Death and Gravity

These days a man makes you something
And you never see his face
But there is no hiding place.
-- Don Henley

One of the strangest things about working in the entertainment industry is the way your life tends to intersect, if only momentarily and trivially, with the lives of people whose work you like and admire. For your whole life, or at least a goodly portion of it, you are a fan of X., and then – bam! – he or she is standing next to you at a party or on set or in line to get coffee somewhere. A word or two of conversation follows, which they won't remember in fifteen minutes but which you will never forget. But this intertwining of lives is sometimes even subtler than that: often you work with them without meeting them at all; movies and even TV shows employ huge numbers of people, and the percentage who physically interact with the cast is actually quite small. I worked on something like nineteen episodes of Heroes, and my one ambition was to meet Hayden Panettierre, but the closest I came was at the wrap party for the show's final season, when I may – or may not – have glimpsed her from across a crowded, neon-lighted room jammed with insensible drunks. Moments like this, silly as they are, go a long way towards compensating for all the bullshit I have to put up with living in Los Angeles – the traffic, the noise, the smog, the exorbitant cost of living. At the same time, these incidents remind me of the tremendous power one human being can exert over another without necessarily knowing they exist. In a sense they are like planets whose gravity effects the course and habits of the smaller objects around them.

In the last week, four actors whose lives tangled with mine – though not one of them knew it – have passed away: George Romero, Martin Landau, Nelsan Ellis and Trevor Baxter. I want to stress that of the four, the only one I physically encountered was Landau, and him only by virtue of being in the same theater (and later, in the same parking lot); I never spoke with any of them and none of them ever knew I existed nor would have had any reason to care had they known. Yet in different ways, each played a role in my life that is worthy of note and made me mourn their passing as if I had actually known them.

George Romero is, of course, famous for his classic 1968 horror film, Night of the Living Dead, which spawned a number of sequels and a host of imitators: indeed, one could say it set the standard for all zombie films which followed, right up to today's Walking Dead. But never having had a real affinity for zombie movies, I can't say Romero was much on my radar over the years – with one notable exception. When I was a college sophomore, I attended a reading by three horror authors collectively known as “The Splat Pack” (John Skipp and Craig Spector are the two I can remember; the third's name unfortunately escapes me). These gentlemen knew Romero quite well, and told a half-humorous, half-sad story about how the director, during the shooting of Dawn of the Dead, had been abruptly informed that his budget was being cut by two-thirds. The four of them were sitting in a diner in Pittsburgh – the three authors in full zombie makeup, for they had been cast as extras – and Romero, crestfallen over what he saw as the ruination of his movie, began to rail bitterly about movie producers – their miserliness, treacherousness and general stupidity. At one point he blurted, “A producer with an idea is like a 90 year-old man with an erection. He's so excited that he's got one he doesn't give a damn where he puts it!” I heard this story in 1992, and while I found it hilarious and have repeated it innumerable times, I had no idea how true it was until I moved to Los Angeles fifteen years later. There are, of course, many movie producers who are authentic geniuses – Gale Anne Hurd comes to mind – but in the main, you could put the lot of them on a cruise ship, sink it over the deepest part of the Pacific, and nobody would notice. Or care if they did. So thank you, George, not only for the horror, but for the laughs -- and for the wisdom.

Martin Landau hardly needs an introduction from me, any more than Romero did; he began acting in the 1950s and continued to work right up to his death, winning as Oscar along the way. I know he was working because when I attended the talk he gave at the Egyptian Theater in January of this year, he had come directly from the Actor's Studio... where he had just sat in on 27 auditions. (When I am 89 years old, if I have the energy to watch 27 actors audition and then go attend a screening of one of my films and be interviewed and conduct a Q & A afterward, you can kiss my octogenarian ass.) He was crusty, quick-witted, and most importantly, full of passion for his craft – he mentioned a film he had just completed with Paul Sorvino as being “the best work he'd ever done,” which was a bold statement from a man who had been in North by Northwest, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Ed Wood. He told humorous stories about some of the directors he'd worked with, like Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, and gave sage advice about acting. I left the theater feeling grateful that I'd had a chance to meet this icon (even if he did star in the most reviled sci-fi show of my childhood, Space: 1999.) Scarcely two months later, I was at a screening of a surprisingly good low-budget horror movie called Terror on Hallow's Eve, when I ran into his daughter, Juliet. Juliet Landau is best known for playing the hell out of her role as the batshit-crazy vampire Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel. Being the daughter of Hollywood royalty, she could perhaps be forgiven for being a snob, but no, not a bit of it – I've seldom met anyone in the business who was friendlier or more willing to engage in conversation with a complete stranger, simply because the stranger was a friend of a friend. (In fact, I got a chance to tell her the story of how, when I was working at the now-defunct Optic Nerve Studios in 2009, I dropped the mold of her face they had taken for her vampire makeup onto my foot.) The warmth she showed to everyone at the screening seemed to me to speak very well of her dad and how she was raised. So thank you, Martin, for inspiring me with such great performances (his turn in Ed Wood is truly a masterpiece), and for showing that not every famous actor makes the raising of his children a lesser priority than his craft.

