POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Tom Skerritt Changed My Life
By Dan Brown This has been a season of celebrity death. And the celebrities who are dying fall into one general category: Character actors who I’ve interviewed only once in my career as a journalist. Tom Skerritt passed last week. I interviewed him for an Alien 20th anniversary story when I was at the National Post in 1999. Check. Walter Koenig died this week. I interviewed him for an article about a Star Trek fan film when I was at CBC.ca in 2005. Check. Both are solid guys who made the most of their limited time on screen. And I like to think I learned something during the interviews I conducted with them, even if they were one-offs. When I spoke with Skerritt, he was an absolute gentleman. Just the fact he was willing to speak on the phone with some no-name journalist up in Canada says good things about him. I remember he told me about his affinity for The Duellists, which was Ridley Scott’s debut film and the picture he directed before starting work on Alien. Skerritt asked if I had seen the Napoleonic Era story, and I told him I hadn’t. “Treat yourself,” he replied warmly, meaning I would enjoy it. I have since then adopted that phrase. Whenever I'm telling a friend they should indulge a whim, I say with the same gusto, “Treat yourself.” They love to hear that. Unlike some big-name stars, Skerritt was pretty much the same guy off screen as on. That’s why I’d rather interview a character actor any day over the likes of Tom Cruise. Those who aren’t at the top of the A-list are willing to give honest answers and not just rely on a message track like politicians to get through encounters with journalists. Oh, and if you haven’t seen Alien, treat yourself, it’s a riot of character acting. (For the same assignment I also interviewed Skerritt’s co-star, Harry Dean Stanton, another character actor, he passed in 2017.) I got in touch with Koenig when the news broke that he would playing Chekov, the Star Trek character that made him semi-famous, in a fan film. This was a watershed moment. The thing is, by 2005, fan films had reached a new level of sophistication. So I asked Koenig, if a fan film stars an original cast member from Star Trek, and is written by a writer who worked on the original series, and has state-of-the-art special effects, how is that different from “real” Star Trek, especially if it’s embraced by the fan community? “I don’t think they can say it’s not Star Trek,” he said. “But it’s a Star Trek that has not been attempted before.” I admired his passion for the project, and he pointed out this wasn’t a bunch of amateurs in a barn somewhere pretend-playing Star Trek. And if people laughed at him for doing a fan film, what then? He was blunt: “Screw it if they feel that way.” Performers like Koenig and Skerritt aren’t divas, they didn’t put on any Hollywood airs or attitudes with the press. It was my pleasure to bring their stories to readers. I just hope actors like Martin Sheen, Ben Kingsley, George Takei, and Veronica Cartwright are taking care of their health, because I interviewed them, too, and I don’t want this trend to continue. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: The Summer of IMAX
By Dan Brown Now that fall has arrived, the question can be asked: Who, or what, had the best summer this year in the entertainment industry? Was it Ella Langley, who’s ubiquitous number Choosin’ Texas was clearly the song of the season? Was it the suffix “-maxxing,” which got added to virtually every noun and verb in the English language during the warmer months? Was it Tomdaya, the celeb couple du jour who seemingly appeared on every red carpet on Earth? Nope, it was none of these. The hottest summer personality/event/trend/franchise was . . . IMAX. Out of all the people and things that make up the entertainment business, the one that had a better summer than anyone or anything else was a formerly obscure film format that has transcended its weird origins – this summer, it moved to the centre of the cultural conversation. If you didn’t know what IMAX was before this summer, by the end you may have been an expert. That’s thanks largely to two summer releases, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Just look at the numbers. Of the more than $1.7 billion dollars The Odyssey has grossed since it was released on July 17, $521 million of that amount has come from the sale of IMAX tickets – which makes it the highest-grossing IMAX movie ever, higher even than Avatar. Of the $360 million that Brand New Day pulled in on its opening weekend at the end of July, fully 24 per cent came from IMAX and other PLFs (premium large formats). It’s fair to say more people paid more money to see films in IMAX this summer than ever before. This column won’t go into the technical specifics of IMAX, except to note that Nolan had to have a special camera built to realize his dream of adapting Homer’s epic. Nolan has been working his way toward filming an entire movie in IMAX, previously filming select sequences in movies such as The Dark Knight Rises. IMAX has been around for decades, but it went mainstream in 2026, along with other premium formats. For a long time IMAX seemed like a curiousity that was limited to nature documentaries and the NASA space shuttle. There have even been moments when the company’s future was in doubt. It has met its moment. And you can bet, come awards season, IMAX will be getting thanked in multiple acceptance speeches. Why the mass appeal? The explanation may be as simple as, there are now entire generations who grew up watching motion pictures on their laptops and cellphones. Those movie lovers are hungering for as big a picture as possible, and IMAX is a revelation to them. The big brains in Hollywood have been trying new ways to get people back into movie houses. 3D movies were a thing for a while, but then the studios got so desperate, they even tried guilting people into watching movies in the theatre. Even before COVID-19, movie fans were shifting away from the traditional movie-watching experience. Now theatres are back, in a big way. And there is a hunger like never before for specialized formats. You might even say movie fans were IMAX-maxxing all summer long. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
