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3 days ago
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James McEachin, Star of ‘Tenafly' and Perry Mason Telefilms, Dies at 94
James McEachin, who wrote and produced songs for Otis Redding before turning to acting to portray cops on his own NBC Mystery Movie series and in 18 of the popular Perry Mason telefilms, has died. He was 94. McEachin died Jan. 11 and was interred last month at Los Angeles National Cemetery. More from The Hollywood Reporter Marcel Ophuls, 'Sorrow and the Pity' Documentarian, Dies at 97 'Duck Dynasty' Star Phil Robertson Dies at 79 Les Dilley, 'Star Wars,' 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' Art Director, Dies at 84 The familiar character actor also appeared in four films opposite Clint Eastwood: Coogan's Bluff (1968), Play Misty for Me (1971) — as the deejay Sweet Al Monte — Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Sudden Impact (1983). All in the Family aficionados know him for his turns as the IRS tax examiner who won't be bribed on the 1972 episode 'Archie's Fraud' and as Solomon Jackson, a Black Jew whom Carroll O'Connor's character invites into his lodge to check off some diversity boxes, on the 1977 installment 'Archie the Liberal.' A onetime contract player at Universal, McEachin starred as family man Harry Tenafly, a Los Angeles cop turned private detective, in Tenafly, created by Richard Levinson and William Link of Columbo and Mannix fame. One of the rotating, once-a-month NBC Mystery Movie shows that in 1973-74 included Dan Dailey's Faraday & Company and The Snoop Sisters, starring Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick, Tenafly was the rare TV series back then to star a Black actor, but it lasted just five episodes. Later, McEachin played Lt. Ed Brock on the NBC Perry Mason telefilms that starred Raymond Burr (and, after his 1993 death, Hal Holbrook) from 1986-95. And he portrayed another police lieutenant, Frank Daniels, on the first season (1986-87) of NBC's Matlock, starring Andy Griffith. James McEachin was born on May 20, 1930, in Rennert, North Carolina, and raised in Hackensack, New Jersey. At 17, he joined the U.S. Army in August 1947. 'When I saw those signs saying 'Uncle Sam Wants You,' I swear I thought that bony index finger of his was pointing right at me,' McEachin told the Los Angeles Daily News in November 2021. McEachin spent more than two years in Japan as part of his first three-year term, then re-enlisted for another three years. As a member of the 2nd Infantry Division, he was wounded in an ambush and left for dead before being rescued. (He was awarded both the Purple Heart and Silver Star in 2005.) After the service, McEachin worked as a firefighter and a cop in Hackensack, then left for Southern California. Known as Jimmy Mack, he became a songwriter, composer, record producer, talent manager and label owner who worked with the doo-wop group The Furys ('Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart') and Redding, whom he 'brought into the business,' he said in a 2014 interview. He didn't think he was the 'Jimmy Mack' in the hit 1967 song from Martha and the Vandellas. 'I couldn't have been,' he said, 'even though there are people who say to this day, 'He's just trying to hide from it.' What is there to hide from?' (Songwriter Ronnie Mack was said to have been the inspiration for the tune.) McEachin was walking along Melrose Avenue one day when someone asked him if he wanted to be in a movie. He asked his wife if she thought he should do it. 'She said, 'Well, you might as well. You've bombed out on everything else you've ever done,'' he recalled with a laugh. That movie, shot in Bakersfield, California (not in the Deep South, as the poster said), was I Crossed the Color Line (1966), also known as The Black Klansman, produced and directed by Ted V. Mikels. 'I didn't know you had to memorize dialogue,' he said. 'I didn't know that you didn't have to just pose and do things naturally. It took me forever to learn that. Even though I didn't know anything about acting, I knew what bad acting was. I think I had a patent on bad acting.' However, before the decade was done, McEachin had signed with Universal and appeared in films including Uptight (1968), If He Hollers, Let Him Go! (1968), True Grit (1969) and Hello, Dolly! (1969) and on such TV shows as Dragnet, It Takes a Thief, Adam-12, The Name of the Game, Mannix, The Wild Wild West, Hawaii Five-O and Burr's Ironside. McEachin worked in the 1972 films Fuzz, Buck and the Preacher and The Groundstar Conspiracy before starring on Tenafly. After showing up on Insight, The Rockford Files, Police Story, Emergency!, Columbo, T.J. Hooker, St. Elsewhere, Murder, She Wrote and Hill Street Blues, McEachin signed up for his first Perry Mason movie, 1986's The Case of the Notorious Nun. He stuck around through 1995's The Case of the Jealous Jokester. He said he turned down a role in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) because he was offended at how his character was written. In 2002, McEachin played a liberal Supreme Court justice on First Monday, a short-lived CBS drama from Donald P. Bellisario that starred James Garner and Joe Mantegna. McEachin was appointed a U.S. Army Reserve Ambassador in 2005 to spend time speaking with soldiers and veterans. A year later, he wrote, produced and starred (with David Huddleston, a castmate on Tenafly) in a 23-minute video called Old Glory that the military community embraced. His one-man play, Above the Call; Beyond the Duty, opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2008 and played L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum three years later. He portrayed Old Soldier, a character who 'pries open tough issues left in the wake of battle, boldly confronting challenges that are facing those serving in our military today while reconciling the spirit of one who has killed in war.' McEachin also wrote several books, including 1996's Tell Me a Tale: A Novel of the Old South, 1997's Farewell to the Mockingbirds, 1999's The Heroin Factor, 2000's Say Goodnight to the Boys in Blue and 2021's Swing Low My Sweet Chariot: The Ballad of Jimmy Mack, a memoir. His wife, Lois, whom he married in 1960, died in July 2017. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise
