorcycles, fast cars and drugs. Project will examine his three marriages, including his stormy relationship with Ali McGraw, as well as his battle against lung cancer,” Variety reports.

Related:
Video of the Day: "Karate Kid III" After Dark
Bullitt: The Greatest Car Chase Ever Google Mapped

Reviews By Request: Mister Lonely (2007, Harmony Korine)

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

I find myself sort of at a loss at how to review Harmony Korine’s latest film, Mister Lonely. Here is a film with plenty of ideas without enough ways to satisfactorily tie them together, yet it’s also so rich and strange that it’s impossible to ignore. That it doesn’t really work in any of the usual ways is to its credit. Just because I have such a hard time pinning the movie down doesn’t diminish my admiration for it.

Like all of Korine’s films, Mister Lonely deals with characters who live on the fringes of society. In this case, his protagonist is a Michael Jackson impersonator (played by Diego Luna) who ekes out an existence in Paris. Most of time, he performs on the street, although occasionally his agent (fellow filmmaking enfant terrible Léos Carax, who’s really overdue to direct another movie) will find him a job. It’s at one of these jobs- a “personal appearance” at a nursing home where he cheerfully tells the residents, “don’t die! Live forever!”- that he meets another impersonator, a Marilyn Monroe played by Samantha Morton, who invites him to live with her in a commune just for impersonators.

The commune, an old castle in the Scottish Highlands, is inhabited by Marilyn’s husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple (Morton’s real-life daughter Esme Creed-Miles). There’s also the Pope (James Fox), Queen Elizabeth II (Anita Pallenberg), Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Madonna, James Dean, Sammy Davis Jr., Buckwheat, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Three Stooges. A rather eclectic mix, I’m sure you’ll agree. Here, Marilyn promises, they can all live the lives they’ve chosen in an environment where they will be understood and welcomed.

The early Paris scenes are good, but the movie gets really fascinating once Michael makes the journey to Scotland. It’s also here that the idea of impersonation becomes complicated- for some celebrity impersonators, it’s primarily about making money or indulging their fantasies in a relatively healthy context. Yet the residents of the commune are another breed entirely, having substituted the lives they’ve assumed for their own. Korine shows us the Pope getting drunk at dinner, Buckwheat tending to his chickens, and so on. But try as they may to escape who they are, their real natures end up coming out- Lincoln reveals himself to be a foul-mouthed petty tyrant, Chaplin alternately abuses and neglects his wife, and Marilyn begins to unravel. Even the sheep end up getting sick and having to be put down.

Complicating matters even more is the show they put on for the locals- a few of the impersonators do their own chosen celebrity’s shtick, but some do other people’s famous routines, with such strange sights as James Dean doing stand-up comedy. Indeed, all Three Stooges are never onstage at the same time. Could it be that these people are so uneasy in their own skin that they’re forever searching for another identity to assume? Regardless of the intent, the show is hardly the success that it was intended to be, no doubt because if people are paying to see celebrity impersonators, then by gum want to see them impersonating those celebrities.

All the while, Michael mostly keeps to himself, practicing his routine, never quite giving himself over to the commune’s vibe. If most of the other impersonators have turned the celebrities’ identities into their own, it becomes clear that Michael is more of a seeker, using the Michael Jackson persona as a way to find fulfillment in his own life. Once it’s clear to him that he won’t find it at the commune, he makes his way back to Paris and gives up his Michael Jackson persona, seeking fulfillment from something different altogether.

Perhaps it’s this search that best explains a strange subplot involving a group of nuns led by a priest who’s played by longtime Korine friend Werner Herzog. One day, when air-dropping bags of rice in Central America, one of the nuns falls out of the airplane only to discover that if she prays hard enough, she will survive the fall unharmed. In contrast to Michael, who has searched all his life for some kind of inner peace, the nuns happen upon it by accident, and seize upon the opportunity to experience transcendence through their literal leaps of faith.

After rising to prominence as the writer of Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has made three features to date, all of which have attempted to push the boundaries of cinema. But while julien donkey-boy and particularly Gummo were dragged down by Korine’s need to turn them into freak shows, with Mister Lonely he has matured as a filmmaker by showing a real curiosity for his characters and a willingness to approach his ideas with real sincerity. In an interview earlier this year, Korine described his directing style by saying, “I try to create a place where you feel that anything's possible.” With Mister Lonely, I believe he has successfully accomplished this, and in doing so he’s made his best film to date.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? Once again, I’m playing catch-up on my 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include two of this year’s most acclaimed documentaries, a comic corrective to the rather humorless Quantum of Solace, a celebrated Danish drama, and a David Gordon Green-produced family tragedy. So, what’ll it be?

What should I watch for my next Review By Request? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Feel free to stump for your favorites or to recommend future candidates in the comments box. See you in two weeks!

Your Thursday Afternoon “Twilight” Roundup

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You may have noticed that we at the Screengrab have more or less completely ignored Twilight. We are aware that it’s a cultural phenomenon, and that the movie is out in theaters tomorrow, and that it’s predicted to be one of the biggest hits of the year. It’s just that none of us are teenage girls. Believe me, there are some among us who wish they were teenage girls, not that I’m naming any names. (See if you can PIERCE the veil of that cryptic comment, as if you were an arrow from the bow of Ted NUGENT!) But I digress. In the interest of fairness – and page views from the teenage girls who normally avoid the Screengrab like the plague – here is a handy roundup of the latest the Web has to offer in Twilight-mania.

