The Screengrab

Richard Blackwell -- known to the world simply as Mr. Blackwell -- has died at the age of 86.  Born Richard Selzer in Brooklyn, he took advantage of the endless possibilities for re-invention offered by the entertainment industry and became an icon in that time-honored way:  finding a job that needed doing, and becoming the person who did it.  Catty, witty, sensitive, and often brutal, he single-handedly invented the role of celebrity fashion critic and honed it to perfection decades before the internet and cable TV's endless Hollywood navel-gazing made it a common pursuit.

After a minor and unsuccessful stint as an actor on Broadway (where he briefly played, of all things, the leader of the Dead End Kids, a part made famous by Huntz Hall), he began working as a fashion designer.  He later claimed to have pioneered the concept of designer jeans, but while his New York shop developed a small but loyal clientele, it wasn't until 1960 that he made a name for himself not by the praise he recieved for his own designs, but by complaining about what he saw as a trend towards absurd, overblown and unflattering fashions on the starlets of the day.  Within a decade, he'd established himself as the country's foremost fashion critic, particularly when it came to the gowns sported by starlets at awards shows.  His annual "Worst Dressed List" became, for some, an event to be anticipated as hotly as the Oscars or the Emmys.

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Rudy Ray Moore, the actor, comedian and musician who was perhaps more responsible than anyone for creating the lasting urban archetype of the flamboyant, hustling pimp, has died at the age of 81.  The man born Rudolph Frank Moore in Fort Smith, Arkansas passed away yesterday in Akron, Ohio of complications from diabetes, according to a family friend. 

Moore, whose own past as a lowlife hustler has always been difficult to trace -- given that he was the only source, and grotesque comic exaggeration was his stock in trade -- came of age putting out so-called "party records" for black audiences.  Unapolagetically ribald and wild, often distributed on the gray market and issued at a rapid clip, "party records" were also where Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx saw their first success, but Moore never found a mainstream audience as did those men.  His work was always ruder, cruder, and more sexually explicit than even Foxx's blue material -- which made him a natural for the blaxploitation era.  His two most famous roles were honed from characters created in his stand-up and party-record days:  Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, and the unforgettable super-pimp Dolemite, the role which brought him his greatest fame.  So closely was he associated with the role that many fans simply called him "Dolemite" for the rest of his career.

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Regardless of whether your taste in film runs to blockbusters, independent fare or even artsy foreign films, you know Don LaFontaine's voice.  In fact, no matter whose face you've seen most often at your neighborhood theatre, LaFontaine's is the voice you've heard the most.  In the course of his forty-year career, he did so many voice-overs for television and film -- rising to his pinnacle of fame as "The 'In a World' Guy' due to that phrase's numbing regularity in movie trailers -- that he became known in the industry as the Voice of God.

It was not only the quality of LaFontaine's work, with its steady, rich, almost commanding tone, that made him a success; it was also its regularity.  Starting in the mid-1960s, he embarked on an amazingly productive career that saw him voice the narration for over 3,000 television shows, an incredible 5,000 movies, and an absolutely mind-bending 350,000 commercials.  LaFontaine also maintained a good sense of humor about his work, parodying his role as the Voice of God in nearly a dozen places, from Family Guy to Arrested Development.  In a profile a few years ago on 60 Minutes, a day in the life of Don LaFontaine saw him knocking out as many as 75 voice-over jobs in a single day's work, and doing so in, to invoke a phrase rarely applied correctly in today's Hollywood, a consummately professional manner.  

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The Screengrab's Paul Clark is away from a workable computer, but asked me to post this tribute to Anthony Minghella:

MSN is reporting that Oscar-winning filmmaker Anthony Minghella passed away last night from a brain hemorrhage. Minghella, whose next film, the HBO/BBC production No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, is set to premiere next month in the UK, was fifty-four years old.

To many moviegoers, Minghella was best known as the director of prestige pictures such as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain. In fact, so associated was he with high-toned adaptations that he recently appeared as the moderator of a literary program in last year's Atonement. But his best work was not so easily pigeonholed.

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This just in: Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, is dead at fifty-four.

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Sad news: Gothamist reports that Tony Silver, co-director of the classic hip-hop documentary Style Wars, died last weekend. The film, which first aired on PBS in 1983, is predominantly concerned with the then-flourishing art of graffiti, but expands to cover other elements of early hip-hop culture, including breakdancing and rapping.

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Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks.

