In this issue published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 25, Number 6 November-December, 1989 Flint Mobile . . Not Roger Moore, Michael Moore directed Roger & Me, the documentary sensation of the Eighties: in which our hero, Moore, wheels about his hometown, Flint, Mich. chronicling the devastation wrought) when General Motors’ Roger Smith closed up shop and moved it to Mex- >, Flint chased Moore chased and our autodidact, chased Smith, Harlan Jacobson, Moore around the New York Film Festival to address some problems in the transmission. Eighties Bye-Bye ............ he Eightics belonged to one —a movie star!—Ronald We begin bombing in five 4 minutes” Reagan. Gregg “ \ Kilday charts the industry's unpoliced return to oligopoly, and Greil Marcus picks a score of pictures and cinema bilia that tried to either tackle or outrun the Gipper. Midsection: In Characters........31 Creating reality out of perso ality, the character actor is the star—even in the celeb-satu- rated Righties. We asked crit ics and writers to word:process their odes on a yearn for their favorite non-houschold names. Their paeans to peons appear throughout the section. Above the line, David Thom- son reflects on what exactly we mean by “character actor” (page 32). Beverly Walker traces the arc travelled by char- acter actors from potted palm wm to super-star (58). Actingmen- tors Jeff Corey, Brad Dourif, and William Hickey reveal the _ methods to their moods to Pat McGilligan (40), Marlaine Glicksman (44) and Gavin Smith (52), respectively. Len Klady has the dope on acting teachers 7 (4D, while Jack Barth hails the rise of a new breed of ccelebrity-actor who gets paid for being him/herself. (46). auscide; the tough-as-nails, crusading DA hiding a guilty secret in True Believer. You never believe in his innocence for a minute, b smith’s stentorian voice oozes insincerity—he’s every pompous high school principal, crooked politican, or unctuous preacher you've ever met. Not to mention Joseph Goebbels in the recent T¥-movie, The Nightmare Years Will Smith ever get a role where he can smile? (He came close as Heart of Dixie's poetry professor.) I doubt it. He's too good at making us squirm. —HARRY MEDVED WILLIAM SMITH He brawls like a man with a mission; dirty, gut-crunching, bloody knuckled, knock-down drag-out assault-and-bat- teries are his business. Take Any Which Way But Loose—he's the massive torso who beats the bare-fisted hell out of Clint Eastwood. He's Conan the Bar barian’s father and the Soviet pit bull in human form who hunts down Red Dawn's teen freedom fighters. He's done hard time on dozens of TV shows—from Gunsmoke to The A-Team—and earned a place in miniseries history as Rich Man, Poor Man's vengeful, one-eyed Falconetti. That's William Smith, main- stream supporting player. As an exploitation star, Smith was born to be wild: his skinny legs wrapped around a chopper in Angels Die Hard, The Losers, C.C. and Company, Run Angel Run, and Chrome and Hot Leather, and he answered to “J.J.” and “Link? “Moon,” and, of cours ‘ He's a born beast—he speaks five la guages, but you'd never know it—with five-star biceps and a scratchy little worn to a sandpaper whisper. In his prime—"70 to °73—Smith was every- thing from ‘Travis McGee's bleached blond nemesis (Darker Than Amber) to a neurotic blood drinker (Grave of the Vampire). Without him, a biker picture is just a bunch of jerks acting out on wheels. Smiths degenerate dignity has taken him through nearly 40 years in movies; even such recent credits as Maniac Cop, Eye of the Tiger and Hell Comes to Frogtown cant keep this bad man down —MAITLAND MCDONAGH Angel FRED WARD ANI VERONICA CARTWRIGHT The Starlite Motel scene in The Right Stuff—between Fred Ward and Veronica Cartwright as astronaut Gus Grissom and wife Betty tional center of Philip Kaufman's spoof ing cavalcade of the national space race. Ward and Cartwright wipe the grin off rah-rah Americanism in what may be the decades most significant treatment of social distress. After the NASA parade has passed them by, they are on the downside of hysterical optimism. Betty's disappointment upon being denied a Presidential celebration (I wa talk to Jackie. About—things” is the emo- ted to matches