Four years and four months ago, Tobe Hooper died at age 74. There’s no question that Hooper did himself proud with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (’74), a low-budget slasher thriller that I’ve never liked but have always “respected”. The following Wikipage sentence says it all: “It is credited with originating several elements common in the slasher genre, including the use of power tools as murder weapons and the characterization of the killer as a large, hulking, faceless figure.”

Hooper made a life out of his alleged facility with horror. He career-ed it to the max. But after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre he never struck the motherlode again, not really.

You can’t give Hooper serious credit for Poltergeist, which was mostly directed by Steven Spielberg. And no, I’m not a fan of Lifeforce. If you want to be cruel about it you could call him a feverish, moderately talented fellow who got lucky only once, and that was it. Hooper was tenacious and industrious and always kept going, and of course he dined out on the original Saw for decades. No harm in that.

L.M. Kit Carson, the renowned screenwriter, producer and journalist whom I proudly called a friend and ally from ’86 until his passing in 2014, was friendly with Hooper. They shared a Texas heritage and worked together on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (’86), a misbegotten piece-of-shit sequel that Cannon Films produced and which I, a conflicted Cannon employee at the time, wrote the press notes for.

Carson introduced me to Hooper as a gifted writer who really understood the satirical tone of Carson’s brilliant Saw 2 script. If only Hooper had absorbed it as fully and translated it to the screen with a similar panache.

Here are six things I know or believe about Hooper, based on personal experience.

(1) As editor of The Film Journal, I began hearing in the early summer of ’82 that Hooper hadn’t really directed Poltergeist. Then I ran a freelancer’s interview with Poltergeist producer Kathy Kennedy in which she more or less confirmed that Spielberg had to step in and take charge because of Hooper’s overly deliberative approach to directing. Many articles have since reported or contended that this was the case.

(2) Carson’s screenplay for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was a total peach — a dry, darkly comedic kill-the-yuppies thing.  It was heralded and excerpted in an issue of Film Comment; it might have been Harlan Jacobson who wrote “it’s okay to like it”. Alas, Hooper totally fucked it up. The sly social satire stuff was totally out the window. I was there for the very first in-house screening. The movie was shit.

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…for the coming Democratic Party apocalypse is the anti–meritocracy education thing (i.e., deliberately lowering standards to make things more accessible for students of color). Instructing students about the history of American racism is a vital and necessary thing, but telling parents of smart or otherwise gifted students that merit and scholastic aptitude have no value or place in today’s system because we need to give less advantaged kids more of a chance…this + “parents need to butt out of this as their concerns are imaginary plus professional educators know best”…that is a FUCKING DEATH BOMB.

An excerpt from a 12.28 Matt Taibbi article titled “The Democrats Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump”:

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…and in so doing proclaim your hyper–sensitivity and woke assholery for the benefit of all your social media pallies. I’ve half a mind to drive to Westwood to pay to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s modest and meandering period dramedy again, as a way of saying “many of us hear you, MANAA homies…we get what you’re saying, but PTA was being honest to the period, you see, and his refusal to follow the presentism crowd is an honorable thing.”

What, the ghost of George Floyd descends upon rural Pennsylvania?…the return of defund the police?…intrepid Kate gets to the bottom of a conspiracy among ugly racist cops? Terrific.

For at least four years I’ve been calling the Sundance Film Festival a wokester cul de sac…a dead end in itself, a dog in a box. Robert Redford‘s annual Park City gathering was alive and crackling between the early ’90s until 2016, pumping new blood and attitude into Hollywood and in some instances even reaching Average Joe multiplexes — 25 years of vitality.

Then the wokesters began to take over in ’17, and within a year Sundance had become a festival for woke purists. Or, as I wrote in ’18, “a socialist summer camp in the snow…largely about woke-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc.”

I’ve said this four or five times, only to be met by a consensus view from the HE commentariat that boiled down to “aahh, pipe down… you’re just pissed off because they yanked your press pass.”

But now finally…finally!…a writer director has told The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield that “the indie Sundance machine” has indeed woked itself into a corner, “creating films that no one wants to see…there’s a reason why you don’t have many indie breakouts because the stuff that has been deemed important is completely out of touch.”

Thank you!! Someone has finally joined me in saying how over the last four years the Robespierre contingent have all but poisoned the indie realm, which is annually celebrated in Park City. Indiewire would rather slit its collective throat that admit this, but now there are two of us…me and this writer-director guy!

Monday (12.27) update (NY Post via Deadline):

Last night (12.26):

Eight years ago Dallas Buyer’s Club, directed by the 50-year-old Jean-Marc Vallée, was one of the most talked-about Oscar contenders. In early ‘14 costars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto won Oscars for their performances, and Vallée was suddenly a hotshot, prestige-level helmer.

Then he directed Wild (‘14), a Reese Witherspoon long-hike survivalist drama. Next came two HBO projects, Big Little Lies, which Vallée directed two episodes of while exec producing, and Sharp Objects, for which Vallée won an Emmy for direction.

Now comes a report that Vallée, 58, has been found dead in a cabin outside Quebec City. Regrets and condolences. Quite a shock.

When I was 22 or thereabouts I fell into a hot affair of the soul with a tall, quite slender 20 year-old brunette, at the time a junior at Boston University. She was a little bit taller than I (which was cool), and might have been the greatest hugger I’ve ever known. But going out with a woman nearly a full head taller…I don’t know, man.