Michael Shannon.

b. August 7^th, 1974

When I started this blog, I wanted to focus on actors and actresses many people probably recognise, but whose name you might not necessarily know, and I decided a few months back that I’d like to do a post about Michael Shannon, because I think he’s just grand. I feel like right now he’s on that cusp though, perhaps not of becoming a huge star, but definitely of being a character actor who is a little more than “that guy who was in that other thing”, someone who gets third billing in the occasional summer action flick, and first billing in indie dramas, like a Giovanni Ribisi or Dermot Mulroney.

I first remember noticing Shannon in the late, great Sidney Lumet’s 2007 film Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. (Possible Spoiler Warning) He plays the brother-in-law of a crook who died in a failed heist orchestrated by Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and generally has to lounge about and be threatening to Hawke. Man, that doesn’t really seem like an acting task you’d have to put much effort into, but Shannon almost walks away with the entire film, which in a cast of fairly strong hitters is no mean feat. My boyfriend and I were pausing the dvd after each scene he was in to exclaim “who is this guy?” and “We have to have seen him in something before, there is no way someone can be this good, this distinctive and strange, and not have showed up being awesome in something else.”

Checking ye olde IMDB confirmed that I had indeed seen him being awesome in something else- Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories, a deceptively low-key independent tragedy of Shakespearian proportions about two families of half-brothers locked in a blood feud following the death of their father. Shannon plays the eldest brother with a mixture of quiet dignity and barely repressed rage. He also has apparently been in a million and one HUGE movies which completely passed me by – Revolutionary Road, Pearl Harbour, Vanilla Sky. He’s set to play General Zod in the next Superman movie.

So, when Take Shelter, the next film directed by Nichols, and also starring Michael Shannon, came around, I was pretty psyched to see it. It was during the film festival in Wellington, I had my ticket for 9pm on a Friday night (nerd!), front row centre, and oh my I was not prepared for this film, or this performance. Shannon plays a loving father and husband, with a good blue-collar job in Ohio, who starts having violent nightmares, leading to paranoid delusions, leading to both trying to seek psychiatric care and to rapidly build a storm shelter in his back yard. Like in Shotgun Stories, Shannon plays a man who loves his family and is trying to do best by them, but in this case that requires asking for their help, and that’s a painfully difficult thing. There were moments in this film where I wasn’t just crying, I was shaking from feeling this character’s stress and fear so acutely. Shannon’s done his research – I was especially impressed by how, when he finally does tell his wife what is happening for him, his voice comes out thick and slurred, and his mouth moves like he’s having trouble forming the words. Times I’ve been in bad, bad depressions, I remember that happening, though I’d mostly forgotten it until I saw him do it. The film lags a little in the final five minutes, but that doesn’t take away much. I can’t wait for the dvd so I can watch it again, and I can’t wait to see Shannon in more.    

Elizabeth Daily.

b. September 11th, 1961.
Elizabeth Daily, aka E.G. Daily, is probably best recognised as Dottie, the long-suffering wannabe girlfriend of Peewee Herman, in Peewee's Big Adventure (1985). This was my very favourite movie when I was ten, and I always felt sorry for Dottie, whose romantic interest in Peewee was rebuffed with all the sensitivity you could expect from an attention-deficit man-child. I had an early "oh my god, it's that girl from that other thing!" moment when I saw Valley Girl (1983) a few years later, where I believe she plays a character who is date-raped - the film is otherwise notable for being one of those teen movies which makes up and attempts to popularise its own slang, and for being the first film in which Nicolas Cage had a starring role.
Daily appeared in several other films during the 80s, such as Ladies and Gentlemen:The Fabulous Stains and Streets of Fire, and also released several pop hits - her single "Say it, say it" made it to #1 on Billboard's Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart in 1986. Check out the hilarious Lolita-themed video clip:

Most of Daily's film and TV roles are now as a voice artist for cartoons - she replaced Christine Cavanaugh as the voice of the little pig Babe for Babe 2: Pig in the City (1998), and is the voice of Buttercup from the Powerpuff Girls, and Tommy Pickles in Rugrats. In terms of live action, she's appeared in recent years in My Sister's Keeper (2009) and in the Rob Zombie horror film The Devil's Rejects (2005), which is where this entry's picture comes from - that film is a veritable who's who of " It's that one guy" moments: almost every minor part is filled by classic horror movie character actors such as Michael Berryman, P.J Soles, Ken Foree, Danny Trejo.
Daily also played Paris Hilton's mom in National Lampoon's Pledge This! (2006). On her website she shares this about the role:

The most ironic part of the whole thing is my x-husband Rick Salomon just happens to be the guy in the infamous x-rated tape with Paris and here I was playing her mom!! Crazy!!! We all ended up having a great time and the cast was awesome!

