Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Dick Miller is dead?



I missed that Dick Miller had died. I hadn't seen him in anything for a while, and he was the kind of actor who would show up in anything at anytime, so that was concerning, and five seconds of interneting revealed that we lost the great man in 2019.

He was always so good. Always classing up the joint with his protruding jaw and wise ass. For decades the sight of a Dick Miller face in any movie wasn't always a sign that the movie was ever going to be any good, but shit, at least it's got Dick Miller in it. 

He was the extra layer of seasoning on films that felt like a full meal - showing up in The Terminator,  Demon Knight, The Dirty Dozen, The Trip, Gremlins, Truck Turner, New York New York, Piranha, Police Squad, the Twilight Zone film, After Hours and a hundred other films. He was the voice of Oberon in a Justice league cartoon and had a substantial scene deleted from Pulp Fiction.

He was always fun. I still keep expecting him to pop up in something new, as some wise old mentor, or bitter old drunk, but the only way he is coming back now is as some sort of weird VFX thing.

(Don't. Don't do that. Don't bring him back as one of those weird VFX things. Just don't.)

I'm starting to really feel the loss of so many artists and writers and directors I grew up loving, all passing on into the great beyond in the past few years. The adults that were making all the great art and entertainment of my youth are now geriatric, and swiftly passing from this earth.

I was definitely shook by the recent loss of Alan Grant and I'm still dealing with the fact that we're not getting any more Carlos Ezquerra or Steve Dillon and I am seriously not ready for the cascade of other brilliant talents that made me what I am falling silent forever.

It's just a fact of life that it does end, but we can still rage against losing our best writers, artists and  character actors.

Dick Miller is dead.

...

Fuck it, at least we still got M Emmett Walsh!



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