Morbid Diversions (Friday's video diversions)

 

     As with more an more these days the opening topic's something I know I've brought up before. Age and social isolation turn so many of us into creatures of repetition.
     I know from several conversations I've had, including various online interactions, that I'm not the only one who finds himself disappearing down the rabbit holes of "whatever happened to?"upon being reminded of someone in a show or movie. In an age of so many screens, so much access, it's more than a major pastime, for many it's a reflex. It's part of the reason so many people don't seem to go five, conscious minutes without poking at their phone's screen. With more and more of our entertainments on-demand affairs, that we can not only summon, but pause at will while we indulge these curiosities, it's something more and more of us are doing more often.
     As a much younger person I was little interested in celebrities, much less their lives and relations. It just seldom interested me, preferring to keep my attentions on the characters they were portraying and the stories being told. Their personal lives, families, etc. were just not something that tended to draw me in. How much of this was a lack of social tendencies on my part, and how much a matter of much more limited, often lurid and slanted, access to such information growing up in a pre-Internet world is debatable - seeking out lurid tabloids and staged fan magazines? - but not important to today's opening topic.
     In a modern world, soaked in easily-accessed information, as an aged and aging person being attracted to nostalgic things, I've gotten more interested in, among other things, celebrities from decades ago.  This is with a particular emphasis on the person, relationships and passions, rather than the roles they played or the whatever else they created as entertainments. Moments where they got to interact with others as themselves - on talk shows, and sometimes game shows, where they were there as themselves. Oh, many were guarded and cautious, career-protecting armor in place because they knew they needed to win more parts, and/or were really there only to plug their latest or upcoming work, and to stay in the public eye. Still, there were situations where enough time and sufficiently distracting circumstances would allow more of who they really were, what they thought about various issues, to come through.
     It occurs to me I'm already getting away from my own topic. All of the above is true, and it remains a substantial part of my interest, but today I'm more focused on looking at these appearances and these people from our perspective in time. Looking back decades in media, it's a very apt analogy to astronomy. We're looking back through time at what are now more and more often dead stars.
    One of the venues I've gotten drawn into in recent years was the game show Tattletales - a show I have zero memories of even being aware of when it was in first-run.

    Hosted by actor, singer, and game show host Bert Convy, the show had two eras, from 1974-78, then revived for 1982-84. Three celebrity couples (sometimes married, sometimes dating, sometimes just friends - including instances where the people were quietly homosexual, but in keeping with the times arrived in boy/girl pairs passing for the mainstream audience as couples) would be there as themselves. In many cases just half of a pair would be famous, with their significant other not. A series of often leading and provocative questions would be posed to each couple, with half the show being the men trying to predict what the women would answer, and vice versa. The show's main gimmick was that each couple would be playing for their section of the audience, which would divide that day's winnings. All five shows would be filmed in a single day, but they would have to treat it all as if this were happening on five different days. Knowing that, and that it would have to wear thin cycling through five separate intros and outros, becomes part of the fun of watching these all the way through the credits. Still, though, that's off the mark of why I'm bringing the show up.

     Each show brings us three couples, the prominence of the celebrities is going to be a matter of one's own entertainment interests. General tv and movie character actors, comedians and some from the world of music were more likely to immediately pop for me, while the occasional soap opera star or sports personality almost always needed the introductions for me to know why they were there. There are whole worlds of interest to be had in looking at the show simply through the lens of how ephemeral fame can be. Eventually, of course, nearly everyone's forgotten, but having lived through those years and looking back on them, it can be humbling to witness firsthand how someone can seemingly be on millions of people's lips one day, then seemingly forgotten a stunningly short time later. Again, though, not today's point. Today we're interested in What Happened.
     As these arrive on the show in pairs, the majority of them are couples in a relationship, often married. So the morbid thoughts can apply not only to the eventual fate of the individuals but of their relationships.
     One could easily do a series of pieces on the forensics of the various relationships and what happened to the people themselves. Maybe I'll make a series of these.

     Convy himself collapsed in April of 1990 while visiting his mother (who had been hospitalized for a stroke) and was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer, forcing his immediate retirement. He and his wife, Anne, married since 1959, divorced in very early 1991. Really awful timing from at least the perspective of us looking in on only these facts, but it may have been that the marriage had rotted through well before this, and rising tensions just delivered the final blow. Convy married his second wife in February, so there'd likely be a clue in knowing how long they'd known each other; it at least suggests an affair. It didn't make much of a difference to Burt, I suppose, as five months later, he was dead.
     The chain that brought the broader target of celebrity doom to mind for this week was, of all things, this past Tuesday being Talk Like A Pirate Day. Why?

