riding the echo down

huge huge HUGE thanks to tempural for helping me troubleshoot the video embed coding in this!


(happy pride demon month, here's a new round of homosexuality from yours truly. i even made a new icon for the occasion <3)

the other day i had the bright idea of searching the wayback machine for "lawrence dane" - i've searched the internet archive's website on a regular basis but never thought to do a text search in the wayback machine itself, and was curious whether i might be able to find anyone else talking about him on old sites. (when i explained this to my partner they laughed and were like "no, i think you're the only one who's ever cared this much" lol.)

the first result for my search was lawrencedane.com which would have been quite the coincidence if it wasn't him - going through the site captures it became clear the domain had been taken over by spam squatters before going down entirely, so i went back to the beginning. the domain was registered in 2002, and an early crawl revealed that it had indeed likely been his personal website. but it was mainly based on flash, so i couldn't view it on a regular browser - my only confirmation was a string of text at the bottom of the broken content that read "photo gallery / credits / biography / contacts / what's new".

after some trial and error that night i got the archived captures to be functional! i tried the ruffle extension and it worked long enough to load the home page and verify it as dane's site, but refreshing the page somehow broke the extension so i had to use a portable flash-friendly version of firefox kindly shared via reddit here. that worked much more reliably and i was able to take screenshots of a 2003 crawl - and record the flash animations, lol.

(you can turn off the loop if enabled with a right click, or view a still image here. the video appears a little small here because i had to fight with dreamwidth to get the embed working, so the screenshots represent the dimensions of the site more accurately. you can also open the video in a new tab to view it at the correct scale.)

( further documentation and discussion behind the cut )

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 4/5

he's not the main antagonist - that would be lloyd bochner's character - but his scenes take up a fair amount of the runtime and he opens and closes the episode as well. it's a nice performance too, appropriately intense but not hammy. also, this episode has one of the most bonkers death scenes i've seen him do and that gives it a full extra point on the worth-it-for-dane scale. like i knew he was gonna die but the way it happens.... i've never seen anything like it elsewhere in such a serious context lmao. maybe i'm just sheltered?? a clip of the scene is included at the end of this post so you can judge for yourself. (uploading the whole episode privately to youtube for autocaptions was a bust because of copyright bullshit, so i paid for captions, but it seems as though very short clips are fine so there's that at least. a dane cut wasn't necessary imo since he's in it enough and the rest is interesting enough especially when lloyd bochner is there.)

the plot: two men are working together as diamond thieves at the behest of someone who knows where and when diamonds will be in transit and thus easy to steal - an inside man. dane plays one of the thieves and lloyd bochner plays the inside man. (they were together again in 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' a couple years after this, though they don't interact as much in that.) dane has something of a homoerotic relationship with his robbery partner, played by a fellow named clyde ventura* - we're given to understand that they met in prison and promised each other that they'd buy a ranch together when they had the money, among other intimate little details, and they seem to be peers but dane cares more about the welfare of his partner than one might expect for the average heist team. (dane could have been fun in an episode of leverage but i digress.)

on the one hand, this show was written in partnership with j. edgar hoover and his top fbi agents, which, yuck. but on the other, the screenwriters give the "bad guys" a surprising amount of depth in this context and it seems pretty clear to me that we're even meant to find the situation somewhat tragic. at least, dane gives us a performance good enough to help us believe he genuinely cares about his partner and the pathos of that carries the episode. the narrative ends pretty abruptly and i wished they'd had the space to dwell a bit on how bochner's character is treated versus the working-class thieves, but at the same time if this was produced under hoover's watch they probably weren't allowed to go that far.

while i was starting to draft this post i was reminded of his performance in his first episode of the virginian (aired 1968) and how he feels less natural there compared to this fbi episode. at first i was thinking oh he must've started hitting his stride in 1969 but no, he was very good in yerma and in his episode of jericho (both aired 1967) among other roles. really makes me think that it comes down to the director, something i think i’ve touched on before - with the right director he can be phenomenal, but that isn’t consistent enough to make someone a star. a shame, because he really does do a decent job with the material he's given in this episode.

since this was a procedural show it’s difficult to find newspaper reviews for individual episodes, but there’s a fansite for the show - that site’s rating for this episode is a B and i think i agree. if you enjoy the style of police procedural that's heavier on investigation than on action, it's a solid episode. if you don't enjoy police procedurals at all, well, understandable. but perhaps you can at least enjoy how cute dane is in this one.