The first reviews are in! Entertainment Weekly gives Twilight a B; critic Owen Gleiberman oozes over Robert Pattinson’s “dreamy, sculpted hunk of a teenage vampire,” who he describes as “Romeo, Heathcliff, James Dean, and Brad Pitt all rolled into one: a scruffy-gorgeous bloodsucker pinup who is really an angelic protector.’ Get a room, Owen! Slate’s Dana Stevens calls it “flawed yet transfixing,” reserving special praise for costume designer Wendy Chuck, who “manages to make weatherproof parkas look Goth.” Claudia Puig of USA Today dissents, citing “questionable casting, wooden acting, laughable dialogue and truly awful makeup.”

The LA Times reports that the Twilight setting of Forks, Washington is getting all the tourist business that used to go to Snoqualmie (aka “the real Twin Peaks”). “Forks High School is often besieged with Twilighters, who pose for pictures in front of the Spartans sign or scan the parking lot for Edward's car, a silver Volvo sedan. Some have even wandered inside to seek out the fictional characters. Still others have requested to be transferred to the school.” That’s okay, I still have my Twin Peaks Phys-Ed Dept. t-shirt somewhere.

Movie Retriever offers Six Excuses Grown-Ups Can Use for Going to See Twilight This Weekend. “Forget about the kid-vampire stuff. You're just a big fan of Twilight's director Catherine Hardwicke, ranging back to her days as a production designer - she designed Tapeheads, I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, and Tombstone! - to her more-recent career as a big-time director, helming movies like Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown.”

Of course, there’s the inevitable face-off between Twilight and True Blood: BuddyTV asks “Who's the Better Vampire Boyfriend?”

At Rotten Tomatoes, dreamy Robert Pattinson dishes on his five favorite movies. One of them is Corky Romano. How’s that crush doing now, Owen?

21 Stars We Hate (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SEAN PENN

Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High? Classic. Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking? Harrowing. Emmett Ray in Sweet and Lowdown? Hilarious. Milk? Looks great. And nobody’s better at playing sketchy, fidgety weasels like the coked-out traitor in The Falcon and The Snowman, the coked-out lawyer in Carlito’s Way and, uh, the incredibly annoying coked-out movie producer in Hurlyburly. But, ugh...it’s amazing how a guy capable of sporadically fantastic character performances can be such a humorless, pretentious tool in real life. I’m guessing he’s calmed down a lot since the Shanghai Surprise days when (as observed by Christopher Ciccone in his book Life With My Sister Madonna) the middle class white boy from the comfortable home enjoyed presenting himself as a tough street kid, trashing hotel rooms, assaulting paparazzi and hanging out with Charles Bukowski. But Penn still can’t take a joke, as evidenced by his humorless retort to Chris Rock’s joke about the low-wattage stardom of Jude Law during the 2005 Academy Awards, not to mention the stereotypical "serious artist" grim=quality aesthetic he brings to his directorial work (i.e., two films about dead children, one about feuding brothers and one about a completely egocentric guy who dies moronically ‘cuz he’s just gotta be free, man). Even when the actor pokes fun at his own self-serious image, it’s hard to believe it’s all just for laughs: his recent cameo in What Just Happened? paints him as the kind of actor who equates depressing bummers with integrity and...well, something tells me Penn takes that characterization as a compliment. As the old saying goes, it’s hard to make people laugh, but drama’s easy: just kill a puppy and you’ll get a reaction...which more or less describes Penn’s m.o. If you dare to mock his maudlin, manipulative performance as the mentally-challenged protagonist of I Am Sam, that just means you’re insensitive, dude (so many thanks to Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr. for doing it for me in Tropic Thunder). If you’d prefer not to drag yourself through the boring slog of 21 Grams, it’s just that you don’t “get” it. And if you laughed out loud during Mystic River when Penn’s character discovers the latest dead child in his oeuvre, then screams “NOOOO!!!!” to the heavens in the type of overblown “ACTING!” moment that was already a parody of itself years before the movie was released...well, maybe you just can’t handle “serious” art.

MICHAEL DOUGLAS

Michael Douglas was born to be a movie star. Which is too bad, because he sucks at it. His father, Kirk Douglas, was an actor of limited talents, and too often prone to gassy overplaying, but he was also fortunate enough to work with a lot of great directors and get a handful of great scripts. No such luck for Michael: though he made tens of millions of dollars in his career and appeared in tons of hit films in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they tend to be forgettable (The Star Chamber), obnoxious (Wall Street), dated (The Jewel of the Nile), or downright terrible (The Game). Which, really, is only appropriate, since all those adjectives apply equally to Douglas himself, who resembles his father less as an actor than he does Charlton Heston. His personality and his performances also tend to be forgettable (surely no one remembers Basic Instinct because he was in it), terrible (he was the world’s least convincing action hero as Jack Colton), dated (who on earth isn’t deeply ashamed to watch Falling Down nowadays?), and, especially, obnoxious. Unless we know him – and hey, give the guy credit, he’s nailing Catherine Zeta-Jones and we’re not – we can never be sure if he just happened to pick about a hundred scripts in a row where he plays an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk, or if he just happens to be an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk who brings those qualities to every role he plays. But that’s not really the kind of micro-fine distinction you want to hang a career on.

