The movies that leave the deepest impressions on us would be nothing without the people who made and starred in them. From Cicely Tyson, the star from Sounder, Fried Green Tomatoes, and many more classic films and television shows to Christopher Plummer, forever beloved for his role as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, here is MovieMaker‘s list of people from the motion picture industry who have died in 2021.
Michael K. Williams, pictured in HBO and The Atlantic’s Question Your Answers series.
Michael K. Williams
Best-known for playing Omar Little on The Wire, Chalky White on Boardwalk Empire,Moussa in Assassin’s Creed and Robert in 12 Years a Slave, Williams was found dead in his New York apartment on Sept. 6, according to Variety. He was nominated for an Emmy three times for acting, for roles in When They See Us, Bessie, and The Night Of, and is currently in contention for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series for his role as Montrose Freeman in HBO’s Lovecraft Country. He was also nominated for his work as a producer on Vice. He talked honestly about his struggles with drugs, but said he had a moment of clarity in 2008 when Barack Obama declared, at a presidential campaign rally that Williams attended with his mother, that The Wire was the best show on television — and that Omar was his favorite character. “Hearing my name come out of his mouth woke me up,” Williams later told The New York Times. “I realized that my work could actually make a difference.”
R.I.P. Michael K. Williams and Jean-Paul Belmondo; Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings blows away a Labor Day Record; Star Wars and Jurassic Park stop-motion mastermind Phil Tippett directs his own film, Mad God. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.
Congratulations Shang-Chi: The first Marvel superhero film with an Asian lead actor — Simu Liu — blew away the previous record for Labor Day weekend, earning $90 million over four-days. That’s roughly twice what it was projected to pull in. (Expectations were cautious in part becuase of COVID-19 fears.) The three-day opening of $75.5 million for Shang Chi was the second-biggest since the start of the pandemic, behind only Black Widow, which opened to $80 million in July, Variety noted.
R.I.P Michael K. Williams: The magnificent actor, best known for playing Omar Little on The Wire, was found dead yesterday in his New York apartment. He was 54. Williams was nominated for an Emmy three times for acting, for roles in When They See Us, Bessie, and The Night Of, and is currently up for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series for Lovecraft Country. Before his breakthrough in The Wire, he was also a guest on shows including The Sopranos. I especially liked him on Boardwalk Empire, where he played Chalky White, leader of a Black crime syndicate trying to flourish during Prohibition, and had the honor of interviewing him about the show in 2013. He was friendly, funny, relaxed, charming, and very obviously adored by his cast mates. He wryly explained what it means when a show is “making multiples.”
Obama’s Favorite Character:The Associated Press said that his death was being investigated as a possible drug overdose. Williams talked honestly about his struggles with drugs over the years, but had a moment of clarity in 2008 while attending a campaign rally for Barack Obama in 2008 with his mother. From the stage, Obama said The Wire was the best show on television — and that Omar was his favorite character. “Hearing my name come out of his mouth woke me up,” Williams later told The New York Times. “I realized that my work could actually make a difference.”
R.I.P. Jean-Paul Belmondo: The star of Breathless and Pierrot le Fou, among other films, has died at 88. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw wrote a gorgeous appreciation, which includes this description of Belmondo’s final scene in Breathless: “Defying agony from his bullet wounds, he just clownishly stretches his face into the two silly expressions he’d earlier used to explain the phrase “faire la tête”: a goofy silent scream, then a panto grin. Isn’t this what acting is, what life is: tragedy, comedy, faces, speeches? Who cares?”
Phil Tippet’s Mad God: Phil Tippet, a visual effects mastermind whose creations include Jabba the Hutt and the AT-ATs from the original Star Wars trilogy — and who won an Oscar for bringing dinosaurs to cinematic life in Jurassic Park — has always wanted to write and direct his own feature film. And now, at 69, he has. Mad God features stunning stop-motion creations he first began developing in 1987. Thanks to a very successful Kickstarter campaign and lots of help from Tippet’s loyal animators, Mad God is now playing festivals — including, last month, the Locarno Film Festival and Fantasia Festival. It makes its U.S. debut at Fantastic Fest later this month. Here is the trailer:
Main image: Michael K. Williams as Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire.
