Earlier this evening I had just finished a yummy dinner of homemade soup with Japanese noodles, miso/lime broth, chicken, carrots, seaweed, and some hot red peppers I bought at the farmers market on Friday evening. I had a great workout this morning and then proceeded to knock the hell out of a to-do list full of tasks, and I even found time to finally unload some winter clothes from my truck at my storage space and sort through a bunch of cold weather clothes before taking a big load to the Salvation Army down the street. The sunset was lovely and the soup was tasty and filling — a nice ending to a productive good day. That’s when I saw a headline on my phone informing me that Sam Shepard had died.

Shepard, his plays, his prose, his films and his persona as an American artist all loom large in my pantheon of creative heroes. I actually admire and enjoy the work of lots of writers, actors and directors, but Shepard is way up on that mountain for me. Shepard is right up there with the Beat Generation which inspired him, and Patti Smith his one time lover and collaborator. Shepard is on that mountain next to other great anti-leading-man actors from the 1980s like Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts at their very best. Among the rocks you can see Shepard sharing a handful of mushroom buttons with Eugene O’Neill and rolling another smoke with Nina Simone whom Shepard saw performing while he was a busboy at the Village Gate when he first moved to New York City. He plays his beloved drums on an outcropping with Jimmy Dean and Brando — they both loved to play the drums and what if Shepard had had the chance to put them on his stage with his words in their mouths?

Motel Chronicles will always be one of my favorite books, and I’ll never forget the Lobster Man from “Cowboy Mouth,” and I’ll never forget Shepard as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff appearing out of the red flames and black smoke from his wrecked plane putting one foot in front of the other crossing the desert walking straight at the camera; not speaking or crying or screaming or yelling, just walking, right into his own legend.

Adios, Sam. Here’s the man himself looking back on his big screen breakthrough in Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven…

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Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre kicks off its massive Robert Altman retrospective this weekend. The series includes 19 features and 3 short films, but completists might notice that one of the director’s earliest projects didn’t make the cut.

For me, the most important period in American culture is that window during the 1940′s and 1950′s when European Modernism finally comes to the U.S. and it’s remade with an emphasis on the unfettered expression of the single artist’s voice, resulting in the incendiary pronouncements of Beat literature, Be-Bop jazz, Abstract Expressionism in art, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Method acting.

Lee Strasberg stripped the acting system devised by Konstantin Stanislavsky down to its psychological techniques and taught it to his Actor’s Studio students starting in the 1950′s. One of his prized pupils was James Dean who — along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift — would revolutionize acting on both stage and screen.

Dean died in 1955 at the age of 24. Two years later Warner Brothers released The James Dean Story. The directing credit is shared by Altman and George A. George. Here’s the Turner Classic Movies take on the flick, its subject and its unconventional director…

While it’s rarely shown in retrospectives of his work, Robert Altman’s The James Dean Story (1957), is easily one of the more offbeat and poetic examples of documentary filmmaking. Officially cited as his second feature (Altman’s first was The Delinquents, 1957), The James Dean Story was co-produced and co-directed with George W. George, a former writing partner of Altman’s, as a serious exploration of the young actor’s mystique and impact on the youth culture of the fifties. Rounding out Altman’s crew was cinematographer Lou Lombardo who shot the bulk of the interviews and transition footage for the film and would remain a close collaborator of Altman’s for many years.

Originally Marlon Brando was approached to do the film’s narration and he gave it serious consideration. In Robert Altman: American Innovator by Judith M. Kass (Popular Library), the actor said, “Toward the end I think he (Dean) was beginning to find his own way as an actor. But this glorifying of Dean is all wrong. That’s why I believe the documentary could be important. To show he wasn’t a hero; show what he really was – just a lost boy trying to find himself.” In the end, Brando refused the offer and Warner Brothers took over the project from Altman, hiring Martin Gabel, a former member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre Company, to narrate the documentary from a script by Stewart Stern. The latter had not only co-written Rebel Without a Cause but had also been a close friend of Dean’s.

In direct contrast to contemporary documentaries on movie stars, The James Dean Story avoids sensationalism, industry gossip, or celebrity talking heads and instead offers an introspective and occasionally stark portrait of the Indiana farm boy turned superstar. The documentary begins with James Dean’s childhood, when, at the age of nine, he was sent to live with relatives in Fairmount, Indiana and progresses from there through his brief Hollywood career. There are interviews with Dean’s aunt and uncle in Fairmount, the man who sold him his first motorcycle, former UCLA fraternity brothers, the highway patrolman who sped to the scene of Dean’s fatal car wreck, and Arleen Langer, a New York girl who had a crush on him during his struggling actor days. Some of the rarely seen material includes a screen test for East of Eden (1955), a highway safety film Dean made with Gig Young, and Altman’s re-enactment of Dean’s high-speed car wreck as well as numerous photographs and film clips from Dean’s career. Altman also provides a virtual travelogue of Dean’s old stomping grounds from his Indiana childhood (with footage of the Fairmount cemetery, the train station, and the Dean farm) to his New York City days (Rube Goldberg’s apartment, Georgie’s Restaurant) to California hangouts like Schwab’s drugstore.

It was during the making of The James Dean Story that Altman became introduced to the zoom lens which he would soon incorporate into his unique style of filmmaking. He also learned a new technique for presenting archival photographs on film from renown still photographer Louis Clyde Stoumen who called his process “photo motion.” This method dispensed with the traditional presentation of static images, instead adding movement to the photograph as the camera closed-in on specific details in close-up.

Get your Altman retrospective off to a great start with The James Dean Story…

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Marlon Brando may have been the best American actor ever. He was a star of the stage before becoming a cinema idol, bridging a career between the two with his performance as Stanley Kowalski in both the Broadway production and the Warner Brothers film of A Streetcar Named Desire — both directed by Elia Kazan.

The actor was famously cantankerous and contradictory, becoming as well-known for his seeming-laziness and infamous pranks as he was for his unforgettable performances in films like The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now.

While he was often flippant about Hollywood and his enormous dramatic gifts, Brando was an energetic civil rights activist, lending his fame, influence and voice to the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, and making films like A Dry White Season which addressed Apartheid in South Africa.

This is our tenth year without the star who died in 2004. During the 1970′s, Brando made some of his most important films — he also died in nearly all of them. Check out this reel of his best final scenes from this important era…

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