     Albert Salmi was an actor, initially and in his heart through his entire career a stage actor - considering film and television to be inferior media - who nonetheless became a fairly prolific and successful character actor. Through the '60s and '70s in particular he was all over the place on television, shifting more heavily toward movies as time wore on.
     In late January of '66, he made a single-episode appearance on a show that was written at a level that was much appreciated by still four year-old me - Lost In Space. That was the show's 18th episode, where Salmi arrived as a spacefaring buccaneer, Cap'n Alonzo P. Tucker -- complete with a robotic parrot named Nick, all on an Irwin Allen budget. Much scenery was chewed.
     Hey, this stuff works when you're four.
     While I would see Salmi in many other things over the years, my first and strongest association with him would remain that "yarr"-in' portrayal of a pirate who befriends young Will Robinson (my demographic's surrogate, the bright and earnest boy adventurer) with an eye towards using him as leverage to get his ship repaired before those pursuing him arrived. [The second-strongest association - not that anyone asked- would likely be him as William Feathersmith, in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville", an episode from the fourth season of The Twilight Zone. There he's a predatory, sadistic businessman who at age 75 in 1963 is at the top of his empire, and bored by a world he's conquered. He makes a deal with the devil (Julie Newmar) to be restored to the appearance of his relative youth, while retaining all the knowledge from his life, and dropped back in his hometown of Cliffordville in 1910 with a stake of $1,412, the rest of his vast fortune traded in the infernal deal. After the life he'd lived, it wasn't as if he had a soul to bargain with. As with seemingly all such deals, important details were overlooked.]
    Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, my gradually nostalgic leanings found me tapping this Tattletales vein, my DVR set to scoop up twice-daily reruns off the BUZZR channel. At sometime earlier this year I had a sudden surprise when out of their grab bag of episodes they unearthed a week where one of the couples was Albert Salmi and, who I'd soon learn was his second wife, Roberta. I likely hadn't thought much about Salmi in a long time, though he's always been a go-to, arch and comic pirate voice in my head.
     Curious early on as Bert was introducing the couples, I paused it and did a quick Wiki search for Salmi on my phone.
     I saw that Albert and Roberta had been married in 1964, his second marriage as mentioned above, and it seemed that this one technically stuck to the vows of only a mortal end. Still, it turned out to be rocky, and in a more civil world would have ended by court decree. They separated in early February 1990 - she remained in their family home in Spokane, while he moved into a condominium they owned - and she filed for divorce on the 6th, declaring him an alcoholic and citing physical and psychological abuse when he was in his cups. She then proceeded to take out a restraining order against him, with him claiming innocence and blaming their estrangement all on her "emotional issues."
     On April 23rd, one of Roberta's friends stopped by her Spokane home to check on her. Too late. Salmi had fatally shot Roberta in the kitchen, then gone upstairs and done himself in.
    Whew.
    However, on my paused screen, it was still 1976.
     Letting the show roll, to all appearances their then twelve-year marriage was going fine. Albert was in the midst of an extremely rare for him series role, this time as the main character's right hand investigator on the legal drama Petrocelli. That show wouldn't survive its second season's sharp ratings drop, but nothing I'd read suggested that he had grown any fonder of tv work.
     Nonetheless, my knowledge of their tragic future made a completely innocent reaction from Roberta while she was struggling to guess how Albert would answer the latest hypothetical situation Bert had posed, too appropos for me to not take a quick pic.

     ...and I'm not going to do better than that for a Tattletales moment of morbidity today.

