By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com

Remembering Bill Paxton

Posted Sunday, February 26th, 2017 - Comments Off on Remembering Bill Paxton
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The phone rang. I picked it up. The voice on the other end said, “My name’s Bill Paxton and I’d like to show you something.”

It was almost thirty years ago. I was writing a column called CineFile at the Los Angeles Times. While Paxton offered a pleasing balance of modesty and persistence, he needn’t have been concerned. I was already a fan from his supporting turns in Aliens and Near Dark.

He wanted to show me a music video that he had made for his band Martini Ranch. A few days later, he introduced me to his musical partner Andew Rosenthal and fellow actor-musician Rick Rossovich. Though details have blurred over the decades, I remember both the music and video being unconventional, ironic and engaging. It wasn’t what I expected. It was a lot better.

I ran into Bill Paxton often, although it’s was about five years since our last encounter. He was honestly one of my favorite people for his warmth, humor and energy.

At the Chicago International Film Festival in 1991, I saw him just before to the premiere of The Dark Backward. He was gleeful. Writer-director Adam Rifkin had given him the best role yet – an unrepentantly amoral womanizer, drug-addled larger-than-life character. He reveled in playing against type. After the screenings we talked for hours about the film, acting, music and the future.

Bill was movie-star handsome and largely served as the anchor to whatever chaos was on the rest of the screen. He was the rock in Apollo 13, Tombstone, Titanic and many, many other pictures. He was the leading man that wanted to be the comic foil, nemesis or colorful counter-puncher.

In 2001, we met up after his directorial debut Frailty about a serial killing. Bill cast himself as the killer’s abusive father in flashbacks and I wasn’t wholly merciless (in jest) with cracks about going behind the camera to get a good part and whether the experience was cathartic enough to let him move on to “more pleasant” stuff.

He directed only one other feature and then found a career as the lead in the series “Big Love.”

Bill Paxton was good at whatever he did and he did a lot of things. He should have done a lot more and it seems inconceivable that’s all come to an end. I’ll miss him.

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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