Well this is a bummer to start the week:
We’re shocked to learn tonight that Tony Scott, the brother of Ridley Scott and the director of films such as The Hunger, Top Gun, and True Romance, died today at the age of 68 due to an apparent suicide. Sources report that Scott leapt from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro at 12:35pm this afternoon, and that authorities identified the body, recovered this afternoon, as Scott. The coroner’s department and LA port police report that he jumped “without hesitation,” and that a note was found in his office.
I’ll be honest, Tony Scott’s aesthetic, especially in recent years—the step-printing, the hectic cuts, the washed out colors, etc.—was never really my cup of tea. But there’s no denying that the man was a force to be reckoned with, one of those rare directors who truly grasps the nature of action filmmaking and the importance of timing within the genre. Man on Fire, Enemy of the State, Crimson Tide, Top Gun, True Romance, and so on—all eminently entertaining films that understood their place in the filmmaking ecosystem.
I would like to defend Scott against this ridiculously unfair broadside by Mark Harris, published in GQ last year. After bitching about the state of Hollywood—sequels and adaptations and comic books, oh my!—Harris writes:
How did hollywood get here? There’s no overarching theory, no readily identifiable villain, no single moment to which the current combination of caution, despair, and underachievement that defines studio thinking can be traced. But let’s pick one anyway: Top Gun.
It’s now a movie-history commonplace that the late-’60s-to-mid-’70s creative resurgence of American moviemaking—the Coppola-Altman-Penn-Nichols-Bogdanovich-Ashby decade—was cut short by two movies, Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977, that lit the fuse for the summer-blockbuster era. But good summer blockbusters never hurt anyone, and in the decade that followed, the notion of “summer movie season” entered the pop-culture lexicon, but the definition of “summer movie” was far more diverse than it is today. …
Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film’s real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the “high-concept” blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren’t movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.
Oh, give me a f—ing break. Shorter Harris: “Tony Scott made action movies that had action, zomg! He the devil!” He then goes on to decry the role of marketing in Hollywood, the death of platforming, and a bunch of other so-called ills of modern moviemaking. Some of which is fair, some overblown. But to describe Tony Scott as patient zero in this epidemic? Ridiculous load of claptrap.
I hope Harris feels good about himself today.
