Anyone who works in a job that involves close proximity with the famous and the talented will very quickly tell you, “Never meet your idols.” Get a second cocktail into a maître d’, a magazine photographer, or a chauffeur, and they’ll tell you about how their respect for Celebrity X went out the window after having to deal with him or her in person.
Thankfully, that same headwaiter, shutterbug, and driver will also tell you about which famous folks are kind and generous and compassionate. And when I heard the sad news about Polly Platt passing away Wednesday at the age of 72 after a battle with ALS, I immediately remembered how incredibly gracious and forthcoming she was in our one meeting.
Also read: Polly Platt, Producer and Production Designer, Dies at 72
In 1995, I was working in Dallas as the Artistic Director of the USA Film Festival, and Ms. Platt happened to be in Houston producing “The Evening Star,” the somewhat ill-fated sequel to “Terms of Endearment.” (She received an Oscar nomination for her art direction of “Terms,” one of several projects on which she worked with director-producer James L. Brooks.)
When director Louis Malle died in November of that year, it occurred to me to invite Ms. Platt to Dallas to screen Malle’s controversial 1978 film “Pretty Baby,” which she had written and associate-produced. Despite her busy production schedule, she called me back less than a day after receiving my fax and enthusiastically agreed to drive up.
The screening was set for the first week of January, and on the day of the program, Texas was hit by a freak snowstorm. Dallas, like many cities in the South where I spent my formative years, doesn’t see a lot of snow, and so when frozen precipitation does show up, it tends to shut everything down. With snow covering the freeways from Houston to Dallas, we figured that Ms. Platt -- who was driving herself, mind you -- would politely beg off.
But, no, that afternoon, she called the festival office from her hotel and assured us that she would be there. “I’ll go anywhere for Louis,” she said, and she meant it.
Figuring that she had navigated enough wintry roads for one day, I drove her from the hotel to the theater, and then back again afterward. After giving a moving tribute to Malle and fondly recalling the time they spent together making “Pretty Baby,” as we got back in my car and crawled around slowly through Dallas’ snowy streets, Ms. Platt was open and honest enough to answer my questions about her amazing career.
Of course, her collaborations with ex-husband Peter Bogdanovich -- his early triumph with “Targets,” his mammoth breakthrough “The Last Picture Show,” and delightful Hollywood genre homages “Paper Moon” and “What’s Up, Doc?” -- have been fodder for any number of books and documentaries about the Giants of 1970s Hollywood, so I didn’t go there.
