Encounters with M. Emmett Walsh

Although I first saw this actor in a movie back in 1985 in Portland, OR, I had several unexpected and memorable encounters with the legendary character actor M. Emmett Walsh in the past few weeks.

Cameo in Knives Out

The now-84-year-old actor has a cameo role in the holiday suspense/comedy movie Knives Out, where he plays an elderly security guard in charge of a grainy surveillance video that the plot hinges on.

That led me to download a copy of the first film I saw him in, the Coen Brothers' first film Blood Simple, a dark indie classic from the mid-80's that glitters with stabs of comedy.   I saw Blood Simple (and I can recall the theater and the girlfriend of the time) in the middle of my medical school years, during the year I lived and did research in Portland, OR.  The Coens' went on to bigger hits like Fargo.

Podcast with Gilbert Godfried

What makes this worth writing about, around the same time these past weeks, I stumbled on a podcast series that has been running several years by the eccentric comedian Gilbert Godfried, where he interviews ... very old celebrities (Dick Cavett, Buck Henry, Emmett Walsh....), what they jokingly call the "they haven't died yet" podcast.    It's called Gilbert Godfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - here.   He interviewed Walsh a couple years ago. 

Three Quotes

Walsh was born in 1935 and was raised in far upstate Vermont, and attended Clarkson University, graduating in 1958.  He had a degree in business administration.   His filmography begins ten years later, in 1969-70, with a small roles in "Alice's Restaurant," "Midnight Cowboy,"  "Little Big Man," and "Cold Turkey."

Although he looks his age, perhaps deliberately playing-frail in Knives Out, Walsh is wonderfully sharp and articulate in his podcast interview (May 2018).

Here's the first memorable quote from the Godfried interview.  He had majored in business, and taken accouting classes, which he was very proud of, and he said it gave him a big advantage in his life as an actor, because he was always able to manage money and income-average, handling the cash that came in spurts of activity, which he observed most of his actor colleagues did not manage well.  He was very proud of his business classes in college, and attributed much of his working success as an actor to them.

The second memorable quote is that thanks to his college classes in business, he always understood his place as a character actor.   "When I walk into that audition," he said, "The casting director has twelve problems.  If I can fit that role for him, then he only has eleven problems.   That's my role in getting the movie made. Period." 

The third memorable quote we hear in the voice of one of his characters, in a movie of his I'd never heard of, the little-known 2007 film Christopher Plummer, "Man in the Chair."  Plummer plays a washed-up forgotten director and Walsh a sad, washed-up screenwriter, who are brought together and given a purpose when a cocky high school kid needs them to help him make a student film. 

Walsh delivers this quote beautifully:  "The film industry is a money trench, where thieves and pimps run free down plastic hallways and where good men die like dogs."   (pause)  "There's also a negative side."    The quote is from Hunter S. Thompson.

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I also recall Walsh from his comic role as a crazed assassin in Steve Martin's The Jerk (1979), his role in the Coen Brothers' comedy Raising Arizona (1987) and as the AA sponsor in the Michael Keaton movie Clean and Sober (1988). 

Although I discovered Godfried's long-running podcast series just recently, in 2019 there was also a full length documentary about Gilbert Godfried himself - here.

BOOKS AND FILMS - CY2019

For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here.

For earlier book lists, see 2015 here, 2016 here, 2017 here, 2018 here.

PDF of this blog in the cloud - here.

Technology and Business

  Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and their Lasting Impact.  Vaclav Smil.

  Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern Economy.  Tim Hartford.

  Getting (More Of) What You Want: Secrets of Economics and Psychology.  Margaret Neale, Thomas Z.Lys.

