I first saw Harold and Maude as a college freshman at UCSB, and then two years later as a film student at UCLA. Colin Higgins, the film’s writer and a UCLA graduate, spoke after the screening about how the film got made. He said the film would never have worked if Hal Ashby hadn’t found Bud Cort, and I think that’s right. I can’t imagine another actor from that era doing what Bud did. Truly sui generis.

A couple of years later I was at a party and who should I meet, but Bud Cort?  We got to talking and I told him I was a filmmaker and he insisted on reading the script I was trying to get made at the time. I ran out to the car and grabbed a copy never thinking anything would come of it. Well, two days later I get a call and it’s Bud and he’s gushing about the movie and telling me he’ll do anything he can to help me get it made. Naturally, he wanted to play the lead, but I didn’t see him in that role, so I never followed up with him.  But, in the next picture I wrote, I created a part I thought would be perfect for him and, thankfully, he agreed. We spent the next three years trying to get this low budget indie off the ground and in the process became the best of friends. He was wry, mischievous, and fearless — just like Harold. He also had a deep well of love and was pure in his passion for art. Yes, he could be difficult, but also brilliant.  When he was up for the part of Harold, Robert Altman was prepping McCabe and Mrs. Miller and wanted Bud to play a gunslinger in that film. He said Altman warned him if he played Harold he’d always be the guy in the velvet jacket and, though he knew what Bob meant, the part resonated with him so profoundly he passed on McCabe and became Harold Chasen. We’re all better off that he did. To him, Harold and Maude was about choosing love wherever you find it. What a beautiful idea. Yes, he had a love/hate relationship with the part, because he did become the boy in the velvet jacket, but I also know he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Thank you for remembering him.

Clif Lord

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Bob, so many things about this Bud Cort post resonated with me.   I too found out about it well after the fact; there surely wasn’t any fanfare and his death got buried under an avalanche of Nancy Guthrie kidnapping and Epstein files follies.

There are many reasons I appreciate growing up when I did, but the most deeply felt were the music and the movies.  Both were so readily available and could touch your heart and soul.  How lucky we were to live through such a time.  It’s been years since I last watched “Harold and Maude” and I thank you for reminding me about the Cat Stevens tunes on the sound track. “Mona Bone Jakon “ may not have been a platinum album, but I owned it and absolutely loved it.  I’m having my morning jet juice listening to it on iTunes, thanks to you.

As Simon and Garfunkel once sang: how terribly strange to be 70.  Or 74.  Or anything not young, with death’s certain presence hovering.  Perhaps your post about Bud Cort struck me so because yesterday I found out a former work colleague passed away after surgery and when I called a mutual acquaintance to inform him, turned out that person was admitted to an inpatient hospice unit, dying of cancer.  It’s the scourge of growing older, losing those who have been a part of your life.   So, fly high Bud Cort.  You might not have had a huge career, but you absolutely knocked it out of the park in “Harold and Maude”.

Nancy Barnum

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An actor friend of mine invited Bud Cort to my birthday party he had for me at his house. This was a few years before Covid to put it in a point of time. Bud arrived at the door in a full length mink coat, (it was August 15th in Beverly Hills) a cigarette in his cigarette holder. He said he just had a few minutes but had a story to tell us. It included Groucho, Valium a strainer, a red carpet and a tooth. It was hysterical and we were all doubled over in laughter. With a quick one eighty turn, he was gone.

I would run in to him a few years later and we laughed about the appearance.

He was a hero of mine, and I was really thrilled to meet him. H&M is a movie I get a thrill watching to this day. RIP Bud…..

David Spero

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He was awesome in The Life Aquatic as the “Bond Company Stooge”. RIP

Justin Bartek

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Dead on Bob.

Couple of years behind you, but “Harold and Maude” was a cultural touchstone for us in our  late teen/early twenties.   It was required viewing to go the Nuart Theatre here in West LA every time it played.

“And if you want to be me, be me And if you want to be you, be you ‘Cause there’s a million things to do, You know that there are”

Peace

Bill Stolier

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I have made no secret of my mixed feelings about our alma mater, but you have reminded me of a terrific night — probably in ’75.