I wonder if that was awkward, or strange, or anything.

Hey, sorry for the brief hiatus here at It's that one guy who was in that other thing - my computer died the death and I had to get a new one. I am excited that I have had traffic through this blog from people searching "james ransone masturbation"! Fabulous!

Una Merkel

b. December 10th. 1903
d. January 2nd, 1986.
42nd Street (1933) is one of my alltime favourite films, and I always especially liked the two wingwomen of going-out-youngster-coming-back-star Peggy (Ruby Keeler): 'Anytime' Annie (Ginger Rogers) and Lorraine (Una Merkel.) If you didn't know who either of them were, you would look at them and think, "Dang, both these women are amazing, and should be huge stars." One of them was, of course, but Una Merkel was always relegated to being the sassy best friend or the comic relief. Maybe it was her cartoonishly high voice, maybe something in her looks - IMDB somewhat bitchily notes "In her early years, before gaining a few pounds, she looked like Lillian Gish, but after Abraham Lincoln (1930) her comic potential was discovered." Because remember, fat women are funny, or something? Ugh. Anyway, Merkel's most notable roles, aside from 42nd Street, were as W.C.Field's bratty teenage daughter in The Bank Dick (1940), and Lillibelle in the western Destry Rides Again (1940), where her character gets into a vicious catfight with Marlene Deitrich's. She was in many, many films in the 1930s and 40s, as she was on an MGM contract, but was often 'loaned out' to other studios. In the 1960s she reappeared as a character actor, usually playing people's mothers. She's in the original Haley Mills version of The Parent Trap (1961).
Here is a nice memory that someone has edited into the Wikipedia entry for Merkel, flowing straight without a break after all the rather formal biographical information: "Una Merkel spent a lot of time with her sister in Seven Mile, Ohio. I was a child and lived next door. This was in the early 1940's. Her sister's husband owned the grocery store in Seven Mile. Una was beautiful with long red hair. We spent a lot of time together swinging on the porch." I feel so very touched that some old person thought to share this in an online encyclopedia. It kinda debunks the idea of the untouchable or or somehow ultra-human celebrity, if they will sit and swing on the porch with you.

James Ransone.

b. 2nd June, 1979.
Last week with Art Hindle I was talking about a guy whose overacting detracted from the quality of the films he was in, but James Ransone often acts 'big', overacts, appears borderline hysterical onscreen, and it works, dammit. You probably recognise the guy as Ziggy Sobotka in series two of The Wire, or as Corporal Josh Person in Generation Kill. He's also shown up in Treme and Law and Order. I loved him as Ziggy - such a pathetic character, who wanted so hard to fit in and be one of the boys, but whose tantrums and idiocies got in his way. He was funny, but there was also a lot of frustration at not being able to be cool no matter how hard he tried that I really empathised with. 
      I first saw Ransone in John Waters' A Dirty Shame, where he plays a character aroused by dirt (he chews lovingly on a used tissue Tracy Ullman's character tosses to him), and since then have been rewarded with many "hey it's that one guy" moments. I got to see Larry Clark's Ken Park recently, which I liked, but I especially loved Ransone's psychotic character, Tate. The Scrabble game with his grandparents that devolves into triumphant screamed accusations of cheating is a particular highlight. The film also contains some fairly explicit masturbation and nudity courtesy of Ransone (I was going to include that as the picture for this week, but then I felt like a creeper.) I think he shows up nude quite a lot in general, and is also getting handsomer and handsomer with age. Hence the culty following he seems to be accruing: for more photos of the man than you can shake a stick at, check out this tumblr Fuck Yeah, James PJ Ransone!  It's just full of shirtless and broody.

Art Hindle.

b. July 21st , 1948.
I do love horror movies, and one of my all time favourites is The Brood (d.David Cronenberg, 1979.) I've watched it many times but still find it pretty scary - it's about a father, Frank Carveth, whose wife is in an experimental psychiatric facility, where patients are trained to allow their emotional pain to manifest as physical afflictions. Whenever Carveth's wife feels hurt or wronged by someone, mysterious deformed children show up and bludgeon them to death. Like all good Cronenberg, the film makes you feel really disgusting about your own body, and aware of how vulnerable your mental health can be. There are some wonderful performances in this movie as well - Samantha Eggar as the disturbed Nola Carveth, a great child performance by Cindy Hinds as her daughter, an ice cold and creepy Oliver Reed as the psychiatrist. But what the film really needs to hold it all together is a well-played, grounded portrayal of Frank Carveth, who is one of the only sane and responsible characters in the film. The fascinating flaw of The Brood is that Art Hindle plays Carveth, well... kinda terribly. His eye rolling and scenery chewing and hammy yelling are particularly embarrassing next to the gravitas of Reed. I have a lot of affection for this frightening little movie, and I even have affection for Hindle's ridiculous performance, but a lot of the blame for why this isn't a great movie rests on his shoulders, in my opinion.
      Hindle is from Toronto, and was encouraged to pursue a career on the screen by his uncle, character actor Michael Kane (not Michael Caine, as the IMDB claims.) He's been in many, many films from 1971 to the present, most of them Canadian, and is best known for his roles in the TV series Paradise Falls, and the 1978 Phillip Kaufman version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which his acting is serviceable but not outstanding. I first saw him in a horrible made for TV movie called Liar, Liar (1993) (not the Jim Carrey comedy.) It's about a father who is brutally sodomising his children, and when his eleven year old daughter reports the abuse, no one believes her.  The father is played with much creepy intensity by Hindle. For some god-unknown reason we were shown this film in our Social Education class in highschool, leaving us all traumatised.

