Hey, guys. Quint here. What you're going to notice as word spreads of the untimely death of Bill Paxton is that a whole lot of people have Bill Paxton stories. Celebrities, journalists, fans, everyday people... Paxton was one of the most accessible and friendly actors to ever enter the business and in all my years doing this I've never heard one bad word said about him.
My Bill Paxton story takes us back to SXSW 1998 when he came with a little-seen flick he did called Traveller. He was all over that festival, doing panels, going to screenings and interacting with just about everybody, including high-school aged tubby nerds like me.
I have two very specific memories of Paxton at this festival. The world premiere of Traveller was held in Austin's Paramount theater, which is a grand movie old palace that seats close to 2,000 people. It has a painted ceiling, a balcony straight out of Joe Dante's Matinee and the world's most uncomfortable, but authentically old school, seats.
This theater has what I call Lincoln Seats, those little private mini-balconies up close to the stage/screen. Normally people don't sit up there, but Paxton and his crew did. He waved to the crowd when he got up there and then for the entire runtime of the movie you could see his cowboy boots kicked up over the side as he made himself comfortable.
Later on he did a panel about this movie and afterwards brought up a stack of Traveller one-sheets and said he'd stay and sign them for anybody that wanted one. I got in line and noticed he took his time with everybody that came up and when he signed the poster he always personalized it and wrote in one of his famous quotes. Saw him do Weird Science for the guy in front of me. When I got up to him he was very nice and signed my poster “To Eric – Game over, man! Bill Paxton.”
I told him that was the line I was hoping to get, but that one of my other favorites was “I think this guy's a couple cans short of a six pack” from Terminator and that's something my parents lifted and would say all the time around the house when I was growing up. He laughed and said it was a great line and that was it.
All these years later I'm still impressed he was so available for his fans. I've been to hundreds of film festivals and cons and rarely have I seen someone that accessible.
Paxton's on screen persona was always big, even in his more subtle performances. The man always showed his heart and personality, whether the film called for a huge, over the top performance like Hudson in Aliens or a more internal, subdued bit of acting like in Sam Raimi's best movie A Simple Plan. Paxton was always 100% invested and always always always put a bit of his true self on the screen.
That's why we love his work so much. Chet from Weird Science is a massive asshole, but one you enjoy watching. Hudson's a coward, but he's our coward and when he finally steps up for his hero moment, protecting his friends from the incoming alien horde, the audience always cheers him on even though they know he's not gonna make it out of that room.
He had that star quality in a character actor's skin. His sheer force of personality could demand you pay attention to him when on screen if he was the star, like in Twister, or if he was the third grunt from the left.
His death leaves me reeling a little bit. He was only 61 and seemed to have all the fire of his youth. I mean, look at him in the recent Edge of Tomorrow. He's as engaged and strong as ever. He still had a lot to give us, not just in front of the camera either.
Paxton proved to be a fantastic director as well. His Frailty is one of the most overlooked genre gems of the aughts. The direction has a little bit of David Fincher's eye mixed with James Cameron's production value and Sam Raimi's sense of visual storytelling. He didn't copy these men, but obviously learned from their work what cinematic language really was.
The man fought Aliens, a Terminator and the Predator, was one of my favorite vampires ever put onscreen (Severen in Near Dark, of course), chased tornadoes, fought alongside Wyatt Earp, pulled a long story out of a Titanic survivor, rode a rocket to the moon and back and brought polygamy to the masses thanks to TV's Big Love.
I mourn for the other projects of his we'll never see, but I'm thankful for the huge career he had and the legacy he's leaving behind. My thoughts are with Mr. Paxton's friends, family and fans.
Before I go, I will say that the 1998 SXSW story isn't my only Bill Paxton story. Many, many years later I ended up on the phone with him as he was driving between LA and San Diego for an AICN Legends interview. The chat was supposed to last about 45 minutes and it ended up over 2 hours long. I never published it because we left off promising to do a follow up to answer a couple more questions and that ended up never happening.
I think I'm going to transcribe the chat as is and post it this week. My memory of it is that he was very gracious and honest about his rise to stardom and that the cell signal was really shitty and he had to call me back a good half dozen times because the connection kept dropping. But he hung in there and talked the whole way between LA and San Diego.
I'll get to work on that and hopefully have it ready to read sometime this week. Stay tuned.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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