Terry Gilliam (Image via IndieWire)
Early yesterday evening, Variety tweeted out a link to an article announcing the death of filmmaker Terry Gilliam. After a short brief period of panic, a few smart people recognized that this may have been a technical problem rather than a piece of misinformation. For one, the headline of the article did not list Gilliam’s age, only three XXXs meant to serve as a placeholder until an actual value could be inserted. For another, according to those fast enough to catch the offending tweet before it was taken down, the link itself led nowhere. Thus, the story of the possible death of Terry Gilliam became something appropriately bizarre and macabre: Variety has a death tweet ready for all the major names in Hollywood. Imagine being the intern tasked with updating that in Hootsuite.
While it’s tempting to poke fun at Variety for their (thorough) contingency planning, there is a nice upshot to the few minutes that Terry Gilliam spent dead. As I write these, people all across social media platforms have Terry Gilliam on the brain. They’re making Monty Python jokes, vowing to re-watch Brazil, and trying to decide if Gilliam has now been reported dead more often than his Don Quixote adaptation. For a whole hour, “Terry Gilliam” was the eighth-highest trending topic on Twitter in the entire world, finishing only a few scant places behind important breaking news stories like #TheBieberFeverIsBack. Which means that, unlike other filmmakers and celebrities whose outpouring of love and affect came too late to be appreciated, Gilliam now gets to play Tom Sawyer and check out his own funeral. Turns out we all still love the guy’s movies quite a bit.
And this is a refreshing reminder of a great talent still in our midst. We’ve gotten very good at eulogizing the work of great filmmakers, but we’re considerably less generous with our sentiment when those filmmakers are still alive. There is something bittersweet about watching thousands of people tweet fond memories and brief words of appreciation to the Twitter handle of someone who is no longer with us. I certainly wouldn’t stop them from doing so even if I could – there’s no such thing as too much love for older movies and great directors – but more than a few people have remarked that it would be nice if some filmmakers could receive the same degree of appreciation while they are still around to hear it. Even I sometimes go entire days without burning a blood sacrifice to ensure the continued good health and output of John Carpenter. In a pop cultural landscape that only has eyes for upcoming releases, there’s not a lot of room for those whose best work is undeniably behind them.
Each outpouring of affection also comes with the guilty feeling that we might be part of the problem. It would be one thing if a filmmaker was given access to prestige properties and talent right up until the day they died; call this the Altman Exit, where even your backup director hired to appease the insurance company is one of the best of his generation. For most filmmakers, though, this simply isn’t an option. Both Harold Ramis and Wes Craven are considered legends in their respective genres and continued making films well into their sixties and seventies, but fans had effectively stopped treating them as creators in the decade before their deaths. Instead, the two writer-directors were filmic icons, people who we stand next to at conventions while never paying to see their newest movies in theaters. Scream 4, Craven’s last feature, returned $38 million domestic dollars on a $40 million dollar budget; Ramis’s Year One only managed to make back $43 million on a $60 million dollar budget.
This doesn’t mean that we should blindly pay to see the movies of older filmmakers in theaters just to pay interest on their earliest films. Not every filmmaker – not even the best among them – can continue to put out challenging and thoughtful work across multiple decades. But there certainly is no real reason for us to wait until after a filmmaker is no longer with us to celebrate the breadth of their work. If you hold a particular director close to your heart, keep an eye out for local retrospectives of their best films. Check out the latest Blu-ray release from their expansive filmography backlog. And maybe, failing that, use the next accidental death notice as an opportunity to start the celebration a little early. Just because Terry Gilliam is still with us doesn’t mean we have to hold off on the praise. If I’d known that all it would take is a WordPress malfunction to get people to rent Brazil en masse then I would have taken that on months ago.
Actually, that’s not such a bad idea. It is with a heavy heart that we here at Film School Rejects report the death of director Penny Marshall. And Alejandro Jodorowsky. And Jean-Luc Godard, and Peter Bogdanovich, and on and on and on. Time to go send them some love.