Stuntman Gary Kent passed away last week at the age of 89. A celebrated stuntman in the Hollywood community, he was a key inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and possibly even “Stuntman Mike” from Death Proof; Gary’s film credits were close to a cool hundred, having been involved in a plethora of action and exploitation films from the sixties all the way up to the indie-exploitation films of the last few years. But taking a look back on the past couple of months, Gary Kent was not the only entertainment legend to leave us recently. Over the past two months alone we’ve lost Helmut Berger (Beast with a Gun), Jim Brown (Slaughter, Mars Attacks!), Michael Lerner (Anguish, Barton Fink), Italian genre film actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice (House on the Edge of the Park, Cannibal Apocalypse), Bill Butler, the legendary cinematographer who shot The Conversation, Jaws, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Seymour Stein, the co-founder of Sire Records (who had signed the Ramones to their record label), and many other talents – artists and writers including Kenneth Anger (Lucifer Rising), Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, crime author Anne Perry, whose latter claim to fame came in the 90s when she was outed as being one of the New Zealand teenagers who murdered her friend’s mom in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures; and Al Jaffe, the longest-tenured cartoonist at MAD Magazine and inventor of the back-page fold-in (along with writing one of my personal recurring favorites, “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”). Most of these personalities had long fallen from mainstream recognition to varying levels of cult-status (with ongoing fan followings), and as the years have now progressed well into this third decade of the 21st century, it’s been inevitable that by now they had fallen even further into mainstream obscurity outside of their inner social media fan groups. Such is the outcome of life, yet that cannot detract from the awe and inspiration these talents have brought so many of us through their creative and artistic years while we were just discovering cinema or music or MAD magazine. Their deaths now over the past two months are inevitably overshadowed by only the most recognizable of the mainstream celebrity passings of our generations, and this time it was of the seemingly superhuman Tina Turner, who even enjoyed her own “cult” turn in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. But no matter their mainstream celebrity status nor current popularity, the inspiration of these performers and artists and human beings have helped shaped us and have been cemented into so many of us, and we will continue to find joy in the lasting work that they had generously given us and shared with us, for the next set of our own years to come. RIP.
DARKSIDE RELEASING 