Linda Manz, 58, starred in Dennis Hopper's "Out of the Blue" (1980)

[l***@yahoo.com]

Cause: pneumonia and lung cancer.

So sad!

That movie is very haunting and is one of the few grim teen dramas I've enjoyed watching more than once.

(Which, unfortunately, was NOT true for another one she was in - the 1997 "Gummo." It's enough to make The average person seriously ill. I was warned by the critics; I should have listened.)

More in a sec...

[l***@yahoo.com]

Also well known for "Days of Heaven."

"Out of the Blue" had this tag line:

"She's 15.
The only adult she admires is Johnny Rotten."

In some scenes, she could have passed for 13. However, she was at least 18 at the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Manz
(this has quite a few articles linked)

https://extratv.com/2020/08/14/days-of-heaven-star-linda-manz-dead-at-58/

Linda Manz, who as an androgynous teen captivated many with her performances in the films "Days of Heaven" and "Out of the Blue," died Friday at 58. The cause, according to extended family posting on social media, was pneumonia and lung cancer.

Born in NYC on August 20, 1961, Manz was cast at 15 to appear as the narrator of Terrence Malick's period film "Days of Heaven," which was released in 1978 after an arduous shoot. Initially received with mixed reviews, it has gone on to overwhelming critical acclaim. Manz's improvised narration is widely considered an essential aspect of what makes the film — which is preserved in the United States Film Registry — an artistic success.

In 1979, Manz had the fondly remembered supporting role of Peewee in the hit film "The Wanderers." One of its stars, Ken Wahl, wrote of Manz on Facebook Friday, "She was great to work with and I'm glad I got to speak with her before she passed."

Manz's last starring role was in 1980's "Out of the Blue," in which she was directed by, and acted alongside, Dennis Hopper. The influential film competed at Cannes, and Manz's performance inspired a generation of actresses. Chloë Sevigny told Paper in 1995, "As for acting, I’d like to have a career like Linda Manz. She’s my favorite actress. She did three movies and all of them are masterpieces, except for 'The Wanderers.' Now she lives in a trailer park with three or four kids, I think. But I’d rather do that than do 10 movies and make millions of dollars and have them all be trashy films."

Natasha Lyonne told Interview in 2013, "The world at large doesn’t always make sense to me, and there are safe havens. Linda Manz in 'Out of the Blue' is one of them."

Crowdsourcing raised over $60,000 last year to restore "Out of the Blue."

In 1997, Manz — who rarely acted past the '80s, appearing in a small role in that year's "Gummo" — told Time Out New York, "There was a whole bunch of new young actors out there, and I was kind of getting lost in the shuffle. So I laid back and had three kids. Now I enjoy just staying home and cooking soup."

Manz was preceded in death by her son Chris, who died in a motorcycle accident two years ago. She leaves behind her husband, Bobby Guthrie, their two surviving sons, and three grandchildren.

A GoFundMe has been set up for the late actor — whose married name was Linda Guthrie — to help cover final expenses.

(end)

[l***@yahoo.com]

I've always been fascinated with OotB, even if it's not quite as well assembled as "The River's Edge." (Do NOT watch any YouTube videos about it; chances are you'll stumble on big fat spoilers if you do, and if you liked "The River's Edge," you will not want this one spoiled!)

And Neil Young sings the title song.

Check out the punk band names on the girl's bedroom wall - they are: "Teenage
Head," "Submission," and "Public Enemy." (Clearly not THAT band, in 1980!)

Oh, and Raymond Burr plays the high school counselor who astutely
suspects Manz is hiding something...

A couple of reviews:

"Utterly preposterous, Dennis Hopper's "Out of the Blue" is small-town
American gothic at its seamiest, with sleazy, layabout young ma
mainling, drunk pa fresh from jail after crashing a school bus, and
their street-wise kid gruesomely into punk. Sharon Farrell and Hopper
convince as horror-comic parents, but it is the magnetic runt Linda
Manz, with her fling-around limbs and small-hewn, epicene, ugly-
beautiful phiz, that makes this a must." -John Coleman, New Statesman.

