I never felt comfortable calling him
Richard. Even after we'd corresponded for a few years, even after I'd met him in person, I preferred to
cheat in my e-mail salutations and start off simply with “Hi.”
This, mind you, was my problem, not his. “RC,” – as he signed
his e-mails, and as I came to think of him – was an uncommonly kind
gent, one of the single friendliest movie experts I've ever known.
He knew what he loved about cinema and
pop culture in general (more on that in the second part of this
piece), but he kept his mind open about the things he wasn't as fond
of or had never heard of (he remained as curious at 71 as I'm sure he
had been at 15). What permeated his writing, both public and private,
was an enthusiasm for culture that was thoroughly infectious. He
loved sharing his obsessions and if he discovered that you were
already attuned to his wavelength, he reached out and said hi.
Which is exactly how I first made his
acquaintance. In the mid-Nineties, a publicist for a distributor of
Hong Kong features told me that “Richard Corliss from Time
magazine” had told her that my show Media Funhouse
was covering HK cinema – many of us were utterly obsessed by it in
that period – and I should be put on her list.
A few years later, in 2000, I received a phone
call from Time office asking if I could supply
images from my show to accompany a piece Corliss had written about
it. I was delighted to read the review, since he had focused on the
range of material I covered (from “high” to “low”), and he
found time to convey the joys of the mighty Nelson de la Rosa.
I wrote to him to thank him and ask if
I could take him out to lunch (this review having been a major boon
for the show, both then and now). He said he had a policy of not
meeting the people he wrote about – a policy he later thankfully
broke – but what happened after that was that we became e-mail
correspondents.
I will be eternally grateful for RC's
continual plugging of the show and this blog in his writings, but
(and I really do mean this), I was even happier about our e-mail
exchanges. The fact that he would supply me with more info about
something I'd covered on the show, correct me on a small point, or
just make a connection between that item and something else in
popular culture, was a delight.
Being a research junkie myself, I could
sense in his writing how much he loved to “connect the dots”
between cultural phenomena, as well as just being able to rhapsodize
about something he clearly loved but was probably not going to be
able to write about for Time (as the years went
by, he continued to be one of the magazine's major film critics, but
unfortunately wrote less and less about his other cultural passions).
Some of the pieces of the puzzle came
together for me when I read in Richard T. Jameson's tribute to him
that RC was plagued by insomnia (most likely the way he found the
Funhouse). Our informational and fanboy e-mails usually had very
extreme time stamps – I wrote to him very late at night and then
received replies that were written in the very early morning hours.
E-mail may have none of the personal touch of the handwritten letters
of yore, but there is something more personal and intimate about the
notes written at the beginning and end of the day.
At the end of 2012 my hard drive blew
up and I lost a decade's worth of e-mail, including all of the notes
from Corliss received during that time. (I thought I was backing up
e-mail in addition to documents; in the blink of an eye, I found out
I was wrong.) I notice that in one of the e-mails I do have from him
(post late-2012) he notes that he, too, lost something over the years
– “a database [of information about Hong Kong movies] I compiled
over about seven years in my HK mania period. That 60,000-line list
was lost, alas, when TIME changed from Quark to WoodWing.” (Damn!)
 |
| RC with some director-mogul type. |
Thus, I don't have the bulk of our
correspondence with him, but am left with the memories of what we
gabbed about to each other in print: I shared certain pieces of
“news” (usually deaths or appearances of local cartoon exhibits)
and he passed on obits as well, while also sending other bits of
news.
He told me in person that the only
Funhouse episodes he wound up fast-forwarding through were my Jerry
Lewis tributes (but he did note that I knew my subject well), but he
was very good about sending me weird articles about Jerry that he had
come across. He also would reflect on a topic I tossed to him, and
supply anecdotes, odd trivia, and, occasionally, his own memories of
having encountered the item for the first time.
At points he would let me know about
non-review items he'd just published online: “At TIME.com, I keep
jumping into the quicksand of ridiculous projects, like seeing and
rating every available version of LES MISÉRABLES or spending too much time defending Patti Page against obit writers who never
forgave her for 'Doggie in the Window.'”
