Special to The Malibu Times
He’ll always be with us
My friend Stan Winston has died. The four-time Academy Award winner and Malibu resident succumbed to complications from multiple myeloma Sunday, June 15. He was 62 and perennially young. Since his death, much has been written about Stan in the New York Times and the L.A. Times related to his talent, his skill as a sculptor and his passion for the creation of visual effects on countless film projects including “Aliens,” “Terminator 2,” “Judgment Day” and “Jurassic Park.” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a close friend of Stan’s, refers to him as a genius. And I’m sure he’s correct in that assessment. An obit appeared in the June 19 issue of The Malibu Times, as well.
No account has yet mentioned Stan’s humor, his organic sense of the outlandish. You’d have to had known him.
There’s a magical quality that some special people have: the ability to riff off an ordinary comment or situation and to go directly to the absurd. In a sense, it’s a kind of word-jazz-plus. The process requires a vivid imagination and the utmost freedom. Gene Wilder has the quality. Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor had it. Good comics have it, as do some good actors. Stan Winston had it in spades. I don’t think you can learn the quality. I see it as more of an un-learning, a giving up of social restraints. It involves logical but generally outlandish behavior, a quality not always welcome in social situations. You need to risk making a complete ass of yourself, and that commitment alone, if you have the talent to back it up, especially in concert with another gifted nut, is astonishingly funny to watch, and to occasionally be a party to. Stan was all of that. And I am now, and was then, privileged to be part of it.
Though we were not intimates-we never met for lunch; indeed, we were never in the same room alone with one another — I feel I knew Stan at his best by watching him operate socially with another crazy master of improvisation: Rod Steiger, a risky genius who didn’t give a damn for decorum among friends.
Back in the mid-1970s, Stan and Karen Winston and I would often be at the same dinner table either at Rod’s home or at La Scala Malibu. Several years before Stan collected his Oscars, he created Steiger’s makeup for the film “W.C. Fields and Me.” Sensing an immediate kinship with one another-either artist could, and did, flip with ease into an absurd characterization. They became fast friends. How could they not?
Stan did not like to be called Stanley, a perfect piece of ammunition for Steiger, who would frequently call him at the top of his voice from across the dinner table: “Stan-lee!” with an abrupt accent on the “lee!” And so, the running around and exalted nonsense would begin.
Steiger has been gone now for nearly six years, so that duet exists only in memory. Yet I so loved those days and Stan’s unselfconscious touch of the zany that lately I tried to keep it alive. And sure enough, it overtook both of us the moment we fell into one another’s eye line. If I chanced to spot Stan first at, say, the Malibu Kitchen, I often stole Steiger’s line: “Stan-lee!” I’d say at the top of my voice. The last time I did it behind his back, Stan retorted, “He’ll always be with us.”
And now, today, it feels as if Stan will always be with us. I don’t know who else I can have that kind of fun with.