As a product of Meriden’s schools, I had never heard of Harold and Maude.  But it was being shown in Dana Hall (at least I think I have that name right) and I followed some dorm mates to see it.

It was a revelation.  In fact, we knew the folks running the theater and persuaded them instantly to show it again.  We spent the rest of the night buzzing about it — exactly the right kind of college experience.

I’m saddened to learn of Cort’s passing.  But I am delighted to revel in nostalgia for one winter night way back when.

Best,

John Hyman

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Revival Houses

And who can forget Bogey becoming our anti-hero in revival house showings of “Casablanca”. That film still chokes me up and I’m now in my eighties!

Willie Perkins

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Total agreement!

I’ve watched Harold and Maude maybe 20 times, or more. It’s my favorite of all time.

So I was also somewhat surprised that his passing wasn’t mentioned in mainstream anything…

Until it dawned on me that it was the same day that James Van Der Beek died… and then it made sense: TV star trumps cult movie star.

I watched H&M again. (I’ve never seen Dawson’s Creek. lol)

Thom Wise

PS I met Ruth Gordon in NYC many years ago, but that’s another story.

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I didn’t know about this either. Between my divorce and other complicated things as my kids were growing up, I only had a very short window where I was able to watch movies with the both of them before it became too difficult, and this is one of the ones that we watched. Though they mocked it at the time I’m pretty sure it has stayed with them like it did with me. The message in this film is eternal and it’s been on my top 10 list since I saw it in college. Thank you for letting me know about this, I just put a tribute on my socials. True love has no boundaries. Gregory Mcloughlin

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Great piece on Bud Cort. And, yes, Harold & Maude was the pinnacle of his movie acting. Both him and Ruth Gordon were transcendent.

But I go back to film 1970s Brewster McCloud by director Robert Altman. I saw this at a cinema back in the day, after I saw MASH earlier, possibly around the same time. It was a quirky movie. Cort being excentric who was dedicated to fly and lived in the Houston Astrodome (wow! Does anyone remember that place? The called it a wonder of the world of architecture) But I could not take my eyes off Shelley Duval in that film. With her Alice Cooper-like eyelashes.  I thought the movie was unique and I loved it because of its uniqueness. Mosty defines its times of of 1970s underground newspapers and comics (R Crumb, Fritz the Cat, etc)

 

Its irreverence towards authority figures resonated with greatly me (as did MASH).  Sad to see him pass on, but he left his mark with some great film roles.

My Regards; D Bodnar

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Bud Cort was terrific as Howard Putzel in “Pollack.” It’s true that we have no central source of information anymore, but Bob, you are a great source of curation for us. Keep up the good work.

Liz Dean

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Our local hippie theatre was where I first saw “Harold & Maude”. Imagine a time that when you wanted to see a movie that wasn’t a current release. You had to find one of these theaters. Or hope to see it on TV at some point, but some of these were never going to show on TV.

Jim Guerinot

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I saw Harold and Maude when I was in university, at a rep theatre. It must have been 1971. My friend and I were so blown away that we found a film distribution company in Toronto and rented the film in 16mm. We invited everyone we knew for a weekend showing, filling my friend’s basement with about 50 people we knew. I”ll wager I’ve seen the film a dozen times, the last time a year or so ago when my wife and I showed it to our then fourteen year old twin sons. They loved it. RIP Bud Cort.

Regards,

Steven Ehrlick

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Wow! Six degrees of separation.

I remember Bud Cort very well. Like many other hippies (soon to become yuppies) growing up in Dallas, Texas back in the late 60’s we congregated at the local midnight cinema on Maple Avenue for the stoner movies. Fritz the Cat, Harold and Maude, The Groove Tube, Brewster McCloud, Easy Rider, Reefer Maddness among other films were the staple. Lots of smoke filled the air and life was “groovy”…or so we thought.

A couple years later while in college as a mass communications major I got a summer gig on a Disney “True Life Adventure” movie in Oregon. The Director was Larry Landsberg along with his son Brian. Larry was one of Walt Disney’s go to film makers for this genre of films. I recall they played on the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday night TV.