Retired professional tennis player Mardy Fish’s battle with mental health on and off the court is at the heart of the fifth and final episode of Chapman and Maclain Way’s Untold sports documentary series, Untold: Breaking Point.
In 2015, Fish penned a personal essay in the Player’s Tribune called The Weight, which detailed his experience with the anxiety attacks that lead to him withdrawing from a match against famed Swiss tennis icon Roger Federer at the 2012 U.S. Open. It was that very story that Fish says inspired the Way brothers to reach out to him — they were already acquainted through a mutual friend, fellow pro tennis player Sam Querrey — about making a documentary on his story. From there, the rest of the Untold series was born. And in Untold: Breaking Point, Fish opens up more than he ever has before.
The reason Fish speaks so openly about his struggle with anxiety, he says, is because it makes him feel better.
“It made me feel better when I talked about it. Even if I was just sitting here with you around a coffee and we just started talking about mental health, I would feel better about how I was feeling in that moment,” Fish told MovieMaker. “So part of it was to try and educate, part of it was to try and give someone a success story of being able to really hit rock bottom with mental health and come back. And not only come back, but come back to the place that took it all away from me.”
After bowing out of the Winston-Salem Open in 2013, Fish didn’t return to tennis again until 2015, according to ESPN. He retired that same year, ending his prestigious career at the U.S. Open. Today, he’s the captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team, a high honor in the world of tennis. And he’s highly qualified for the job — Fish knows as well as anyone that although tennis isn’t as physically taxing as sports like football or mixed martial arts, the pressure of being a one-man team takes an invisible mental toll.
(L-R) Rafael Nadal and Mardy Fish, courtesy of Netflix
“I’m a male athlete from a noncontact sport, but a pretty gladiator-ish sport where when you leave the locker room, we’re all by ourselves. We have to figure out how to beat that person across the net and we don’t have any help doing it,” he said. “We’re out there all by ourselves in front of thousands of people in attendance.”
He attributes a strong support system to his ability to come back to the sport after walking away at the height of his career.
“It had taken months in 2012 in the summer to understand what was going on,” he said. “Having a support system, or a good support system or a solid foundation is so important in mental health… Just learning from every episode, learning from every situation, and growing from that is part of the main reason why I was able to sort of beat it and still continue to fight it and beat it on a daily basis.”
Nearly a decade has gone by since Fish walked away from Roger Federer in 2012. Now, he has some advice for young athletes — or anyone at all — who is struggling with their mental health.
“If you’re having those thoughts, those issues, panic, anxiety, depression, anything like that, there are ways to get around it,” Fish says. “There are ways to beat it. Getting a great doctor… having a support system in place to where you can be vulnerable and you can really tell people what you think and what you’re feeling and be open about it. That’s the most important thing.”
Untold: Breaking Point is out today on Netflix.
Main Image: Mardy Fish pictured in Untold: Breaking Point courtesy of Netflix.
Impeachment: American Crime Story premieres Tuesday on FX. The third installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series centers on President Bill Clinton’s famous affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky — and the precipitating events that lead Lewinsky’s friend and coworker Linda Tripp to expose their secret to the world.
Longtime Murphy collaborator Sarah Paulson (American Horror Story, Ratched) plays Tripp in Impeachment. But the real-life Linda Tripp passed away before she could see Paulson’s portrayal of her on cable television — or meet Sarah Burgess, the screenwriter who spent countless hours pouring over books, documents, interviews, and audiotapes to understand Tripp’s reasons for recording her phone conversations with Lewinsky in which the young woman revealed intimate details about her sexual relationship with the president.