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Twenty-eight-year-old Heath Ledger, one of Hollywood's most promising young actors, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment two hours ago, reportedly surrounded by sleeping pills. Ledger started out his career as a teen heartthrob, garnering young fans and critical derision with pap like A Knight's Tale  — but like Leonardo DiCaprio and James Spader before him, Ledger quickly dropped the pretty-boy act for edgier fare that showed off his true range.

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It takes a special kind of actor to dominate the screen in a role that requires him to remain physically prone and grow increasingly comatose over the course of a two-hour, thirty-three-minute movie. Ion Fiscuteanu pulled that feat off as the title character of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the 2005 black comedy that stormed the festival circuit, heralded the resurgence of the Romanian film industry, and won Mr. Fiscuteanu the Best Actor prizes at festivals in Copenhagen and his native Transylvania. Now Fiscuteanu has died, at the age of seventy, reportedly after a bout with colon cancer, which was one of the hundred or so ailments that the clueless, distracted doctors in the movie tried to ascribe to his character in the movie. Fiscuteanu was best known for his theater work, but also appeared in a handful of other movies, most notably the 1992 The Oak. But he will probably be best remembered for his unlikely starring role as the luckless Lazarescu, a modern image of man's impotence in the face of bureaucratic indifference and neglect, barely mustering the strength to raise a middle finger in protest as he's wheeled through the exit door. — Phil Nugent

Norman Mailer's death on November 10, at the age of eighty-four, was a great blow to American letters, and also to film lovers, robbing us as it did of a major literary artist whose relationship to the movies was just about unique. Mailer always said that he was seduced into writing by the novels of James T. Farrell, and he claimed Ernest Hemingway as a personal hero. Both Hemingway and Farrell reacted to the new primacy of movies by stripping their writing down, but Mailer wasn't really quite of that school. His style was sometimes downright baroque, and he loved to delve deep into the psyches of his characters, of real people, of himself and the events in which he was taking part. Nor did he have much truck with the common attitude among literary figures of his era that the movies were the enemy. Mailer loved the novel as a form and feared that it might be dying out, but he tried to keep it alive by writing as if he were making a movie on the page. And he went about that goal not cynically or opportunistically but whole-heartedly.

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The writer Peter Viertel has died, at eighty-six, a little more than two weeks after the death of Deborah Kerr, to whom he was married for forty-seven years. A novelist, journalist, memoirist and all-around freelance word merchant and world traveler of the old school, Viertel wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Saboteur, adapted Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea for the movies, and did on-location script doctoring on John Huston's Beat the Devil and The African Queen. (In 1992, he commemorated his experiences with Hemingway, Huston and other notables in his book Dangerous Friends.) Yet his best-known accomplishment, and the work that made him a cult figure to generations of readers and movie fans, was his 1953 novel White Hunter, Black Heart. Readily acknowledged to be have been based on the time he spent in Africa with Huston while making The African Queen, the book details the verbal jousts between screenwriter "Pete Verrill" and the flamboyant, high-living director "John Wilson", described by the narrator as "the leading exponent of the 'screw-you-all' type of personality." The book is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written about the movie business. (It was filmed in 1990, with Jeff Fahey as the writer and with the movie's director, Clint Eastwood, swaggering around talking as if the Dust Bowl had settled in his larynx, as the Huston figure.) — Phil Nugent

Robert Goulet has died, after a sudden illness, while waiting for a lung transplant. He was seventy-three. Goulet struck gold in 1960 when he was cast as Lancelot in the original Broadway production of the musical Camelot. That triumph led to a successful recording career and a string of TV appearances, notably as a favorite guest of daytime talk-show host Mike Douglas. He also returned to the Broadway stage, most recently in a revival of La Cage aux Folles.

But to movie audiences, Goulet had his own special niche: he was one of the pioneers of the straight-faced, ironic cameo appearance by the celebrity who may or may not be in on the joke. Goulet, who appeared in several "straight" dramatic roles on such TV series as Police Woman and Fantasy Island, never developed much skill as an actor, but whether playing the villain in a Naked Gun movie or getting shot through the roof in Beetlejuice or parodying himself by name in Scrooged or a memorable episode of The Simpsons, he seemed like a nice guy and a good sport. He may have been a sacred object to many a fan of Broadway ballads, but to a generation of movie lovers, he came to be fondly regarded as the Chuck Norris who sings. The two halves of his career came seamlessly together in the high point of his movie career, the great moment in Louis Malle's 1981 Atlantic City where, again playing a clueless version of himself, he presides over a publicity event in a casino lobby and attempts to serenade a woman (Susan Sarandon) who has just been informed that her husband's been murdered. — Phil Nugent