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3 days ago
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Marilyn Howard Ellman, Daughter of The Three Stooges' Curly Howard, Dies at 86
Marilyn Howard Ellman, the youngest daughter of The Three Stooges star Curly Howard, died May 6 in Simi Valley of heart failure, her son Bradley Server told The Hollywood Reporter. She was her parents divorced and her father often on the road at the height of his career in the early 1940s, Ellman only got to visit him maybe two weekends a month, her son noted. Later, she would spend time with him in the hospital after he had suffered a series of strokes, one of which forced him to leave The Three Stooges in 1946. 'My mom vividly remembers how much he loved animals,' Server said in a 2020 interview. 'She would always play with a dog he had. And he absolutely adored this dog that stood by him until the end. You know, despite my grandfather's big personality onscreen, I learned he was actually a shy, quiet man in private.' More from The Hollywood Reporter Taina Elg, Actress in 'Les Girls' and 'The 39 Steps,' Dies at 95 James McEachin, Star of 'Tenafly' and Perry Mason Telefilms, Dies at 94 Marcel Ophuls, 'Sorrow and the Pity' Documentarian, Dies at 97 Ellman was just 13 when her dad died at age 48 on Jan. 18, 1952, in San Gabriel, California. Curly had been replaced in the act by brother Shemp Howard, who joined another brother, Moe Howard, and Larry Fine. Marilyn Howard was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 18, 1938. Her dad — birth name Jerome Lester Horwitz — and mom, Elaine Julia Ackerman, were married for three years before they divorced in 1940. (Curly would have a second daughter named Janie with his fourth wife.) After Curly's death, she was adopted by her mother's second husband, Moe Diamond, when she was 14. Ellman graduated from North Hollywood High School and attended USC for two years before she worked as a procurement buyer in the electronics business. She would marry twice, and her survivors include her older son, Darren; daughter Andrea; granddaughter Elizabeth; and half-brother Michael. Bradley Server performs slapstick comedy on social media under the stage name Curly G, short for 'Curly's Grandson.' 'Our mother will be deeply missed, and she will never be replaced as the matriarch of our family,' Bradley said. 'Her love, compassion and wisdom has shaped all of us.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
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5 days ago
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‘Code of Silence' Writer Catherine Moulton Knows: 'Lip Readers Are Detectives'
When you watch the crime drama Code of Silence, which premiered on ITV and streamer ITVX in the U.K. on May 18 and will hit streaming service BritBox in the U.S. and Canada in July, you quickly realize that lip reading is even harder, and much less of a science, than you may have believed. One big reason for this reality check embedded throughout the detective thriller series is the experience of partially deaf creator and writer Catherine Moulton (Baptiste, Hijack) and the show's deaf star Rose Ayling-Ellis who portrays the protagonist Alison, a deaf police canteen worker who gets tasked with a role in a sting operation due to her lip-reading skills. 'People are always looking for new ways into crime shows,' Moulton tells THR. 'And it just sort of made sense to me that lip readers are detectives. So to have a crime show with a lip reader at the heart was just something that felt very personal to me.' More from The Hollywood Reporter Marcel Ophuls, 'Sorrow and the Pity' Documentarian, Dies at 97 Crunchyroll Anime Awards: 'Solo Leveling,' 'Look Back' Big Winners at Star-Studded Tokyo Ceremony 'Romería' Review: Carla Simón Dives Deep Into Painful Family History in an Act of Reclamation That's Equal Parts Shimmering and Meandering The show, executive produced by Bryony Arnold and Damien Timmer for ITV Studios' Mammoth Screen, alongside Robert Schildhouse and Stephen Nye for BritBox, as well as Ayling-Ellis and Moulton, also features Kieron Moore (Vampire Academy, Masters of the Air, The Corps), Charlotte Ritchie (You, Ghosts) and Andrew Buchan (Black Doves, The Honourable Woman, Broadchurch). Moulton talked to THR about the inspiration for the series, the origin of its title, and her hopes for addressing misconceptions about lip-reading. Could you share a little bit about what inspired you to create and write ? I'm partially deaf, and I have been since childhood. Kind of like Alison, I I just picked up lip-reading. I just taught myself naturally, and it came quite instinctively. I didn't really know how I was doing it. Then, a few years ago, I wanted to understand more about it and get better at it. So I had lip-reading lessons, and I learned more about the theory. The statistic is that between 30 and 40 percent of speech is visible on the lips, and that's the best case scenario, when we're sitting looking at each other, and I can see you clearly. The rest of it is just very informed guesswork. You're looking at people's body language, you're taking