JOHN WAYNE

Since I’m going to hell anyway, I might as well take this one. “Hey,” some of you asked when we posted our list of the all-time great leading men a few weeks back, “how come John Wayne didn’t even make the top 25?” Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. or Ms. Screengrab Reader: it’s because John Wayne was a miserable actor. While there’s no denying Wayne’s importance in Hollywood history, and without minimizing his role as a film icon, the fact remains that he was really bad at the thing he did for a living. He basically only played one role in every movie he ever made, and it wasn’t a very interesting one. It’s a role that could have been played better by any number of other actors, many of whom were appearing with him in those very films. And in his case, you can’t blame a short career or an inability to get good scripts: Wayne lived a long time, and by all accounts showed almost zero interest in playing anything outside his war/western tough-guy métier. By the end of his life, he was getting offered roles that would have allowed him to slightly redefine his image, but instead chose ones that let him stretch about a centimeter in every direction. He was either a miserable judge of scripts or had the world’s worst agents; for someone who made almost 175 movies, he sure didn’t make that many good ones. While I’m willing to concede that Wayne was an effective movie star, the distance between what he did on screen and what I think of as acting is abyssal; I remember getting into an argument with a friend that concluded with me saying that if John Wayne was a good actor, I obviously didn’t understand what acting means.

JAMES DEAN

We don't want to spend too much time here talking shit about the dead. Just because we Screengrab people are barely human doesn't mean we're vultures. But after more than fifty years, the upward trajectory of Dean's posthumous reputation is long overdue for a course correction. In his first two (of three) starring movie roles, Dean had the mixed fortune to play desperately troubled teenagers in material pitched directly at a teen audience that liked to project itself onto stories of the tragically misunderstood, under the guidance of directors (Nicholas Ray on Rebel Without a Cause and Elia Kazan on East of Eden) who never saw an emotional flourish they didn't like and would have been reluctant to declare a performance over the top even if the fallout from it brought about nuclear winter. Dean's unrestrained, sometimes apparently uncontrolled exploration of the wronged-and-unloved theme made him a legend and a cult hero, but it also meant that what he left behind in the way of an acting legacy is very heavy on him breaking down into a shivering mess and howling, "You're tearing me apart!" For some of us, a little of this sort of thing goes a very long way, which makes it that much more remarkable that Dean's most devoted fans have watched those movies scores if not hundreds of times: we can barely believe that we made it throught them once. To Dean's credit, he seemed very ready to move on to new things if his last film, Giant, is any indication: there, as a cocky poor boy who becomes a self-made asshole, he's better-controlled, more winning, more resilient and funnier than he ever had a chance to be in a movie released during his lifetime. This is especially true because the movie, in which Dean has only a supporting role, is in a traditional-boring-prestige-epic mode that can just barely accommodate Dean's Method style, and the actor serves the same function in it that his character serves in the story. It's not just about Jett Rink getting up in the face of Jordan Benedict, Jr., and weirding him out with a scary taste of a new world in which he'll be an anachronism, but also about James Dean doing that to Rock Hudson.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Hopkins was in his early fifties and had been acting, and even sometimes starring in, movies since 1967, when Jonathan Demme made him a household name with The Silence of the Lambs. This was not a case of genius being discovered late. Hopkins is talented and hard-working and had already given a number of excellent performances, such as his sensitive but restrained Dr. Merrick in David Lynch's The Elephant Man. But he was always more meticulous than exciting onscreen, and when he was cast at the center of a movie, whether it was a popcorn horror flick like Magic (1978) or a serious contemporary drama like the British film The Good Father (1987), he tended to veer so heavily into depressiveness that watching him could be like talking somebody in off a ledge. He had already been smoked in the Hannibal Lecter role before Lambs even came out: as all true connoisseurs of character acting know, Brian Cox's brief performance as Hannibal in the 1986 Manhunter had a rich, convincing creepiness that sank into viewers' bones. By contrast, Demme spoon-fed viewers Hopkins' Hannibal with frozen close-ups of his face held in a jack-o-lantern gaze, with just a suggestion of the raging ham behind his features. The results somehow passed for realistic, but there was enough camp in the recipe that it's no wonder the monstrous Lecter ultimately struck audiences as so enjoyable as to be strangely endearing, to the point that Hopkins would not only reprise the role in Hannibal, the movie version of the sequel that author Thomas Harris felt obliged to write in response to the success of the Lambs picture, but in a paralyzingly unnecessary remake of Manhunter (filmed under Harris' original title, Red Dragon), in which, adding insult to injury, he had more screen time than Brian Cox did back in 1986. By then, Hopkins had become Hollywood's go-to guy for a leading role as a classy middle-aged or older male in a prestige film, be it Nixon or Picasso or Van Helsing or (in The Human Stain) an African-American professor passing for white. But Hopkins had never had the range this kind of resume suggests, and he could still be a dull lump when he was too much at the center of things and wasn't cast just right. (And, having been richly rewarded for having laid it on thick as Hannibal, he was now as much in touch with his inner ham as William Shatner.) He's still an ingenious actor who has his moments, and after his long apprenticeship, it feels churlish not to wish him well. But after he and Antonio Banderas co-starred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1998's The Mask of Zorro, the young Zeta-Jones informed a TV interviewer that she couldn't decide for sure which of her two leading men was sexier. And by God, that shit ain't right.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

