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Rip Torn doesn't have the Oscar (and multiple nominations) of Gene Hackman or the still-foxy good looks of Paul Newman. But we all should revere him as much as we do them. The man is one of the few national treasures who can also be described as a total fucking bad-ass.
Look up top, there -- 116 major movie and TV roles. There have also been forty-six TV guest appearances (so far). On the spectrum of showbiz whoriness -- the scale on which we chart an actor's willingness to play basically every single role he's offered -- that puts Torn at slightly whorier than Alan Arkin, but not quite as whory as Christopher Walken. Actors in this class work so much that it's easy to take them for granted, but in Torn's case, we do so at our peril -- partly because he's getting on in years and won't be around to entertain us forever; partly because he's cool; and partly because if he ever decided to get shirty about being unappreciated in his own time, he might kill us. He's tough enough that he could do it in such a way that no one would ever find out.
Well, maybe Rip Torn couldn't secretly murder some deserving clod and totally, totally get away with it, but Artie sure as hell could. The thing you notice when you watch a lot of The Larry Sanders Show -- in which Torn starred as Arthur (no last name -- he's too cool for one) -- in syndication is similar to what you notice when you watch a lot of Alias: just as the real hero of ABC's spy drama is not Jennifer Garner's Sydney but Victor Garber's steely, unflappable, brilliant Jack, so too does an immersion into Sanders prove that the most compelling, most fully developed, most lovable character on the show isn't Garry Shandling's putative star Larry, but Torn's Artie. And Artie's not just the greatest character, but the greatest on a great, well-written show on which every character is precisely drawn, perfectly cast, and beautifully acted. (Jeffrey Tambor's Hank Kingsley, in particular, stands out alongside Artie as one of TV's greatest comic characters; Tambor must be a really smart, sweet man in real life to do such a fantastic job playing a big dumb asshole like Hank.)
You might ask what makes Artie the greatest if you've never seen even one minute of the show; if you'd seen even one minute, you would know: Artie is the executive producer we all wish we had. Never mind that most of us will never be in charge of anything that needs to be produced executively; Artie is so great, he makes us want to go out and get our own late-night talk show just so we could have an Artie to oversee it -- specifically, to take care of us. As Larry's producer, Artie's job is not only to know everything about the show, but to know everything about everything. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the entertainment industry, and there isn't an executive with whom he hasn't gone on a bender, nor an aging starlet with whom he hasn't had a torrid tryst. And although one of the primary responsibilities of his job is to insulate Larry from the often distasteful realities of the business, Artie is always keenly aware of when and how to puncture Larry's protective bubble and give Larry that brief glimpse at unpleasantness that makes him all the more grateful for everything Artie does. Amid all this, Artie's smooth demeanour is virtually never ruffled. He's a total pro: he makes his extremely difficult job look totally effortless. This is what we mean when we say he's the greatest. Torn so inhabits the role that it's unimaginable to picture anyone else playing it. Sure, he won an Emmy for it -- which is nice -- but Torn's performance as Artie over the show's six seasons should have allowed him to join the upper tier of character actors (like Tommy Lee Jones, but a generation older) instead of leaving him anywhere on the whore scale.
You may also remember Torn as Albert Brooks's sort-of lawyer in Defending Your Life, the unfairly reviled flop that is actually surprisingly entertaining and stands up well to repeated viewings. Bob Diamond is sort of a proto-Artie role, in which Torn gets to be superficially helpful and kindly, but ultimately unsparing and bullshit-free in his judgments and advice. In the Men In Black movies, he's an interstellar Artie, co-ordinating traffic and catering to the VIPs. Torn has also done his part to beef up Oscar bait like The Insider and Wonder Boys. Furthermore, his gravelly voice and stern bearing have lent themselves to roles portraying such real-life people as Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Grant (though the last portraying Grant when he was still just a general), as well as controversial celebrities like J. Edgar Hoover and Henry Miller. He was probably great in all those roles, but since they were from the olden days, we wouldn't know. Though we have to think Torn's Nixon would kick Anthony Hopkins's Nixon's British ass, knighthood notwithstanding.
It's absolutely true that a man who works as much as Torn does makes the occasional stinker. Freddy Got Fingered probably wouldn't make it into his AFI tribute, but hell, Alan Arkin made The Jerky Boys and Christopher Walken made The Country Bears; if the products of whoring were pretty, "whoring" wouldn't be such an ugly word. Welcome to Mooseport also didn't mark Torn's finest hour, but he was slumming it there with not one but two Oscar winners -- Marcia Gay Harden and the aforementioned Hackman; others were far worse disgraced with that one than he. And if we were home with the flu on a Saturday afternoon and Mooseport happened to be airing on TBS (we predict that this hypothetical Saturday afternoon will become all too real around August 2006 or so), the factor that would make us stop on that channel while we napped would be Rip Torn, doing what he could to make the movie better with his very presence.
The people who cast Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story obviously knew that was Torn's special talent. Vince Vaughn's and Ben Stiller's are the marquee names that are supposed to attract the crowds, but what has made us bullish on the movie is the presence of so many gifted character actors filling out the movie's tertiary roles -- actors like Gary Cole, Stephen Root, Jason Bateman, Hank Azaria, Missi Pyle, and Torn. Stiller's track record is getting worse by the film, and Vaughn isn't faring much better, but even if this outing sucks ass (as we fear, deep down inside, where we're soft like a woman, that it will), Torn and his character-actor colleagues will make every little corner of the movie that they appear in just that much more enjoyable. Especially Torn, playing a grizzled old dodgeball veteran ("Patches O'Houlihan," and Torn is probably the only man alive who could play someone named "Patches" without coming off at least a little gay) whose coaching style would be generously called "tough love" and somewhat more accurately called "unfettered sadism." There aren't many seventy-three-year-old men from whom we'd fear a wrench lobbed in our direction, but Torn is no wizened old pensioner; he could probably chuck a wrench a lot further and harder than we could. And if he did, he'd really, really mean it.
Rip Torn is cool. Many of the right people -- the ones in charge of casting movies and TV shows -- seem to know it. And it's not like he's not famous enough to get plenty enough to do. We just wish he were famous enough that the ratio of movies he does to movies we want to see were slightly better. If he could have found a way on Mooseport to siphon off just a little of Gene Hackman's fame, we'd all be better off.
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