Tripp died on April 7, 2020, according to her obituary in the New York Times, though her former lawyer, Joseph Murtha, did not provide a cause of death. According to NPR, Tripp had at one point battled pancreatic cancer, though it’s unclear whether she died from the illness.
Burgess sorely wishes she could have met Tripp before her death. She said that she “felt connected” to Tripp when she was writing Impeachment, and put emphasis on painting a fair, nuanced picture of her rather than casting her as a one-sided villain, as she has often been portrayed in the media.
“I would have loved to talk to her. It was very hard for me when she passed away last year that I’d never got the chance,” Burgess told MovieMaker. “I don’t believe characters have to be quote-unquote ‘likable,’ especially female characters. That can be sort of a trend that we fall into. Women are sometimes expected to behave differently from men and female characters have to have this more explicit warmth or vulnerability sometimes. Linda’s a messy and complicated character and someone who I… had great affection for as I was writing.”
Burgess isn’t sure whether Tripp was ever aware of the FX series’ existence while she was alive. It was still in production when she died, and Tripp says the show’s general policy is not to reach out to its subjects for their input — Bill and Hillary Clinton were not contacted, either, though they are played by Clive Owen and Edie Falco, respectively. Lewinsky’s role as a producer on the series is an exception to this rule, allowing her some control over how she — played by Beanie Feldstein — was portrayed during the most vulnerable moments of her life.
Burgess says she was always confident that the way she wrote Tripp was fair, but that after learning of Tripp’s death, she did reconsider one part of the script.
“I didn’t feel that I had to change course because I already felt that I was writing so much from her point of view. I think it did briefly — her death made me reconsider how I would end her character. I will say that. I don’t want to give away too much,” she said. “Her final moments in the show, I think I reconsidered after her death.”
Tripp worked in the White House for multiple years before being transferred to the Pentagon to work in the Department of Defense, where she met and befriended Lewinsky. Tripp ultimately became famous for turning over tapes of their sensitive conversations to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and then later wearing a wire for the FBI to record another conversation with Lewinsky. But Burgess does not believe that Tripp ever intended for her actions to hurt Lewinsky as much as they did.
“I don’t believe this person is a complete monster,” Burgess said. “I have studied Linda Tripp so carefully over the past three years, I’ve developed I think what I would describe as an obsession with Linda Tripp… I personally wrote the story believing that she was acting on instinct and did not totally understand the forces that she was unleashing,” she added. “I wrote the story believing that some part of Linda Tripp is aware of the problems with what she did, and I think felt the need to articulate different ideas in the press because she felt under attack. And there’s a tragic loneliness to that to me.”
Impeachment: American Crime Story premieres Tuesday, Sept. 7 at 10 p.m. on FX. Main Image: Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp. Credit: Kurt Iswarienko/FX.
The Rick James documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, briefly touches on James’ stint in a band with Neil Young called The Mynah Birds — one of those rock collaborations that sounds too weird to be true.
Anyone with a basic knowledge of popular music probably thinks of James as the funk-driven, volatile mastermind of tracks like “Super Freak” and “Mary Jane,” and Neil Young as the earnest architect of ballads like “Heart of Gold” and protest anthems like “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
But their musical tastes melded beautifully in 1966 Toronto, where James went to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, and immediately fell into a thriving Canadian music scene that spawned Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot, among others.
James recounted his Toronto years in his magnificent 2014 memoir, Glow, which was completed after the singer’s 2004 death by author David Ritz, who appears throughout Bitchin’, which was directed by Sacha Jenkins and debuts Friday on Showtime.
James was born James Ambrose Johnson, Jr., and grew up in Buffalo, New York, just 100 miles from Toronto, across the U.S.-Canadian border. As he explains in Glow, he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy at the age of 16, but soon decided it was a mistake. After reporting to Rochester to be shipped over to Vietnam, he decided to instead buy a one-way ticket to Toronto — and went AWOL.