10. SIDNEY POITIER (1927 - )

Poitier's breakthrough as the first African-American actor fully recognized as a leading man and star secured him a permanent place in the cultural history of the movies, but his status as a major actor and one of the great talents of his day may have eroded a little. In part this is because a lot of the movies he starred in were high-minded tosh that have dated very badly, not least because of the perceived need to present Poitier's characters as being superhuman and even morally superior to whites, the thinking being that a black man wouldn't be worth building a movie around if he were merely human. But just as Jackie Robinson had to play baseball extraordinarily well to earn his place on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was Poitier's enormous talent that made most of his movies watchable at all. Even in something like To Sir, With Love, his powerful presence and banked fires seems informed by the mixture of intelligence and anger that made him stand out as the student worth saving in the juvenile-delinquency melodrama The Blackboard Jungle. It would be nice to report that, as the sixties gave way to the seventies and opportunities began to open up for black artists, Poitier was able to drop the black messiah act and take more challenging, morally complicated parts, but instead, he seemed to accept the idea that "Sidney Poitier" was a fixed concept that had no place in the era of Super Fly and Shaft. (In one of his 1971 movies, Brother John, his mistreated black Southerner character turned out to really be Jesus.) Poitier withdrew from the center of the film world, concentrating on directing and appearing in light comedies, aimed at the underserved African-American family audience, in which he played tightass straight man to such co-stars as Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby. Them after a long layoff, he turned up acting again in such movies as Shoot to Kill, Little Nikita, and Sneakers. He didn't look as if he'd aged much and he could still command the screen, but the new scripts sucked about as much as the old ones had. He appears to have been effectively retired for the last decade or so.

9. DENZEL WASHINGTON (1954 - )

For a long time, Denzel Washington seemed content to play it safe. He looked good in a military uniform (Glory, Crimson Tide, Courage Under Fire) or a detective's plain clothes (Devil in a Blue Dress, Fallen, The Bone Collector), and his career strategy appeared to be "If Harrison Ford can do it, I can do it," which is admirable in the sense that he clearly never wanted to be pigeonholed as The Black Guy in Hollywood's eyes. There are limitations to this approach, though, and eventually folks start to notice that, for example, in Philadelphia you're the lawyer, not the guy dying of AIDS, and they start to wonder if your career is just going to be one tailored suit after another. (To be sure, many a leading man has built a career on just that.) Of course, you run the risk of upsetting a whole other contingent of your fans when you finally say what the hell, I'm gonna have some fun playing the baddest cop in Los Angeles – especially when that's the role that finally wins you the Best Actor award on Oscar night. All these complaints seem petty now; Washington blew the roof off the joint in Training Day and ever since then, he's been livelier in his straight roles (Inside Man, Deja Vu) and more willing to sprinkle the occasional bad dude (American Gangster) in with the noble characters (The Great Debaters). So hey, maybe he knew he was doing all along.

8. JAMES DEAN (1931-1955)

It’s inconceivable that a career like James Dean’s could happen again. History and circumstance prohibit it; the mere fact of his existence proscribes it. When the blazingly handsome Indiana farmboy blazed out of existence so spectacularly on Route 466, he took with him the possibility of anyone ever repeating his singular, spectacular career. It was not merely the circumstance of his death that made him a legend; plenty of actors had died young before, and plenty would die young after. But so stunning was his rise to the top, and so distinct was his personality both on and off the screen, that no one since would carry into death the legendary quality that makes his a name to conjure with, a shorthand for infinite possibility fatefully snuffed. The closest modern-day analogue, for example, is Heath Ledger – but the young Australian was four years older than Dean at the time of his own death, and had an astonishing sixteen more screen roles. That’s one of the qualities that makes Dean such a towering figure in Hollywood: even ignoring his brooding personality, his smoldering good looks, his pioneering, emotional Method performances, his controversial personal life, and his restless and rebellious off-screen persona, it is staggering to consider that James Dean, as iconic an actor as can be imagined, made only three films in his entire life. Of course, had he lived, he likely would have been instrumental in tarnishing his own fiery purity, but…well, he didn’t live, did he?

7. SEAN CONNERY (1930 - )

Connery became a star because, at a point where his animal presence was enough to hold the camera but his acting was still at the beginner's stage, he became James Bond. What's amazing is that he's still so strongly associated with the role even though he's long since developed not just a strong body of work but a strong screen image that's pretty far from the over-accessorized pretty boy stud of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. In fact, by the time of his last "real" Bond movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever (not counting the 1983 rehash Never Say Never Again), his Bond was starting to look more human and fleshy and fallible, never more comfortably in his skin than in a throwaway moment where he gets to apologize to a rat for his body odor. By then, he had given impressive, full-bodied performances in such mid-60s films as The Hill and A Fine Madness, and was known to delight in opportunities to strip off his hair pieces and indulge in his taste for extravagant and weird facial hair choices. One thing that never changed much, whether he was playing an Irish-American cop in The Untouchables or a beefcake messiah assassin circa 2400 A.D. in the visually opulent, brain-damaged Zardoz, was his voice, and that was probably a right call: after purring his way through his first couple of appearancs as 007, Connery had developed one of those voices that makes almost any line seem worth hearing at least once. The Scottish music machine that he calls a larynx may have as much as his strapping form and experienced manliness to do with his status as probably the longest-reigning A-list sex symbol in the history of movies, an iconic musk dispenser who was able to convincingly get younger actresses ranging from Tia Carrere to Catherine Zeta Jones to respond to his first call at an age where most former Mr. Universe contestants have to ring three times just to get the nurse. The odd bit of voice work aside, he has been officially retired since 2003, having cited his experiences during the production of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with having convinced him that he'd gotten too old for that shit.

