By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

Eulogy For Bingham Ray, By Ben Barenholtz, Eamonn Bowles, Tom Prassis, Arnie Sawyer

Posted Saturday, January 28th, 2012 - 1 Comment »
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(As read by John Cooper at the Sundance 2012 award ceremony.)

We are here to mourn, and honor, an icon of the film industry.  And as we begin we can hear his voice whispering in our ears, “Don’t fuck it up, Kitty Kats!”  Followed by a huge roar of sarcastic laughter.

This was Bingham Ray to a tee.

It sounds strange to talk about Bingham in the past tense. Even stranger to admit to ourselves that our dear friend is no longer with us.

We who knew him through the good and the bad years mourn the loss of a true friend, a bad poker player, a fierce competitor and a raconteur of the highest order.

Starting out as a projectionist at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City, he rose to become one of the handful of giants in our cozy corner of the film world, intimately involved with some of the figures whose images he used to project. He was loved by actors and directors in a way that few people on this side of the fence are. But as with everything else, he had no problem challenging them when he thought they were wrong. And they usually loved and respected him more for it.

He was incapable of not speaking his mind, almost to a tourette’s level. As you’d imagine, this led to many legendary beefs with many people. This is also reflected in the astounding number of companies at which he worked over his career, a career that almost perfectly paralleled the rise of independent film in America. But anyone who truly loved film could not really dislike Bingham. His knowledge was encyclopedic, fueled purely by enthusiasm, not some nerdy desire to impress and he could talk about directors or quote dialogue for hours.

If you were fortunate to be his friend or within spitting distance he could suck up the oxygen around you and beguile you with his tales in the trenches.  When Bingham was in the room, it was like somebody had turned up the volume on the stereo. Tales of triumphs and tales of struggles, with incredible, sometimes excruciating, detail, bringing you into HIS world.  All the highs and lows he experienced.  Even as Bingham was telling the lamest story or singing one of the many silly ditties he would make up, stuff we’d heard so many times before, we’d break up seeing him rippling in laughter, tears in his eyes, paralyzed by his own punch line.

His mischievous smile will be forever seared in our memory and someday when we are together again after all the cards are dealt, Bingham will reveal to us the punch line of this joke he started telling so many years ago.

Our deepest thoughts go out to his incredible wife, Nancy, truly his rock through all the highs and lows, and their three wonderful children, Becca, Annabel and Nick.

The world lost some of its luster this week when Bingham passed away.

His laughter still echoes and we are laughing with him.  A stupid thing like death cannot take that away from us.

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Posted in Movie City News, Press Releases | 1 Comment »

One Response to “Eulogy For Bingham Ray, By Ben Barenholtz, Eamonn Bowles, Tom Prassis, Arnie Sawyer”

  1. Richard Maynard says:
    January 29, 2012 at 11:46 pm

    I met Bingham in college in the Fall of 1974. This is the same Bingham I knew back then. And the same Bingham I saw last in the summer of 2010. I think about him every day.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon