Online Articles
Articles by Fletcher Rhoden, as posted on Writing.com and Helium.com
Coining A New Term
Although it is not rare that I should step into the public eye, today I'm taking one of many bold new steps forward -- so take note, as this one appears first among many. I am taking my place beside Ben Franklin and Stephen Colbert and other great Americans and coining a phrase -- step back and prepare, as your life is about to change.
P'OSCAR -- new slang for posthumous Oscar award, such as was given to Peter Finch for NETWORK. Current usage: "Do you think Heath Ledger will win the P'OSCAR this year for THE DARK KNIGHT?" There -- I've coined it, the P'Oscar. And as we all know, copyright law states that as soon as something is fixed in a tangible form, such as a publication, it is copyrighted by virtue of its creation. To my knowledge and to the best of my research, this word has never appeared before ever.
So, do YOU think Heath Ledger will win the P'Oscar?
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Sean Penn: Our Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. Both great actors, each arguably the greatest of his generation. But the similarities only begin there. With so much in common, it’s almost impossible to resist calling Sean Penn our Marlon Brando.
The first things one sees are the physical similarities. Both men shared an almost feline posture in youth; slender, forward-leaning with broad but slopping shoulders. Like big cats stalking through tall grass, they moved with heads low and forward and with hulking grace. You see it in Brando’s turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Names Desire as he prowls the house like a caged tiger. It’s there in Sean Penn’s bobbing and weaving Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times At Ridgemont High or in his hunched, old-lion turn as Jimmy Markum in Mystic River. Interestingly, these characters are all outsiders, criminals, feral in domestic society, another similarity we’ll get to shortly.
Other physical similarities that help make Sean Penn our generation’s Marlon Brando are collected in close proximity just above the neck. Penn has the doleful eyes, the arching brows, the expressive forehead, the high cheekbones, the strong chin, the air of melancholy; he’d be ideal to play Brando if the opportunity ever arose.
Each man also plays his allure in a similar way; a kind of sullen sexiness that was perfected by Brando’s contemporary, James Dean. Like Dean, Brando and Penn each trade in brooding intensity, be it the driving impetus behind Penn’s performances as Michael O’Brien in Bad Boys and as Brad Whitewood Jr. in At Close Range, or Brando’s legendary Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront or the simmering volcano that was Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
In these same performances two more similarities are underscored. Both Penn and Brando expertly combine the vicious and the humane, each capable of rendering the good and evil that exists in men and letting that rendering be both spontaneous and simultaneous. This is classically illustrated by the image of Don Corleone in the opening moments of The Godfather, lovingly stroking a cat (Brando’s spontaneous innovation) while a local mortician asks him to commit murder in the name of revenge. Later, that powerful head of a criminal empire stands before the same mortician, over the body of his butchered, murdered son, and weeps. But we see this juxtaposition of the tough and tender, the tortured and the terrible, not only in Penn’s Mystic turn, but in The Assassination of Richard Nixon as Samuel J. Bicke and as Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking.
And a glimpse at these roles reveals another striking similarity between Brando and Penn, as mentioned earlier; these men are all criminals (save Waterfront’s Terry Malloy). And they are not the only criminals these one-time leading men have played, by any means. Brando played a cross-dressing assassin in The Missouri Breaks, a kidnapper in Night Of The Following Day, a sadist in The Nightcomers. Sean Penn played a coked-up movie executive in Hurlyburly, a coked-up shyster in Carlito’s Way and a coked-up spy in The Falcon and the Snowman. But neither artist backed down from unglamorous roles that might estrange them from their general audiences or from a lucrative female fan base.
But the similarities go beyond acting choices and into the acting. Each man immerses himself in his characters, from Brando’s lead in Viva Zapata! to Sean Penn’s upcoming performance as Harvey Milk, these men become their characters from the inside out. Brando did it famously in Last Tango In Paris, at such emotional cost that he never invested himself in another role thereafter.
But put the acting aside, as both of these great actors have tried to do; another similarity. Each moved into directing (Brando with One-Eyed Jacks and Sean Penn most recently with Into the Wild). And while a lot of actors become directors, they don’t all disdain acting as much as both Brando and Penn seem to have done. Sean Penn has threatened to retire from the craft a number of times, and Brando’s contempt for it is evident in any number of interviews, particularly his Larry King interview, where he sarcastically chides his stubbornly Hollywood-minded interviewer, “I’m glad you asked about acting, because acting is the most important thing in the world.”
And beyond their careers, both men share a love of their privacy; beyond the needs of most of their contemporaries, it would seem. Sean Penn has reacted violently toward photographers for invading his privacy, and Marlon Brando had to buy an entire island to find the seclusion he so desperately craved.
Also in their private lives, both Brando and Penn were activists; Penn currently as much a high-profile liberal as Brando was in his own generation. Where Penn speaks out against Bush’s war and practices his homespun relief efforts in a flood-ravaged New Orleans, Brando attended a 1968 Black Panther rally and more famously helped bring attention to the plight of the Native American Tribes, struggling to survive and reestablish their national identity. And, returning to the chosen profession of these activists, both Brando and Penn brought their politics back into their films (Brando with Burn! and The Ugly American, Sean Penn with All The King’s Men).
Which leaves us to wonder if the trajectory of Sean Penn’s life will be anything like the last half of Brando’s life. Penn is still very fit, but his family does show a propensity for weight gain, as tragically illustrated in the premature passing of his brother, actor Christopher Penn. In their personal temperaments, both men seem given to flares of temper, as illustrated above. Both men seem strong-willed and idealistic, a characteristic than can often lead to unpopularity in Hollywood. Sean Penn has only recently been embraced by a skittish Entertainment community, causing him to include as part of an Independent Spirit Awards acceptance speech, “You tolerate me, you really tolerate me.” Will Hollywood stop tolerating Penn the way it stopped tolerating Brando, who was at one point barred from getting the role of Don Vito Corleone, the role that put him back on top? Will audiences devalue Penn’s talent as it so often did Brando’s? Is Penn capable of slipping into the kind of lethargy and self-indulgence that marked Brando’s downfall? Could Penn ever resort to a series of soulless performances without even the attempt to masquerade a single-mindedly commercial motivation? Hopefully, we have learned from the past, and we all, Mr. Penn included, will have enough taste and style to ever let Sean Penn truly become our Marlon Brando.
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Who Is Our Wally Cox?
I recently published an article suggesting that similarities between actors Sean Penn and Marlon Brando were so great that Penn was essentially this generation’s Brando. But what of Wally Cox, Brando’s lifelong friend and iconic antithesis? Cox of the thick eyeglasses in TV’s Mr. Peepers and Hollywood Squares, the lisping nasal voice of the classic cartoon series Underdog. Who is our Wally Cox?
A better question might be, who isn’t?
Traces of Cox’s influence are all over every popular media. From the giggling nerd Irkle from TV’s Family Matters to the title character recent animated feature Chicken Little; every little man in big glasses, every brainiac and nerd, every belabored bookworm and bureaucrat character owes a nod to Wally Cox, who made the look acceptable, even popular with modern audiences. It’s not just the eyeglasses, even though his breakthrough role of Robinson Peepers did seem predicated on that look (not an affectation but Cox’s genuine appearance). One can scarcely put on a pair of glasses without invoking the archetype Cox perfected.
But beyond the glasses, Cox perfected the befuddled everyman shtick that Bob Newhart would later become famous with; the stammering moral center of an immoral, comedic universe. The comic and the straight man rolled into one.
And it’s hard to imagine the snickering sarcasm of Drew Carey without recalling Wally’s oft-peevish retorts on Hollywood Squares: When asked by host Peter Marshall, “What your average gorilla weighs?” Cox answered, “Well, I don’t have an average gorilla.”
Wally Cox was an intellectual, a philosopher, a humanist; a Woody Allen without the cult following. Indeed, the traces of Cox’s understated delivery are echoed in Allen’s, voices lodged in the middle of the clenched throat. Would America have warmed to Allen without the familiarity implanted by Cox? Both men trade in a school founded by earlier comics, as we’ll investigate shortly, but Allen cannot stand without some measure of Wally Cox’s shadow passing over him.
Wally Cox was more than a sitcom actor, however. Many don’t know he was a nightclub comic, specializing in characters and sketch-type storytelling, the like of which made Bill Cosby famous in the years after Cox’s success. And his characters had a surreal Americana, a twisted normalcy that would later be Jonathan Winters’ stock in trade. To imagine Winters doing Cox’s bit about the scoutmaster who gets his troops lost on the way back to camp is a glimpse at comedy heaven. The line is even more direct from Wally Cox to the humor of Johnny Carson, loopy midwesterners like Cox’s Dufo and Carson’s Aunt Blabby and Art Fern are kindred spirits. This was America portrayed by Americans; honest, weird, dark America.
And, to make an even riskier connection, to caustic and criminal Lenny Bruce, as far from Cox’s bookish societal cog as the animalistic Marlon Brando. Wally Cox was every bit as ahead of his time as the late comic Bruce. Cox did a bit about the then-outlandish idea of a man who brings his dog to a therapist. Thirty years later people were actually doing that... and they’re doing it today.
But Cox’s influence extends beyond his individual look or style. Popular scholastic sitcoms like Welcome Back, Kotter and Head Of The Class were really just Mr. Peepers updated for their eras. And unlike Peepers, those other series’ refocused quickly on the more interesting students in the class and lost sight of the teachers. But Cox never lost his audience’s attention, something Gabe Kaplan and Howard Hessman cannot say.
And Cox has a part of a dubious part in TV lore as well; his series Mr. Peepers was predicated on a “Will-they/won’t they?” sexual tension that later drove popular series like Cheers and Fraiser. But when Cox’s Peepers married his longtime girlfriend Nancy (Patricia Benoit), the show began a ratings decline that resulted in its cancellation. This was the first time a series ever “Jumped the shark,” one of the key footnotes to Mr. Peepers’ place in TV history.
The influence of Hollywood Squares on the modern preshow has been well documented. But suffice it to say that, with Wally Cox as a regular in the show’s formative years, Squares influenced every game show from Match Game to The Gong Show to Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? After Squares, game shows had to be funny, and Wally Cox was a big part of establishing that comedic tone, not only for Squares but for game shows that followed.
Of course, Wally Cox did not exist in a vacuum. Also noteworthy is the tradition that Wally Cox carried on. Cox is a forgotten heir to the Chaplin line of comic character, that tragic little man who triumphs against overwhelming odds by sheer purity of soul and cleverness of wit, even if success means only one more day of survival. Willing to dream in a world that has cast dreams aside, a gentle expression of his will standing up to great adversity; how like Chaplin greats City Lights or The Gold Rush does Wally Cox’s minor work Ralph Makes Good seem in retrospect.
To read Cox’s autobiographical My Life As A Young Boy is to see a Norman Rockwell painting brought to life. One might think it the supple, philosophical work of O. Henry or Will Rogers. Rogers said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Wally Cox wrote, “Hurt a minimum of people.” The gentle misanthropy of that line recalls Mark Twain and Twain’s inspirations Benjamin Franklin and Davy Crockett.
Cox also liked to say, “Walk softly and carry a little twig.” Wally Cox; forgotten comedy genius, TV pioneer, patron saint of nerds and brainiacs everywhere, with generations of protégées to carry that little twig onward into the vast, funny darkness.
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