"Dennis Hopper's dogged, painful, desperately sincere "Out of the
Blue" is a portrait of a family that has fallen apart. Hopper's sub-
Cassavetes improvisatory style can be infuriatingly clotted and
inexpressive, but now and then the despair of an aimless, booze-
centered existence comes through with the force of a fist smashing
down on a table." -David Denby, New York Mag.

And, from Movie Retriever:

"A harsh, violent portrait of a shattered family. When an imprisoned father's
return fails to reunite this Woodstock-generation family, the troubled teenage
daughter takes matters into her own hands. "Easy Rider" star Hopper seems to
have reconsidered the effects of the 1960s."

[Lenona]

Post by l***@yahoo.com
Check out the punk band names on the girl's bedroom wall - they are: "Teenage
Head," "Submission," and "Public Enemy." (Clearly not THAT band, in 1980!)

Yes, it's kind of silly to bring this up again. But anyway...

While I think there's more than one scene where you can see what's on the bedroom walls, on one occasion, at least, the sign said "The Subhumans," not "Submission."

(There's more than one punk band named "Subhumans" - one is British. Each has its own Wikipedia page. However, given the time and location, it's more likely that the group in question was the Vancouver group, founded in 1978.)

Also, I found that "Public Enemy" was actually a short-lived newsprint publication. Now that I think about it, I seem to remember one issue - at an antiquarian book fair! It may have had a drawing of Elvis Costello on the cover - or someone similar.

More on it:

https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/events-and-entertainment/the-original-public-enemy-designed-in-vancouver-1924233
(this has pictures)

Bob Kronbauer
Dec 27, 2011 9:34 AM

If you're a hip hop history nerd then you already know that the rap group Public Enemy came together in 1986 and released their first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, in 1987.

If you're a Vancouver punk rock history nerd then you already know about the newsprint publication, entitled Public Enemy, that the Georgia Straight launched almost a decade previous, in 1978, which lasted six issues.

At the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated pieces of music history meet two Public Enemy logos which both utilize the same typeface and share a very similar design (although P.E. the group expand on it with the addition of "man in crosshairs" icon). Now I know that there are more than a few design nerds (like myself) out there who read V.I.A., and I would love to hear what you all think of this. Is it a cut and dry case of there not being many typefaces available in the 70's and 80's and the designers having Stencil in front of them and going the obvious route with the stacked layout? Did both parties have an actual stencil that they used to design their logo as it was pre Adobe Illustrator times when both were designed? Or perhaps was it a little more sinister than that?...

(snip - it's short)

[l***@yahoo.com]

And, from critic Ty Burr, in 2010:

...In the 25 years that followed, Hopper slowly evolved into a journeyman character actor, capable of enlivening good movies (1991's "Paris Trout" and bad ones (1995's "Waterworld"), taking jobs for the money and directing a few for the love or the fun of it. (1980's "Out of the Blue" may be his best and truest as a filmmaker, and 1988's "Colors" isn't shabby either.) Yet as younger and younger audiences appeared on the scene and the revolution faded in the rearview mirror, the anarchic glow in his eyes never dimmed.

If anything, it grew more insistent. In the end, Hopper was proof, if you wanted it, that the '60s really happened and that they were far more dangerous than you know.

(end)


Manz's filmography:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0544371/

[l***@yahoo.com]

Here's one trailer, at least, that doesn't really spoil anything...

But, as I said, it's grim.




Lenona.

[l***@yahoo.com]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/linda-manz-dead-days-heaven-actress-was-58-1307568

Middle third:

...She went on to appear in Philip Kaufman's 1979 drama The Wanderers alongside Ken Wahl. The film was based on the Richard Price novel about an Italian American teen street gang. On Facebook, Wahl posted several polaroid pictures of Manz from the movie and wrote, "She was great to work with and I'm grateful that I got to speak with her before she passed this morning."

