POWERS BOOTHE: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Powers Boothe went up at the Guardian online yesterday, you can link to it here. He died in his sleep at only 68, a surprise because of the incredible energy he brought to his roles. Yet the seeming easy with which he pulled off intensity was amazing, and it was what made him one of my favourites.

I was thinking about how much fun he seemed to be having when he acted, that well studied sense of not having studied at all. And how much fun the set must have been on so many of his films, and what good ensembles he was part of. Extreme Prejudice is like a Hall of Fame of B movie villainy: Rip Torn, Michael Ironside, William Forsythe. Walter Hill had worked with Sam Peckinpah, and this was very much like a movie Peckinpah might have wanted to make. The same with Southern Comfort, another Hill effort, with Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, and Peter Coyote. Or think of Tombstone, with such great turns by lesser stars like Val Kilmer (the definitive Doc Holliday) or Kurt Russell as Wyatt, but tremendous work from Michael Biehn (Ringo Kid), Stephen Lang (Ike Clanton), Bill Paxton (Morgan Earp) or Joanna Pacula (Big Nose Kate).

But the two roles that might be his best performances are his breakthrough part as Jim Jones, which he played like a demented summer-camp director, which made it easy to see how he might get typecast as charismatic villains, and his take as Al Haig in Oliver Stone's Nixon: another film where he shines amidst a wonderful ensemble cast. He gets the lightly hidden drive for power behind Haig, and the way he succumbs to the opportunity to grab it, the way a vampire might succumb to the smell of blood.

There are similarities in many of his roles. Obviously he played a lot of corrupt people with power. But even in two of his starring roles as a hero, he winds up being converted to his heroic role (A Breed Apart and Emerald Forest). The latter in particular is very interesting because he starts off not to far from his character in Red Dawn, which possibly inspired Ironside when he played in Starship Troopers. As an aside, I saw a preview of Red Dawn at the DGA in Los Angeles with a friend of mine, and my ridicule of the movie forced my host to tell me to keep it down lest I offend anyone connected with the film who might be in attendance. It's kind of like the creation myth of the Tea Party militia.

Writing the obit was not easy: there were lots of half-way details about his life, especially his personal life. I found lots of gossip clippings about him and Rebecca de Mornay, which might help explain why his long marriage eventually failed, but was nothing important enough nor solid enough to warrant inclusion. Then, as it turned out, the Guardian was contacted to say his marriage had not ended in divorce, and the alleged second wife and two sons did not seem to exist. It was easy to say wikipedia was wrong, but I hadn't followed Wiki blindly; it was sourced (perhaps from wiki) in many places, and what had given the second wife idea credence was one source that actually was correcting wikipedia regarding dates. If this were a hoax, it's hard to conceive of why it would be done. In the end, finding no evidence to confirm either second wife or children, we corrected the piece, with apologies for distress it may have caused.

To add to the confusion, I also discovered an artist named Power Boothe, who made a short film called Overture, which some listings credit to Powers Boothe. I eventually found the correct name on a sale listing of old VHS art tapes. I assumed it was this Boothe who had also done the art work for Todd Solandz's first film, which also gets credited to Powers.

Most interesting, however, was one source, which appeared to get repeated, saying Boothe had appeared as an extra in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, as a Bolivian bandit. The timing was not impossible; he might have been between college and graduate school, though location shooting was done in Bolivia. I felt that had that story been true, I would have found Boothe talking about it at some point, especially considering his success in westerns. I did manage to find a still from the scenes in Bolivia, and in the back is someone who looks an awful lot like Boothe, although not necessarily the 21 year old Boothe. I never made contact with someone who could tell me definitively, but I feel like this is apocryphal, much as I would have liked it to be true.

Boothe also thrived in the quality small-screen dramas that have changed the face of film-making in the past 15 years.  This should not have been a surprise, because his best lead role as a non-villain was as Philip Marlowe, in the HBO series Marlowe, as I describe in the obituary. That series was produced along with London Weekend, the kind of deal that was the forerunner for the modern style of subscription channel offerings. Showtime's Fallen Angels was another similar series, though better written, directed and shot.

Boothe didn't fit my idea of Marlowe, but he got the character and interpreted it deftly. Latterly he stole scene after scene from Kevin Costner and Paxton in Hatfields and McCoys; he and McShane were a terrific double-act in Deadwood, and he was born to play Connie Britton's dad. There would have been more television greatness to come for sure; he was gone too soon. RIP.

WHEN KATE MET ROBERT: SOUTHERN COMFORT, THE DOCUMENTARY

Note: I wrote this piece ten years ago for the Financial Times, having seen Southern Comfort at the Sheffield Festival, and then interviewed Kate Davis after the film played at the NFT. It aired that spring in the BBC's Storyville series. Seek it out; it's a brilliant documentary. I came across the article as I was going through some files, and thought, since May is supposedly Movie Month here at IT, I'd run it again here....
 

