Steven Bach, a writer, film and literature professor, and studio executive, died last week of cancer, at 70. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Bach moved to Los Angeles in 1966 and began working in public relations and as a story editor for various production companies. In the late 1970s, he produced Mr. Billion and Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, and was made vice president and head of international production at United Artists, working under UA President Andy Albeck. Albeck and Bach were in place when UA gave the go-ahead to Michael Cimino to direct his epic Western Heaven's Gate, which was in production, on location in Montana, from April 1979 until March 1980 and finally cost upwards of $40 million. (It was originally budgeted at $11 million and scheduled for a Christmas 1979 release.) The collapse of the movie at its first premiere screening in 1980 caused the implosion of UA, which was sold off by its parent company, Transamerica, to MGM, which discontinued its production arm. Five years later, Bach published Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", a witty, gracefully written account of his time at the studio. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael called Bach's book "About the only good thing that has ever come from the movie"; David Thomson called it "the best book ever written about the making of a movie. It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”

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To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Valentine’s Day!  Huh!  What is it good for?

Well...depends who you ask:  it certainly didn’t work out too well for the poor Roman priest who got himself beaten, stoned, beheaded (and later canonized) for nuptializing Christian couples out of season, nor for any of the other Catholic martyrs named Valentine whose various grisly fates somehow led to the annual tradition of grown-ass men dropping seventy bucks a pop to have teddy bears in boxer shorts with hearts on them delivered to grown-ass women in the middle of winter.

Scholars blame Geoffrey Chaucer for ruining February 14th by linking a bunch of obscure Roman Catholic feast days with the aggravating concept of courtly love, thus stressing out singles and couples alike for centuries to come with unrealistic, unattainable expectations about all the perfect moments of romance we’re all supposed to be having (instead of weeping lonely tears into our popcorn at solo matinees of He’s Just Not That Into You or forgetting to buy a frickin’ card for our significant others and never hearing the goddamn frickin’ end of it).

It should, of course, be remembered that St. Valentine’s ol’ pagan buddy Cupid is the son of both a goddess of love AND a god of war, and thus not all the couples the little bastard shoots with his arrows wind up living happily ever after. Therefore, as a cheery reminder that things could always be worse in this infernal season of l’amour, your friends-with-benefits here at the Screengrab are proud to present BLOODY VALENTINES: THE WORST RELATIONSHIPS IN CINEMA HISTORY!

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ROBERT DOWNEY, JR. in IRON MAN & TROPIC THUNDER (2008)



Like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, the seemingly indestructible Robert Downey, Jr. has pretty much been coming back from the dead again and again (sometimes literally) since the beginning of his career...and, frankly, I got tired of rooting for him sometime around the first Bush administration. For one thing, I never really thought he was all that talented: in movies from Less Than Zero to Natural Born Killers, he just seemed to keep recycling the same fast-talking hipster schtick that John Cusack did at least as well, if not better (and with far less off-screen drama). To my way of thinking, if an actor’s extracurricular lunacy eclipses their onscreen work, they either belong on Celebrity Rehab with Gary Busey and Corey Haim, or their performances had better reach Klaus Kinski levels of riveting, can’t-look-away intensity, but Downey seemed to be forever slumming, demanding endless sympathy for his problems and respect for his craft while never bothering to really try all that hard (except for the occasions, like Chaplin, when he tried too hard). And yet, for all that, whenever Downey managed to connect with a well-written part in his range (like the legal clerk in True Believer, the editor in Wonder Boys or the crime reporter in Zodiac), he’d generally knock it out of the park and make me like him again, pretty much against my will. Thus, in spite of everything, I was happy for Downey’s latest one-two punch career revival in a pair of films that knew precisely how to use (and reward) the actor’s self-deprecating, hard-won personal and professional maturity (while gently goosing all those skeletons in his closet):  two redemption songs, one about an aging party boy who finally grows up and takes responsibility for his life and another about a talented but pretentious actor who learns the difference between real life and movies. Perfect. Now, seriously, Bob...don’t fuck it up again, ‘cuz you’ve been on borrowed time for way too long already.

