Everybody have a salty dog in his memory. Drink it! Rip made it to 88, not bad and probably a surprise to many who knew him in his younger days. Besides his great film work, Artie in The Larry Sanders Show has to be one of the greatest TV characters ever created, on a level with the likes of Archie Bunker, Louie De Palma and Basil Fawlty.
The Twitter account “RIP has outlived...” was a great source of celebrity death news. Today it just tweeted “...”
In one of the obits I read about him today, it was mentioned that back in the day he had the Jack Nicholson role in Easy Rider, but somehow lost it to Jack. Might have been the knife fight he got into with Dennis Hopper . I saw an old picture of Rip and surprisingly, he bore a striking resemblance to Jack when they were young. The Albert Brooks cult classic, Defending Your Life, is my fav Torn movie role. He played Brooks' attorney and while doing so to the best of his abilities, managed to matter of factly convey to Brooks that he didn't have a chance in hell of moving on to heaven. Indeed. He created a character just as vivid and unique in Artie as had ever been seen on TV. It was pretty obvious that the Larry Sanders Show was modeled after the Tonight Show, but I didn't realize that Artie was modeled on Johnny Carson's old producer Fred De Cordova. I never knew much about De Cordova, who would occasionally appear on camera, so I had and have, a hard time picturing him hovering over Carson and protecting him from all forms of reality. RIP to Rip.
Yeah, the concept of the show definitely came from Shandling's experiences as a guest and host on "Tonight," but it was more of a setting to frame his own ideas and the characters were not direct copies. Artie was like de Cordova in the way he had extensive Hollywood connections and like to schmooze, but Fred was by most accounts very hands-off around the offices and was more of a high-level liaison and adviser (until his late falling out with Carson) while Peter Lassally handled the nuts and bolts of running the show. Neither had a highly assertive and confrontational personality like Artie. Carson's personality was not like the insecure, needy, passive-aggressive Sanders, either, so he didn't need the constant hand-holding and reassurance. Carson knew everything that was going on with the show and made all major decisions himself. Carson did like to be insulated from most of the staff, though, and did not like personal conflicts, but neither did de Cordova so the more difficult personnel situations fell to Lassally.