Back To His Roots

 One of the things I learned about the movie business before I really knew about the movie business came to me while I was working at a video store. Actually, working at a video store was my first true brush with show business, so there were plenty of lessons to be learned. The most apparent among them was promotion. 

A movie without a poster would not rent. Sure, there were those customers who would accept recommendations from yours truly, but your standard Friday night interaction started with "What's new that's good that's in?" Some people were clever enough to reserve those lightly sought after new releases in advance. How did they know about them? Primarily from the Point of Purchase materials that we had placed in the windows and in any spare space we had. Posters were good, but companies that were anxious to see their movies do well sent along cardboard standees that needed to be erected from their folded size to their full size to seven foot glory.

One in particular sticks in my memory: It was a beast of a thing in yellow and gold that featured the stars of the film Firewalker: Chuck Norris and Louis Gossett Jr. Released in 1985, this pastiche of Raiders of the Lost Ark and other swashbuckling type adventures was released three years after Mister Gossett's Academy Award winning performance in Officer and a Genrleman. What good did that Oscar do his career? Here he was billed below Chuck Norris in a feature that now boasts an eighty percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Please understand I was a Louis Gossett fan before he started berating Richard Gere. I had seen his work on television, most significantly as Fiddler in the ABC production of Roots in 1977. It took a while for the rest of the world to catch up to the talent of this hard-working actor whose credits went all the way back in TV and film to 1960. 

I knew how good an actor Louis Gossett Jr. was. So what was he doing on that gaudy chunk of cardboard that was never quite out of my field of vision every shift I worked at the video store? 

Stomping on the Terra. Breaking down barriers and doing his job. And being very good at it. Whether he was an offiecer, a gentleman or an alien from another planet, as he was in Enemy Mine, Louis Gossett Jr. brought it. 

He died this past week at the age of eighty-seven. That might be enough to get me to watch Firewaker. That's how much he will be missed.