movies i've seen for the first time recently that i can remember/may want to revisit soon somehow:

• god told me to (1976) - watched this a couple months ago, actually, but it's stuck with me. such a great little microcosm of a specific slice of the 1970s. also interesting to compare with the current general attitude towards gun murders in the usa..... and it had really fun devilman vibes though there's no actual connection i know of.
• crimes of passion (1984) - mostly watched this because "fucked-up preacher man with some kind of sex addiction" is right up my alley. also i was curious about ken russell's later work. it's pulpy fun and anthony perkins really owns the movie. doesn't feel as inspired as some of russell's other work that i've seen, but still some great visuals.
• speedy (1928) - a charming love letter to both the then-dying and then-evolving versions of new york city, albeit a very white love letter. interesting to compare its depiction of the city with movies like god told me to or the taking of pelham one two three (1974 version, natch).

also rewatched showgirls (1995) and was introduced to the idea that it was intended as satire. if so, the satire misses the mark imo because there's no clear target. pick one and stick with it if you want the commentary to be clear; the rest will follow. it also doesn't help that mclachlan felt like he was in a different movie, lol, and gershon's character felt more developed than the main character. when discussing this with my partner i was comparing it to midnight cowboy (which itself isn't satire but still very much a social commentary) and hope to show that to them soon because they haven't seen it before. it's been a long time since i've watched/read it myself so i'm looking forward to the chance to spend time with those characters again.

i'm also hoping to show them lynch's dune, since it's on the criterion channel through the end of this month. i've seen it once before but want to check it out again now that i know what to expect and won't be totally blindsided by dean stockwell showing up (and no i still haven't seen the new version, though not for lack of interest. just...hasn't worked out for various reasons).

honorable mention goes to the curse of inferno (1997). what a strange movie. in places it's a similar kind of strange as showgirls, with actors seeming as though they're in different movies despite sharing a scene. in a way it's almost as ripe for a cultural studies focus as god told me to, though it does need the additional context of knowing who pauly shore is and his career trajectory.

i also finally put together the dane cut for of unknown origin and now that i'm in a better mood i think i can rate the movie more highly, lol. i'll try to work on that post soon.

gotta catch up on my inbox/reading page again but for now, since this was fun last time:





i know i keep stalling on the national lampoon movie but.... i just did a post about an unfunny comedy i really don't want to do another one so soon lmao.

i might do a write-up of the 1965 short 'control of inmates' before any of these just because it's less than 30 minutes and the story behind it is kinda cool, and/or i can revisit 'happy birthday to me' for a more positive assessment like i said i would months ago orz. wish i had more time to devote to all this.... and i also gotta navigate calling the cbc to pay for some more videos. it's bullshit that apparently i can't use relay to make outbound international calls. fuck deaf people with any international business or friends i guess. but they might be able to call me? i'll have to see if they're willing to work with me on this, lol, or if i need to recruit a hearing person to help out. tedious, but it should be worth it in the end....

yoinked a custom mood theme off ye olde livejournal (source post here). i used to have a really cute one of kawamura takashi from prince of tennis on my lj but it seems to have been nuked. thanks photobucket. at least this one is fun too.

watched a japanese horror film last night with the english title of "bloody muscle body builder in hell" on shudder. entertaining little thing - only an hour long - and very clearly a love letter to the evil dead film(s). seemed as though there were also some oblique references to reanimator but i could be wrong.... then again, decapitating someone with a shovel is pretty specific, isn't it? ditto a foot attached to another limb vis-a-vis bride of reanimator? or am i just Uncultured? at any rate i had fun, even if the movie did a couple things on my "thanks i hate this" list wrt things that keep me awake at night.

i really don't like jerky head movements, especially if they're at an unnatural speed, and i also don't like sudden loud noises/music cues at a specific pitch. the latter is related to my inability to tolerate a very specific kind of throat sound, lol, because for whatever reason my hearing aids just. cannot process it in a way that sounds organic to me. nope. cannot do it. (yes, i've watched the original grudge movie, yes every single fucking time that sound happened i just turned off my h/as until i was told it was over. No Thanks.) i'm also pretty susceptible to visual jump scares, even if i can guess they're coming, and when the movie ends with one.... wonderful. super nice. won't keep me awake at all.