Long story short the producer was a guy named Chuck Mulvehill. Oregon was a non union state and I got to work as a gofer/assistant camera man on the set. Over the course of eight weeks Chuck and I became friendly. Chuck has worked on Harold and Maude. I was industrious and worked hard and guess he noticed. He invited me to come back to Los Angeles with the promise he would get me connected and an IATSE union card. I had done some stage tech work as a teen around Dallas so was familiar with grip, electric, carpentry etc..

After the shoot I returned to college for my junior year. I was invited back 6 months later by Chuck to work on another film in Oregon. Chuck told me about working with Bud Cort on Harold and Maude and Brewster McCloud. I guess he did a lot of work with Hal Ashby and Robert Altman. After the second film and another invitation I made a hard choice to finish college and eventually went into live event marketing with Irvin Feld’s company. It turned out to be a great career so no regrets.

Every now and then I stumble across some old family photos of me on that film shoot in Oregon holding a camera and wonder “what if”…. Deja Vu

Bill Powell

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I can’t believe I had to hear this from you. And I can’t believe the NY Times didn’t think he was worthy of a social media notification. In fact, apparently nobody did. Which I think just shows, as important a movie as it has become, there are still a lot of people who have never seen it and don’t know about it.

I saw it when it came out as part of a double bill with Papillon. After Papillion finished, the couple next to me asked if I knew anything about this movie. I told them it was a comedy. During the opening scene, he turned to his companion and said, “A comedy?”. They left a minute or two later.

And I will always love the Farrelly Brothers for adding the line: “it’s probably the greatest love story of our time” in There’s Something About Mary.

Bruce Greenberg

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My standard question upon engaging with young people is: Do you watch black and white films? Mostly it engenders baffled looks, but those that embrace the question positively have an energetic and starry look in their eyes.

 

Fred Ansis

Spotify (except where noted):

“20th Century Man” – “Muswell Hillbillies”

“Celluloid Heroes” – “Everybody’s in Showbiz”

“Money Talks” – “Preservation Act 2”

“He’s Evil” – “Preservation Act 2”

“Salvation Road” – “Preservation Act 2”

“You Can’t Stop the Music” – “Soap Opera”

“I’m in Disgrace” – “Schoolboys in Disgrace”

“Juke Box Music” – “Sleepwalker”

“Life Goes On” – “Sleepwalker”

“A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy” – “Misfits”

“Permanent Waves” – “Misfits”

“Live Life” – “Misfits”

“Catch Me Now I’m Falling” – “Low Budget”

“(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” – “Low Budget”

“Destroyer” – “Give the People What They Want”

“Come Dancing” – “State of Confusion”

“Living on a Thin Line”- “Word of Mouth”

“The Video Shop” – “Think Visual”

“Scattered” – “Phobia”

“To the Bone” – “To the Bone”

“I’m Not Like Everybody Else” – “To the Bone”

Tune in Saturday February 14th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

I found out he died in the “CT Insider,” which Apple News+ suggested to me probably because my sister Wendy sent me so many articles from the publication. And I wondered whether I was getting the full flavor of the Nutmeg State news when I noticed in the upper left-hand corner a button entitled “Sections,” which when clicked upon rendered a menu and one of the choices was “Entertainment.” Wondering what was going on in the old nabe, I clicked on it. I saw that Matteo Bocelli, the son of Andrea Bocelli, was booked to play in Westport. And there was a podcast about the Martha Moxley murder whose host said Michael Skakel wasn’t near the top of his suspects list. And then further down the page, I saw that Bud Cort died. In Norwalk. At an assisted living facility. I think of those places as being for the truly aged, in their late eighties and nineties. But Bud was 77, and recovering from pneumonia, and the grim reaper got him.

We don’t have cult movies anymore. Nothing that comes out to little effect but then spreads through the culture and becomes a phenomenon, like “Harold and Maude,” which I found out about from my mother, the culture vulture.