Manz starred alongside director Dennis Hopper in his 1980 cult drama Out of the Blue, a Cannes competition entry in which she played a rebellious young fan of Elvis Presley and punk music, at odds with her ex-con father, played by Hopper.

She was coaxed out of acting retirement by director Harmony Korine in 1997 to play the tough-love mother of Solomon, one of the marginalized adolescent outsiders in Gummo, an unconventional drama set in a small Ohio town that had been hit by a tornado.

"I had always admired her," said Korine in an interview in Index Magazine at the time. "There was this sense about her that I liked — it wasn't even acting. It was like the way I felt about Buster Keaton when I first saw him. There was a kind of poetry about her, a glow. They both burnt off the screen."

One of her co-stars in Gummo, Chloë Sevigny, was among indie film artists championing the restoration and re-release of Manz's small but indelible filmography. Sevigny called Manz her favorite actress, while Natasha Lyonne was another former child actor who expressed admiration for her unique gifts as a teen performer. "The world at large doesn't always make sense to me, and there are safe havens," said Lyonne in a 2013 feature in Interview magazine. "Linda Manz in Out of the Blue is one of them."...

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/08/linda-manz-dies-at-58-1234580210/
(a few remembrances)

[l***@yahoo.com]

(slideshow with narration about her life - I was surprised about one detail regarding "Days of Heaven")

(this has clips from her movies' trailers; I never saw "The Game," maybe I should)

https://www.etonline.com/linda-manz-days-of-heaven-and-out-of-the-blue-actress-dead-at-58-151387
(this mentions the 2016 documentary "Along for the Ride" - I never heard of it)

[l***@yahoo.com]

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/08/linda-manz-star-of-days-of-heaven-and-out-of-the-blue-dies-at-age-58
(this includes a video of the opening sequence of "Days of Heaven")

Excerpt:

...Manz followed Days of Heaven with a very short-lived television sitcom Dorothy (starring Annie’s original Miss Hannigan, Dorothy Loudon), and a small role in Phillip Kaufman’s ode to Bronx greasers and gangs, The Wanderers. Manz plays Peewee, the shrimpy androgynous girlfriend to the enormous and baldheaded Terror. The role was written specifically for Manz, who dazzled Kaufman, writer Richard Price, and producer Scott Rudin at her audition.

That same year, 1979, she appeared in a curio called Boardwalk that starred Ruth Gordon and Lee Strasberg as an old married couple facing urban blight in Coney Island...

(snip)

I have to say, Erland van Lidth, who played Manz's boyfriend in "The Wanderers" WAS a terror to look at. The only way I'D have anyone like that for a boyfriend is if he oozed with sweet charm - and/or wit. (As it happens, he went to MIT and was a wrestler, an opera singer and an English teacher. He died of heart failure at age 34 in 1987. He was also in "Stir Crazy" with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.)


Lenona.

[Louis Epstein]

Post by l***@yahoo.com
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/08/linda-manz-star-of-days-of-heaven-and-out-of-the-blue-dies-at-age-58
(this includes a video of the opening sequence of "Days of Heaven")
...Manz followed Days of Heaven with a very short-lived television sitcom Dorothy (starring Annie?s original Miss Hannigan, Dorothy Loudon), and a small role in Phillip Kaufman?s ode to Bronx greasers and gangs, The Wanderers. Manz plays Peewee, the shrimpy androgynous girlfriend to the enormous and baldheaded Terror. The role was written specifically for Manz, who dazzled Kaufman, writer Richard Price, and producer Scott Rudin at her audition.
That same year, 1979, she appeared in a curio called Boardwalk that starred Ruth Gordon and Lee Strasberg as an old married couple facing urban blight in Coney Island...
(snip)
I have to say, Erland van Lidth, who played Manz's boyfriend in "The Wanderers"
WAS a terror to look at. The only way I'D have anyone like that for a boyfriend
is if he oozed with sweet charm - and/or wit. (As it happens, he went to MIT and
was a wrestler, an opera singer and an English teacher. He died of heart failure
at age 34 in 1987. He was also in "Stir Crazy" with Richard Pryor and Gene
Wilder.)

