F.X. Feeney was the kindest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. Well, not specifically — the preceding description actually applies to Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate — but F.X. really was one of the best human beings I’ve ever dealt with in this racket…this kinship of the cloth made up of bicoastal film chasers and acolytes, contrarians, worshippers, cultists, would-be priests, snarkers, chess players, obsessives, rage junkies, hand-jobbers and torch-carriers.
And now he’s gone and my heart goes out. A series of strokes. 66 years old. If anyone hears of a gathering or farewell party of any kind, please advise.
Sharp, perceptive and enterprising though he was, F.X.’s stock-in-trade was the fact that he had a big beating heart that never quit. He didn’t seem to have a caustic or dismissive bone in his body. He might allude to this or that shortcoming in a film or a person, but he never put anyone or anything down. He was mainly about scholarly hugs and caresses.
F.X. Feeney
Plus he was a staunchly emotional Irishman, and I can recall two or three times off the top of my head when his voice cracked while speaking of something near and dear. Buy or stream Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (which no one, I realize, is allowed to mention these days because founder Jerry Harvey killed his wife and himself in some kind of horrific murder-suicide finale), and watch F.X. reflect tearfully on the Z Channel mystique and Harvey’s contradictory currents.
F.X. prayed at the altar of film on a daily, devotional basis. He cared, he believed. You could wake him up at 4:30 am on a Sunday and talk to him about Michael Powell or Budd Boetticher or Michael Cimino or Roman Polanski. The only other film persons I can think of who’ve routinely augmented their film passions with such kindness and tenderness are Guillermo del Toro and Martin Scorsese.
If he hadn’t become a film guy F.X. couldn’t been a great priest. I can see him right now in a freshly pressed black cassock. To me he was always the Film Yoda with the kindly face and the Andy Devine-sized pot belly, that pinkish complexion and that dapper fedora covering his swept-back salt-and-pepper hair.
Of all the people in the New York and Los Angeles film realm there are maybe four or five I would consider confessing my sins to. Until today F.X. was one of them. I could go into the confessional closet, get on my knees and say, “Bless me, father, for I have sinned against whatever or whomever.” And F.X. would say, “You’re absolved, Jeff. Go and sin no more. And while you’re at it you might want to find a bigger place in your heart for Michael Cimino.”
F.X. and I worked as in-house freelancers for People in ’97 and ’98. It was in the People offices that F.X. passed along a story he’d gotten from Lars von Trier at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, about an alleged incident between Harvey Keitel and Nicole Kidman during filming of Eyes Wide Shut. (I once referred to it as “The Saga of Mr. White.” **)
A lot of brief tributes have appeared on F.X.s Facebook page.