WHEN KATE MET ROBERT

“It’s not what you have down there that determines your sexuality,”says Robert Eads. “It’s what’s here,” pointing to his heart, “and here,” to his head, “that determine who you are.” Kate Davis’ documentary Southern Comfort charts the last year in Eads remarkable life, but that wasn’t what she set out to do.

The director of the award-winning Girltalk, a study of runaway teenagers, had turned to producing for an American cable network. “I found more opportunity to give a voice to people who aren’t usually heard much,” she explains. But while working on a programme about the struggle for civil rights by people who’ve undergone sex change operations, Davis attended a conference of female to male transsexuals. Standing out from the crowd was Eads, a bearded, pipe-smoking man in cowboy hat and boots.

“He broke all the stereotypes, so completely." she explains, "He was a prototype Georgia 'bubba'. But this redneck had been the mother of two children."

Born into a girl’s body, Robert always felt male. He’d tried marriage, but found childbirth “both the best and worst experience of my life.” The joy of life inside him was countered by his despair at feeling it was all wrong, because he was a man. He got divorced, lived for a time as a lesbian, but finally began hormone treatments and surgery to remove his breasts, transforming his body to match his mind.

When Davis met him, Eads, only 52, was dying of ovarian cancer; betrayed, as it were, by the part of his body that remained female. When he first noticed the symptoms, some two dozen doctors made their excuses and declined to treat him, avoiding the awkwardness of a man in their OBGYN surgeries. Eades' lack of bitterness made an deep impression.

“I couldn't get him out of my mind," says Davis. "All the way back to New York, I was thinking 'I've got to make a film about Robert. This is such a bizarre story, I've got to tell it myself'.' When I got home and called him he said 'I thought you'd call'. Robert, knowing he was dying, wanted to reach out to as many people as he could."

But even as Davis began filming, the story began to change. Robert fell in love with Lola, a male-to-female transsexual. As their relationship blossomed, he became determined to stay alive long enough to attend Southern Comfort, Atlanta's annual transgender convention, one last time.

The film opens in spring, with a sense of emotional rebirth as Robert speaks of coming to terms with dying just as he finally found peace in life. As Robert shows Lola pictures of himself as a little girl, we see just how far he has come. Davis works with all the intimacy of a home movie, allowing the audience to become part of Robert's world. "Yes, you could say it's close to subjective camera work," she says. "It gets the audience into the people's heads, so you can't objectify them."

Documentaries often do objectify. Davis studied with the masters of fly-on-the-wall techniques: Frederick Wiseman, Ricky Leacock, and Ross McElwee. The unwritten law of such films was that the camera is a silent observer. Not so this time. "I found the camera disappeared." Davis says, "In a sense I crossed the line. It became totally a labour of love. Where it might have been shocking, there was just so much normality."

In fact, what is amazing is how quickly the audience accepts a new definition of normality. The film's saddest moment comes when Robert's father explains why he now tells friends Robert is his nephew. "I didn't want the neighbours realising this is something different," he says. At the same time, when one of Robert's own sons tells us, "If I were to remarry I'd want Mom to be the best man," it is uplifting, and it doesn't sound at all strange.

Using digital video enabled Davis to work unobtrusively, and to move quickly to emphasise emotional reactions that larger equipment, or crews, might miss. Having Robert's trust enabled her to gain quickly the trust of is surrogate family, a pair of younger transexual men, and their partners. These are people whose first instinct is to remain inconspicuous. They appear to have chosen backwoods Georgia specifically for the privacy it affords. And they had real fears.

"Some were scared they'd lose their jobs, if not their lives,” Davis says. “But they wanted to believe they could change people's hearts and minds.” She laughs. “Of course, no one liked the way they looked on film! But seriously, some have attended public screenings, and when they see audiences react positively, they've been amazed."

Southern Comfort won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. Its UK premiere came at the 2001 Sheffield International Documentary Festival. I spoke to Davis after a February 2002 screening at the National Film Theatre, part of the Sheffield Festival's national tour. She too was overwhelmed by audience reaction.

"This was what he wanted. I think Robert would have approved," she says, and her eyes begin to fill. She still feels the loss. "I just couldn't break away," she tells me. "Usually after you finish a film you may stay in touch, but you re-establish your distance from your subjects. This was a real friendship. Frankly, it took me almost a year before I could begin editing. I miss him so." She stops again, distracting herself by rounding up her two children. "That year was necessary, because I was still caught up in the injustice of Robert's death. I needed distance to cool down, to see that the story was simpler, deeper than that. I'd actually interviewed two doctors for the film, but I cut them out. I didn't want an investigative report."

Instead, it is a moving portrait of one man's difficult struggle to simply be accepted as the man he wanted to be. Robert Eads brought dignity to the film himself. Kate Davis might finally bring him acceptance.