Smil has the theme that the most profound and impactful inventions of 1700-2000 were mostly born in a few decades in the late 1800's.  (See similarly Northwestern's Robert J Gordon.)   It takes some twisting to get there - for example, he pegs the discovery of something to those years, such as the airplane (Kitty Hawk in 1903 fits his epoch of peak industrial discoveries, with the 747 just a later development!)  Despite this logical yoga he pulls off, I found it an interesting read.  Names we know as nouns from science class - Ohm, Joules - made discoveries that at the time were absolutely pivotal to the creation or evolution of things like electric motors.  And discovering nearly everything as hard - Edison's lightbulb was tied up in patent wars for 20 years, and Diesel's invention of the oil engine got so bogged down during commercialization that Diesel committed suicide.  

A breezier book is Fifty Inventions, with a deliberately eclectic cornucopia of topics, from "The Plow" to "Barbed Wire" to "The Bar Code" in short chapters.   (If you like this, one of my very favorite books of recent years was Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now, with six topics; also a PBS series).  

Getting (More Of) is one of hundreds of books on negotiating, but I found it an entertaining and worthwhile read on an airplane this year.

  

Biography From The White House Today

   Anthony Scaramucci, Trump, the Blue-Collar President

   George Sorial, The Real Deal 

   Chris Christie,  Let Me Finish:  Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey

   Genl. James Mattis, Call Sign Chaos

I'm back and forth from home in Hollywood to Washington twice a month, and buzzed through these on some of the redeye flights.  Scaramucci is probably the most entertaining, Sorial (a longtime, now-retired Trump Inc. attorney) the most hagiographic.  Mattis barely mentions his year in the White House; get this only as a biography of his military career.  

Chris Christie's book, while no doubt partly ghostwritten, has the breezy entertainment value of watching Christie on Bill Maher.   It's the page-turner from this set and fun as an audiobook as well, read to you by Christie himself.

Books on the Constitution and the South

Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, by Steven Luxenberg.  Includes a rich view of US and southern history of the 1800s; can be paired with the PBS series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Henry Louis Gates.   

I've also read parts of The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era by Stanford Law's Gienapp and Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution, by Harvard Law's Lawrence Lessig and I'm sure these are worthwhile, but slower going. 

Second Creation describes how there were countless mysteries and degrees of freedom in setting up a legislative and an executive branch in the first several years after the Constitution was penned.  (Think by analogy: How the Medicare program developed, or the FDA, and continues to evolve, relative to the sometimes sparse language of the actual statute that creates them.)   Fidelity and Constraint talks about the constant tug of war between judicial literalism and social and political dynamics.   

A different view than Separate is provided by Spying on the South, by Horwitz.  Frederick Law Omsted - the architect whose works include Central Park, Boston's parks, and Stanford's campus - started his career as a journalist with long travelogues about a Yankee's view of the South ("The Cotton Kingdom.")  Horwitz, a prolific international traveler and author, retraces the 1855 journeys of Omsted, today.   Pair with: while it's not a great movie, I enjoyed the quirky indy movie Sword of Trust with Marc Maron.

 A Few Films from 2019

The HBO dramatization series on Brexit with Benedict Cumberbatch.

Reconstruction, the PBS series with Henry Louis Gates.

A whole list of good biographical film documentaries again this year:

Citizen Jane, about urban activist Jane Jacobs, and Moynihan, about the Harvard professor, U.S. Senator, and ambassador.  Add Raise Hell! about journalist Mollie Ivins, and the multi-part PBS documentary about Bill Gates.  Meeting Gorbachev by German filmmaker Werner Herzog and Where's My Roy Cohn?   Saw Mike Wallace Is Here during its one-week run in an audience of about 4 in Beverly Hills, but enjoyed it.  Finally, The Brink, a interesting and up-close movie about Steve Bannon. 

2019 also brought us a film drama based on a biography, Can You Ever Forgive Me, with Melissa McCarthy and screenplay by one of my favorite writer-directors Nicole Holofcener; life of author and forger Lee Israel.  And still two other films-from-real-life:  These are the holiday Netflix film based on real people, The Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, and the holiday film Bombshell, based on real-life events in 2016 at Fox News.