Ajay Naidu.

b. February 12, 1972.

Ok, so you remember all those neat kids films about having some weird body swap or morph, like Freaky Friday and Big and 18 Again! and Like Father, Like Son? Well for my money, the best of those is a little movie from 1988 called Vice Versa, starring Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage as a father and son who swap bodies. Aside from the hilarity of seeing Reinhold playing a nine year old boy in a man's body, the film also has a teenage Ajay Naidu, playing a mean kid who picks on Savage at school.

     You get a lot of "It's that one guy who was in that other thing" moments with Naidu, because for a time there it seemed like he was the only young, cute, Indian guy appearing in American movies (now, with Kal Penn and Aziz Ansari, there are three! Progress.) Which meant that, any time a film called for a humourously accented convenience store clerk (as in Richard Linklater's SubUrbia) or cab driver (as in episodes of Monk and 30 Rock), it would be Naidu. And he's really distinctive and funny - much better than the comic stereotypes that those roles call for. He is probably most known for his role as Samir in the cult comedy Office Space, and for appearing in nearly all Darren Aronofsky's films to date (he has parts in Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Wrestler.)

     One thing that I've really enjoyed with writing these posts is seeing how fans react to these actors. Because they're not big stars people seem to feel they can address them directly, lay claim to them, be more familiar than they would be with the unreachable A-listers. Of course, this means on one hand, you get the crazy, like the bodyguard guy who was so fond of Linda Manz , but on the other hand you can get some really sweet interactions that you know probably made someone's day. On the discussion boards for Naidu on IMDB, several people have written things along the lines of Hey Ajay, we were in highschool/college/the neighbourhood hometown together. We're so proud of your success. And several times he's written back: I remember you, you were friends with my sister. Big respect to you and your family, Ajay. What a lovely guy. 

EDIT: Here's a link to a rather sweet piece about the building in which Office Space was shot.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/austin-were-gonna-need-you-to-go-ahead-and-visit-t,57328/

Linda Manz.

b. August 20th, 1961.
I had originally planned to get this post done real quickly so I'd have several up in the first week, but this one has proven difficult to write, if only because I really, really admire Linda Manz, and hence the careful balance of filmographic trivia and fanatical raving that I was hoping for with this blog was already looking like it might get skewed in favour of the latter. So I'll get it out of the way straight up: Linda Manz is one of my favourite actors, despite only appearing in a handful of films. I think she's incredible. I promise I'll try and write this without just reiterating that every few sentences.

When she was in her late teens, Manz landed her first starring role in Terence Malick's epically gorgeous Days Of Heaven (1978) Her performance in this film has the same rough-hewn combination of vulnerability and toughness that, to my mind, shines through strongest in her next big role as Cebe, in Dennis Hopper's 1981 film Out of the Blue.

There have been a lot of films which articulate how fucking horrible it is being a teenager, a lot of stars who've conveyed it well - James Dean, Brando, Jake Gyllenhall in Donnie Darko, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick... most of them are dudes. Teenage girls in films might have troubles, but they tend to have friends or family who support them in some way - they seldom seem as painfully lonely and isolated as their male counterparts. Linda Manz's angry, raw, frustrated portrayal of Cebe is as close as I got as a teenager to seeing a character who seemed as tightly-wound and alone as I felt (which is sorta ridiculous - I had supportive friends and family for Africa; but like everyone else I felt like I was the only one having an existential crisis.) Director Dennis Hopper, as Cebe's drunk ex-con father, gives one of the most unhinged, terrifying, fabulous performances of his career in this film, and I mean, that's a career of playing a whole lot of unhinged, terrifying characters. But Linda Manz wipes the fucking floor with him. Arhg, seriously, just watch the film. It is Pretty Good.