things from the context of what you know about them, the situation that you're in, and even the rhythm of speech. And you're putting all those clues together to work out what the sentence is. So there's a lot going on. If I have to spend a whole day relying on lip-reading, I get very, very tired. It's really a lot of work. People are always looking for new ways into crime shows, and it just sort of made sense to me that lip readers are detectives. So to have a crime show with a lip reader at the heart just felt right, and it was something that was very personal to me. How did you come up with the title . I love that it has a couple of layers and meanings… It came very early on. I always find with titles, either you get them straight away, or you're forever changing it. This just felt thriller-y and tells you that you're getting a thriller. But it's also [a reference] to lip-reading. Lip-reading is a silent code, so that's what the show is about. As a viewer, you learn a lot about lip-reading and its challenges. For example, Alison asks in one scene if the police can zoom in on someone's face in a video. Or in another scene, she asks someone to turn to her while speaking. How did you approach integrating these issues into the script? The trickiest thing was marrying the kind of the information we needed to get in for the thriller and mystery story with the reality of lip-reading. [Lead director] Diarmuid [Goggins] has done such a brilliant job, because there was a version that could have looked really bad where either you definitely can't see the lip shapes, or they are weirdly always looking at the camera really conveniently. But Diarmuid has done it so brilliantly that it really works. You draw viewers into that idea of lip-reading as detective work that you have mentioned in scenes where Alison pieces together lip movements and we see letters appearing and moving around on screen until they end up forming a sentence or phrase. I felt so frustrated following these puzzles and gained additional respect for lip-reading because I often couldn't figure out what was being said until the words were shown on screen. I assume you wanted us to feel this stress… Yeah, I wanted to put the audience in the position of a lip-reader, and for them to understand how difficult it is, and how tiring. I think there's this misconception that lip-reading is just like reading a book — you just magically see all the words. And I don't think people really understand quite how much work lip-readers are doing. So, I'm glad you felt stressed. Catherine Moulton How did you think about balancing this educational aspect and the entertainment focus of your show? It was really important to me that the show was entertaining and that you could just watch it and be entertained. It's hopefully a really good crime story. I love detective shows. I've grown up watching them, and I really love mainstream crime drama. With Code of Silence, what I wanted to do was just think about how to put someone with some of my experience and some of Rose's experience in a crime show. Obviously, there are elements that we've seen before, like surveillance shows and heist shows. But if you put a very different character, like Alison, at the heart of it, what does that do to the story? How does that change it? Hopefully, that makes it feel fresher. What was the biggest challenge as a writer on the show? The biggest challenge was definitely making the lip-reading realistic and difficult, but also making sure that we were getting enough of the right beats of the crime story at the right point. so that people could understand what was going on and wanted to know more. And the lip-reading subtitles kind of evolved even in postproduction. Obviously, it was quite an unusual script in a way, because there was the scene you're seeing on camera, Rose with the police, and what she's able to see, but then we had to also write the scene that was happening in the background — the scene of the crime gang and what they're saying to each other. So there was a lot of trying to balance what they would really be saying and what we wanted to reveal. So it was different from any other crime show that I've worked on. What feedback did Rose give on her experience that led you to adjust the script? Rose, I think, was brilliant when we got to finalizing the lip-reading subtitles in that she was very, very focused on the authenticity of the moment and what we can actually see on screen. What lit patterns are there? What can we work with? Whereas I was kind of juggling that with what the audience needs to know. So, she really kept me honest in that respect. Sometimes it was just really great to have someone else who is a brilliant lip-reader on the show. A lot of the time it was us just going: Oh, can I actually see that on screen? Or do I just know that I wrote that line? Did you always know Alison would be someone who gets a chance to work with the police? It started from that thing about lip-readers being detectives, and then the idea that lip-readers have to watch all the time. You have to watch very closely, so that suggested a surveillance show. And because she's deaf, it feels unlikely that she would be a police officer, and I didn't think she should be a criminal. So she was obviously going to be a civilian [who ends up working with the police]. I caught myself rooting for Alison early on because everyone seems to doubt her but she is ambitious, and you want to see her succeed. What can you share about why you chose to make her so driven and not, as you could have done, a more passive character who gets dragged into a big role? I didn't want that character to feel like a victim. That's not how Rose is. That's not how I am. We don't see ourselves as victims,. We're kind of happy with who we are and being deaf, so I never wanted to make Alison any kind of victim. She had to be an active character. I did want you to both be rooting for her to succeed and to worry. At the start, she's not where she wants to be in her life. And she's running between two jobs, and when she gets this opportunity with the police to use her skill that often goes unrecognized, she grabs onto it with both hands. But I wanted you to worry a little bit about how far she would push that, because you see that she's got something to prove. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise
