The Deaths of Robert Preston and Dean Paul Martin

Did you know that last week marked the twenty-first anniversary of the death of not one but two celebrities of whom I was quite fond in the 1980s? On March 21, 1987, both Robert Preston and Dean Paul Martin died.

Most people my age know Preston from his role as Centauri in 1984's The Last Starfighter. I think I saw that film at least twice at the theatres that year and endlessly thereafter on premium cable. If you haven't heard of that film, you were not an adolescent boy in the 1980s. It is the story of a young man who, by scoring very, very well on a video game (called The Last Starfighter, of course), catches the eye of a extraterrestrial military recruiter, played by Preston. Preston, essentially, plays himself. He is much more famous for his role as Prof. Harold Hill in the stage and film adaptation of The Music Man. Born in 1918, he died of lung cancer in his late 60s. I actually remember hearing the news of his death. So often, when you are young, celebrity deaths are meaningless to you, because you don't know the work of the celebrities who are old enough to be passing away. (I suppose this is why the death of George Reeves so affected the youth of American back in the late 1950s.). But I knew Preston from both films I mentioned above, both of which my family had taped off of television and watched often.

Martin was the son of the famous singer, Dean Martin, and he was only a few years older than I am now when he died. He had a brief musical career, but I knew him for something far different: he was the lead in the 1980s television show, The Misfits of Science. Martin was the affable, slightly goofy ringleader of the self-described Misfits, a group composed of people each with his or her own paranormal power. Think of it as a campy precursor to Tim Kring's Heroes. To modern television viewers, that program is the answer to the trivia question, "What was Courteney Cox's first television show?" They reran the show on the Sci Fi Network sometime in the mid to late 1990s, and I was embarrassed to have ever been fond of it. It featured Max Wright, for goodness sake. But back in the mid-1980s, when it aired, I loved it. I have a vivid memory of leaving school one day and being excited that it was to air that night. Yikes.

Martin, who was in the National Guard, died in a plane crash. He was married to the very beautiful Oliva Hussey, who you will know as the lovely young girl who played Juliet in the 1968 cinematic version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. You probably watched a tape of this in your high school English class and were disappointed (maybe) when the teacher had to fast forward through the brief nude scenes.

From what I have read, Dean Martin never recovered from his son's tragic death. I don't remember hearing of his untimely passing until a number of years later, during the early days of the Internet when I did a pre-Google search engine search on the fateful television series.

Resquiat in Pace.

The Legacy of Budd Dwyer

Not too long ago, those with an alleged conscience in the mainstream media debated the issue of what images, if any, were appropriate to broadcast in the wake of Saddam Hussein's execution. The botched execution was newsworthy, of course, but what standards, if any, does simple decency impose upon the modern mainstream media? How does the media balance that which is newsworthy with that which is appropriate to air? As society becomes more and more desensitized to violence, standards are lowered and then institutionalized. But with so many alternative sources of information these days, the mainstream media doesn't want to be scooped by some fly-by-night website, so mainstream journalists rush to air that which they might not have even considered airing only a few years before. What to do?

This is an old, and sometimes macabre, debate. Twenty one years ago today, on January 22, 1987, R. Budd Dwyer, an embattled Pennsylvania politician, took his own life in front of assembled journalists during a press conference. That very day, Paul Vathis, a Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer, offered this account of the awful scene:

I didn't think there was going to be a problem. Dwyer was passing out handouts. I was waiting for him to bring out the handout saying he finally had resigned. He was nearing the end of the news conference.

He took a blast at the press. We thought the news conference was about to end. He never said anything about resigning.

I was waiting for him to break down and cry. I was waiting for the emotional picture at the end of the conference.

Then he held up his hands when he saw some of the television people starting to take down their cameras and start to leave.

He told the newspeople, "You don't want to take down your equipment yet."

Then he passed out three different envelopes to aides in the room. He called the people up, and I thought they were his letters of resignation.

He put his hand into the brown manila envelope, and I thought he was going to pass out handouts on his resignation. I took a picture of him with his hand inside the envelope.

Then all of a sudden I saw the pistol come out, and I started shooting pictures. He held the pistol in front of his chest with the barrel up. Then he held it outright, with his right hand straight out toward the right wall. And he put his left hand out, trying to stop people from approaching. Duke Horshock, his press secretary, was on his left.

When he pulled the pistol out, everybody started yelling, "Don't, Budd! Budd, don't!"I was standing on a chair between two television guys. Nothing went through my mind except to keep shooting.