other than that the movie was really enjoyable! the practical effects were so fun, as were the stop-motion/painted animation bits, and i loved how i could feel the passion in it all. would i watch it again? PROBABLY NOT LOL. but i'll definitely recommend it to others!

i also rewatched tommy recently, i don't remember why now - something about a conversation with pendulumscale and wanting to show it to them just so they'd have that context - and i did NOT realize that fucking father grandier is in it! i didn't recognize him when i watched the devils even though i'd seen tommy first (same director!) but it was kinda surreal this time around knowing the actor. he doesn't do a bad job in tommy at all, though i do think he gives a better performance in the devils. but when i was watching tommy with whim i realized that i didn't remember the latter half of the film at all. it just isn't as compelling once it gets into the cult narrative, which is a bit ironic imo considering that ken russell apparently agreed to direct because he liked the cult element. it just falls apart narratively imo, and that might be partly due to how it handles disability. it was really weird the first time around, and let me tell you it's even weirder the second time around because i was more sober and could tell they weren't even trying to use british sign language. yas qween use crips as props more! groundbreaking!!1 everything before tommy gets his sight/hearing back is great visually so idk wtf happened after that. (yeah there's the revival church scene in the first half but that felt a little less yikes to me personally because of the context, with his mother trying to ~cure~ him and it being framed as misguided, vs the context of the scene where tommy's preaching to the disabled people because...??? idk why that was necessary to include lmao)

i do remember whim making a couple comments to the effect of "if i were high right now this scene would probably be amazing" and y'know what? they weren't wrong. but even high i was like :| at some of it lol. maybe i just don't find exploitation narratives interesting when they move into religious territory, or when they use disabled people as visual props? like, i love iscariot in hellsing, they're my favorite part of the whole thing, but my interest is in the characters rather than the exploitation aspect. hm. Food For Thought, i suppose.

was gonna start taking screencaps for my next dane review (a good idea at the time/find the lady, per that poll i ran a while back) but got sidetracked uploading the custom mood theme. that took longer than i thought it would! while in adhd hell yesterday when trying to work from home i found some mixed/positive reviews for those movies so that was interesting, since until now i'd only seen bad ones. thank you [redacted local library] for providing premium access to newspapers.com. do be sure to check out your local library's database offerings in case they have free access for a database you'd find interesting/useful! the website kept 404ing when i tried to follow results for two specific papers, which was very frustrating because one of the results sounded like it included him discussing why he switched from zahab to dane, but oh well. i sent in support requests so we'll see what comes of that.

i did see that shudder has castle freak, but whim wasn't interested in a more serious movie and jeffrey combs/barbara crampton being in it wasn't enough of a sell, alas. hoping to watch it tomorrow with a good friend who's a combs stan - their enthusiasm is infectious. speaking of reanimator&c - check out this super cool post by tempural about an artwork i commissioned from them. i love hill/west and jumped at the chance to get a valentine's day commission from them because i love their art and knew they'd have fun with the premise of my request. i wanna write more hill/west this year! fuck the people on tungle who get mad if your gay reanimator ship isn't danbert. it isn't my fault david gale is mega sexy!

anyway, time to log into eso and dick around in advance of the elsweyr event starting next week. my absolute favorite expansion... next post of mine on here should be a review of find the lady. pray for my adhd. thanks.

i talked a lot about lawrence dane in 2022 without actually taking the time to explain why him of all actors. granted, the posts in my rituals tag get into most of it, but the snowflake challenge made me realize it'd be a good idea to have it all in one place instead of spread out across reviews&c. that way i have a nice little introduction to link at the top of the review masterpost!



lawrence joseph zahab was born april 3, 1937 to two lebanese immigrants in a town in quebec, canada, and raised in ottawa. he grew up very involved in his community - playing high school football, emceeing local events, trying out impersonations at talent shows, and eventually acting in community theater. he was the youngest of six children and his father died suddenly when he was just finishing high school. since he wasn't the oldest son and therefore didn't face the same expectations to care for his mother and sister, he had enough freedom to travel and pursue his interest in acting. he started out credited as larry or lawrence zahab but switched to using lawrence dane as a stage name during the mid-to-late 1960s, when he began focusing on television and film productions outside of canada. in his private life he seems to have always gone by larry. he had several friends, most notably canadian icon gordon pinsent, but stayed a bachelor most of his life; he appears to have been largely single or only had short-lived relationships until 1995, when he wedded a woman named mary laurel macintosh in las vegas. they stayed together until his death of pancreatic cancer on march 21, 2022 and they don't seem to have had any children, but by all accounts he was a lovely uncle to his extended family of nieces and nephews.

his most well-known roles are as braedon keller in scanners (1981) and as lt. preston in bride of chucky (1998). he was a not-infrequent guest on american television in the '60s and '70s, and he was in a handful of early john candy films. if you're a canadian over the age of 30 or 40, you've likely encountered him on television at some point, whether in a drama, sitcom, or advertisement.