We shared a fascination for the
well-intentioned but poorly run Air American Radio. Corliss
championed Rachel Maddow from the beginning (it was obvious to all
who listened that Al Franken didn't care about what he was doing,
Janeane Garofalo was a walking timebomb of crazed emotion, and Randi
Rhodes was extremely knowledgeable but also a very hard listen).
Richard – it's too late now, but I
think I can now bring myself to refer to him by his first name –
championed Rachel early on, saying she had “a natural radio
personality: sensible, charming, with an easy-going commitment and
flashes of impish wit.” He followed her through all of her Air
America incarnations. (I dropped off the train when she was on at
5:00 a.m. for one stinkin' hour, but even during that very lean
period he listened regularly.)
He was very happy when she wound up
being the only person to emerge as a “star” from the AAR fiasco.
His overjoyed piece on her new primetime show is here. To my
knowledge Rachel hasn't acknowledged the passing of one of her
earliest champions in the press, although she was so pleased by his
initial write-up that he and his lovely wife Mary attended a party
thrown by Rachel and her partner in the West Village.
Richard was thus a valuable
cheerleader, and he was great at conveying his unbridled enthusiasm.
Around 2009, I became utterly obsessed with the work of an amazing
crop of British humorists (standups, actor/writers, TV producers) and
began to show their work a LOT on the Funhouse TV show. I had a
feeling I might be driving away some of my regular viewers who were
more attuned to my presentations of European filmmakers and vintage
American film and TV.
Richard tapped into my enthusiasm and
wrote, thanking me for my on-air “101s” about the work of Stewart
Lee and Armando Iannucci, among others (those were the two whose work
he particularly cottoned to). He passed on notes about his
fascination with Jerry Springer: the Opera, the
controversial musical cowritten by Lee that was decried as
sacrilegious and has been rarely staged in the U.S. (He had seen it
in London.) He encouraged me to dig even deeper into this well of
recent British comedy by, again, supplying anecdotes, compliments,
and info, in a discursive, wonderful-to-read fashion.
He also dropped lines after my “Easter
blasphemy” episodes, wherein I show Christian kitsch to acknowledge
my status as an ex-Catholic (very ex-). His take on the one that
aired just a few weeks back was that it was as another
“great/dreadful” episode. (That was intended and taken as a
compliment; the show contained a bushel of new Xtian kitsch I'd
discovered at Honest Ed's, as well as an amazingly
sentimental/corny/bizarre film with an Xtian message called The
Drum Beats Twice.)
At one point in e-mail he began
enumerating the ways in which the new Superman movie portrayed Soup
as a Christ figure – he concluded the recitation with this remark:
“Funny, those refrigerator-magnets of memory from a Catholic-school
education....”
I finally met Richard in late 2011 when
he and Mary invited me to a gathering they had celebrating a book
published by the brilliant film historian David Thomson. He was
exactly as amiable, generous, and friendly in person as he had been
in e-mail (Mary is a delight as well). I inquired about his movie
collection and was shown walls of beautifully crafted shelves (on
wheels so as to “disappear” into the wall) containing DVDs and
probably a few thousand VHS tapes.
We spoke about our former infatuation
with HK cinema (which petered out for most of us in the late 1990s
after Hong Kong became a “special administrative region” –
read: colony – of mainland China). He also showed me a shelf of
tapes that contained episodes of the Funhouse (my work was shelved
below his Disney VHS collection – he loved animation deeply – and
above “miscellaneous auteurs”).
The last time I contacted him, the
wellspring of his generosity flowed again. I had begun to write a
piece on the comic novelist Max Shulman – something Richard and I
had talked about back in late 2013 (the finished piece appears
below). He had started research for a piece on Shulman that I believe
would've dovetailed with the release of the complete Many
Loves of Dobie Gillis DVD box set.
I wrote to him asking if I could use
quotes from e-mails he'd written me back in '13 (with citation). He
gave his blessing and sent along his notes for the Shulman profile
piece he never wrote – profile pieces were indeed the kind of thing
he did brilliantly, so more's the pity this particular one got swept
away. He mentioned that he was considering resurrecting the piece in
2019, on the occasion of Shulman's centennial, “but who plans that
far ahead?”