He was Dynamo in "The Running Man"...

Post by l***@yahoo.com
Lenona.

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.

[Kenny McCormack]

Post by l***@yahoo.com
http://youtu.be/-3ayljXUxZk
(slideshow with narration about her life - I was surprised about one detail
regarding "Days of Heaven")
http://youtu.be/b-gNrcqxC3M
(this has clips from her movies' trailers; I never saw "The Game," maybe I should)

This (the 2nd one) is a Private Video, and, thus, inaccessible.

[Lenona]

In article

Post by l***@yahoo.com
http://youtu.be/-3ayljXUxZk
(slideshow with narration about her life - I was surprised about one detail
regarding "Days of Heaven")
http://youtu.be/b-gNrcqxC3M
(this has clips from her movies' trailers; I never saw "The Game," maybe I should)

This (the 2nd one) is a Private Video, and, thus, inaccessible.

Well, it was accessible a year ago.

[Kenny McCormack]

Post by Lenona

In article

Post by l***@yahoo.com
http://youtu.be/-3ayljXUxZk
(slideshow with narration about her life - I was surprised about
one detail regarding "Days of Heaven")
http://youtu.be/b-gNrcqxC3M
(this has clips from her movies' trailers; I never saw "The Game," maybe I should)

This (the 2nd one) is a Private Video, and, thus, inaccessible.

Well, it was accessible a year ago.

I believe you. But it still a shame I can't view it now. Do you remember
what it said?

[Lenona]

Post by Lenona
Well, it was accessible a year ago.

I believe you. But it still a shame I can't view it now. Do you remember
what it said?

It's possible that it only had the clips from her trailers. In that case, you can look up the trailers - maybe. (Again, beware of any short video concerning "Out of the Blue," aside from the trailer I posted last year, since the other videos tend to have BIG spoilers. Also, I think there were two DVD releases of that movie, years ago. One had Manz on the cover and the other had Hopper. I only saw it on VHS - rented!)

[Kenny McCormack]

Post by Lenona

Post by Lenona
Well, it was accessible a year ago.

I believe you. But it still a shame I can't view it now. Do you remember
what it said?

It's possible that it only had the clips from her trailers. In that
case, you can look up the trailers - maybe. (Again, beware of any short
video concerning "Out of the Blue," aside from the trailer I posted
last year, since the other videos tend to have BIG spoilers. Also, I
think there were two DVD releases of that movie, years ago. One had
Manz on the cover and the other had Hopper. I only saw it on VHS -
rented!)

Interestingly enough, I actually saw the movie - in a theater, in 1980. I
liked it, but don't remember much about it, and haven't seen it since.

At the time, I was actually more into Neil Young and the theme song, than
the movie itself...

[Lenona]

Post by Kenny McCormack
If you ask a Trumper who is to blame for the debacle of Jan 6, they will almost certainly say
something about Antifa/BLM/something/whatever.

As more than one wit has written by now:

Trumpers : "January 6th was STAGED!"

Non-Trumper: "OK, then you won't mind if we arrest and indict everyone who broke in that day."

Trumpets: "Oh...no! NO! Don't do THAT!"

[Kenny McCormack]

Post by Lenona

Post by Kenny McCormack
If you ask a Trumper who is to blame for the debacle of
Jan 6, they will almost certainly say something about
Antifa/BLM/something/whatever.

Trumpers : "January 6th was STAGED!"
Non-Trumper: "OK, then you won't mind if we arrest and indict everyone who broke
in that day."
Trumpets: "Oh...no! NO! Don't do THAT!"

