RIP Tom Snyder & Ingmar Bergman

[Ming]

Tom Snyder, late night TV talk show host, dead at 71
By Jason Dearen
Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO - Talk show host Tom Snyder, whose smoke-filled interviews were a staple of late night television, has died after a struggle with leukemia. He was 71.
Snyder died Sunday in San Francisco from complications associated with leukemia, his longtime producer and friend Mike Horowicz told The Associated Press on Monday.

Known for his improvised, casual style and robust laughter, Snyder conducted a number of memorable interviews as host of NBC's "The Tomorrow Show." Among his guests were John Lennon, Charles Manson and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

Snyder began his career as a radio reporter in Milwaukee in the 1960s, then moved into local television news. He anchored newscasts in Philadelphia and Los Angeles before moving to late night.

"He loved the broadcast business," said Marciarose Shestack, who co-anchored a noontime newscast with Snyder at KYW-TV in Philadelphia in the 1960s. "He was very surprising and very irreverent and not at all a typical newscaster."

In 1972, Snyder left news to host "The Tomorrow Show," which followed "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.

His catch phrase for the show was: "Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air." Snyder smoked throughout his show, the cigarette cloud swirling around him during interviews.

He gained more fame when Dan Ackroyd lampooned him in the early days of Saturday Night Live.

In 1995, he returned to late night television as the host of "The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder" on CBS. The program followed David Letterman's "Late Show" until 1998, when Snyder was replaced by Craig Kilborn.
Snyder announced on his Web site in 2005 that he had chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

"When I was a kid leukemia was a death sentence," he wrote then. "Now, my doctors say it's treatable!"

Horowicz met Snyder in 1982 and worked with him at WABC in New York before producing the "Tom Snyder" television show.

"He was a great guy and very talented," Horowicz said.

Snyder is survived by his daughter and longtime girlfriend, who live in the Bay Area.

[Tiamat]

It took me a minute to remember who you were talking about, then I remembered the cigarette smoke. That's to bad

[Winston]

I take it Ingmar Bergman does not approve of this thread, this forum or this messed-up world of ours in general.

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Winston
I take it Ingmar Bergman does not approve of this thread, this forum or this messed-up world of ours in general.

Bergman commits the sin of not being American.


I enjoyed Snyder's interviews.

Both will be missed.

[Ming]

Film-maker Ingmar Bergman dead
Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, has died. He was 89.

Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, confirmed the death on Monday.

Bergman died at his home on the Baltic islet of Faro, north of the tourist island of Gotland, Sweden, said Eva Bergman, one of his nine children.

The cause of his death was not immediately known.

Bergman inspired a generation of film-makers with his often stark and melancholy works including the films Wild Strawberries, Scenes From a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander.

He made about 60 films before retiring from film-making in 2003.

Bergman and actress Liv Ulmann at a theatre
rehearsal in Stockholm in the '60s [AFP]
"He was one of the great ones," Jorn Donner, who produced Fanny and Alexander, said.

Richard Attenborough, the British actor and director, said: "The world has lost one of its very greatest film-makers. He taught us all so much throughout his life."

His cinematic masterpieces often dwelt on sexual confusion, loneliness and the vain search for the meaning of life, themes that many ascribed to a traumatic childhood in which he was beaten by his father.

He won Oscars for best foreign language film in 1960, 1961 and 1983, and a collection of his work was added last month to the Unesco store of history's greatest archives.

Fanny and Alexander won four Oscars alone in 1983 and in total Bergman's work included 54 films, 126 theatre productions and 39 radio plays.

In his films, Bergman's vision encompassed all the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, the gentle merriment of glowing summer evenings, and the bleak magnificence of the island where he spent his last years.

Bergman approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness with inventive technique and carefully honed writing, becoming one of the towering figures of serious film making.

"He was one of the world's biggest personalities. There were [Japanese film director Akira] Kurosawa, [Italy's Federico] Fellini and then Bergman. Now he is also gone," Bille August, an academy award winner, said.

Laurent Delmas, a French cinema specialist, said France's national cinema school required aspiring students to analyse a five-minute extract from a Bergman film as part of last year's entrance exams.

"There is not a serious French director out there who has not watched Bergman and taken elements - consciously or unconsciously - from him," Delmas said.

"They watched Bergman not to ape him but because they were blown away by the essential subjects of his films - death, relationships - by his stories and the way he filmed them."