6. JIMMY STEWART (1908-1997)

Over the years, there have been as many "young Jimmy Stewarts" in movies as there have been "new Dylans" in music. That alone would probably be enough to qualify the real deal for this list, but what's most interesting about Stewart the actor is how far off the mark most such comparisons are. They're usually intended to evoke an aw-shucks, American as apple pie appeal, and certainly that's part of the story with Stewart -- the stand-up, virtuous hero of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Glenn Miller Story and The Spirit of St. Louis, the man of decency who would age into the stammering sentimentalist reading weepy odes to his dead dog on The Tonight Show -- but such shorthand doesn't take into account the disturbed, obsessive Stewart of Vertigo and the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, notably The Naked Spur. (And despite its status as a perennial holiday favorite, he's not exactly a ray of sunshine in It's a Wonderful Life, either.) His Boy Scout qualities made him an icon, but like David Lynch – the man Mel Brooks called "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" – it's his darker impulses that made him an artist.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My friends, last week in this space we paid tribute to the Top 10 films of the late, lamented Paul Newman, one of our favorite movie stars of all time...which, not surprisingly, got us thinking about the very qualities that separate the film industry’s classic, iconic Leading Men – the true gods of the silver screen – from, say, Shia LaBeouf.

My friends, I ask you: what is that special something, that ephemeral je nes sais quoi that makes for a truly great Leading Man? Is it talent? Sex appeal? Box office clout? Are we drawn more to the stars who remind us of ourselves or those who embody exactly the qualities we lack (but do our best to imitate in hopes of meeting girls)? Do the off-screen good deeds and/or drunken racist ranting and/or pro-Xenu proselytizing of the men behind the movies matter? Do we forgive the occasional bombs and missteps in a long, prolific career, or do we prefer a shorter resume packed with performances of a generally higher quality? And do foreigners count?

My friends, these difficult questions led to much consternation and debate within the hallowed halls of The Screengrab...but in the end, we all came together as a website, setting aside our individual differences to bring you this historic document, our bipartisan, multilateral picks for THE TOP 25 LEADING MEN OF ALL TIME!

25. FRANK SINATRA (1915-1998)

Sinatra's movie career had three distinct acts. In the 1940s, as a young singing heartthrob, he starred in such godawful musicals as Step Lively and The Kissing Bandit while dabbling with "acting" (as the kids call it nowadays) in such roles as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells. Some twenty years later, with his stardom set in concrete, he got paid for palling around on-screen with his buddies in such stuff as the original Ocean's Eleven and 4 for Texas, as well as for honoring his serious (or at least his self-serious) side by allowing his grumpy mid-life crisis to be recorded on camera in such downers as The Detective and The Naked Runner. But in between, starting with the famously career-reviving supporting performance as Maggio in From Here to Eternity, Sinatra had a good, solid career as a leading actor, a period which includes his political-assassination double feature of The Manchurian Candidate and the lesser-known 1954 Suddenly, in which he invades a house and plans to take out the president from a conveniently placed window. This period also included his best co-starring gig with Dean Martin in Some Came Running, his vividly sweaty impersonation of the nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild, and (especially) his rhythmic, convincing embodiment of a junkie poker dealer in The Man with the Golden Arm. The trick to getting work of this caliber out of Sinatra seems to have been that he felt in danger of fading away and washing out -- or at least becoming just another rich, famous entertainer -- and he had to deliver, a feeling that gave a charge to everything he did...for a while. When he felt his confidence return, he knew he wasn't going anywhere and so, in movies at least, he turned into a coaster. Maybe it's too bad that some way couldn't have been found to throw a good scare into him every ten years or so. But how the hell are you going to scare somebody after they've agreed to star in Dirty Dingus Magee, and even that check has cleared?

24. MONTGOMERY CLIFT (1920-1966)

James Dean was a tragic figure, but Montgomery Clift was a doomed one. When he finally died in 1966 (of arterial sclerosis, though his former acting teacher called it a slow-motion suicide), he was readying to play a lead role in Reflections in a Golden Eye opposite his friend Elizabeth Taylor; Marlon Brando took over the role. The two had a lot in common, including searingly handsome faces that would eventually be scarred by their self-destructive behavior and ill health, and a propensity for masterfully portraying emotionally complex working-class characters. That Brando was, at the time, considered the more stable of the two gives some indication of just how fucked up Monty Clift was. Brought up in an abusive family situation, wracked his entire life by ill health, and paralyzed by guilt over his own homosexuality and drug addiction, Clift was beloved by half of Hollywood and despised by the other half. So ruined was both his body and his career by the early ‘60s that he nearly became, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, the third Hollywood legend to make The Misfits their final film. Happily, Clift survived just long enough to turn in a riveting performance in Judgment at Nuremberg, but the cards were dealt for him almost from the time he was born. He didn’t live past 45, and for someone who had such a great reputation as an actor during his prime, he made precious few movies – only 17 total, and a dozen as the lead. But he left hardly a screen credit that didn’t make a lasting impression, and his legacy, curiously enough, can be seen in music: a number of bands have written songs about poor doomed Monty, including R.E.M. (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), Jets to Brazil (“Conrad”), and the Clash (“The Right Profile”).

23. JAMES CAGNEY (1899-1986)

Cagney was originally cast as the sidekick to the hero in his first big picture, The Public Enemy, but after the director, William Wellman, saw the rushes from the first day's shoot, he had a rude shock when he discovered that nobody could take their eyes off the runty smartass guy who wasn't supposed to be the star. It is a tribute to the common-sensical, whatever-works spirit of the early talkies that Wellman, rather than agonize over this perturbing situation, marched onto the set the next day and simply informed the two actors that they'd be swapping parts. Anybody who wanted to establish, with as little effort as possible, that the movies are probably the work of the devil could do worse than to screen a few of Cagney's choicest gangster movies -- say, The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, and his middle-aged kiss-off to the genre, White Heat. In these films, Cagney emanates danger and energy as naturally as an electrified fence, and his satisfaction in being able to discharge his anger in ways that are unpleasant for the people he's discharging it all over is deeply unwholesome, but no actor in history has ever been more dependably watchable. A veteran of the vaudeville stage, he used a dancer's physicality, as well as his natural likability and an unpredictable streak ot dark wit, to keep his tough guys from ever seeming like mere brutes or bullies. He had range, and he tore it up in his hoofers' musicals, including the movie he was proudest of, the George M. Cohan musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy. But he remains chiefly identified as old Hollywood's favorite unromantic urban tough guy. (Bogart, who he shot full of lead in a couple of movies, has the romantic division sewn up.)