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JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)



Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until (in the kind of wet dream moment that never really happens) A-list director Steven Zaillian just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and, of course, the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

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20. LILLIAN GISH (1893-1993)



One should resist the temptation to guess that Gish's name is better-remembered than most of the actresses who did their most noteworthy work during the silent era because she was such a favorite of D. W. Griffith, a director who has received (and deserved) so much of the credit for the development of the movies as an art form. In her performances for Griffith -- the titles include Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, and, of course, The Birth of a Nation -- she embodied fragile, beautiful girlhood, and had to carry out all the cliches of Victorian melodrama that make so many dramatic silent movies look ridiculous today.  Yet she did it with an unearthly technique that poeticized the material and made her eternally threatened characters seem not so much frail and dainty but rather not of this world; it's as if they'd become their own ghosts without taking the customary step of first abandoning their bodies. She also made two great silents with director Victor Sjostrom, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind; the latter was a box-office failure that led to the cancellation of her MGM contract. Although she was never to enjoy anywhere near the same degree of success in talkies, she had a few notable roles spread far apart over the course of her remarkably long life and career, the most impressive being the stern, Christian spinster who holds her own against the devil, in the form of Robert Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter. Her last film appearance was in 1987's The Whales of August. She reacted to news that people were appalled she didn't get an Oscar nomination for it by saying that she really didn't mind not being put in the position of losing to Cher.

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If there’s one thing Hollywood is sorely lacking nowadays, it’s larger-than-life figures. Nowadays, most moviegoers want their industry types to be down to earth, but in the classical era of Hollywood, it was a different story. Tinseltown was ruled by grandiose, even vulgar men who flaunted their wealth, made bold statements and engaged in dangerous behavior just to fuel their taste for adventure. Today’s peekaboo paparazzi photos and pregnancy gossip pale in comparison to the stories of Errol Flynn’s legendary parties and John Huston deciding to make a movie in Africa with the notion of shooting an elephant while he was there.

Michael Todd was one of these men.

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You want to talk about life experiences? Keira Knightley is twenty-three years old and has already starred in three very long movies based on a Disney theme park ride. "I mean, it was really fucking embarrassing and we all thought it was going to be total shit anyway," she told Matthew Rhys. "But then suddenly I was kissing Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and bang, there you go, instant bloody stardom. I'd always wanted to be an actress, always dreamt of it, but I don't think you're ever quite prepared for being a movie star." Maybe not, but it's probably a good sign that she recognizes that the two positions are not the same, though they sometimes overlap. "I know that when Bend it like Beckham came out and it was quickly followed by Pirates, suddenly people were looking at me and thinking, 'Well she's not very good, she's just a pretty face, don't know what all the fuss is about'. But I wasn't really ready to be scrutinised. I wasn't any good at my job yet. But with Pride and Prejudice, yes, I was at least trying to say: look, see, I can learn, and I can do this, or at least give me the right director and I'll give it my best shot. So since those first films, I've always been looking to be stretched - it doesn't always mean I'm going to be good, but I'm trying to become a good actress, really I am."

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Born in Los Angeles in 1905, in movies since she was a teenager, Anna May Wong was the first Chinese-American actress to make a name for herself in Hollywood. With her shiny black bob and imperious hauteur, which had a suggestion of something trembling, vulnerable and lonely beneath it, Wong established herself as an icon of '30s style, effortlessly holding her own alongside Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's 1932 Shanghai Express. At the same time, she was habitually paid far less than her caucasian co-stars and stereotyped in ways that she herself found increasingly insulting. At one point, she made her complaints heard on a film set with a film-magazine writer present: "Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain. Murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilisation that is so many times older than that of the west?"

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We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.



Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

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