Well, I just saw that Charlton Heston has passed away. A lot of people made fun of him for his politics, and I must say he was on the opposite side of things from me but I met him once and he could not have been more gracious and kind. When I happened to run into him, I thought I would just make a brief comment and scurry away - Theresa and I had watched TOUCH OF EVIL the night before, by sheer coincidence - but he engaged me fully, telling me how much better he thought he could have done in the film, and why, and what he thought he should have done differently, and it was a touching thing to hear. Theresa and I were thrilled with the film, of course, and I had looked it up in Peter Bogdanovich's book on Orson Welles, so I was able to remind him that Welles had a quite different idea about his performance, praising it unreservedly. Well, anyway, that was the time I met Charlton Heston. I don't suppose I'll ever forget how he began his first sentence to me: "Orson and I ..." That's certainly the last time anyone will ever start a sentence to me that way. As the obituary in the New York Times points out, he was an early and vocal supporter of Martin Luther King and I know we can all get behind that! So let's remember the good parts, not some of the stuff that came later. What do we want from our old men? Nobody's perfect! Not even young people, it turns out. And honestly it's just not polite to snicker at the old folks, even when they are wrong and you have everything figured out. Right, Michael Moore? (I like you, too! Isn't it all right if I like you both in different ways and for different reasons?) WILL PENNY (co-starring "blog" acquaintance Anthony Zerbe, who told me about - SPOILER ALERT! - spearing Heston in THE OMEGA MAN) is a great movie, too.
