sbjork
Supporting Actor
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2020
- Messages
- 988
- Real Name
- Stephen
I couldn't think of the appropriate forum for this, so feel free to move it to someplace more appropriate. Michael Schlesinger, aka cadavra on these forums, passed away a few hours ago. He was a frequent contributor to extras on Blu-rays and DVDs thanks to his socko-boffo commentary tracks and Trailers from Hell videos, and he probably spent the most time lurking on Blu-ray/DVD posts on these forums, so maybe this is the appropriate place for a thread about him after all.
I'll share a post here that I wrote about him earlier on social media:
The great Michael Schlesinger just died today, and the world will be a much sadder place without him --and not just because of his penchant for bad puns, either. He'll be remembered for things like his tireless support of the Greatest Movie Ever Made, recording socko-boffo commentaries, and for boldly leaping back in time to make the charmingly retro Biffle and Shooster series. But that's not what I'll remember him for.
No, in my case, it's two remarkable accomplishments that may mean less to other people than they do to me. When he was at Columbia in the Nineties, he was the one responsible for setting Grover Crisp down the path of restoring Sam Peckinpah's mutilated western Major Dundee. Whenever I tried to praise him for that, he would always humbly point out that he just greenlit the project, and Crisp deserved all the credit for the work. But the reality of the business is that no bucks, no Buck Rogers. Nothing gets restored without a mad genius who's willing to go out on a limb by committing studio money to do something that most studios don't want to do. The creative people need the full support of the suits back in the office.
Yet Schlesinger excelled at creativity, too. Years before he dreamed up Biffle and Shooster, Sony assigned him the task of helming an Americanized version of Godzilla 2000: Millennium. He had never worked on anything like that before, but he rolled up his sleeves and achieved something that no one else has been able to do in the entire seventy year history of that franchise: he improved on the original. He tightened up the editing, fixed some technical issues like bad sound mixing, and made the whole thing flow much more smoothly. I think that he was pretty damned proud of that one, too, because whenever I told him that he earned his place in film history for Major Dundee and Godzilla 2000 alone, while he still demurred on Dundee, he was pretty pleased to hear that about Godzilla.
Film isn't really a director's medium. It belongs to all of us. So does the legacy that Schlesinger left behind.
I'll share a post here that I wrote about him earlier on social media:
The great Michael Schlesinger just died today, and the world will be a much sadder place without him --and not just because of his penchant for bad puns, either. He'll be remembered for things like his tireless support of the Greatest Movie Ever Made, recording socko-boffo commentaries, and for boldly leaping back in time to make the charmingly retro Biffle and Shooster series. But that's not what I'll remember him for.
No, in my case, it's two remarkable accomplishments that may mean less to other people than they do to me. When he was at Columbia in the Nineties, he was the one responsible for setting Grover Crisp down the path of restoring Sam Peckinpah's mutilated western Major Dundee. Whenever I tried to praise him for that, he would always humbly point out that he just greenlit the project, and Crisp deserved all the credit for the work. But the reality of the business is that no bucks, no Buck Rogers. Nothing gets restored without a mad genius who's willing to go out on a limb by committing studio money to do something that most studios don't want to do. The creative people need the full support of the suits back in the office.
Yet Schlesinger excelled at creativity, too. Years before he dreamed up Biffle and Shooster, Sony assigned him the task of helming an Americanized version of Godzilla 2000: Millennium. He had never worked on anything like that before, but he rolled up his sleeves and achieved something that no one else has been able to do in the entire seventy year history of that franchise: he improved on the original. He tightened up the editing, fixed some technical issues like bad sound mixing, and made the whole thing flow much more smoothly. I think that he was pretty damned proud of that one, too, because whenever I told him that he earned his place in film history for Major Dundee and Godzilla 2000 alone, while he still demurred on Dundee, he was pretty pleased to hear that about Godzilla.
Film isn't really a director's medium. It belongs to all of us. So does the legacy that Schlesinger left behind.
