Saturday, November 9, 2002
Jonathan Harris is dead. I just read a story on his passing. They described him as the “flamboyantly fussy actor who portrayed the dastardly, cowardly antagonist Dr. Zachary Smith on the 1960s Sci-Fi show “Lost In Space.” As a friend of mine once put it “If you grew up watching that show as a kid, he was the first guy you were exposed to who was like that. You weren’t sure what it was, but there was something a little off there.” That is, unless you had a bachelor uncle whose name was never mentioned without a wink from your parents . (This is a bit more painful for me now, having recently become an uncle out of wedlock.)
Smith was an American Original, even though he used an affected, fruity, quasi-British accent. He was the ultimate coward, shrieking like somebody’s tortured aunt at the slightest hint of danger and weeping uncontrollably at the drop of a hat. He made ten-year-old Billy Mumy look like Clint Eastwood. And he was always engaged in great confrontations with Don Robinson, the prototypical helmet-haired alpha male who only ever uttered “Smith, I oughtta break your neck.” To which Smith would reply in his droll lisp “Major, please…spare me your venomous barbs.” I don’t think you’d find a man of Harris’s disposition cast as such a blatant coward these days, as it would be considered an offensive stereotype.. which is too bad, because he did a hell of a job.
(Editor’s update: After writing this blurb, I did some Internet research on Harris to see if there was any public record of his sexual preference. He was married for sixty-four years and had a son, as it turns out. Of course, his wife was Tony Randall..)
“It’s getting to the point where I’m no fun anymore” – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Neil
Could there be a greater tragedy? When Dylan Thomas suggested raging against the dying light, I think what he was really getting at was raging against being no fun anymore. Who really has a problem with the unfun dying? We may make like we do for the sake of grieving widows but underneath most of us are handling it fine. Fun, in all forms, can take on widely different dimensions. There are those who are big fun by virtue of being insufferable pains in the ass. Some of these people are entirely aware of how much fun they are and others are not. I appreciate this form of covert, subversive fun. It differs from the Robin Williams overt brand where one is always openly in need of response. The covert and miserably fun often seem content to toil in obscurity. They ask little in return for being miserably fun and are often content to go it alone. For this I applaud them.
Even more rare and perhaps most coveted are the unintentionally covert fun. So uncommon is this quality that I tend to think it might only exist in the minds of those deciding who these people are. I put Giants baseball announcer Duane Kuiper in this category. Kuiper is a lot of fun because underneath his play-by-play calling there seems to be an unspoken level of adequately-controlled depression. He jokes about the one major league home run he hit because he can. How many of us even get to the major leagues? His tone and demeanor make these self-deprecating barbs more poignant and suggest genuine darkness and despair. The beauty of this is that I’ve no doubt made it up in my own head and nobody else (including Kuiper) is giving it any thought.
Everybody funny .. now you funny, too.
Semi non sequiturs notwithstanding, George Thorogood is my kind of rock star. He’s got that Delaware blues thing down well and opened for the Stones in ’81. Still, he placed more importance on playing semi-pro baseball and often put his promising musical career on hold to do so. How much more delusional could a grown man get? He was lucky enough to sell albums with titles like “Get a Haircut” and write songs with lyrics like “I really, really, really, really, really, really like girls,” yet cocky enough to pursue the one-in-a-million dream of being a pro ballplayer. Now there’s some fun.
So Ron Howard won a few Academy Awards for his latest movie.. A Simple Mind or A Beautiful Plan or something like this. I didn’t see it. I like Ron Howard alright.. I mean, he was a cool little kid on The Andy Griffith Show, sporting some fine short-sleeved shirts and a truly earnest face. And his stint as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days held water, at least for the first few seasons when he played it down and was a solid counter to Henry Winkler’s Fonz who was still wearing the much cooler blue, cloth jacket at that stage and not saying much. (Winkler lost any credibility he might have had as a James Dean figure shortly after switching to leather and getting bigger speaking parts.) It’s as a director that I started having real problems with Howard. Films like “Backdraft” and “The Paper” are packed with so much dramatic Hollywood cheese, they just scream “Opie’s A Big Boy Now!” Saying his style lacks understatement doesn’t cover it. He seems way too caught up in the idea that everyone still pictures him wearing a letterman’s jacket and drinking a milkshake at Arnold’s. But I’m certain that he will hit his stride eventually, when he gets the courage to go against studio support, finance his own feature, and move younger brother Clint up from bit part to starring role. He’s got the money now from a string of commercial hits, so why not put some of it up himself to pair Clint with Cameron Diaz or whomever in a romantic epic? That’s when I will admit that Opie has truly arrived. (4/5/02)