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Two weeks ago, shortly after finishing my last post, I read the obituary for Haskell Wexler, who received five Oscar noms and two wins. The one for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, 1966) was to be the last Oscar given out for a black-and-white film. A week later I was reading the obituary for Vilmos Zsigmond, another Oscar-winning cinematographer legend who first blew me away in 1971 with McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Deliverance. They say death comes in threes, but I don’t remember reading anything about the grim reaper adding vocations to his deadly lottery numbers. Should I worry about Christopher Doyle and Emmanuel Lubezki? My fears were, of course, unfounded, as the third showbiz obit for me to read came last Friday, and it was for Pat Harrington Jr., aka: Schneider on One Day at a Time. They all made their contributions in the field of entertainment, and each NYT obit had its surprises.
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Let’s first talk about the odd-man out, as I realize readers might think I’m tossing in Harrington’s name as some form of a cheap shot that pits two cinema titans against someone known instead for daytime TV. What first caught my eye about Harrington’s obit was the description of his Schneider character as a “would-be Lothario”, and “a benign, pencil-mustachioed lecher” – “whose ubiquitous, oleaginous presence quickly became a comic fixture of the show.” Oleaginous! What a wonderful word. Talk about onomatopoeia. What fascinated me was to learn that Harrington was the son of a vaudevillian and that his parents had forbidden him from entering show business. He had a bachelor’s in philosophy and government, followed by a master’s in political philosophy, and then served in the air force during the Korean War, after which he took a job in advertising. It was there that he invented the character of Guido Panzini, “a linguistically maladroit golf pro”. It started as a sales tool, but one night in the late 1950s his Guido persona was overheard by Jonathan Winters at a restaurant and he was invited on air. The 60s were a vibrant time for him, and he worked on films with James Garner, James Coburn, and even Elvis Presley.
Haskell Wexler also put in some wartime, but in his case it was joining the merchant marines during World War II where “the ship he was on was sunk by German torpedoes, and Mr. Wexler spent nearly two weeks in a lifeboat with 20 other people.” Director John Sayles recounts Wexler telling him the story of being torpedoed and mentioning how the U-boat surfaced after sinking his boat and everyone aboard the lifeboat thought they were about to be machine-gunned. Instead, “the captain lifted a small movie camera to document his kill, and Haskell remembered thinking, ‘I wonder if he’s shooting color or black and white?’” After the war came work in TV, a friendship with Conrad Hall that resulted in a commercial production company and, of course, Medium Cool (1969), with Robert Forster. The obit reminds me that I’ve been meaning to watch his documentary Who Needs Sleep? (2006), about overworked Hollywood film crews, and the one directed by his son, Tell Them Who You Are (2004).
I once had a close-encounter of the Zsigmond kind when he offered to come speak to students at our film classes, back in the late ’90s. Alas, his busy schedule intervened. One of the nice things about NYT’s obits is that they tell you how to properly pronounce people’s names (“full name is pronounced VIL-moshe ZHIG-mund”). Zsigmond managed to escape Soviet dominance of Hungary in the mid-’50s, along with other cinematographers, including his countryman Laszlo Kovac. Zsigmond played a pivotal role in composing shots wherein the whole of the image was more important than “making the star look gorgeous.” Crazy now to think that both Zsigmond and Kovac’s got their first job in Hollywood… “picking up trash in a park.” But soon they got their foot in the door by working on “low-budget genre films – nudies, horror flicks, beach movies – often together under the names Leslie Kovacs and William Zsigmond.” One of those films was used as the name for the trivia team headed by a friend of mine: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!?
Haskell Wexler stopped living on Sunday, December 27th. Zsigmond stopped living on Friday, January 1st. Pat Harrington Jr stopped living on Wednesday, January 6th. R.I.P.