He set out for Yorkville, which he had been told was “the Greenwich Village of Toronto,” according to Glow. He loved the coffeehouses, clubs and strips bars, but was soon confronted by three drunk Americans who accused him of being a draft dodger and called him a racial slur.
Fortunately, a group of Canadian musicians came immediately to his aid. They would later become famous as members of The Band. (Martin Scorsese chronicled what was billed as their last performance in his 1978 documentary The Last Waltz.)
The Rick James memoir Glow, written with David Ritz, who is featured in the new Rick James doc Bitchin’ on Showtime.
They brought James into the Toronto music scene, where he went by the name Little Ricky, in part to evade arrest for escaping Vietnam. He soon met a budding manager named Colin Kerr, who was impressed with his musical talents and invited him to his cafe, The Mynah Bird.
This led to the creation of the band The Mynah Birds, featuring “Little Ricky” on lead vocals. Inspired by The Beatles, Kerr promoted the group heavily, and they gained local buzz.
At first, they were basically an R&B band, and James says in Glow that he stood out “as an authentic R&B singer living in a city where white musicians were striving to play authentic R&B. That added to my status.”
But James wanted to change the group’s sound. As James tells it, his friend Joni Mitchell and his Mynah Birds bandmate, Bruce Palmer, both recommended adding then-unknown Toronto native Neil Young to the Mynah Birds, because he could help the group attain a “blues-based folk rock” sound.
“Like most of the other white musicians in Toronto, he was into Black music,” James says of Young in Glow. “His singing was a little strange, but his facility on the guitar was crazy. He got all over those strings and showed me some shit I’d never seen before. Neil helped reshape the Mynah Birds into the band I’d been hearing inside my head.”
Neil Young was equally complimentary of Rick James — who went by Ricky James Matthews in the Mynah Birds — in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace.
“Ricky James Matthews, as he was called then, was our lead singer, and he was known as the Black Mick Jagger. He sang his ass off.”
They moved in together, and played a lot of Rolling Stones covers. But Waging Heavy Peace also includes some grim foreshadowing of James’ fate:
“Living with Rick in a basement apartment… I became introduced to other drugs,” Young writes. “I was trying amphetamines and smoking a little hash. Looking back, I could have done a lot deeper. Luckily I didn’t get too far into the stronger drugs.”
Here’s the Mynah Birds song “It’s My Time,” featuring Rick James and Neil Young (story continues after):
The Mynah Birds soon parted ways with Colin Kerr and joined up with a new manager, Morley Shelman, and financial backer John Craig Eaton. James describes in Glow as “two rich kids in love with music.”
Because the Mynah Birds were a little bit folk rock (like The Byrds), a little bit bluesy (like the Stones), and a little bit Motown, Eaton and Shelman set up a meeting with the Mynah Birds and Motown Records, across the border in Detroit.
The band played “It’s My Time,” which James describes in the memoir as “the Four Tops meets the Lovin’ Spoonful, a combination of soul and folk rock.” (It’s great — listen above. James says in his memoir that he wrote it, and Young says in his memoir that they wrote it together.)
Motown signed the group to a six-year contract and began grooming the band to be Motown’s next big thing. James and Young first met Motown luminaries like Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and The Temptations.
“Smokey Robinson dropped in and was helping us, and some of the Four Tops would come in and back up our vocals, standing behind us as we sang,” Young writes in Waging Heavy Peace. “They made us sound cool. Everything was going great! It was just a big family feeling around Motown.”
Not necessarily says James: He recalls Marvin Gaye telling him that Motown was “survival of the fittest” and “a throat-cutting contest.”
Either way, at the start of 1967, The Mynah Birds were poised for success. But after a dispute over money, James says in Glow, Shelman, the group’s manager, “ratted me out” to the U.S. government — and the Motown contract disappeared.