Nelsan Ellis? Never met him. Never saw him, either, unless I did without realizing it. And yet we have a connection of sorts, too, and that connection is True Blood, in which he played a motormouth transvestite cook who instantly became one of the show's most popular characters. It so happens that my first-ever onscreen credit came from an episode of this show, which I worked on intermittently during 2011 and 2012. In fact, my labor on True Blood, trivial as it was, put money in my pocket at a time when I was desperate for same; it also allowed me my first on-set and on-location work. I will never forget the three days I spent in the desert in Palmdale, toiling sleeplessly in blazing heat and, at night, sub-freezing cold, watching a small army of crew work their way through a shot list that would have killed Stanely Kubrick. For a guy with a passionate interest in TV and film, being inside the process was quite literally a dream come true – the reason I moved to Los Angeles in the first place. Of course, when one works on a show, one tends to get the full 411 on the cast – especially their failings as human beings. But nobody ever had a bad word to say about Nelsan Ellis. He was by all accounts not only immensely talented, upbeat and friendly, but the sort of actor who electrifies even jaded professionals. There was a rumor, which I have subsequently discovered to be true, that Ellis, who was a playwright as well as an actor, was the only cast member allowed to improvise his dialogue – no mean feat, that. So I would like to thank you, Nelsan, for delivering the kind of performance that kept ratings up, fans happy...and me from being evicted.

Now we come to Trevor Baxter. Doubtless his name means nothing to you, for in addition to not being famous, he was not even American (gasp!). Trevor Baxter was an English character actor of the sort that abound in that country – skillful but unobtrusive, the sort who delivers such seamless, seemingly effortless performances that he never gets his full due as a thespian, if only because you completely forget he's acting at all. I first “met” Trevor as a boy of about eight or nine years, when my mother introduced me to Doctor Who. At that time – we're talking 1979 or 1980 – Doctor Who was not the international powerhouse it has become since it was rebooted some years ago. Far from it: not one in a hundred Americans had ever heard of the show, and it was available only on PBS or local stations in re-run format, with weak transmitters and incomplete episode libraries. Nevertheless, from the very first episode I encountered, I was hooked, and never so much as when I watched the six-part episode “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.” This story, originally broadcast in 1977, found the Doctor and his beautiful but savage companion, Leela, in foggy Victorian London. Writer Robert Holmes had devised a fiendishly wonderful plot which was inspired by the Jack the Ripper killings, the story of Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, and Sherlock Holmes. Trevor Baxter played Dr. Litefoot, a police pathologist who teams up with the Doctor to defeat the time-traveling war criminal Magnus Greel. Baxter's character, clearly based on Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes universe, is a gem to behold; the quintessential English gentleman of the era, he is a bit prissy and a bit snobby, and has a pathetic tendency to get knocked unconscious, but is loyal as a hound and fearless in the clutch. I was delighted by his performance, and by the performance of his “wingman” in the story, pompous theater owner Henry Gordon Jago (played by Christopher Benjamin), who is as cowardly and verbose as Litefoot is brave and restrained. Even as an adult I thought it a shame that Baxter and Benjamin could not reunite to reprise these wonderful “one-off” characters, so you can imagine my joy when, in 2009, Big Finish Productions began a series of radio plays called Jago & Litefoot, starring these two great actors in their old roles. Between '09 and '16 no less than thirteen series (seasons) were produced, totaling 52 episodes, with a number of stand-alone stories and crossovers as well. Baxter shocked me by slipping into a role he had played only once, in 1977, as easily as one might an old leather jacket. Listening to his assured, almost unchanged voice, it was almost impossible to believe that decades had passed – indeed, it made me feel like a kid again. So thank you for that, Trevor, and for reminding me what a skilled actor can do when given the right material – namely, bring happiness to someone (to millions of someones) he never met.