Posted in: by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Documentary, DVD

DVD: ‘Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction’

“Do I have any lines? I don’t want any lines. How about I do nothing? How about silence?”

Harry Dean Stanton, the veteran character actor with (by his own count) over 250 film appearances to his credit, would rather not talk about himself. Or about his family, his life, his career, or the craft of acting. Which makes him a curious subject for a documentary. Director Sophie Huber follows him around Los Angeles, films him hanging out at his favorite L.A. bar, Dan Tana’s, where he’s known the bartender for more than 40 years, and shoots him in his home singing folk songs and standards between sessions trying to get the actor to open up.

“How would you describe yourself?” asks friend and frequent director David Lynch. “There is no self,” he answers, his craggy, lined face maintaining a nearly unreadable stoniness. “How would you like to be remembered?” “Doesn’t matter.” He’s not simply an actor with nothing to prove. He’s a private man who prefers to keep his thoughts and feelings to himself and a few chosen friends. Stanton opens up a little over coffee and cigarettes with Lynch, who makes a game of lobbing questions from a card provided by Huber and then spins off in remembrances of their long history together, and he eases into reminiscing with Kris Kristofferson, who credits Stanton for his first film role in Cisco Pike and then launches into his iconic song “The Pilgrim”: “He’s a poet, he’s a picker. He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher. He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned.” Stanton was one of the inspirations for those lyrics, according to Kristofferson, along with a few others, and the two start checking off all those early seventies characters who fit the bill.

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Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

‘Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction’: He Says Little, Smokes a Lot

David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton

Harry Dean Stanton does not want to talk about himself. This might stop many potential documentary filmmakers from attempting a profile of the weathered actor, now 87. But director Sophie Huber tried anyway; and if the movie fails to give us much factual information about its subject, it certainly captures the aura that surrounds him. We do learn that Stanton was born in Kentucky, did military service, roomed with Jack Nicholson for a while, and has never been married. He lets a few things slip, including the tidbit “She left me for Tom Cruise”—somehow one of those sentences you never expected to hear from the mouth of a character actor this unglamorous. (The ex-girlfriend in question was Rebecca De Mornay, who lived with Stanton before she met Cruise on the set of Risky Business.)

One thing Stanton does like to do is sing, and the movie is strung together with craftily crooned numbers from the country-folk songbook.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly