We’re Going to Need a Bigger Hearse

(An epitaphany shared with Don)

Or
So Long, Old Chum
(Props to Craig)

Or
French Disconnection
(Additional Accolades for Craig)

Or
2008: The Year We Make Compost
Roy Scheider, whose unique approach to good cop-bad cop with Martin Short cracked notorious criminal mastermind Jim Belushi, has jumped the shark, succumbing to a staph infection at the age of 75. Best remembered as cinema’s greatest shark hunter in Jaws I and II, Scheider scored a Best Supporting Actor nomination as Cloudy Russo, Popeye Doyle’s partner in The French Connection and a Best Actor nomination as Joe Gideon, the chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing, workaholic, alcoholic, choreographer and director in All That Jazz. He was also the inept secret agent in Marathon Man that lets a 70-year-old Laurence Olivier get the drop on him, thus setting up the world’s most famous dental exam for Dustin Hoffman. He was the aging star Billy Young, and theoretically teammate of Billy Chapel, depending on your opinion of the impermeability of the 5th wall, in Tiger Town, showed that it was possible to make a sci-fi movie that made 2001: A Space Odyssey look linear in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. On the small screen, Scheider played Nathan Bridger, Commander of the submarine SeaQuest DSV, until he bitched about how much the show sucked and got himself out of his contract and Russian crime lord Fyodor Chevchenko on Third Watch. Despite the successes, Scheider had no problem with paycheck roles, playing the president in the Dolph Lundgren opus The Peacemaker and jumping into the sequels Dracula II and Dracula III, despite not having appeared in Dracula 2000.