    Over on Max (possibly in the HBO On Demand mix, too - I haven't checked) I recently watched one of the films I'd tagged to add to My List there during one of those sessions where I just browsed through the listings of films for forty minutes or so before getting sleepy enough to shut things down and fall asleep without ever watching anything.  Occasionally, though, I eventually circle back around and decide I actually want to watch something.
    In this case it was a film made in 1995, starring Johnny Depp, a film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch: Dead Man.
     It's a 19th century period piece western, in which an accountant leaves behind the ruins of his old life in Cleveland - his parents newly dead and buried, and his fiance having changed her mind about starting a life together. Using the last of his money to secure Westward passage to the end of the rail line, in the town of Machine, he carried a letter in the vest pocket of his garish suit, promising him the position of accountant at the town's metal works. This does not go as planned, as the would-be accountant's circumstances go from dim to dire. In the two months since the offer was made, while he settled his parents' affairs and made his way across the country, the position had been filled, and his would-be boss turned out to be a hostile, paranoid man (played by Robert Mitchum) who held a gun on him to make him leave.
      A kindness extended to a local brought the otherwise destitute young man a momentary refuge with a young woman, but her estranged fella (Gabriel Byrne) showed up and things quickly flowed from sad to vengeful and tragic.
     Two quickly dead, and the wounded young man escapes on the dead man's horse. And the dead, estranged fella turns out to be the son of the would-be boss, who's the financial power in the region.

     Co-starring with Depp is Canadian actor and musician Gary Farmer, as Nobody - a mixed-heritage native American who has lived his entire life as an outsider - including having been captured by English soldiers and kept as a living exhibit, then brought back to England to amuse them, eventually to be educated, then finally to escape and make his way back to North America.
     Nobody comes across the wounded, wobbly young man, and attempts to tend his wound while he lies unconscious. Probing with his knife, Nobody decides that the bullet is lodged too close to his heart to be removed without killing him, so he sees that the doomed man exists on borrowed time.
     One shining item in Nobody's education abroad was being introduced to the Romantic Age art and poetry of William Blake. This becomes a critical plot point, as Depp's character is also named William Blake. The living Blake is completely unfamiliar with his historic namesake, but Nobody - inclined to read a mystical subtext into life (sometimes with the aid of peyote) - is gobsmacked by the revelation. To him it is a clear sign that this meeting was destined. He regards the young white man as the reincarnation of the poet's spirit, marked for death, and takes it upon himself to help guide him through both the new, violent form of artistic expression - firearms instead of pens and paint brushes - as that is what has marked the young man's sudden drastic turn of fortune - while on a journey back to the spirit world. They soon become aware that there's an actively-advertised bounty on his head, dead or alive, so the young Blake gets to express himself in high-speed lead slugs and blood spatter more than once.

    As is typical of Jarmusch's ouvre, the film is stocked with an eclectic aggregate from Jarmusch's parabolic social orbit, each generally playing eccentric characters. In no particular order, this film's cast includes Iggy Pop, Gabriel Byrne, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfred Molina, Jared Harris, Steve Buscemi, John Hurt, Lance Henriksen, Crispin Glover, and Robert Mitchum in his final film role. Tom Waits must have been busy. Those were the names that popped for me, but there are others in the mix who might mean more to you than they did to me at first look.
     The film's score is by Neil Young, primarily on electric guitar, though with some acoustic guitar, piano and organ - all improvised as Young watched the freshly-edited film, by himself, in the recording studio.
     Not a commercial success - a black and white film with so much weirdness and a downbeat tone was not going to be a broad people-pleaser - it was nonetheless a worthwhile watch, and mere days later I find myself interested in watching it a second time. That's Dead Man (1995  R 120 m)

     I'd only become aware of writer/director Jim Jarmusch in the summer of 2019, when his zombie comedy hommage The Dead Don't Die, hit general release, but at the time I'd not made a point of pulling up his list of credits and looking to make a checklist of it.
      I know I've seen his 1991 collection of vignettes about the temporary bonds between passengers and cab drivers in various places around the world, Night on Earth. I know several of his films were ones I'd seen in channel guide listings many times over the years, but not at moments when I indulged any curiosity. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is one of those. The title and that it stars Forest Whitaker likely gave me vague expectations of a hip hop and/or rap-filled soundtrack, which is not going to be a draw for me. Knowing that it's a Jarmusch film adds some interest for me now.
      I will try to finally remember to do more of a streaming platform search to see how many others of his films I have easy access to... but not in time for this week's blog.

     Another week's fled from me, and as I understand Garbo's plans to wrap this shared blog early in the first week of October, next Friday will be my final entry for the Consortium of Seven group blog. I hope and aim to announce next steps for myself and future blogging plans then. In the meantime, as always, take care, enjoy the weekend, and please come back here next Friday. - Mike