In 2008, Robert F. Boyle was given an honorary Oscar for his work in the film industry as an art director and a production designer in such memorable motion pictures as The Wolf Man, North by Northwest, The Birds, Fiddler on the Roof, Portnoy's Complaint, Mame, The Shootist, It Came from Outer Space, Cape Fear, In Cold Blood, The Thomas Crown Affair and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

In 2010, the 100-year-old Boyle in turn handed out 1 point, in honor of his death, to Abby. Because we here at the internationally beloved AO Deadpool are all so kind, we tacked on an additional five bonus points for this less-than-a Double Feature. Total: 6.

Destination Hitchcock: 'The Making of North by Northwest'
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

— Bill Schenley

I'm too tired and too stupid to write a decent update on Tony Judt, who has died shockingly quickly of one of those horrible wasting away diseases at 62. He was a brilliant historian, and his masterpiece was a book called Postwar, a history of Europe since 1945. (Fascinating subject. Big, big book. Dense. I've picked it up several times in the library and in bookstores and I still haven't worked up the nerve to take it home from either place.) Judt was a Jew who had very definite opinions about Israel. He was a Zionist until the Six-Day War disabused him of that notion, and allegedly believed in a one-state solution for the Israel/Palestinian "problem." This did not endear him to his landsmen one bit, even if it isn't quite true. Here's a nice little piece from The Forward that explains.

Oh, I had him, one of my trademark solos. 11 points for the hit, 5 for the solo. Total: 16. Yay, me.

— Amelia

While I was growing up, Patricia Neal was considered an heroic figure. She was more famous for having had strokes than for her film work, and in striving to recover her skills and her career, she became larger than life.

That personal life was largely a mess, the reverse image of a successful professional career that began on Broadway when she was 20 and led straight to Hollywood, where she made a few really good movies and a fair number of forgettable ones. She made The Day the Earth Stood Still, a good film that Neal dismissed, and The Fountainhead, a wretched mess that co-starred Gary Cooper. She also made a baby with Coop but, to her lasting regret, aborted it. After that she broke up with Coop and went back to Broadway, and lived in a nice apartment on Park Avenue.

Soon after she returned to New York and the stage, Neal met her eventual husband, author Roald Dahl, who'd been a British spy and may still have been one. (To this day it's not clear just whom he was spying on.) Neal didn't love Dahl — not then, anyway — but she wanted to start a family, and so she married him.

Neal did plays in England and the U.S. for a few years, and then returned to the movies in the standout A Face in the Crowd, a 53-year-old film that could have been made yesterday. She's brilliant as Andy Griffith's mistress who gets thrown over for the younger and prettier Lee Remick and, eventually, gets her revenge. She took a smaller role in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a film that isn't nearly as good as some people think it is. Then there was Hud, for which Neal deservedly won the Oscar and a BAFTA Award. After that came In Harm's Way, a real stinker of a wartime soap opera, and that was it for a while.

Neal was pregnant with her daughter Lucy (her fifth child with Dahl) in 1965 when she suffered a series of three strokes. They left her paralyzed on her right side, wiped out much of her memory, and badly affected her ability to speak. (Lucy was fine, though.) Roald Dahl, who could be a real bastard, bullied Neal into recovering. Ten months after leaving the hospital, the only thing still obviously wrong with Neal was a loss of vision in her right eye. Her recovery was remarkable. She went back to work in 1967.

Neal met her best friend, a set designer named Felicity Crosland, while she was filming a Maxim coffee commercial for David Ogilvy's advertising agency in London. They stayed friends until Neal eventually discovered that her husband and Crosland were not only having an affair, but had been having one for eleven years. Neal dumped Dahl, who soon married Crosland. They were still married when Dahl died in 1990.

