MIchael Crichton, 1942-2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Michael Crichton, who died of throat cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, started out as a prodigy and developed into something like a smoothly functioning assembly line of marketable concepts. Crichton, who graduated from Harvard in 1964 and obtained an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1969, published his first novels under the name "John Lange", starting with Odds On in 1966; he also published the thriller A Case of Need (which would be filmed, in 1972, by Blake Edwards under the title The Carey Treatment) in 1968 under the psuedonym "Jeffrey Hudson" and co-wrote the countercultural action comedy Dealing (1970) with his brother Douglas, which they published under the name "Michael Douglas." (It too was made into a movie in 1972.) Under his own name, Crichton published Five Patients (1970), a nonfiction account of his medical experiences, as well as the sci-fi thrillers The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, both of which were also quickly snapped up by Hollywood. Not surprisingly, Crichton, by all reports a bit of a control freak and no shrinking violet, soon decided to get more involved, in a hands on way, with what the movies were doing to his books, and he launched his own directing career with Pursuit, a 1972 TV-movie based on a John Lange novel. A year later, he made his feature directing debut with Westworld, an ingenious sci-fi movie about a futuristic amusement park where average joes can pay to inhabit robot-infested, pasteboard versions of the wild west, medieval times, and ancient Rome and live out their sleaziest, movie-inspired daydreams. The movie, which featured Yul Brynner as a sinister robot version of his own character from The Magnificent Seven, demonstrated just how far Crichton could go in powering a movie with his own cleverness. It also dropped an early hint that he might not have the most flattering opinion of the mass audience he'd decided to pitch his work at.

Crichton would also direct the medical thriller Coma with Genevieve Bujold in 1978 and, in 1979, adapt an elegantly staged version of his 1975 novel The Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery as a Victorian super-thief. In the 1980s, his pace slowed considerably. He Between 1980 and 1989 he published only two novels, Congo and Sphere, that were not well received, as well as a couple of non-fiction books, including a follow-up to Five Patients and an introductory guide to computers. He also wrote and directed a couple more sci-fi movies, Looker (1981) and Runaway (1984), and directed a forgotten-on-impact Burt Reynolds movie, Physical Evidence (1989), which would remain his last credit as a director. (He reportedly came out of retirement to do some uncredited reshoots on John McTiernan's 1999 The Thirteenth Warrior, which was based on his 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead.) But his 1990 novel Jurassic Park relaunched Crichton as an idea man, a master of high concept with a knack for latching onto hot-button issues and molding them into audience-friendly gimmicks ranging from rampaging, resurrected dinosaurs to his illustrating the issue of sexual harassment by having, in the movie made from his novel Disclosure, Demi Moore terrifying Michael Douglas (the real one this time) with her mechanical-career-woman sexual avidity. (To some degree, Crichton never really stopped writing for robots.) Crichton's genius reputation in Hollywood was solidified by his work as creator-writer on the TV series ER, which made George Clooney a star and provided work for every other English-speaking actor within reach of a SAG card, proving to be a lot harder to kill than dinosaurs. Out of deference to the newsmagazine-cover-worthy success of his second act, Hollywood once again fast-tracked everything by Crichton they could get their hands on, including not only his Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World, Timeline and Rising Sun (which enlivened his chilly technocrat image by lending it an arresting undercurrent of deranged, crackpot xenophobia) but earlier, dodgier novels that had been lying dormant for years. (He also produced and co-wrote the 1996 Twister.) His last work to appear in his lifetime was his 2006 novel Next. It generated headlines when it appeared that Crichton had avenged himself on a journalist who had attacked a previous Crichton novel, State of Fear, for its dismissive attitude towards global warming by giving the man's name to a fictional character who was a child molester.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:30:00 GMT

DREW BARRYMORE (1975 - )

As inspiring figures go, Barrymore pulls double duty by proving that it's possible to be both a Barrymore and a former child star and still not go tragically off the rails, even though the attractions of the grape are not unknown to her. (Lindsay! We know you read this feature religiously! Put down that bottle and pull over to the side of the road and take some notes!) She made her film debut at five in the aptly titled Altered States; two years later, E.T. the Extra-terrestrial made her a household name and led to her becoming the youngest-ever host of Saturday Night Live, a record that I hope is still in her name: I'm too afraid to check to see who might have broken it since. After an early spell (she was barely in her teens) as a tabloid star with stints in and out of rehab, Barrymore's mature career began with her attention-getting bad girl performance in the 1992 Poison Ivy, in which she played the jailbait from hell. Her work in that film was highly creditable, but it soon became clear that she wasn't really cut out to be playing mean girls: she was just too damned lovable. Since then, she's contributed her glow to such offbeat projects as Guncrazy, Home Fries, and Donnie Darko, which was partly financed by Flower Films, the company she co-founded in 1999, and which has produced such vehicles as Never Been Kissed and the Charlie's Angels films. Her charitable endeavors extend to many of her romantic comedies: she has convincingly simulated a yearning interest in such male co-stars as Adam Sandler (twice!), Jimmy Fallon, and Tom Green. (Let's not go there.) Barrymore has the potential to be a major dramatic actress, as has been most clearly demonstrated by her remarkable turn as a girl whose life is twisted out of shape by a pregnancy born of a mercy fuck (with Steve Zahn), but in the meantime, in fluffy comedies and talk show appearances, she continues to do the great work that it sometimes seems that she, alone of all the actresses in Hollywood, is fully capable of doing: she gives cuteness a good name.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (1938 - )

