Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Damien Karras sells cereal!


Hollywood special f/x artist/concept designer guru Miles Teves (Robocop, Legend, Pirates of the Caribbean, King Kong) recently sent me his demonic possession entry, Pazuzu Bitz. If you haven't guessed it yet, the cereal box is based on William Friedkin's 1973 horror classic, The Exorcist.

Found at Cereal Killers

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Jason Miller Tribute video

I didn't make it (I don't make slide shows or anything...), but it looks very nice. Pretty satisfying to know that he's still appreciated! Thanks, Knoxvicious, for putting the pics to good use!

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller

“Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller” is an intense one-man show that examines the soul in afterlife of the late Pulitzer Prize winning playwright (“That Championship Season”) and film and television actor (“The Exorcist”, “F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood”) Jason Miller. Stuck in purgatory until he can answer – in a battered, loose leaf notebook, no less – for the mess that his life became before he died of a massive heart attack in 2001, Miller walks us through the shattered detritus of his career and alcoholic existence, a deeply troubled man who turned his back on Hollywood and returned home to Scranton, PA, to become the town drunk.

Copyright: © 2005 Rodger Jacobs and Tom Flannery Standard Copyright License
Language: English
Country:
Edition: First
  • Paperback book $12.50
  • Download $6.01

Printed: 98 pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding, black and white interior ink

Download: 1 documents, 324 KB

LINK

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Obituary: Jason Miller

Independent, The (London), May 17, 2001 by Tom Vallance

THE PLAYWRIGHT and actor Jason Miller achieved in the space of one year notable triumphs as both writer and performer. In 1973 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play That Championship Season, a mordant drama about a reunion of members of a winning basketball team and their coach, which also won the Tony and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the year's best play. The same year he was cast as Father Damien Karras, the priest who battles demons for a girl's soul in one of the scariest of horror films, William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973).

His performance won him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He commented at the time, "I can't quite catch up with it. I still wake up some mornings and ask myself, `Is today the day I go to the unemployment insurance office?'" His success had come after a long struggle. "I worked for welfare, I worked as a truck-driver, I worked as a waiter. And then I'd go out to the provinces and do some resident theatre and come back and have to get another job or go on unemployment."

The son of an electrician and grandson of a coal miner, Miller was born in 1939 in Long Island City, New York, but grew up, like the ex- basketball champions in his play, in the Lackawanna Valley of Pennsylvania. Also like the men in his play, he was an outstanding athlete, but there the similarity stopped. "I was never involved in a state basketball championship, and I never had a coach like that. It is, however, the material of my life."


He was educated at St Patrick's Academy then entered the Jesuit- run University of Scranton on an athletic scholarship, studying English and philosophy. He later credited the nuns at St Patrick's with initially steering his interests in a literary direction when he was "getting into a lot of trouble and they thought poetry writing might help". They drilled him in elocution and encouraged him to act in school drama and study writing for the theatre.

His one-act play about a prize-fighter, The Winner, won him the top prize at the regional Jesuit Eastern Play Contest. Later he attended the speech and drama department at the Catholic University in Washington, but confessed in a 1974 interview that he was asked to leave "for never attending classes, never taking tests and never getting the girls back to their dormitory by 10 o'clock". In 1963 he married a fellow student, Linda Gleason (daughter of the comedian Jackie), with whom he had three children - he had a fourth child with a girlfriend, Susan Bernard.

Miller and his wife performed Shakespeare together in local high schools before moving to New York where they later divorced. Miller struggled to find work as an actor while continuing to write. "When you write a play," he said, "you act out all the parts, so what you're doing in the daytime is preparing you for your performance at night. You get to the theatre warmed up." He completed several plays, including Nobody Hears a Broken Drum, about oppressed Irish miners in Pennsylvania in 1862, which had a brief off-Broadway run in 1970, but had little success until, while appearing in the play Subject to Fits at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre complex in 1971, he showed Papp his play That Championship Season, which Papp put on at the theatre in 1972.

Directed by A.J. Antoon, and with a cast including Richard A. Dysart, Charles Durning and Paul Sorvino, it was a profanity-riddled story about four small-town Pennsylvania men who gather for a reunion at the home of their old coach 20 years after their high-school team won a basketball trophy using dirty tactics. The play then exposes the cynicism and disillusionment that has since pervaded their lives, with all of them having failed to fulfil their earlier ambitions. The critic Clive Barnes wrote, "Here at last is the perfect play of the season" and Walter Kerr in The New York Times called it "rock solid, bitterly funny, painfully shaming".

The play transferred to Broadway, where it completed a run of 834 performances, though a London production at the Garrick Theatre in 1974 starring Broderick Crawford fared less well, its cynical look at middle-American life and the collapse of the American dream having less resonance. A film version, directed by Miller himself in 1982, was also a failure, despite a strong cast including Robert Mitchum, Bruce Dern, Martin Sheen, Stacy Keach and, in his original role, Paul Sorvino. In 1999 Miller up-dated the script for a television movie directed by Sorvino.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize the author told The New York Times that he felt an obligation to continue writing for the theatre. "I think it would be ungracious not to. Theatre is in desperate straits, and I'd like to help pick it up." But Miller's writing and acting careers were never to reach the pinnacles of 1973, though he wrote several television movies and had considerable success as a television actor, playing the title role in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976) and starring in the mini- series The Dain Curse (1978), based on Dashiell Hammett's novel, and an incisive study of a girl's battle with anorexia nervosa, The Best Little Girl in the World (1981), described by one critic as an "uncommonly good `disease- of-the-week' TV movie with exceptional performances".

In 1986 Miller returned to his hometown to become artistic director of Scranton Public Theatre, and in 1990 he repeated his Exorcist character in Exorcist III. His only produced play after That Championship Season was Barrymore's Ghost, produced in Seattle in 1997, though at the time of his death from a heart attack he was collaborating with his son the writer- director Joshua Miller on a new play, Me and My Old Man. He was also preparing to appear as Oscar Madison in the Scranton Public Theatre's production of The Odd Couple. He is survived by three other children who include the actor Jason Patric.

Jason Miller, playwright and actor: born Long Island City, New York 22 April 1939; married 1963 Linda Gleason (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1973), one son by Susan Bernard; died Scranton, Pennsylvania 13 May 2001.

Copyright 2001 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.