

by Sam Juliano
Dearest Allan:
It has been almost ten months since you departed this earthly realm. Lucille and I won’t ever forget the last time we spoke, which was by phone two days before you left us on August 29, 2016. You struggled to speak, but you moved us to the core of our beings with your achingly emotional regard for our eleven year relationship. Though we saw each other on three occasions, adding up to sixty-seven days in each other’s company over that all-too-brief period, our friendship was fueled by daily correspondence and more marathon phone calls than I have had with any person during my lifetime. I can’t remember any other person I fought with more regularly nor can I even fathom the vitriolic nature of some e mails we shared in a chain with fellow friends from Brooklyn and Chicago. Those contentious rows almost always ended with phone conversations initiated by you, with peace branches being accepted on both ends. I fondly recall the first time we ever spoke on the phone back in 2005, when I recklessly dialed your Kendal number and spoke with you nearly four hours, erroneously thinking I had unlimited time. I took an eight-hundred and forty dollar hit that day, one that had you and your mum deeply mortified over the colossal gaffe. As you recall you felt so bad over it that you sent me one-hundred and fifty dollars worth of DVDs to ease the pain, but that now laughable baptism under fire led to more Sunday afternoon conversations than I can remotely recall. Hence, when you told Lucille that she, I and our family “made my life worth living” you immediately and for all time erased all the acrimony and malice, validating in those tearfully impassioned words “what I say about someone is one thing, what I feel about him is another.” Just two months before you shattered us with your untimely adieu, you consoled me on the phone after the tragic passing of my brother Joe’s oldest son at age thirty-six. I shared my eulogy of him with you and you did all you could, even monitoring my own state of grief with Lucille. Though you yourself began to have seizures at that time -a short while after the dreaded cancer had returned- you did all you could from 3,000 miles away to ease my pain. You had all that you could handle and them some, yet you had something there left for me. Whatever time I have left, I won’t ever forget your deepest concern for a friend at a time when your own life was hanging in the balance. Of course, I won’t likewise ever lose sight of the fact that when I was given the news of Brian’s sudden death (drug related) I was driving on a highway about an hour west of my home. I jerked the steering wheel and pulled to the side of the road overcome by grief. The very first thing I did before even allowing such catastrophic news to settle in was to reach you on FB message to appraise you of this horrific event.
Such was the nature of daily communication that as you will fondly recall was in the neighborhood of at least a dozen back and forth e mails, new release announcements, links to other sites and reviews and general banter that often concerned personal matters, finances and family related issues. Our shared site contains many priceless exchanges, and there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to have you back as the yang to my ying. Heck I just heard over the last few days that you told one of our mutual friends that there was a time you’d have to “rethink our friendship” as a result of my being generally unimpressed by the television show The Wire. That quip made me think of when you thought I deserved life imprisonment for championing Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun Sister Moon and Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy. Those were precious exchanges, and I tear up just reliving them.
But I know you were taken from us for a specific reason. You had done your job here, and are now bringing the cinema to people who left their earthly origins much too soon, much as you did. After all your job was to write a film encyclopedia for use by newbies and those expanding their horizons. Now you have others to teach, to spread the word, to delineate what is exceptional and what is disposable. As always your persuasiveness is irresistible, a kind of pitch like the one Ed Wynn gave to Mr. Death in The Twilight Zone’s season one gem “One For the Angels.” When Wynn departed he brought along his box of goodies so he could make pitches to those in heaven, much as your transported file copies of your book are probably all the rage in the movie paradise not too far beyond the pearly gates. The old phrase “I wish I were a fly on the wall” applies to me as I try to surmise what your lectures are entailing. Though I quite understand and respect that this is a one way correspondence – you are allowed to read it but cannot respond before the point of departure for others, I have still come to speculate how’d you’d respond to new releases based on your prior assessment of works bearing thematic or stylistic similarities. I have you down for 3.5 for La La Land, 4.5 for Moonlight, 3.5 for Fences, 4.5 for Indignation, 3.0 for Jackie and the top 5.0 for Manchester for the Sea. If like you I am fortunate enough to get up there at some point, I would like to compare notes on these and many other releases both old and new. I am sure you are celebrating over the Arrow blu ray release of the long-unavailable Rainer Warner Fassbinder television release, Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day. I know that you and Jamie Uhler had many discussions about it, but were doubtful it would ever experience the light of day for cinephiles. But late in July it will become a reality, following in the paths of your beloved Yoshida, Rivette and Fassbinder sets. (more…)
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