In the meantime he attached his “raw
notes” for the piece that he never wrote. I wound up not making use
of them in my writing – the quotes from his e-mails offering a
capsule “summing-up” of Shulman were more valuable, so I went
with those, citing him as the source for the quotes. The very act of
him sending his notes on again defined him for me – *no* writer
sends another writer his/her notes unless they are close friends, or
the one who has done the research has been assured that he/she will
get a nice credit on the finished piece (or cash in hand).
The fact that he sent them on to help
me write the piece was an offhanded gesture that I don't think he
thought about in much depth, but, again, demonstrated his
selflessness and generosity. He thought it might be fun to see me pay
tribute to Shulman, and so he sent on the fruit of his labor to make
that happen. Believe me when I say that doesn't happen a lot in the
world of film reviewing.
*****
Richard and I corresponded a lot about
celebrity deaths. He enjoyed my “Deceased Artiste” tributes and I
absolutely loved his obituaries on time.com. I consider several of
his obits to be definitive, sprinkled as they were with anecdotes,
effortless puns (he loved a good – or in fact bad – pun), and
historical context for the work of the person being profiled.
(Perhaps that was the secret right there – his obits read as
post-mortem profiles, not as “let us now mourn this wonderful
performer...” eulogies; they were introductions as much as
farewells.)
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| RC and Mary Corliss |
Corliss the writer wasn't just a great
wordsmith, he was an excellent (and quite dedicated) researcher. His
obits for celebrities dealt with their public image, but he always
delighted in illuminating the more obscure corners of their careers
and connecting the dots between their work and that of their
contemporaries (or successors).
Because of his own expertise in the
craft of paying tribute to “the passing parade” and his very
sudden passing, I find it very difficult to write anything like a
linear Deceased Artiste tribute for him – thus this lopsided
collection of very fond memories. It's a helluva lot easier to say
goodbye to someone you never knew in person.
Richard overcame that obstacle
beautifully in his heartfelt tributes to his friends Andrew Sarris
and Roger Ebert, and his critical hero, Manny Farber. I was always
impressed by his obits, so when confronted by the dilemma of how to
pay tribute to him, I was brought back to his sunny (the word he used
to describe Max Shulman) summations of the lives and careers of his
fellow critics.
Of the three, Ebert was the most famous
and yet the least significant writer (my opinion, not that of
Corliss). The two remained friends for decades, even though Richard
had earlier written an extremely eloquent piece lamenting the
dumbing-down of film criticism, which he partially attributed to the
Siskel & Ebert method of rating movies as if they were Roman
emperors passing judgment on gladiators. (I already expressed my
opinion about the twinkle-twins of Film Crit Lite here).
 |
| R. Schickel, K. Turan, R. Ebert, R. Corliss |
Interestingly, in his obit Richard acknowledged
Ebert's skill at “branding” himself: “He could not have
achieved this ceaseless prodigality if he did not also have an
enlightened capitalist’s organizational mastery of his midsize
empire of journalism and movie love. You don’t build a career like
his — actually, there was no career like his — without optimism,
discipline and a sharp business sense. He made millions and earned
every penny.”
He noted that their friendship began
when Corliss put Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on
his 10 best list – this when he was writing for The
National Review. (I was always surprised that the very
liberal Richard had worked for that pub early in his career.) Back to
him praising BVD in print: “As amused as he was
amazed by the citation, Roger would frequently refer to it, if only
to raise doubts in the minds of listeners about my own critical
acuity.”
The strangest note in the obit is
struck when Richard reveals that the only time he and Mary ever met
Roger in Manhattan (where they lived for their nearly half-century of
marriage) was “a night in the late ’70s when the three of us went
to the sex club Plato’s Retreat, as observers only, tiptoeing on a
boardwalk in the middle of the room as women and their hairy mates in
socks took their pleasures.”
An image out of a Jerzy Kosinski novel
to be sure (Jerzy used to go there to scope out the action as an
observer), but quite wholesome compared to the story Russ Meyer
delighted in telling, wherein Ebert was sitting poolside and flapping
his feet like like a seal as a comely lass went down on him (that
image will not leave my head – Russ, we didn't need to know
that....).
