FAREWELL SYDNEY POLLACK

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Academy Award-winning director Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay who achieved commercial success and critical acclaim with the gender-bending comedy Tootsie and the period drama Out of Africa, has died. He was 73.

Pollack died of cancer Monday afternoon at his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, agent Leslee Dar said. He had been diagnosed with cancer about nine months ago, Dar said.

Pollack, who often appeared on the screen himself, worked with and gained the respect of Hollywood's best actors in a long career that reached prominence in the 1970s and 1980s.

And

He executive-produced HBO's Recount, about the fight over Florida's electoral votes in the 2000 presidential election. The movie recently had a screening at Rice University's Baker Institute in Houston.

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Big drag. I really, really liked Sydney Pollack. He was a hoot acting under his own direction in Tootsie, a movie that ought to be fluff, but has too much humanity to be so easily dismissed. He was always fun playing Will's philandering father on Will and Grace; he was equally fun playing a similar role in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. He was the only redeeming aspect of Stanley Kubrick's final film Eyes Wide Shut, blowing lead actor Tom Cruise out of the water in every scene they had together.

I mean, the guy was just fucking great, and, to the best of my knowledge, never played a lead role, but turned his relatively small moments into dynamite every single time. Put that together with the fact that he was also a great director: Sydney Pollack was one of the few American role models for how I see myself as a theater artist. That is, Pollack was able to circumvent an industrial era theater and film mandate, which continues to exist to this very day, shackling artists to narrowly specialized fields. Actors almost never direct, and directors almost never act, but Pollack defied all that, excelling equally well in both areas. And why not? Being a great actor means that, as a director, Pollack was able to speak to actors as peers, getting fantastic work out of them in ways that elude other great directors. In short, he was both a general and a foot soldier, a manager and a worker, denying hierarchy and elitism through the example of his career.

That's not surprising, I suppose, given his connection to early twentieth century theater radicalism by way of training at the Neighborhood Playhouse where he was taught by former Group Theater member Sanford Meisner. Okay, that's probably a stretch. Meisner was, by all accounts, an authoritarian bastard, despite the communist leanings of the Group. But then, communists have always had something of a fascist streak. I'm just saying that Pollack was a workingman's artist in a field dominated by narcissistic Colonel Kurtz figures.

Pollack was also a Real Artist in that he was able, from time to time, to use his art to make poignant political statements. I haven't seen the above mentioned Recount yet, but I plan to, and Three Days of the Condor, which he directed in the mid 70s, and is an extraordinarily cool Hitchcock style thriller, worth watching if only for that, is a scathing indictment of US covert action, and the politicians who play with the lives and deaths of the citizens they supposedly represent.

Yeah, losing him is a big drag. He was a great man.

Farewell Sydney Pollack.

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