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5 days ago
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Marcel Ophuls, ‘Sorry and the Pity' Documentarian, Dies at 97
Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning, German-born French filmmaker whose powerfully eloquent documentaries confronted difficult political, moral and philosophical issues, has died. He was 97. Ophuls 'died peacefully' at his home in the south of France, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Code of Silence' Writer Catherine Moulton Knows: "Lip Readers Are Detectives" 'Duck Dynasty' Star Phil Robertson Dies at 79 Crunchyroll Anime Awards: 'Solo Leveling,' 'Look Back' Big Winners at Star-Studded Tokyo Ceremony Ophuls earned his Academy Award — as well as prizes from the Cannes and Berlin film festivals— for Hotel Terminus (1988), a 4-hour, 27-minute documentary that examined the life of the notorious Klaus Barbie, convicted in Bolivia of his Nazi war crimes in 1987. Ophuls' best known work, however, came almost two decades earlier with The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which explored the reality of the Nazi occupation in the small industrial French city of Clermont-Ferrand. Ophuls spent more than two years compiling the more than 60 hours of footage that was eventually boiled down to that 4-hour, 11-minute film, which delineated France's compliance with Nazi Germany. (Some in the country supported Hitler and others joined the resistance, but most just went along for the ride.) Sorrow and the Pity struck such a nerve in France that it was not shown in the country until 12 years after it was completed. 'Many people in France still think it gives a 'message' about how the French behaved,' Ophuls told The New York Times in 2000. 'This would be pompous, stupid and prosecutorial — to make a statement about a country that has been defeated and had to live under these conditions for four years. 'I did not set this up to set up France for being collaborators. In times of great crisis, we make decisions of life and death. It's a lot to ask people to become heroes. You shouldn't expect it of yourself and others.' Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called Sorrow and the Pity 'one of the most demanding films ever made.' In Life magazine, Richard Schickel declared it 'a great human document.' The Sorrow and the Pity also has a prominent place in Woody Allen's Annie Hall: It's the film that Allen's Alvy Singer drags his reluctant girlfriend (Diane Keaton) to see in a theater (Marshall McLuhan is there, too), and at the end of the movie, she drags her new boyfriend to see it. Ophuls also was behind other influential documentaries like A Sense of Loss (1972), centering on the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Belfast; The Memory of Justice (1976), which focused on the Nuremberg trials and the Vietnam War in its 4 1/2 hours; and Veillees d'armes (1994), about journalists under siege in Sarejevo. Born on Nov. 1, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany, Ophuls and his family fled their home in 1933, then escaped from Paris in 1940 when the Nazis invaded that city. They finally settled in Los Angeles in 1941. While attending Hollywood High School, Ophuls had a small part as a Hitler Youth member in the U.S. Army-commissioned Prelude to War (1942), directed by Frank Capra. He then attended Occidental College and UC Berkeley sandwiched around a stint with the U.S. Army's theatrical unit. Fluent in French as well as German, Ophuls broke into film as an assistant to leading directors like John Huston and Anatole Litvak. He assisted on Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and helped out his father on Lola Montes (1955) after the family returned to live in France. While working at a German TV station in Baden-Baden, Ophuls made a short film about painter Henri Matisse. At his father's funeral in 1957, he was introduced to Francois Truffaut, and the French legend hired him to write and direct one of the five segments in Love at Twenty (1962). Through Truffaut, Ophuls met French stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, and they played the leads in his first feature, the comedy Banana Peel (1963). He followed by co-writing and directing Fire at Will (1965), an international thriller about a gang of female spies that starred American expatriate Eddie Constantine as an FBI agent. Ophuls' first foray into documentary features was Munich or Peace in Our Time (1967), also done for German television. For Hotel Terminus, Ophuls employed more than 120 hours of discussions with former Nazis, American intelligence officers, South American government officials and victims of Nazi atrocities and witnesses to make his film about the infamous 'Butcher of Lyon.' Later, Ophuls worked for CBS News and for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 and taught at Princeton University. In 1995, he received a career achievement award from the International Documentary Association. Mike Barnes contributed to this report. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