Corliss' goodbye to Andrew Sarris (seen at right with unidentified Brit) was
as tied up with the critic's art as much as his life. Sarris was
clearly an “elder” figure to him (there was 16 years between the
two gentlemen); he referred to the man he knew as Andy as “the
Galileo of film critics.” Given the space to summarize what Sarris
had taught us about film, Richard pretty much summed his own
philosophy (since this was, of course, his wording anyways): “the
Voice... gave him a weekly pulpit to promote his
view that the director was the author of a film and, more important,
that cinema was a form of aesthetic expression as rich as life and
much more beautiful.”
The most interesting reflection he
makes on Sarris' work is about his “gerontophilia.” At first
Richard doubted Sarris' premise (formulated when he himself *wasn't*
an old duffer) that “advancing age can stoke genius, and a high
hack can grow, not decline, into an auteur. But now I am touched by
the sentiment. It pointed to his respect for the old moviemakers whom
he had rescued from anonymity. As Disraeli said, and Andy loved to
repeat, 'In the long run, we are all dead.' That is true. It is also
true that, thanks to Sarris, some directors and films will never die.
He was the prime reviver of our ragged, treasured art.”
The third and final Corliss obit I will
spotlight here is one he wrote for a figure who seemed to truly daunt
him, Manny Farber. Farber is well-regarded by film critics and
students, but is unknown to most moviegoers (unless they go “deep”
into the well of brilliant writing about film). That piece by Corliss
ends up being about his admiration for Farber's work, his admiration
for Farber himself, and, ultimately, Richard's own love of research.
He was fond of summing up the figures
in his profiles physically. (If called upon to do so about Richard, I
would have to say he had the serene countenance of a wise old polar
bear – with striking black eyebrows.) While Sarris was a “panda
man,” his description of Farber dips into B-movie mythology: “his
receding hairline gave him a forehead as high as Jeff Morrow the
Metalunan's in This Island Earth, and inside this
gigantic braincase all manner of creatures crawled, gnawed and sang.”
He includes a rather startling story to
give one a sense of Farber's deep-seated cantankerousness. In 1990,
they were both at the Telluride Film Festival, and “after I'd taken
some conversational flight at what [Farber] considered too great an
altitude or length, he stared dreamily into the middle distance and
wondered aloud, 'Do you think that if I broke your jaw they'd have to
wire it shut?' ” (So much for impressing your heroes.)
The most interesting thing about this
obit, and the reason I'm closing out on it, is because Farber's death
caused Richard to reflect on who really were, in his estimation, the
best writers on film (or as he phrased it, the critics whose work
“makes me jealous”). He offers a list (not a “listicle,” mind
you) in the piece that I will reproduce, since it does seem like he
had a solid grasp on the cream of the crop.
They were (in what appears to be
chronological order) Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Robert Warshow,
Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Richard T. Jameson, J. Hoberman (whom he
cited as a Farber disciple), Ed Gonzalez (one of the “new guys”),
and David Thomson.
But that digression into creating a
Sarris-ian “pantheon” of film critics isn't all. Richard also
recounts his attempts to discover which reviews Farber had written
for Time when he was the main film critic for the
magazine for a mere five months from 1949 to 1950. The reviews had no
bylines, but he discovered that they contained identification in the
copies kept in the Time offices. He thus was very
excited to find “undiscovered” writings of Farber's (which, he
noted to me in an e-mail, he was disappointed to see didn't make it
into the book collecting his work).
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| RC and Margaret O'Brien |
He provides a number of film titles and
then instructs the interested reader to check them out, if they
happen to have a time.com subscription. He had noted to me that he
had one, since the Time search engine is
impossible to navigate as a non-paying “outsider” – as is
easily demonstrated by putting Richard's own name into it and finding
generic links to older issues of the mag and not a full list of his
many, many reviews and articles available for free.
What is interesting is that, even in a
“summation” of an artist's career, Richard was able to turn the
assignment into one of discovery. Therefore the only way I could
think of to truly honor Richard's memory was to publicly spotlight
how much of his art was bound up in his love of research (not just
the viewing, but the reading, the consulting of books, the scouring
of the Net). He was a master at it, it was part and parcel of his
enthusiasm for cinema.
I want to further discuss his writing
in the weeks to come, but for now I will simply say that he won't be
forgotten. The Funhouse will always be dedicated in a very strong
sense to his memory.
My in-depth discussion of Corliss's most important book, Talking Pictures, can be found here.