Dwyer brought the pistol back and held it in front of his chest and put the barrel into the top of his mouth. And he pulled the damn trigger. I kept shooting my pictures during the whole sequence. I was shocked, personally shocked. From professional experience, I just kept taking pictures. After the bullet went in, it was a gory scene. He went straight down to the floor and went under the window, leaning against the wall.¹

In those circles where such sinister things are celebrated, Dwyer's suicide has been referenced (and the audio has been sampled) in songs over the years (which no doubt causes pain to those family and friends if they chance across them). Filter's "Hey Man Nice Shot," about the Dwyer shooting, has an eerie and ominous feel to it (and for that reason was utilized in episodes of both "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "The X-Files," if memory serves).

It's certainly difficult to imagine an act more selfish than Dwyer's last. "You don't want to take down your equipment just yet"? He purposefully traumatized those assembled, and by offing himself in such a way, he must have made it impossible for his family and friends to fully recover from his death. How could they? When one's intentional death becomes some type of bizarre political theatre, family members and friends can never recuperate from it. But that is why the event is still being discussed a score and a year later.

1. "Painfully Close to the News," Newsday, (January 23, 1987).

Off Duty VII

Travel today thwarts my attempt at a more substantive post. Have you queried your presidential candidate of choice as to his or her views on the Mutant Registration Act?

Deathrow Gameshow

Sometimes, independent film is independent because it is so wonderfully bad. You probably had to have had Cinemax or HBO in the late 1980s or early 1990s to remember 1987's Deathrow Gameshow. Or, perhaps, you frequented a video cassette rental store which was less than discriminating in its selection of titles. I first saw the film with some friends in 1990 or 1991 on one of the premium film cable channels, and we quoted from it religiously for weeks. Deathrow Gameshow is hardly Citizen Kane, but it is the type of silly movie that is so exceptionally awful that it becomes entertainment on that level.

The brain child of very independent filmmaker Mark Pirro (who also produced Nudist Colony of the Dead and Curse of the Queerwolf), the film and its premise are actually somewhat prescient, considering our recent fetish for reality television. (You can find a trailer here by scrolling down to the bottom of the page). Death row inmates can elect to participate in game show, titled "Live or Die," instead of facing their sentence of capital punishment. However, the risk of death by playing the game is quite high. As the film progresses, Chuck Toedan (John McCafferty), the show's host, inadvertently allows the mother of Mafia crime boss (Beano) to become a contestant, and when she is slain during the broadcast, Toedan's life enters a new level of jeopardy. All the while, he maintains a tense relationship with the aptly named Gloria Sternvirgin (Robin Blythe), a feminist activist who disdains Toedan and his program.

This clip adequately conveys the tone of the film:
Toedan's dream sequence, halfway through the film, is a riot. ("I'm afraid of no one," the paranoid dream Toedan exclaims in one of the more bizarre voices in cinema history.). Otherwise, the film is your basic low-budget vulgar comedy with gratuitous nudity and scatological humor which, of course, is why I watched it in the early 1990s.

In its premise, it is not unlike the same year's The Running Man, itself based upon a 1982 novel by Stephen King writing under his Richard Bachman persona. (Really, The Running Man could be called the thinking person's Deathrow Gameshow. How about that?).

Not among the film's fans was Ted Mahar, a writer for The Oregonian who noted (in a review of another late 1980s film, actually) that Deathrow Gameshow is among the films that are "so remarkably bad that they become negative phenomena, almost worth seeing for their very awfulness, like a two-pound wart or the world's largest slug."¹ In his original 1987 review, Mahar wrote that Deathrow Gameshow "illustrates the ancient principle that a drama or melodrama that misfires may be inadvertently funny, but bad comedy just lies there like week-old pizza.^"2 Ouch. Mahar, who two decades later still writes for The Oregonian, did not respond to an email asking him if he recalled the film or his review of it.

Interestingly enough, the film has never been released on DVD. Apparently, Rhino owns the rights and has no plans to release it commercially. But, those who remember this cult film have at least one option to obtain it on DVD. P irro, when asked whether viewers can contact anyone at Rhino to motivate a DVD release, notes on his website:

Not to my knowledge. Even if they did put it out, it wouldn't be the remastered version which we discreetly offer through this site. If you're interested in getting a good DVD copy of Deathrow Gameshow, just order one of the titles that we sell (Polish Vampire, Queerwolf, Rectuma, Color-Blinded, Nudist Colony of the Dead), and in the comments section of your Paypal order, write in "add DRGS." We will include a free DVD-R of Deathrow Gameshow. We can't legally sell it, but we can throw it in for free.

(See August 26, 2007 entry of Ask Pirro.). Does it get any more cult than that?

1. Mahar, Ted. "'Nightfall': Bad Story, Bad Acting," The Oregonian (Portland, OR), October 22, 1988.
2. Mahar, Ted. "'Deathrow Gameshow'? Off with the Director's Head," The Oregonian (Portland, OR), November 18, 1987.