I enjoyed re-watching the 1980s film Being There, Peter Sellers' last film, finding something interesting going on in every scene.  On a truly idiosyncratic note, maybe somehow the Two Popes movie reminded me of an old-school 1960s Catholic comedy with Haley Mills called "The Trouble With Angels."  It turns out there is a revisionist feminist viewpoint (!) on this nearly-forgotten comedy; see a Youtube short film here, I wrote about it in an essay here. 

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Footnotes

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Money Laundering!

Enjoyed a couple books about international fraud and money-laundering:

    Moneyland, Oliver Bollough

    Lying for Money, Dan Davies

These can be paired with the Netflix movie Laundromat, in which an all-star cast ranging from Antonio Banderas to Meryl Streep looks at the Panama banking scandal.   On the topic of global finance, looking forward to the upcoming documentary Citizen K, about oligarchs in Russia, by noted filmmaker Alex Gibney (he did Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room, 2005.)

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Biography

I get more biography from film documentaries than books, but I enjoyed Robert Caro's memoir about his working life, "Working," and I stumbled across a 1930s book that was an interesting read, Edith Wharton's largely forgotten autobiography "Looking Backward," which brings the 1880's and 1890's in New York and New England back to life.  

Also stumbled across Jessica Pan's memoir of a year in her life, "Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come." About life as a young ex-pat, freelance author, living with her new husband and settling into life in London, built around the theme of adventures in becoming more extroverted and overcoming shyness.  For me, both Working and Sorry were page-turners I finished in a day or two,

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The 1930s

I am fascinated by the 1930s, ever since I ran across a book called Squire in the White House (1940), by Joe Flynn, a best seller in its day by someone who hated FDR.   A lot of people hated FDR - we forget.   And contemporary books from the 1930s, if they were popular then, are often a dollar or two on Amazon.  So I've developed a book shelf of both US, English, and German books written in the 30's.

Clustered together, on a friend's recommendation I FINALLY got around to In the Garden of the Beasts and really enjoyed it - a page turner.  About the American ambassador in Berlin in the mid 1930s.  Hint: I just invested in the eBook and paired audiobook, after having left the big hardcover book, a Christmas gift, untouched on the shelf for three years.

Also read the new book 1931, by Swiss economist Tobias Straussman, about the national and international decisions that shaped the awesome economics and politics of the early 1930s.

As a 1930s hobbyist, I dug up and read three 80 year old books that were all written "as it was happening" during the period, Darkness Over Germany (by a Brit traveler in Germany), Nazi Means War (by an American journalist in Germany around 1934) and Germany's Master Plan (a contemporary US analysis of what Germany was doing and how) and  a fast-reading work of fiction, Katherine Kressman Taylor's book, Address Unknown, a novella which builds to a plot twist worthy of an O.Henry story.  

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Local Color (LA)

Really enjoyed a book on the history of Los Angeles, focused on three inimitable, eccentric, and impactful characters from the early 20th century, The Mirage Factory by Gary Krist.  See also The Library Book (about LA and the old and modern history of its LA public library) by popular author Susan Orlean.  And over the holidays I finally finished a Christmas book from a year ago, Dear Los Angeles, a cornucopia of extracts from letters and diaries 1750-2018.

Reading Time?

In part, I logged 120,000 miles on airplanes, which at 400 mph is 300 hours - almost 8, 40-hour work weeks.  A fair part working on a laptop, but part reading.  Anyway, between two to three nights in a hotel and six hours on a plane a week, a few hours at a gym or hiking, and often a matched copy of the audiobook at 2x speed, I can often get through one book a week.

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Tee'd Up for 2020

A new book, Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It, by Christopher T. Robinson; Harvard Press, here.   Along with the late Princeton economist, Uwe Reinhardt, posthumous book Priced Out! about the US health system. 

Debating Modern Medical Technologies: Politics of Safety, Effectiveness, Patient Access. Karen Maschke, Michael Gusmano. 

Beyond The Prototype: Roadmap for the Fuzzy Area between Ideas and Outcomes, by Douglas Ferguson.