On BURT LANCASTER

 Mom and Dad were Burt Lancaster fans. I picked up the Lancaster appreciation from them. I have great memories of going to The Compton Drive-in movie theater in Compton or The Vermont Drive-in to see a new Burt Lancaster film. With my parents in the front seat while my little sister and I were in the back seat -- wearing our pajamas underneath our street clothes because we'd be sleepyheads when we got home a little after midnight -- we saw ELMER GANTRY and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. I was a Black Catholic kid in Los Angeles who'd done some time in parochial elementary school when we saw ELMER GANTRY. First of all, Burt Lancaster's head in close-up on a drive-in movie screen looked so enormous that it should've been annexed as a state.

I was too young then to understand everything that was going on in ELMER GANTRY but the visual, the energy of the performances and the religious imagery held my attention. It held my attention with such strength that when ELMER GANTRY aired on CBS years later, its network premiere, I felt that a couple or more minutes were missing from the opening. I was right. TCM host, Robert Osborne, confirmed that decades later in one of his host segments.

Burt Lancaster won the Best Actor Oscar for 1960's ELMER GANTRY. To this day, I feel that his leading lady, Jean Simmons, should have been a Best Actress Oscar nominee for her riveting performance as the traveling evangelist who falls for con man's Gantry's religious hypocrisy yet holds on her to spiritual beliefs with a Joan of Arc-like fierceness.

 My parents urged me to watch JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG with them when it aired on local TV. They saw it as an important history lesson I needed to learn at a young age, a lesson of "Never again" should that bigotry and atrocity on trial happen, Lancaster has a major role in the film. As a teen, during summer vacations, I stayed up several times to see Burt Lancaster kiss Deborah Kerr in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY on Channel 2's The Late Show. I used to imitate the way he bellowed "Rain!" in the final scene of THE RAINMAKER. Mom coaxed to watch Burt Lancaster in BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ when it aired on network TV. She used that film to teach me a lesson for when times got tough. She told me that, if ever I was in an environment in which I was made to feel unwanted and unimportant, to go to that place of freedom and expression in my soul and take comfort there -- like the prisoner Lancaster played in BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ did.

When I see a movie, I like to give it my full attention. If seeing a movie for work purposes, I will sit through the closing credits. I sat through 1985's KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN multiple times. I have a deep love for that movie. I always noticed that Burt Lancaster received a special thank you in the end credits. He was not in the film. Was he a producer? I interviewed William Hurt, who'd won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the drag queen in the prison drama, why Lancaster received a special credit. Lancaster was more than supportive of the film project that earned Hurt his Oscar.

The rest of the Lancaster involvement comes up in the clip of Raúl Julia when he was a guest on my 1988 VH1 talk show. The clip is in this demo reel of mine:

Here's a great New York City movie memory. A friend and I saw 1989's FIELD OF DREAMS with a preview audience at the Ziegfeld Theater. The place was packed. When Burt Lancaster appeared onscreen, the whole audience instantly burst into enthusiastic applause. Burt Lancaster. He was one of Hollywood's best. I'm so glad my parents introduced me to his films when I was growing up in South Central L.A.