22. BURT LANCASTER (1913-1994)

Lancaster established his stardom as a big manly hunk of action star, but he's endured better than many of the trigger-happy lunks who starred in Hollywood action pictures, because he was both a throwback to the days of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and a predecessor to the gravity-defying stars of Hong Kong martial arts movies. A former gymnast, Lancaster had turned to acting after an injury cut short his career as a circus acrobat, and in such movies as The Crimson Pirate (co-starring his former circus partner, Nick Cravat, who appeared in nine of Lancaster's movies, and who died the same year Burt did) and Carol Reed's Trapeze, he demonstrated that it was possible for a big man to spin and pirouette through the air in ways that were not dreamt of in John Wayne's philosophy. At first, other aspects of the actor's art, such as speaking dialogue and making it through a whole scene without yawning, came less naturally to him than dancing in mid-air, but Lancaster, a long-range-plan kind of guy, became interested in developing the skills that would enable him to keep his career going when he could somersault no more. He also seemed to think that it would be a useful thing to make a few movies that would be good enough that he could stand to look at himself in the mirror the day after the premiere. In some of the "serious" pictures he made (The Devil's Disciples, The Rose Tattoo, Come Back, Little Sheba, Birdman of Alcatraz) when he was still in his beefcake prime, Lancaster seemed to be sponsoring his own on-the-job-training acting course. The training paid off when Luchino Visconti offered him the role of the prince in the 1963 epic masterpiece The Leopard, arguably the finest work of his career and one more film that likely wouldn't have been made at all without Lancaster's participation. Infuriatingly, The Leopard would not be seen in its full, uncut majesty in the United States until 1983. However, there was something fitting about that, because by the time it did arrive here, Lancaster's work in Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1981) and Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), to name two, had established him as one of the great old men of the movies, a weathered but still-beautiful oak of a man whose courtly bearing seemed to mark him as an emissary from a better time.

GARY COOPER (1901-1961)

Gary Cooper is one of the greatest stars in Hollywood history, and yet he never strayed very far from one very basic role. That was both the upside and the downside of the old star system; it may have prevented more versatile actors from taking on roles that would have let them break out of their public personality, but it also kept stars of somewhat limited talents thriving by letting them play to their strengths. Cooper the actor wasn’t hard to define: he was the straight-shooting, simple fella who might not have been too bright, but damn it, he knew what was right, and he was going to do what was best no matter what. He essentially filled that narrow role again and again throughout his career, mostly in the Westerns that made him famous; it was a limitation he recognized, but probably never fully accepted. When the roles within that archetype were good enough, when they were handled by capable directors and backed up with good supporting casts, you could see why Gary Cooper became a legend: as Alvin York in Sergeant York, as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, and most especially, and unforgettably, as Will Kane in High Noon, he didn’t so much transcend his limitations as an actor as he did fill out the outlines of his role with complete perfection, with nothing left out. In life, Cooper was a much more complex and contradictory character than any of the roles he played on screen, but the biggest contradiction of all is that the actor, with all his shortcomings, will be remembered long after the man is forgotten.

Click Here for Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Almost indisputably the ur-document of teenage cinema, Nicholas Ray's explosive Rebel without a Cause did it all: it made a huge star out of Natalie Wood, and turned James Dean into something even huger than that – an icon. It proved eerily predictive in its on-screen depiction of poor doomed Sal Mineo. It was made at the exact moment in American history when teenagers were making the transformation from an age category to a demographic, and it became the blueprint for a million movies about how parents just don't understand. It became such an essential part of the culture that it falls under that rare category of movies that you know back to front even if you haven’t seen them. Oh, and incidentally, it's a great movie, with electrifying performances by all three leads, and an often-neglected directing job by the masterful Nicholas Ray. Dean's Jim Stark is the archetype of angry, alienated teenagers, and so perfectly does he inhabit the role that it could fairly be said that pretty much every alienated teenager in film history – in fact, every alienated teenager in reality – is just a copy of him. Most of all, Rebel Without a Cause does something quite magical: while never breaking the tensely emotional shell in which it surrounds its characters, while making their emotions as real and weighty as our own, it manages to give the sensation and perspective utterly lacking from their lives, and the lives of every teenager who would ever watch them: that this too would pass, and that the problems that seemed like – and, indeed, were – matters of life and death during high school would seem weightless as a cloud from the perspective of adulthood.

CARRIE (1976)

There are those who think Brian De Palma is a genius and those who find his "operatic" style overwrought and often downright silly, and 99 times out of 100 you can put me in the latter camp. Yet there was at least one occasion when De Palma's hyper-melodramatic emotionalism perfectly matched the source material: Stephen King's seminal "revenge of the nerd" tale Carrie. In high school, after all, every little slight, snub, or misunderstanding feels like a matter of life and death, and our most embarrassing moments seem to go on for hours – at least for those of us who weren't born to be the quarterback or the prom queen. De Palma conveys that hormones-gone-mad sensibility as if he's undergone some kind of regression therapy, particularly in the movie's two most famous set-pieces. The opening, set in the girls' locker room, transitions from woozy wet dreamland to literal bloody terror without missing a beat, while the pigs-blood prom sequence holds every agonizing note of a symphony of mortification before giving way to Carrie's deadly (but undeniably cathartic) retribution. It's the ultimate high-school-as-horror movie – because when you're 16 or so, it's hard to think of six more terrifying words than "They're all gonna laugh at you."

