From Jawas to Jaws

Lars, But Not Least

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No New Hope
Phil Brown, best known as Darth Vader’s stepbrother, Tatooine moisture farmer, Stormtrooper target practice and Luke Skywalker’s joykill uncle Owen Lars, has died at the age of 89. Brown's 8 minutes on screen in Star Wars as a simple farmer trying to make a better life, killed because of his ingrate nephew’s stupid droids, overshadows a career dating to the 1930s, when he graduated Stanford and joined the famed Group Theater in New York. He worked regularly on Broadway, and like many others made the jump to Hollywood in the 1940s, where he was a founder of the Actor’s Laboratory, a renowned stage theater that was later determined to be an incubator for Communists. Brown was frequently second lead male who didn’t get Jean Arthur, Jean Craine, Hedy Lamarr, Ruth Hussey, Donna Reed or Claudette Colbert. He also directed the movie The Harlem Globetrotters, but fell pray to the Communist blacklist and spent the next 40 years on stage and screen in Europe, based out of England, where he was found during the filming of Star Wars: A New Hope. And you thought he was just the guy who pumped George Lucas’ gas one morning. Other films included Superman, as a state senator, Cold War classic The Bedford Incident and The Camp on Blood Island.

Shawn’s Team One – Oldest knew Brown was no longer strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark, and joins the four-way tie in second with the solo hit. This hit is our 8th of the year. In the record-breaking 2004-05 campaign, the 8th hit came on March 26.

The leaderboard
1st Monty - Comedy of Terrors
2 hits, 22.85714286 points
2nd Matt
1 hit, 20 points
(tie) Paul - Pushing Daisies
1 hit, 20 points
(tie) Dawn - Ashes to Ashes
1 hit, 20 points
(tie) Shawn – Team One – Oldest
1 hit, 20 points

Benched
(Monty strikes again)

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Under the Surface
(Craig: the Revenge)

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The Six Feet Deep

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We’re Going to Need a Bigger Casket
Peter Benchley, washed-up novelist who needed aquatic themes to get it up like an S&M fetishist needs a ball gag and a studded collar, has died of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 65. His curriculum aquae reveals his range: The Deep, The Island, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, Beast (Small seacoast town experiences mysterious disappearances and a wrecked boat; giant squid, rare for this area, is to blame, but the local politicians resist calls to close the beach; finally, the police hire a crusty sea captain to help track down the beast. Sound familiar?), White Shark (about a Nazi experiment mixing man, fish and machine gone awry, revealing why President Bush is so concerned about animal-human hybrids) and Amazon. But of course he’s best known for Jaws, and no author has ever owed more to a director. Steven Spielberg saw a kernel of an idea in Benchley’s overwritten, overwrought mess about infidelity, organized crime, class struggles in small New England towns, and, oh yeah, a killer shark. Spielberg’s movie had as much to do with Benchley’s novel as James Frey’s memoir had to do with James Frey’s life. In later years, Benchley tried to make amends by devoting time to clearing up the misconceptions about sharks that Jaws helped perpetuate. A more appropriate conciliatory effort would have been chucking that typewriter into the deep blue he couldn’t stop writing about.

Honky goes Conky
(Props to Craig)

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Uncovered
(Kudos to Monty)

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Zebra Earns His Stripes

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Cover of Darkness
Another rough week for television icons, as a week after Al “Grandpa” Lewis died, we lose that fat, white guy from The Jeffersons. Franklin Cover, best known as Tom Willis, George and Louise’s neighbor in another deluxe apartment in the sky, died at 77 of pneumonia about two months after a heart attack. At first much of the humor on the show was racial, with George referring to Tom as a honky and a zebra for his interracial marriage to Helen, played by Lenny Kravitz’ mother Roxie Roker. Sherman Helmsley eventually asked the writers to stop having George call Tom a honky, arguing that he would not refer to a friend with a racial slur. When the writers refused, Helmsley simply mumbled the term when it was in the script, ruining enough takes for the writers to get the hint. In addition to his years as the comic foil to opinionated and blustery George, Cover had a number of guest stints on other programs, including the first episode of ER, Will & Grace, Coach and Mad About You.

Curiosity Killed the Writer
(An epitaphany shared with Monty)
And the two robbers didn’t help any. Alan Shalleck, who collaborated with H.A. Rey’s widow to continue the Curious George franchise with new books and television programs, was killed during a robbery at his mobile home. Within two days, two men had been arrested, charged with the murder and confessed to the murder, because, let’s face it, anyone deciding to make it rich by robbing mobile homes probably wasn’t trying to raise the scratch for his Mensa application. After approaching Margret Rey in 1977, following the death of H.A., Shalleck was the writer and director of more than 100 5-minute episodes of Curious George for The Disney Channel. Shalleck and Ray also wrote more than two dozen books, compared to the original seven written by Ray and her husband.

Score Settled
In the history of cinema, there are a few seminal sounds – Al Jolson uttering the first words heard on film, Fred Astaire tapping his way through Top Hat, and Godzilla shattering the post-war Toyko calm with his distinctive roar. The man who gave voice to the embodiment of the Atomic Age by rubbing a contrabass with a resin-coated leather glove and reverberating the sound in a recording studio has died at the age of 91. Akira Ifukube was an award-winning composer, then found work with some of Japan’s leading directors, including Akira Kurosawa, and was Toho Studio’s pre-eminent musical mind, scoring more than 250 movies in a 50-year career. However he escapes the dustbin of history for his work in scoring 11 Godzilla movies, developing the march that would become Godzilla’s theme music and the distinctive stomp by beating a kettle drum with a thick rope knotted at the end. So important to the Godzilla films was the music and the sound effects, that Ifukube became regarded as one of Godzilla’s four fathers along with director Ishiro Honda, producer Tomiyuki Tanaka and special effects director Eiji Tsubaraya.