On Film

Ed Asner an actor all can aspire to be

Sharon Baker’s My Friend Ed closes out the 25th annual Hot Springs Docu mentary Film Festival on Saturday night.
Sharon Baker’s My Friend Ed closes out the 25th annual Hot Springs Docu mentary Film Festival on Saturday night.

When I started in the newspaper business, Lou Grant was one of the most popular television programs in the country.

That was a different time, before cable and streaming services had balkanized the audience. Back then there were three main networks, and prime-time television shows were part of our cultural glue. The young reporters and photographers I hung around with all watched the show (an hourlong dramatic spinoff of the long-running half-hour situation comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show), primarily set in the newsroom of a fictional Los Angeles daily newspaper.

We never talked about it, but some of us modeled ourselves on those characters; especially Robert Walden's arrogant general assignment reporter Joe Rossi (who was partially modeled on Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw, albeit younger, scruffier and less experienced). We wore jeans with our sport coats as Rossi did. Some of us even copped his cockiness.

But Ed Asner was the star of the show and his Lou Grant persona had been established over seven seasons of Mary Tyler Moore. You learn quickly that actors are not the characters they play, but Asner seemed indivisible from Grant -- the very embodiment of the gruff but lovable pater familias that became a trope in fiction and reality. Lots of real-life city editors cribbed from Lou Grant, who claimed he hated spunk while secretly cherishing it.

"I helped speed up the demise of American journalism," Asner says from New York. He says moving from a three-camera situation comedy filmed before a live audience to a one-hour dramatic series ("with humor," he insists) was "like going to the far side of the moon." No one had any idea what they were doing.

"The first two weeks in TV Guide they listed it as ... a comedy," he says, remembering how he went to a party about that time and saw the president of CBS who advised him not to worry, that there would be other shows. "Because they didn't have an instant replacement, they had to stay with us. And we blundered through the first year ... and we survived long enough to get into a second year where we slowly began to build ratings."

Asner, 85, was born in Kansas City -- though he tells me his father had an interest in some El Dorado oil wells at the time he was born. Unfortunately the East Texas oil boom caused a precipitous fall in the price of oil, which led to his father's bankruptcy. So Asner grew up in modest circumstances, working on a General Motors assembly line and serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Europe after World War II before becoming an actor in the mid-1950s.

Talking to Asner has a surreal quality. It feels like I know him, to the point that I fear affecting an inappropriate informality. Maybe he's used to that, having spent nearly 60 years in the public eye, and -- as Sharon Baker's My Friend Ed, the documentary about him that closes out the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival on Saturday night underlines -- he has gathered a lot of friends. (Walden, who was based in Arkansas for a few years, will conduct a Q & A with Asner after the screening.)

One of those friends of Ed was also a friend of mine -- Arkansas poet Miller Williams dedicated his poem, "He Glimpses a Nobler Vision" to Asner. The poem, which appears in Williams' 1989 book Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems (as well as several anthologies), talks about a man much concerned with the ills of the world, "the bomb ... the ozone layer wearing away ... the suffocation of fish in the sea" who find temporary comfort in philosophy, in the contemplation of creation's vastness, before buckling back down to work once more on the practical problems at hand. It's a sketch of a secular saint, a man committed to doing what he can.

And it fits Asner, who's probably as well known for his activism as for his acting. Though he won five Emmys for his portrayal of Lou Grant -- the comedic character and the dramatic one -- and though the show was at or near the top of the ratings, it was abruptly canceled in 1982. Many believe the show was canceled because of Asner's political activities, particularly his support for medical aid to El Salvador during the height of the Salvadoran civil war.

"Ronald Reagan had been elected president of the United States and he had said he was going to draw a line in the sand," Mario Velasquez, who was executive director for medical aid for El Salvador at the time, says in My Friend Ed. "And he promised to do everything in his power to stop the spread of what he called at the time the 'communist idea.' Then the U.S. becomes involved -- implicated -- in massacres and the formation of death squads. So Ed Asner becomes vocal about these things. And Ronald Reagan went after him personally and politically ... In the heyday of his his career, he risked his show, he risked his career, he risked his name and his reputation to stand for human rights. To stand for human decency."

"At that moment, I said, 'Well, that's the end of my career,'" Asner says in the film. It wasn't, although Asner's career did seem to sputter in the mid-1980s. But his film career picked up after he took a role in Oliver Stone's J.F.K., and he became relevant to new generations who identify more with the Santa Claus he played in 2003's Elf and its sequel, or as the voice of (and model for) Carl Fredricksen in the marvelous Pixar animated film Up from 2009. (Asner says the only thing wrong with the film was that they didn't also market it to adults without children.)

And through it all he kept fighting what he saw as the good fight -- becoming one of the most notorious "Hollywood liberals," narrating a controversial "tax the rich" cartoon produced by the California Teachers Union in 2012 and becoming one of the mainstays of the conservation movement. But he's not reliably orthodox; Asner has also raised some questions about the official version of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Though Asner is very likely to find himself among friends at the Hot Springs festival, he's aware of the redness of our state. He's not worried.

"I'm originally from Kansas," he says. "Compared to there, Arkansas is a liberal bastion."

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 10/14/2016

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