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

This late-summer teen comedy was released into the teeth of critics who regarded it as a mall-filler and promotional device for the soundtrack album, a judgment that was probably shared by the studio that released it. It quickly rode to cult status on the strength of its genuine affection for its young characters and the gentle but incisive touch of director Amy Heckerling and her screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, as well as a sprawling, talented ensemble cast. At the time, it was seen as the movie that made Sean Penn a star, and his Jeff Spicoli -- Shaggy with a surfboard instead of a crime-solving dog and a Volkswagen Microbus with a well-toasted aroma -- remains a classic comic stoner archetype. Now, though, the movie looks like one of those pictures that in one sweep introduced a generation's worth of new faces, including Forest Whitaker (as the token black football player who one kid assumes they just chauffeur in for the games), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, in a teensy feature debut, an actor with a long face and good family connections who for the first and only time in his career was billed "Nicolas Coppola." Heavy rotation on HBO proceeded to practically burn it into the DNA of '80s kids, who used their new VCRs to make a close study of Reinhold's masturbation fantasy of a topless Phoebe Cates emerging from the swimming pool, a sequence that made budding cineastes of many an appreciative young male.

HEATHERS (1989)

"Dear Diary," writes Ronnie Sawyer in her journal, in the goth-comedy that launched a thousand imitators, "my teen angst has a body count." That's as good a way as any to describe Heathers, the surprisingly subversive – and even more surprisingly successful – teen comedy that made a huge star of Winona Ryder (and threatened to do the same for Christian Slater, until he had the good taste to appear in several more movies so we could all see how ridiculous it was for him to go around claiming to be an actor). Ryder's character just wants to fit in with her high school's elite (the titular Heathers), but she's got a nasty independent streak and a Bud Cortish hobby of faking suicide, so it looks like she might be caught between her own desires and the intractable social demands of high school forever – until the dreamy Jason Dean shows up, determined to cut the Gordian knot of teen angst, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. Heathers has plenty of problems, from its highly improbable plot to its pat ending to, well, basically everything involving Christian Slater; but the reason it grabbed us then is the reason it holds up now. It's an unsparing look at the ludicrously overblown and arbitrary pressures of high school social life, wrapped up in an extremely funny package courtesy of screenwriter Daniel Waters. It may not be as deep as it thinks it is, but it's got a nasty attitude and it's got tons of great lines, and once you're actually out of high school, and you realize life doesn't really depend on being cool, that's enough.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

From somewhere near the intersection of Hype and Necrophilia comes this AP report assessing a dead guy’s Oscar chances for a performance none of us regular folk have seen yet. I realize it’s rare to find anything crass or tasteless about the Academy Awards, but even by the usual standards this piece sticks in my craw. (And I really like to keep my craw free of offending blockages.)

In case you’ve been doing missionary work with that recently discovered tribe in the Amazon, it seems that Heath Ledger, who died in January, plays the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight. Within minutes of his death there were murmurs about a possible posthumous Oscar nomination, but that was before anyone had seen his performance. Now that a few insiders have seen it, the murmurs have become a dull roar that promises to become much, much duller but totally inescapable over the next six months or so.

“Jack Nicholson's Joker was a blast,” writes David Germain. “Heath Ledger's Joker is as dark and anarchic a figure as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the role that brought Nicholson his first Academy Award. Ledger's performance in the Batman tale The Dark Knight is so remarkable that next Jan. 22, the one-year anniversary of his death, he could become just the seventh actor in Oscar history to earn a posthumous nomination.”

Germain goes on to quote an assortment of luminaries, all of whom agree that Ledger is Brando, Olivier, Nicholson and Cesar Romero all rolled into one. I hope it’s true, and I am looking forward to the movie and the performance, although the hype is beginning to make my left eye twitch uncontrollably. Is there not something a little unseemly about the need to turn Ledger into another James Dean? Germain writes, “The aura surrounding Ledger since his death is a sign that, like Dean, he could endure as a mythic figure of talent silenced before his time…That will not necessarily improve his Oscar chances. Dean had two shots after his death and lost both.” Gee, he must have been all broken up about that.

Related:
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?
Batman: The Lost Years

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Mister Lonely"

Peter Smith — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Bryan Whitefield

By now you're probably aware that Harmony Korine's third film as director follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) in Paris as he meets and follows a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like (Samantha Morton) to a castle in Scotland filled with even more people dressed as iconic figures as varied and ridiculous as Queen Elizabeth, James Dean and Abraham Lincoln. Ironically this wildly original concept is also Korine's closest attempt at a traditional narrative. That said, the bizarre but beautiful opening shot of Luna as Michael on a miniature motorcycle set in super slo-mo to the Bobby Vinton classic the title refers to is a quick reminder that Korine's films are as close to belonging at the Whitney Biennial as they are the Tribeca Film Festival.

The newly sober Korine may not rely as heavily on stunts or shock value here, but there are still several of his signature moments, including Luna's Michael entertaining a French old folks home with dance moves interspersed with chants of, "I want you to live forever! Don't die! Don't die!" There is also a pre-teen Buckwheat riding a miniature pony repeating his love for chickens and women's breasts, "They make me so hot!" But with Korine nothing is literal or necessarily related, as is the case with a strangely satisfying sub-plot with Werner Herzog as a small plane pilot who takes nuns up in the air to skydive back safely to the ground with prayer instead of parachutes. These incredibly beautiful scenes look like found footage from a Super 8 archive and further explore the idea of sublimating one's own identity for a belief in something greater than yourself.

