William Hurt

You have no idea what William Hurt meant to the baby boomers.

Unless you're a boomer yourself.

We went to the movies. There was a belief that television would kill the movies, but that turned out to be untrue. Movies superseded television, they were smarter, and although they ultimately reached fewer people, they impacted the culture much more.

We started off with Jerry Lewis and Disney pics. We remember going to the movies in the afternoon, seeing a cartoon before the main feature, buying ice cream and candy with the money our parents gave us. 15 cents got you in the door, nothing in the novelty case cost more than a quarter. I'd sometimes go for the ice cream cone. It was pre-made. With a flat top. You peeled the paper off and ate it, and the cone was soft and spongy.

And then came "2001." And "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate." It was "The Graduate" that gave another injection of fame to Simon & Garfunkel, they'd been on the way down commercially previously.

And the seventies? The last golden age of film. It's the fiftieth anniversary of "The Godfather." I think "Godfather II" is the best film ever made. The first "Godfather" was close. That horse in the bed!

And the iconic pictures of the seventies are too many to mention. But in '75, the screw turned. "Jaws" changed the business forever, into what it is now. Funny how Spielberg complains about the loss of film tradition, he's responsible!

So by time the eighties came along, the pictures were more commercial, and generally less daring, but we continued to go. Which is kind of funny, because today most boomers don't go at all, unless it's to see the foreign features. You used to have to go to the movies because, like I said, they moved the culture, they were the coin of the realm, they were what everybody talked about. Have you seen it? You had to go to not feel left out. And the discussion could be endless. Analyzing films was a thing, to the point they were studied in college. Today? Who'd study a comic book character?

So we knew all the actors and actresses. We'd marvel that who we'd seen there was now here. You could be comprehensive, you could cover the sphere, you could be an expert. As for the Oscars... It was a ritual. And there was no E! channel and endless commentary on dresses, rather it was all about the movies themselves and who won. And the big pictures did win. The greats were commercial. Like "Tootsie." And ultimately "Working Girl." And one picture we needed to see was...

"Body Heat." We didn't know Kathleen Turner and we didn't know William Hurt, but one movie made both of them stars, people who everybody knew. Today you can top the Spotify chart, be number one at the box office, and most people are clueless as to who you are.

But not then.

So "Body Heat" was steamy.

That's one thing that's been lost with the advent of the internet. Fantasy. Life fantasy, sexual fantasy. We were all dreamers, and we saw our desired lives on screen. Potential husbands and wives. The actors were larger than life. Nobody was tearing them down on the internet. And a passionate love scene...now you can just dial that up on the internet via Google, but back then?

The goal in acting is to have a career. And that's very hard to do. Even if you make it to features, you can have one or two roles and then disappear. But if you get momentum and sustain, you become embedded into people's lives. Especially when the film defines a generation, like "The Big Chill."

Films about us started to be made. In 1979 there was "The Return of the Secaucus 7." And then there was "Head Over Heels/Chilly Scenes of Winter." Ann Beattie was an icon, for she captured the zeitgeist. Today the goal is to write a genre book, a mystery, to become rich and famous. Whereas forty-odd years ago, people were still interested in writing the Great American Novel, and reading it.

"The Big Chill" was not nostalgia, it was not a look back, it was present-day. In the Reagan years. The boomers were selling out, they were being labeled "yuppies," but some were left behind, like Nick, played by William Hurt. Yes, some made the transition from the sixties to the eighties quite easily. They went from love everybody and money is meaningless to mine for me and money is everything. But not Nick. He was lost.

And he wasn't the only one.

And there was "Broadcast News," where Hurt played the empty suit. Representing the change in television news, which had really started in New York in the seventies, with Roger Grimsby. Suddenly the presenters superseded the events. The anchor team was a family. There were jokes. This had never happened previously, and the main criterion was how you looked. Still is, look at Fox News.

Now the last time I remember seeing William Hurt was in Amazon's series "Goliath." The first year was great, but it got progressively worse thereafter. Hurt was the villain. But he still had that slow delivery, unique to him. Hurt was not fungible, like so many of the pretty faces.

And I could cite more of Hurt's roles, but I don't think that will convey my feeling today. I mean William Hurt was one of us, he was born in 1950, he was a contemporary. We knew him, or at least thought we did. He wasn't like one of the old stars, all fabulous, with their twinkling outfits. He was regular, in a world where everybody was trying to be exceptional. In many cases he was just a guy.

But dying? How can that be? William Hurt dead.

It's not like we saw him decline on screen. And it's not like he was a notorious druggie. We just accepted that he was there, gonna appear in roles down the line. But now he won't.

Now when Hurt broke, he had a spouse, Mary Beth Hurt. She radiated spunkiness and intelligence, she was anything but two-dimensional. It was so interesting that they were together. Too many men make it and they want to marry a model, looks are everything. And let me clarify this, Mary Beth Hurt was plenty attractive, it's just that there was something behind the facade, which was visible on screen. And she was present, not reserved like the models.

Mary Beth Hurt was in "Head Over Heels/Chilly Scenes of Winter," but I bring her up because after they got divorced, I lost touch with William Hurt's personal life. I was surprised to just find out he's got four children. You see Hurt had a whole life we were not privy to. Just like us. Most people have no idea what goes on behind closed doors.

But today it's all about exposing yourself to gain influencers. Subtlety doesn't work online. It's got to be in-your-face all the time.

The seventies are history.

But not in the boomers' minds. They've become part of our DNA. To the point where when one of us passes it's sad, but it's also creepy.

I mean it's one thing if you die by misadventure. But so many of my brethren are gonna be laid low by the Big C, and in this case I mean cancer, but it was also Covid, especially before the vaccines. It seems positively random, one gets it and the other does not. Even those who misbehaved, who smoked like chimneys, sometimes they survive and the clean livers do not. You start to contemplate this when you get old. And the boomers now are. And the younger generation doesn't care about them. Wear masks? Stay home to keep your elders alive? Screw 'em, let 'em die. It's a risk we all take. And that is true, we're all gonna die, but you age and you're confronted with it and you don't know where to put your feelings.

Like with the passing of William Hurt.


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