Gilles Jacob, the Cannes Film Festival's director, called Bergman the "last of the greats, because he proved that cinema can be as profound as literature".

The son of a Lutheran clergyman and a housewife, Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala on July 14, 1918, and grew up with a brother and sister in a household of severe discipline that he described in painful detail in the autobiography The Magic Lantern.

Bergman encouraged young directors not to
make any films without a message [AFP]
The title comes from his childhood, when his brother got a "magic lantern" - a precursor of the slide-projector - for Christmas.

Ingmar was consumed with jealousy, and he managed to acquire the object of his desire by trading it for a hundred tin soldiers.

The apparatus was a spot of joy in an often-cruel young life. Bergman recounted the horror of being locked in a closet and the humiliation of being made to wear a skirt as punishment for wetting his pants.

He broke with his parents at 19 and remained aloof from them, but later in life sought to understand them.

The story of their lives was told in the television film Sunday's Child, directed by his own son Daniel.

Bergman's private life often thrust him into the headlines as much as his films.

He was married five times to beautiful and gifted women and had liaisons with his leading actresses.

In a rare interview in 2001 Bergman said personal demons tormented and inspired him throughout his life.

"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times and create panic and terror," he said at the time.

"But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage."

Bergman first gained international attention with 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night, a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical, A Little Night Music.

His last work was Saraband, a made-for-television film that aired on Swedish public television in December 2003.

Nearly a million Swedes - or one in nine - watched the family drama, which was based on the two main characters from his previous TV series, Scenes From a Marriage.


A '70s photo shows Bergman, left, with Sven
Nykvist, his famous cameramen [AFP]

The show starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson - two of Bergman's favourite actors - who reprised their roles from Scenes From a Marriage, which was edited and released as a feature film in 1974.

The Seventh Seal, released two years later, riveted critics and audiences.

An allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, it contains one of cinema's most famous scenes - a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.

"I was terribly scared of death," Bergman said of his state of mind when making the 1957 film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the best picture category.

The film distilled the essence of Bergman's work - high seriousness, flashes of unexpected humour and striking images.

Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also a prominent stage director.

He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm which he headed from 1963 to 1966.

He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg, whom he cited as an inspiration.

Marie Nyrerodand, a Swedish journalist, said on Monday that Bergman died peacefully during his sleep.

After a hip surgery in October last year, Bergman never fully recovered, she told Swedish broadcaster SVT.

"Since then I don't think he really recuperated. They made sure he had company around the clock to help him get up with a broken hip," Nyrerod, who had interviewed him often, said.

[Wezil]

All this site needs now is a Dead Pool...

[Elok]

My dad keeps trying to get me to watch The Seventh Seal. He says it's a great film. But he also said that about Citizen Kane, and so do most critics, and that movie just sucked. Maybe it was technically brilliant, but I for one do not give a rat's ass about some adopted blue-blood who spends his lifetime shooting himself in the foot. Bah.

Oh, but RIP, of course.

[Winston]

*Bergman tentatively stops revolving*

RIP all.

[lord of the mark]

Chess game lost.

[lord of the mark]

Citizen Kane and Seventh Seal were both great films.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Elok
My dad keeps trying to get me to watch The Seventh Seal. He says it's a great film. But he also said that about Citizen Kane, and so do most critics, and that movie just sucked. Maybe it was technically brilliant, but I for one do not give a rat's ass about some adopted blue-blood who spends his lifetime shooting himself in the foot.

And reinventing and dominating the newspaper business.

[Nostromo]

Ingmar Bergman deserves a thread of his own

[-Jrabbit]

Agreed.

But I have much more vivid memories of Tom Snyder. I watched him religiously back in the day and saw most of the more famed interviewed noted in the AP story. He didn't really "get" hippies, punks, or youth culture in general, but knew it was important and gave it an outlet. The results were often unintentionally hilarious, yet somehow touching in their honesty and earnestness. Snyder's offhand yet informed interview style was a breath of fresh air (though the same could not be said for the air itself) in the 70s.

[Chemical Ollie]

Who TF was Tom Snyder???

And for Bergman, Sweden is on a national mourning today, both TV and radio are airing lots of extra memorial stuff. I never appreciated Bergman's greatness, he's too artsy-fartsy for my taste.

[Ming]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
Who TF was Tom Snyder???