Now my mother grew up with the movies, all of our parents did. But when the renaissance happened in ’67, with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate,” she became addicted, reading Pauline Kael in “The New Yorker” and going to Judith Crist weekends. It might be hard for younger generations to learn that up until this turning point, films were not seen as art. But then universities started offering film courses and right along with rock and roll, movies drove the culture.

And music was a big part of “Harold and Maude,” it was the first major exposure of Cat Stevens. It featured the song “Trouble,” from “Mona Bone Jakon,” which most people never heard, their fandom beginning with its successor, “Tea for the Tillerman.”

Everybody didn’t see “Harold and Maude” at the same time. Today there’s focus on an event, a meme, something, and everybody checks it out immediately and then it’s forgotten. But back then… There were revival houses, playing different flicks every night. You’d get the schedule at the record store, along with the rest of the throwaway press. And you went to the theatre to fill the holes in your viewing history. Stuff from the thirties and forties, but even more foreign flicks, and then those movies that had been overlooked and gained momentum over time, like “Harold and Maude.”

Bud Cort is really not famous for much else. He complained that he was typecast, but his obits also said he was difficult to work with. And for a while there he was out of sight, but then I went to some benefit at the Universal Amphitheatre and he came out as an old man, overweight with facial hair, it was cognitive dissonance, it didn’t compute, it was like running into an old girlfriend or classmate decades later, their image is frozen in your brain, but the truth is time has gone by, and just like you, they’ve aged.

I’m not saying Bud wasn’t talented, or that I’m unfamiliar with his filmography. I saw “Brewster McCloud,” it was a requirement if you were an Altman fan…at a revival house, it played for about a minute in theatres upon release. And yes, he was in “M*A*S*H” and so much more, but his performance in “Harold and Maude” was transcendent, a perfect encapsulation of the early seventies ethos, when the protests against the Vietnam War died down with disillusionment and we were looking inward.

So…

I’m reading the “CT Insider” article and there’s a hyperlink to the “Times” obit, from two days ago? How did I miss this?

Yes, I read the obits. My father was a fan. Getting older, I have become one too.

Shouldn’t a death of this proportion have risen up, superseded the dross of information they call news which is really anything but? Shouldn’t the public at large feel this cultural moment? Shouldn’t boomers be e-mailing and texting each other about it?

Well it seems like no. I had to stumble upon Bud Cort’s death in a vacuum.

And I knew about the car accident and the facial surgeries, that was the excuse for his absence from the screen… But I did not know that he was from Rye, nor that his parents were in show biz, his father on stage, his mother behind the curtain. Bud was not much older than me, but I didn’t grow up with anybody from this background.

Now in a world focused on the young, where oldsters imitate youngsters and lie about their age, consciousness of the march of time, towards the end, is a singular journey. No one wants to talk about it. But there are these markers…when friends become ill, when friends die, and when our heroes pass.

Yes, Bud as Harold was a hero, because he was a nonconformist. You were supposed to let your freak flag fly, question authority, stand up for your truth, being a quiet member of the group to get along was anathema. Those were our values, a lot of boomers jumped the ship in the dash for cash in the Reagan eighties, but underneath the trappings, they still remember bell bottoms and long hair and love each other and individualism…

I’ve never heard a young person reference “Harold and Maude.” Then again, you ask them about their favorite film comedy and they’ll say something like “Old School,” which was released in 2003. Not a bad picture, but not in the league of the Marx Brothers, who’ve been completely forgotten, turns out Bud lived in Groucho’s house for a while…

If it’s old, if it’s in black and white…

But that was no hindrance to us. We were filling in the gaps. When video shops came along in the eighties this process was on steroids…you picked up all the films you always wanted to see and then even more which starred certain actors or were done by certain directors and…

I was just really weirded-out when I learned Bud Cort died. Like I said, no one contacted me about it and I found out days later…

But maybe this is how it ends. Alone with your thoughts and experiences. No one else knows, never mind cares. But for my cadre, the boomers, “Harold and Maude” was bedrock, and as good as Ruth Gordon was, and she was phenomenal, it’s But Cort’s Harold that is the center of the picture, because he was so different. And we understood where he was coming from, and we could relate.