You might have noticed that the first clip is in Italian sans subtitles. But I make no apologies for including it! Still, I love you, dear Screengrab reader, almost as much as I love Claudia Cardinale, so there’s a second clip, this time with subtitles, of Ms. Cardinale being charming. Now here’s an amazing fact: both of these films (The Leopard and 8 1/2, that is) are from the same year. You might have noticed that Cardinale is one of the most beautiful women to grace the big screen. You might have noticed that these clips are from two of the finest films in Italian cinema. You are quite observant!

GENEVIEVE BUJOLD (1942 - )

Bujold got her first big break co-starring with Yves Montand in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est Finie; that movie opened up possibilities in French films that she spurned to star in two godawful independent Canadian productions, Isabel and The Act of the Heart, that were directed by filmmaker and jackass Paul Almond, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1973. This detail set the tone for much of her career: a great actress with the ability to make direct contact with an audience, Bujold spent the seventies being courted by Hollywood studios and touted in the press as a big star in the making, but she kept slipping away from the bonds of real fame by her insistence on doing the roles she wanted to do. (One big exception was Earthquake, in which she played Charlton Heston's girlfriend as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Universal Pictures for breach of contract.) During her ingenue period, she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Anne Boleyn to Richard Burton's Henry VIII in her first U.S. picture, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), then slipped away to Greece to contribute a stunning cameo as Cassandra in the Michael Cacoyannis film of The Trojan Women (1971), had a freak-out scene for the ages in Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and came as close as she would ever come to mainstream stardom in Michael Crichton's Coma (1978). In her mature-actress period, she stirred strange longings in Clint Eastwood in Tightrope (1984), stirred even stranger ones in Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988), and introduced some experience and earthiness to Alan Rudolph's soap-bubble worlds in Choose Me (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), and The Moderns (1988). It's been a while since she was in anything that anybody saw, but she is never to be counted out and it's good to know that she's still out there, waiting for some young hotshot director who isn't afraid of writing a part for a strong woman to do himself a favor.

MAGGIE CHEUNG (1964 - )

Born in Hong Kong, Cheung later moved with her family to the U.K. when she was eight, which accounts for the British accent with which she spoke her English dialogue in the French film Irma Vep (1996), directed by her sometime husband Olivier Assayas. Her dry, witty performance in that movie as some version of herself, politely standing around between takes on a movie set while an assistant with a spray bottle applies the right sheen to her shiny black cat suit, was a measure of how far she'd come since her early days in movies: a former model and First Runner-Up in the Miss Hong Kong beauty contest (who beat her? who the fuck beat her!?), Cheung can be seen not doing much besides looking damned good in a number of HK films, including such Jackie Chan classics as Police Story and Project A Part II. Cheung has given credit for her emergence as an actress to Wong Kar-wei, master of all things beautiful, who brought her out in As Tears Go By and later used her in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. While developing her talent, Cheung has also managed to maintain a presence in the Hong Kong action-fantasy cinema, co-starring in such films as The Heroic Trio and Green Snake; both strands of her career came together triumphantly in Zhang Yimou's Hero, where she kicked ass and broke hearts with the best of them. She gave her finest dramatic performance to date in her most recent film, Assayas's Clean, for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. She has since announced that she's quitting acting to concentrate on her music. Her fans can be forgiven for hoping that she eventually finds composing to be insufficiently gratifying to her ego and comes slouching back.