“Neil Young and Bruce Wagner, both great guys, stayed loyal,” James says in Glow. “They didn’t kick me out of the band.”
Here’s The Mynah Birds song “I’ll Wait Forever,” featuring Rick James and Neil Young (story continues after):
But James, taking advice from his mother, turned himself in.
Two days after James was busted, Young writes, Shelman “OD’d on some heroin he had bought with our advance money. The cash was gone, and so was our manager. We went back to Toronto and the band broke up.”
Curiously, James remembers Shelman’s fate differently: He says in Glow that Shelman was “killed in a fiery motorcycle accident.”
After much more draft-related drama — including breaking out of the brig in the Brooklyn Navy Yard — James was able to resolve his issues with the U.S. government.
Neil Young and Bruce Palmer moved to Los Angeles, and joined Buffalo Springfield, best known for the iconic ’60s anthem “For What It’s Worth.” Young later joined Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, which also included his Buffalo Springfield bandmate, Stephen Stills. Soon after, Young became known as one of the greatest rock songwriters as a solo artist, backed by his group Crazy Horse. He remains one of the most revered rock artists of all.
Rick James also moved to Los Angeles, but struggled for years. Still, Neil Young had his back. He recalled a reunion near the end of the ’60s when Young welcome him to his “log cabin in the hills,” wearing “full Indian regalia.”
Neil Young in what Rick James might describe as “full Indian regalia” on the cover of 1992’s Harvest Moon.
“We hugged like long-lost brothers and shot the shit for hours. … Neil and I had great rapport — two wild artists who understood each other on the deepest level,” James says in Glow.
The Mynah Birds also had a direct connection to James’ eventually success. In the mid-70s, after he recorded demos of the album that would become his breakthrough success, Come Get It, in Buffalo, he went back to Los Angeles to shop it around to record labels. He was determined, he says in Glow, to sign with anyone but Motown.
But then he had a chance elevator run-in with a Motown producer, who greeted him with, “I’m Jeffrey Bowen. I met you during the Mynah Birds days in Detroit.”
After some haggling, James agreed to sign again with Motown, after more than a decade of trying to break into music. Come Get It was a hit, and James’ had a strong run that peaked with the massive success of his 1981 album Street Sounds, which included the hits “Super Freak” (featuring The Temptations) and “Give It To Me.”
“You smoke a joint and write a song and next thing you know you’ve got a check in the mail,” he told People Magazine in 1982.
But he had relentless drug problems. In 1990, he received an unexpected windfall when MC Hammer sampled “Super Freak” for his hit “U Can’t Touch This.” But just a year later, his reputation hit its nadir when he was accused of holding a woman hostage, forcing her to perform sex acts, and burning her repeatedly with a crack pipe. While out on parole, he was accused of kidnapping and beating a second woman, also while on cocaine.
He was found guilty of one assault and pleaded guilty to another in 1994, according to the Buffalo News, and served more than two years of a five-years-and-four-months prison sentence.
In 2004, he came back into the public’s consciousness thanks to a Chappelle’s Show sketch featuring a Rick James story from Charlie Murphy. (James had worked with his brother, Eddie Murphy, on a 1985 album that spawned the hit single “Party All the Time.”) It included Chappelle delivering the catch phrase, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” that inspired the title of Bitchin’.
James was found dead at his Los Angeles home in 2004. The cause of death was a heart attack, and he was found to have had nine different drugs in his system, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Since you’re going to go looking for it anyway, here’s Rick James’ “Super Freak,” recorded about 15 years after Rick James and Neil Young collaborated on The Mynah Birds…
… and “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young, released about 23 years after his Mynah Birds collaboration with Rick James.
Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, is now available on Showtime.
Main image: Rick James in Bitchin‘ and Neil Young on the cover of Waging Heavy Peace.
This story was originally published on Sept. 2 and has been updated with more details about Morley Shelman and Rick James signing with Motown in the 1970s.