( what's so interesting about this guy anyway? )

so that's lawrence dane! as always i'm happy to answer any questions you might have, or to just fawn over him together lol. thanks for reading ^^

what a busy winter holiday season. not busy in terms of socializing (covid precautions...) but i had to finish up edits for the magazine publication and then i got a fair amount of personal writing done. nothing quite completed yet, but since they're both xmas/nye-themed i'd like to have them done by the end of this month, lol. i've also been enjoying playing elder scrolls online again - my laptop finally stopped being able to run it back over the summer, but after i built a new pc it runs so fucking smooth it's a whole different experience. still trying to figure out why my pc keeps rebooting instead of staying asleep but it's not a huge problem yet, just a pain in the ass.

it was tough spending yet another batch of holidays away from my family, since i am on good terms with them, but i'm still trying to find a new job that'll put me close enough to make day trips feasible. at least i could do some things online with them, and watch things together with friends via discord. finally got around to seeing the first episode of our flag means death and it was honestly just as funny as people made it out to be. i'll have to watch more soon. i also bought my partner a single by a local musician for hanukkah (we only exchange gifts on the first night) and it was cool comparing how it sounded on our record player to when we've seen him perform it live.

one really nice holiday treat (for me, anyway) was a new ebay listing for a press photo/lobby card i hadn't seen before. the seller also had a listing for the scanners lobby card with dane on it, but they only do reproductions so i hadn't felt like it was worth buying. this new photo, though, hasn't been posted anywhere else and it was covered in watermarks so obviously my only choice was to buy it (and grab a copy of the scanners one while i was at it). i don't know why this seller won't just list the original because it's not like anyone else would want it lmao. nobody likes running (1979)...or if they do, they don't like it for dane. i get the impression that he might've had a scene or two that were cut from the final production, or from the version of the movie i found anyway, since i also have a press photo of a scene that i don't remember seeing in the movie. i have a lot of press photos/lobby cards, lol.


i call this my "panorama of dane" because my mother and her friend, during their teen years, were obsessed with joel grey in cabaret and went to all these stage performances of his and collected various memorabilia that they called their panorama of joel. there's a polaroid of them displaying their panorama and it was really a quite impressive collection, lol, much larger than what i have. i should put these in frames at some point, but i'd have to get a custom frame for a lot of them so that isn't happening (yet). the main thing was just having something nice to look at when i'm shackled to my telework desk. there's a couple other photos i could include but i'd have to get them printed. other than those i thought my collection was finished, especially since none of the lobby cards for nothing personal includes him, but, well... i look forward to potentially being proven wrong yet again.

i'm not going to make any new year's resolutions - i just want to write more and finish another story with an eye towards publication. signed up for the ygorarepairs reverse minibang and might try to sign up for other fan events, but one thing i'd like to do this year is keep my goals realistic so i don't try to take on too much. i also want to do more dane reviews/research! there's one i started drafting last year and i'll have to finish it soon so we can ring in the new year with a short film where he has like three sex scenes within 20 minutes. it's so much...........

here's hoping everyone's new year is off to a good start!

i completely unintentionally backdated my most recent post, lol, because i never changed the date from when i first started composing it. so yeah if you're curious about some of the behind-the-scenes stories/viewpoints of people involved in the production of rituals (1977) i shared some interviews! don't worry, i haven't forgotten about making a post for the seal-clubbing comedy. it's happening, though i did conveniently become sidetracked by a short film mai zetterling directed that stars lawrence dane - i'll save the details for an individual post, but i captioned the whole thing mostly by myself and that sure was a little journey.

i've joined a discord server of david gale fans, and it's been...interesting, since i'm the oldest person there by far lmao. i'm not getting too involved though - just hanging out there for the archival work being spearheaded by this one fan who runs the davidgalearchive account on tumblr. they also have a dedicated youtube account that i've been meaning to trawl though, and it's made me wonder if i should do the same for my dane video clips. i don't have as much that needs public archiving, i think....