MIA FARROW (1945)

The daughter of film director John Farrow (The Big Clock) and actress and Tarzan main squeeze Maureen O'Sullivan, Farrow burst into the late '60s with a waif-like quality that, married to her china doll features, was at its best sexily androgynous and at its not-best borderline elfin. She became a star from her role in the TV series Peyton Place, which she quit at the behest of her new husband, Frank Sinatra; she then blew off the marriage to Sinatra by refusing to give up her starring role in Rosemary's Baby. That movie made her an even bigger star, but it also raised the possibility that she might wind up being exploited in picture after picture as the most defenselessly threatenable potential victim since the days of silent melodrama. Perhaps alert to this danger, she spent most of the next ten years alternating between very bad choices (Secret Ceremony, The Great Gatsby) and, so far as a movie career was concerned, making no choices at all. In 1978, she appeared as a member of ensemble casts in Robert Altman's A Wedding and the Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile and, in both, revealed a new eagerness to subvert audience's sympathetic expectations of her and to use her own weirdness for comic effect. It wasn't long after that she took up with Woody Allen, and starting with 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, embarked on a ten-year stretch where she appeared almost exclusively in his movies. In the best of them, he examined every angle from which she could be charming, and she has him to thank for having broadened and solidified her enduring screen image. There's a whole lot of other stuff he did for which she has not been inclined to thank him, and when their professional and personal relationships both ended with an abrupt thud around the time of the release of 1992's Husbands and Wives, she hurtled out of his orbit and latched onto supporting roles in other people's movies with what looked an awful lot like relief. From the first of her post-Woody movies, John Irvin's Widow's Peak (1994) to the most recent, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, she can generally be counted on to serve as a delightful addition to any project that is salvageable and as something fascinatingly odd in any project that isn't. Last year, Time magazine named her as one of the world's most influential people for her various humanitarian endeavors.

DIANE KEATON (1946 - )

Keaton's warmth and talent, and her special ability to make neurosis seem cuddly, made her everybody's favorite screen comedienne in the seventies, when she starred with her off-screen partner Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper (where she did a mean Brando impression), Love and Death, Manhattan, and of course, Annie Hall, which made her not just a star but a zeitgeist figure. Although she's kept working since that peak -- unlike other actresses, such as Jill Clayburgh, who seemed to embody something very much of the moment for, well, a moment -- there's a sense that Keaton doesn't really get her full due, maybe because her moment is supposed to have passed. (She's always criticized for being too "contemporary" when she plays period roles, even though she's been brilliant in such movies as Mrs. Soffel, where she springs Mel Gibson from a Pittsburgh jail at the turn of the century, and, of course, Reds.) Even when her career was red-hot after her Oscar win for Best Actress in Annie Hall, her success in comedy and the relative dullness of her role in the Godfather movies led to a false impression that she's a funny woman wasted in heavy drama. This may have led to her being overpraised for her work in the strident Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which came out the same year as Annie Hall, but it also cost her full recognition for her greatest performance, in the stunning divorce drama Shoot the Moon in 1982. She also gave a wrenching performance in The Little Drummer Girl, reasserted her comedic chops carrying Baby Boom to the finish line, partnered beautifully with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek for Crimes of the Heart, re-teamed with Woody Allen for Manhattan Murder Mystery, and directed for TV (including episodes of Twin Peaks) and movies (including the oddball documentary Heaven and the underrated Unstrung Heroes). She also helped produce Gus Van Sant's Elephant and dabbled in real estate. Her biggest recent splash in movies was in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, where she has a nude scene, the point of which was the horror that the sight of a naked woman only a decade younger than him inspired in her co-star Jack Nicholson. In fact, she looked pretty good -- certainly better than Nicholson does with his clothes on -- and her performance (and unsurgically enhanced body) helped make the movie a hit among women who enjoyed seeing Keaton getting hit on by Keanu Reeves. She can now be seen in TV commercials as the face of L'Oreal.

MAE WEST (1893-1980)

Mae West was beautiful, talented, versatile, and groundbreaking. Big deal. So were a million other women who don’t have nearly the reputation she does in the history of Hollywood. The reason that we’re writing about Mae West is because she took what was implicit in showbiz and made it explicit: her career, from beginning to end, was all about sex. Never before had anyone become so famous speaking so openly about what goes on between men and women – and she didn’t limit it to that paradigm, either. West was sexually experimental and was rumored to have had affairs with a number of women; and, despite the greater fag-hag veneration of Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, she was also one of the earliest advocates of gay rights, having written a sympathetic play about homosexual men as early as 1928. Oh, yeah: she was a writer, too. Always more than just a pretty face and a round set of hips, West was an engaging speaker, a witty and talented writer, and by all accounts, a legendarily adept improviser. (She said one of her greatest regrets is that she never got to share the screen with Groucho Marx, the only comic she considered her equal at thinking on one’s feet.) Like most people who considered sex a serious business, she couched much of her speculations about it in humor, but that didn’t save her from being repeatedly censored, censured, prosecuted (at least twice successfully) for obscenity, and banned from half the radio and television networks in the country. West never stopped working, and while her latter-day projects like Sextette are often considered more creepy than funny, considering that she kept her career going for some 70 years while pioneering gay rights, women’s liberation, and sexual freedom some thirty years before the rest of the country came around, we’d say she earned a little indulgence.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : genevieve bujold

MIchael Crichton, 1942-2008

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Eight)