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.