While Luna (in his best performance to date), Morton and Denis Lavant as her Charlie Chaplin/Adolf Hitler husband are all excellent, the impersonator idea ends up a missed opportunity, with only Luna able to carry over any behavioral attributes of the celeb he emulates. A conversation between the Pope and Madonna might've been more interesting than just seeing them at a dinner table together.

Mister Lonely is easily Korine's most personal film; its themes of redemption and rebirth in some ways mirror the director's own struggle to get it made. When Diego Luna's character comes out of the Michael Jackson shell, he is seeing the world for the first time, reflecting how Korine himself might've felt with his vision finally freed from drugs. There are several moments throughout the film that confirm Korine's sharp eye for the potent and absurd in his cinema but he, like other indie auteurs (Michel Gondry, Todd Haynes and Vincent Gallo to name a few) who rely on instinct, image and impression to tell a story, fills the movie with beautifully crafted, half-finished ideas. He does however continue to make uncompromising films that have next to no concern for commercial appeal, and while the movies themselves may be uneven there is a certain joy and excitement in getting a glimpse of a filmmaker's overactive imagination almost completely unfiltered.

“There Will Be Blood” Under the Marfa Lights

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

For as long as anyone can remember, Marfa, Texas has been known for two things. It’s the home of the Marfa Lights, those mysterious glowing blobs that could be paranormal entities, swamp gas or car headlights, depending on who you ask. And it’s the little town where George Stevens, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor made Giant more than fifty years ago.

In the last year or so, however, Marfa has enhanced its cinematic pedigree considerably. Both No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were shot there, accounting for 40 percent of your 2007 Best Picture nominees, 16 nominations total, and six Oscars between them. Yet Marfa doesn’t even have its own movie theater.

Starting May 1st, however, it does have its own film festival. The first annual Marfa Film Festival will open with a screening of There Will Be Blood on the set where it was made, “just south of Marfa on the McGuire Ranch. Though some small parts of the set will remain after the event, the town (where we will screen) will soon be torn down, as the West Texas winds are already taking their toll on the scenic construction.” The closing night film on May 5th will be The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper’s notorious follow-up to Easy Rider, which Hopper will present in person. This will apparently be his first return to Marfa since shooting Giant.

The rest of the festival selections range from Texas-shot documentaries recently screened at SXSW (including Crawford and Tulia, Texas) to David Byrne’s Texas-lensed 1986 feature True Stories to films with no Texas connection at all, like the 1961 British horror classic The Innocents. The festival will also feature the world premiere to what may be the least likely sequel of all-time: Okie Noodling 2, the follow-up to the 2001 documentary about hillbillies who pull giant catfish out of holes with their hands. Apparently there’s even more to learn about this bizarre tradition, and I, for one, am intrigued.

You can check out the rest of the schedule and buy tickets here.

Video of the Day: Newman & Dean

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

This brief clip, taken before the filming of East of Eden, shows James Dean (who would get the role of Cal Trask) horsing around with Paul Newman (who would lose the role of Cal's brother, Aron, to Richard Davalos).

It's an amusing enough clip just on its own, with the two future superstars goofing for the camera, but it's also inadvertantly revealing, not only for the pulsating homosexual vibe coming out of Dean, but for the illuminating moment when the casting director tells Dean and Newman to "switch places" — as indeed they would, with Newman getting a lot of roles that, if it weren't for his death, likely would have gone to Dean.

Say Good Night to the Bad Girl: Vampira, R.I.P.

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Maila Nurmi has died, at the age of 86. A Finnish-born model — she worked for Man Ray and the pin-up artist Alberto Vargas — and sometime actress, Nurmi was best-known as her alter ago, Vampira, the "beatnik ghoul-girl" with the long black tresses and long talon-like fingernails who began hosting movies on late night television in 1954. The Vampira character, whose look was reportedly inspired by the cartoon drawing that would eventually be christened Morticia Addams, first appeared on Los Angeles's KABC-TV. The station discontinued the show a year later, but Nurmi held onto the rights to the character and was able to revive Vampira on a different channel. Kinescopes of her TV work are now rare, much-valued ephemera on the collectors' market, but Vampira will remain undead forever in Nurmi's best-known movie role, in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, where she appeared made up as the character and was billed under the character's name.

Nurmi's other movie credits include The Beat Generation, Sex Kittens Go to College, and The Magic Sword. Her last film appearance was in the oddball cult project I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, made in 1998 from an unproduced script credited to Ed Wood; she herself was portrayed by Lisa Marie in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood biopic. She was also a footnote Hollywood celebrity of the 1950s, fabled for her friendships with the likes of James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Orson Welles. (In her later years, she ran an antiques store, Vampira's Attic, on Melrose Avenue.) But her real place in pop culture history is as the first of the TV "horror hosts"; her success as Vampira led to a wave of wisecracking, ghoulish hustlers doing wraparound segments for TV showings of scary movies, most of whom never attained anything like her degree of national recognizability. Probably the best known of the latter day hosts, Cassandra Peterson's Elvira, was in fact the product of a failed attempt, by KHJ-TV, to revive the Vampira character with Nurmi's blessing. (Nurmi withdrew her consent for the use of the Vampira name and makeup after the station rejected her choice, Lola Falana.) She died peacefully in her sleep on January 10.