idk what it is about me that swings between craving internet interactions versus retreating from almost everything sometimes, but i'm looking forward to my upcoming time off as a mental reset button.

i'm also looking forward to seeing a story of mine in print! again, technically, but the last time i went through a formal submission process was in 2015 so.... after about two weeks of revising and editing at a breakneck speed i think the editors and i have arrived at a version that's ready to release into the world. it'll be in the january issue of OFIC magazine and i'm excited to introduce more people to my fucked-up horrible little priest man. who is over six feet tall but y'know. he's doing his best, ok? (and someday i'll finish the high school teacher au story i've been picking away at with the intention of getting it published....) i'm planning on writing more about the whole experience with OFIC after i have the physical thing in my hands, so if you have any specific questions you want me to address in that post just drop them in the comments here.

the "is this worth watching for lawrence dane" rating: 3/5

the plot is pretty straightforward: he plays a lawyer for a mobster that the group are trying to take down and the group decides to exploit the lawyer's resentful wife as a weak link by forcing her into rehab and impersonating her.

there's no cold war wackiness in this one (meaning the obligatory xenophobia is also lacking, though there is one very strange racist exchange during one of the therapy scenes) but there's plenty of other absurdities that make this fun to watch - magical rubber masks, for example, and truly bizarre cutting-edge 1970s "group therapy" sessions - and the main actress, elizabeth ashley, who you might recognize from her later role in the nic cage feature vampire's kiss, gives us just the right amount of melodrama called for by the premise. honestly she carries this episode by playing dane's alcoholic wife - dane does a solid job, and his approach to method acting really shows in some places, but he's a bit hamstrung by the vague accent he's putting on. generic "american tough guy", i think, and it's not usually distracting but there's a couple scenes where it doesn't do his delivery any favors. shame, because dane really has what it takes to play sympathetic bad guys/antagonists. so this doesn't rate as highly as his commandante episode but he gets to do much more here than just looking cute in the survivors, and the stuff with ashley's character is compelling enough to make sitting through the other dane-less scenes worth it. unfortunately (or fortunately) dane isn't in any of the therapy scenes.

it probably is worth warning for domestic violence, however - there's one scene where he slaps her without any warning and both of them do a great job with it but that might make it harder to watch for some. and then she's forcibly manhandled by a few different people, sometimes for restraint or forced institutionalization and sometimes as part of the really strange therapy sessions lol, and there's a scene or two where she throws and breaks things.

yeah yeah i called dane's character sympathetic but he's a wifebeater, cancel me, etc. my policy is generally "if someone lays hands on you irl then leave them asap" but in fiction it can be a little different. what i mean is that you can see the conflict in his eyes and dane sells him as someone who was a good husband, once, but the narrative has decided he's irredeemable. this makes the ending more upsetting to me than i think they intended, honestly, because yeah he dies (not really a spoiler with his track record let's be real) and she has no idea, she's just being forced back into rehab when he gets murdered and the mission impossible crew doesn't seem to really be thinking about her psychological welfare at all. what kind of support is she going to have when she gets out? could he have been a good husband again, if they'd been able to escape the mob he'd gotten involved with? we're not asked to consider that at all but i really feel as though dane plays him as though he had the potential. how much of that is his performance and how much is me just being biased because it's dane, idk, but it makes the story of this more interesting than a lot of mission impossible episodes (imo).


highlight: going through these caps made me realize he has a scar on the right side of his upper lip, almost like my oc....

i'm not positive whether it's REALLY good makeup or an actual scar - it's hard to tell if he had it in the 1967 episode since that one's pretty dark. a damn shame the film quality for rituals is what it is because i could compare some of those lovely closeups.... i didn't adjust the color/light on this or any of the following screencaps btw


( 'she's muh WAHFE' and he's my wife. mwah )

if i had to rank his three mission impossible episodes in terms of rewatchability, i think it'd go commandante, the survivors, then this one. not because his performance is lesser (in the survivors he's mostly standing around being adorable lol) but because it's a little hard to watch just for fun. granted, the imperialist gaslighting in commandante is also a boner kill, but he's having so much fun with the role it's easier to ignore the upsetting aspects of that episode. that said, if you chose to watch only two i'd insist you skip the survivors and watch this one along with commandante. you get to see him do way more here and regardless of whether you think he does a good job or not the rest of the episode is quite the experience.