As well as Days of Heaven and Out of the Blue, Manz played Peewee in Phillip Kaufmann's The Wanderers (1979), but after that she pretty much disappeared from movies for a good while. She married Bobby Guthrie, who was the cameraman who put out Michael Jackson's hair when it caught fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in 1984. They have three sons. After about 17 years away from acting, Manz appeared in Harmony Korine's 1997 film Gummo, playing Solomon's mother. She does that eerie tap dance in front of a mirror. She also gifted Chloe Sevigny (Korine's then-girlfriend) the denim jacked with 'Elvis' sequinned on the back she wore as Cebe. Like I need another reason to be envious of Sevigny's wardrobe.

Before her role in Gummo, People magazine ran a 'where are they now' sort of piece on Manz. In it, casting director Barbara Claman (who discovered Manz for Days of Heaven) explained "Linda was a natural...she was wonderful at being. But there weren't a lot of jobs open for just being." It's a huge pity, because watching Manz 'just be' in a film is such a rewarding experience.

P.S: There is a fanpage for Linda Manz on facebook, and on its wall there is a post which is just....amazing. I'm going to copy and paste it in its entirety, for your edification and amusement: 

 "DO YOU NEED A BODY GUARD MS. LINDA MANZ. I AM AN EXCELLENT DETERENT AND WOULD NEVER CHARGE NOTHING. AN AVERAGE BODYGUARD COST AT LEAST $50,000.00-$75,000.00 PER YEAR FOR A CHEAP ONE. I AM 6ft 6in (78 inches) TALL AND NOT A LINKY STICK BOY. I AM 42 YEARS OLD & I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING. I ALSO HAD OTHER PEOPLE & FRIENDS SAY TO OTHER PEOPLE I AM THEIR BODYGUARD. THAT TOUCHED ME A LOT BUT DON'T MEAN NOTHING. I WOULD MUCH LOVE IT MORE TO BODYGUARD A CELEBRITY OR SIR PAUL McCARTNEY THAT I LIKE AND/OR LOVE. I WATCHED YOUR MOVIE "THE WANDERERS" WHEN I WAS A KID. YOU DONE AN EXCELLENT IN MY BOOK. I WOULD HAVE LOVED TO DATED YOU. I WAS BORN IN 1968 AND A 1980's KIND OF PERSON LIKE YOU ARE. I WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU TO MY 1986 & 1987 HIGH SCHOOL PROM. I GRADUATED IN JUNE OF 1987. THERE IS NOT MANY I WOULD ASK BUT YOU I DEFINITELY WOULD. I JUST WISH I WASN'T OVER 1,800 MILES AWAY. YOU ARE MY TYPE & I DO LIKE YOU. NO LIE! YOU'RE THE BEST. I LOVE YOU PROBABLY MORE THAN RICHARD GERE. I MEAN IT! TAKE CARE."

I hope my obsessive fandom doesn't come across like this.

Eric Blore.

b.23 December, 1887
d. 2 March 1959.
I went with my father to see Top Hat (1935) at the Embassy theatre in Wellington earlier this year. We were sitting there, enjoying watching Fred Astaire dancing about, when his character's valet came into the room (the room in the movie, not the room in the theatre). Dad grabbed my arm excitedly and whispered "Oh my god, it's that guy who was in The Lady Eve!"  It was, and we spent the rest of the movie almost in tears of laughter whenever this guy came on the screen. Fred and Ginger are lovely in Top Hat, but Eric Blore steals every scene he's in.
Blore made a career of playing butlers and valets and the like; he appeared in over eighty films, including several of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films for RKO, as well as Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve (1941) and Sullivan's Travels (1941). He has a fruity British voice and impeccable comic timing.
Blore's IMDB bio includes this anecdote:
"as sometimes is the case when personalities move into obscurity, their deaths are prematurely announced. Such was with Blore when the New Yorker journalist Kenneth Tynan reported him as already passed on. Blore's lawyer raised a flurry, as did the editor of the New Yorker who claimed the periodical had never had to print a retraction. The night before the highly profiled retraction appeared, Blore indeed passed away. And the next morning the New Yorker was the only publication with the wrong information. It seems like Blore would have been particularly tickled with the irony of this last comedic bit in honor of his passing."
 I think Eric Blore is great, and I think he would've been a fun guy to have a gin and tonic with.

Welcome.

Hi. In It's That One Guy Who Was In That Other Thing I aim to celebrate the actors who I've seen in a film, then seen in another film and had a nice moment of recognition. Maybe they were character actors who never made it big but kept on doing reliable but unheralded work; maybe they were supposed to be the next big thing but never made it; maybe they're still in the process of becoming the next big thing. Anyway, with all of them, something about them piqued my curiosity enough to make me want to think about them a while, look to see if I could find out more interesting things about them, and then share them with you. Maybe if you see them in a film, you'll get a happy moment of recognition too.