+3

Indeed, one of the techniques is for various parts of the Right Wing Noise
Machine to propagate different crazy notions. I.e., (to use an old
cliche/metaphor) one source might say that 2+2 is 5. Another might say
that it is 7. Another might say that it is 3-1/2, and so on. As long as
each source sticks to their story, nobody is being inconsistent or
hypocritical; they all maintain "plausible deniability". But, and by
design, the audience (the base) listens to and hears all of them, and
believes them all to be true, blithely unaware of how ridiculous a position
they've put themselves into.

So, here, some sources say "BLM/Antifa did it" and "It was all staged",
while others say "All the people who were arrested that day were good,
patriotic Americans, who should all be freed.". And the base has no
problem believing both stories.

[Lenona]

Post by Kenny McCormack
If you ask a Trumper who is to blame for the debacle of Jan 6, they will almost certainly say
something about Antifa/BLM/something/whatever.

As more than one wit has written by now:

Trumpers : "January 6th was STAGED!"

Non-Trumper: "OK, then you won't mind if we arrest and indict everyone who broke in that day."

Trumpers: "Oh...no! NO! Don't do THAT!"

[Lenona]

I can't believe I forgot to mention this.

Back in 2004, I think, at a screening of Todd Solondz's movie "Palindromes" (a sequel to "Welcome to the Dollhouse"), Solondz was there - and I begged him to put Manz in any future movie of his, since I suspected she could use the money.

(He never did.)

[Lenona]

Correction - it was in April of 2005.

[Kenny McCormack]

Post by Lenona
I can't believe I forgot to mention this.
Back in 2004, I think, at a screening of Todd Solondz's movie
"Palindromes" (a sequel to "Welcome to the Dollhouse"), Solondz was
there - and I begged him to put Manz in any future movie of his, since
I suspected she could use the money.
(He never did.)

Interesting. I actually know who Todd Solondz is; I've seen one of his
movies, but I can't remember the title (might have been the Dollhouse one).

LM would definitely fit the mood of his films...

[l***@yahoo.com]

Finally, a more formal obituary from The Guardian. (I didn't see anything in the New York Times, offhand, and those usually show up, online, the day before the hard copy - right?)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/aug/17/linda-manz-obituary

Excerpt:

...Linda was instinctively brilliant,” said (Richard) Gere. “And with anyone with that kind of brilliance, you just give them space. Terry was smart enough and sensitive enough to just let her be. And she’s extraordinary in the film because of that.”

If her striking physiognomy and unself-conscious mannerisms were spellbinding, it was her otherworldly narration, which was not in the original script, that helped lift Days of Heaven into a divine class of its own. Malick and Weber had struggled to shape the material in the editing room – Paramount was not shown a cut of the film until 20 months after shooting had wrapped – and it was during this arduous process that the idea arose to use Manz’s musings as a kind of connective tissue. Most voiceovers provide clarity or fill in gaps. This one does nothing of the sort: Manz’s elliptical stream-of-consciousness, given a hard edge by her chewy New York drawl, often goes against the grain of the image, mixing tenses and introducing digressions and non-sequiturs.

“They took me into a voice recording studio,” she told the Village Voice in 2011. “No script, nothing, I just watched the movie and rambled on.” One of the most memorable passages of her narration (“There’s gonna be creatures running every which way, some of them burned, half their wings burning…”) was taken from Manz paraphrasing for Malick the Book of Revelation, which she had recently discovered and about which she was eager to tell him.

“Her voice and her ability to very nakedly, but kind of pleasantly and poetically, describe her universe is mind-boggling,” said Gere. “This movie would not be that movie without that voiceover, wouldn’t be that way without the quality of her voice, just the timbre of her voice is so interesting.”

Malick did not make another film for 20 years; Manz, too, soon disappeared for almost as long. Immediately after Days of Heaven she played Peewee, the plucky, pint-sized girlfriend of a gargantuan skinhead, in The Wanderers (1979), adapted from Richard Price’s novel about 1960s gangs in the Bronx. The writer-director Philip Kaufman was so bewitched by Manz that he created the character especially for her...

(snip)


Check out her husband's amusing connection to Michael Jackson - you'll never guess what it is.



Lenona.