Celebrity Birthday of the Day

Happy Birthday, Hal Ashby!

Hal Ashby's story is one of the great (ie tragic) rise and fall stories of Hollywood.

Born in 1929 in Ogden, Utah and raised as a Mormon, Ashby put his fucked up childhood this way:

"I was... the last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was 12. I struggled growing up, like others, totally confused. Married and divorced twice before I made it to 21. Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios."

Ashby parlayed his various jobs at Hollywood studios (he started as a printing press operator at Universal) into being a freelance assistant film editor. While doing this, he made friends with an MGM messenger by the name of Jack Nicholson (who he would later direct in The Last Detail).

Talented, driven and weird, Ashby was soon a full-fledged editor, and it only took until his fourth movie to get his big break: editing Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night.

It's much more exciting edited together.

He won an Academy Award for editing the movie, and three years later he directed his first film, a Beau Bridges vehicle called The Landlord. The next year he released the tender/creepy story of a romance between an incredibly old woman and a teenager -- one of the great love stories of our time: Harold and Maude.

They bang. They bang hard.

Ashby made a number of noted (code for: I haven't seen them) films after Harold and Maude, including Shampoo, a movie about a hairdresser that stars Warren Beatty (the reason I haven't seen it should be fairly evident).

But before the decade was out, he managed to direct one of my very favorite movies, Being There, starring Peter Sellers in his last major role.

The story of a functionally retarded gardener whose generalized ramblings about plants and the seasons are mistaken for profundity, Being There cracked open the world of politics and celebrity in a hilariously bitter way, prodding us to pay attention to content rather than superficial assumptions about who someone is and how they look. The controversial ending (which I dare not give away), remains one of my favorite moments in the movies, since (in my reading of it) it plays the same trick on the audience that so far been played on everyone else in the movie. It's conceit dares you to look through it, and the implication is that if you don't, then you're no better than the dopes you've been snickering at the rest of the movie.

Sadly, Being There marked the effective end for Ashby. Though he had for most of his life been charitably described as an eccentric, he now began the slow slide into madness. Drugs and obsessive behavior began to take their hold. He refused to eat in front of other people. He began to take so long in the editing room several projects were taken away from him so they could be finished.

By the time he had straightened himself out, he was diagnosed with cancer that quickly spread throughout his body. He died on December 27, 1988.

But he left behind a series of totally unique movies (many of which, especially from his 1971-79 phase, I will surely get around to watching), filled with idiosyncratic characters, intelligent concepts and sly humor.

As a parting video, I present this funny scene from Harold and Maude.

Note: If you haven't seen this movie, this is one of Harold's fake suicides, which he stages to try to get a reaction out of his mother.

The Importance of Remembering Ernest

An abbreviated (ie, half-assed) post today, inspired not by a birthday or even a death day, but by this funny video I found today.

As a kid, I loved the Ernest movies. I remember going to see Ernest Scared Stupid in the theater (dragging one of my parents along). I would have been nine years old. After a few months went by, I wanted to rent it, so we went to the video store. Being a shy kid, I asked my mother to ask the person behind the desk if they had it.

Now, my mother is a wonderful woman. I love her dearly. She is the most giving, self-sacrificing person I have ever known.

Her response to my (forgive the pun) earnest plea?

"If you want to know whether they have it, go ask them yourself."

Yeah. My mom wasn't a fan of ol' Ernest. And how could you blame her? We watched the shit out of those Ernest movies.

To give you an idea, let's say I'd developed incurable cancer and my dying wish had been to meet Jim Varney. I'll bet you anything that if he'd actually showed up and started doing that whole "knowwhutimean?" schtick, there's no way she would have been able to restrain herself from kicking him square in the balls.

Fortunately for everyone, that didn't happen. Unfortunately for me, however, they didn't have Ernest Scared Stupid. As a matter of fact, they never had it. I went back a few times and always made sure to ask, and then at some point (like two weeks ago) I just stopped asking, having grown out of it.

But I'm a big ol' nostalgic softy, so these movies still hold a place in my heart.

At some point I'll probably Netflix Ernest Goes to Camp, which has this adorable/ridiculous scene in it.

It's a good thing the Germans never thought of this. They could have captured the world.

Fun Fact: The character of Ernest P. Worrell was created by an advertising company for use as a versatile pitchman. Among the companies Varney did commercials for as the character was Kroger's, a grocery store chain that's apparently big in Tennessee (speciality: sows ears).

Fun Fact Part Deux: Jim Varney (who died in 2000) had a near genius I.Q. level. When people would come up to him and begin to treat him as though he were actually Ernest, his normal response was to shout equations at them until this happened.

Fun Fact 33 1/3: The "P" in Ernest P. Worrell stands for "Powertools". No seriously. That's what it stands for.

Fun Fact Brett Favre: These "fun facts" are a lot easier to write than paragraphs with transitions.

Knowwhutimean?