The End - the Classic Film Obituary thread 2024

LINK

Robert Towne, the screenwriter as superstar whose Oscar-winning work on the 1974 classic Chinatown is widely recognized as the gold standard for movie scripts, has died. He was 89.

His takes on Los Angeles were etched with melancholy and painted the city as one of beauty and sadness. In Chinatown and Shampoo, gumshoe J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) and Beverly Hills hairdresser George Roundy (Warren Beatty) end up alone. (Towne collaborated often with those actors.

Towne also was highly regarded for his work as a script doctor, contributing the Marlon Brando garden scene to The Godfather (1972) and supplying crucial pieces to other films like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

When Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola accepted the Oscar for best screenplay (co-written with Mario Puzo), he thanked Towne from the stage. The writer had been prominently credited as a “special consultant” on Bonnie and Clyde after Beatty, the star and producer on that film, came to him for help.

LINK

Actress Evans Evans, best known for “Bonnie and Clyde,” has died at age 91.

A resident of Sherman Oaks, California, she passed away on June 16.

Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, on November 26, 1932, Evans was married to “The Manchurian Candidate” director John Frankenheimer from 1963 until his 2002 death from a stroke at age 72.

THR

Mitzi McCall, the delightful actress and sitcom writer who partnered with her husband, Charlie Brill, in a sketch comedy act that famously floundered between sets by The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, has died. She was 93.

The pint-sized Pittsburgh native also played the dry cleaner’s wife who wears a fur coat owned by Jerry’s mom on the 1994 Seinfeld episode “The Secretary,” and she was the mother of Carol Leifer’s optometrist character on the 1997-98 WB sitcom Alright Already.

And she wrote for shows including 13 Queens Boulevard, Eight Is Enough, One Day at a Time, ALF, Mr. Belvedere, Charles in Charge and Free for All.

Under contract at Paramount, she made her movie debut as a schoolgirl named Skeets in Norman Taurog’s You’re Never Too Young (1955), starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in a remake of Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor.



McCall appeared in the 1958 films War of the Satellites, Machine-Gun Kelly and The Cry Baby Killer, then joined the Paramount-based Jerry Lewis Comedy Workshop, where she met Brill for the first time.

She and Brill, who were married in January 1960, worked together often. In addition to their McCall & Brill act, they played a bickering wife and husband on “The Fun Couple” sketches during the second season (1968-69) of NBC’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In; appeared on Tattletales and Match Game; and were a couple on the CBS-USA crime drama Silk Stalkings, created by Stephen J. Cannell. (She played Fran, the free-spirited wife of Brill’s Capt. Harry Lipschitz.)

The pair thought they had gotten the break of a lifetime when they were booked by their manager, future Hunt for Red October producer Mace Neufeld, to make their national TV debut with a live performance on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964.

Unfortunately for them, that also was the day The Beatles were to perform on the show in their U.S. debut, and McCall & Brill were met with mostly silence from the throng of screaming teenagers there to see the Fab Four. “They didn’t have this expression then, but we sucked,” McCall said on a 2005 episode of NPR’s This American Life.

At Studio 50 in Manhattan, they did their act for Sullivan during rehearsals, but then the host called them into his dressing room. “What you’re doing is lovely, but not for tonight,” McCall remembered him saying. “My audience tonight is 14-year-old kids.”

Sullivan then rearranged their act, selecting the bits he wanted them to do. While they were scrambling to adjust, John Lennon stopped by, got a dime from Brill and bought a Coke out of the vending machine that was in the couple’s dressing room.