Neal continued to work as the years went on, mostly on television. She did quality TV-flicks and went on Theatre Guild cruises, during which she would perform in short plays and do dramatic readings. One of her final appearances, though, came during a segment on the local TV news in New York last year. A contractor had done a poor job renovating Neal's bathroom, and so she went to Channel 7's consumer reporter for help. That probably wasn't the way Gort the Robot would have handled things, but it worked well enough.

— Brad

Garrett and Johnnyb get the duet. 5 + 3 = 8. Nice one, boys.

Since I had no fucking idea who this guy was, let alone that he had passed over to the, um, Summerlands (oh, gag me with a fucking pitchfork) ... I did what any other lazy motherfucker would do ... That's right, kids ... Wikipedia, there for all your reference needs.

Can you imagine my surprise when I read that Phillip Emmons Isaac Bonewits was an "influential American Druid." See, I had no fucking idea that there was any such thing as an "American Druid" — and the notion that one of them was "influential" — you know, this is why I took so many drugs ... Druid? In a book, maybe ... In a movie ... But not in America ...

Fer chrissakes, isn't it enough that here in America we have Catholic priests who touch 12-year-old boys' pee-pees and Baptist ministers who shove their paws up a prepubescent girl's skirts? Now we have influential Druids? "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio ..."

But wait, it gets better, at least according to Wikipedia ... Mr. Bonewits (that's gotta be a made-up name) founded the Neopagan civil rights group and the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League. So now we are supposed to be politically correct when it comes to Druids, Neopagans and those goddamned Aquarians? How do you defame a fucking Druid? Throw water on them?

And, if you can believe this, he graduated from Berkeley in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in Magic. How does one get a B.A. in abraca-fucking-dabra? It was the first and last time an accredited university handed out a B.A. in Magic. Berkeley shriveled under the pressure from the press. Probably a good move ...

Also, I read that he was "handfasted" to a Wiccan priestess named Phaedra Heyman. Handfasted, huh ... It just doesn't sound right.

Bonewits was raised a Roman Catholic, but over the years he was a member of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, the Reformed Druids of North America, the Schismatic Druids of North America, and with a few friends he created the Hasidic Druids of North America. Just how fucked-up was this guy? Hasidic Druids?

And just how fucked-up is CIB? A fucking Druid, CIB? Sheesh ... He gets 11 points for the hit and five more for the solo. Total: 16.

And for making me write something that witches' covens (oh, excuse me, groves) from all around the world will be casting evil incantations about ... I cast a spell on you ... "I put a curse on you. I put a curse on you ... May all your children be Druids, too ..."

Here is his obit from The Witches' Voice. Not that it's a great obit, but I just wanted to be able to say that once I posted an obit from The Witches' Voice.

— Bill Schenley

"Drummer Wanted, Must Be Freaky." That was the ad he answered in The Los Angeles Free Press almost 45 years ago. Richie Hayward was both a drummer and ... freaky.

In 1969, along with Lowell George, Bill Payne and Roy Estrada, Hayward co-founded the seminal band Little Feat. They developed a distinctive style of improvisational southern rock that mixed elements of blues, rock boogie and funk. Little Feat went the way of the heroin overdose in the late '70s, after Lowell George died.

How diverse was Richie Hayward? He was a session drummer for an eclectic group that included Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Nils Lofgren, Warren Zevon, Robert Palmer, Tom Waits, Travis Tritt, Barbara Streisand, John Cale, Arlo Guthrie, Taj Mahal, Bob Seger, William Donaldson's whore, String Cheese Incident, Ry Cooder, Johnny Lang, Bela Fleck, Bob Dylan, James Cotton, Helen Watson and Jimmy Herring.

As soon as DDT and Monarc heard there was to be a benefit concert for the 64-year-old timekeeper, they jumped off the Throne, kicked the Ludwigs outta the way, put on their Hi-hats, grabbed a Ride to the nearest stationery store where they could Snare a Pad, and pencil into their deadpool lists ... Richie Hayward. For this duet, they get three bonus points added to the 11 points for the hit. Total: 14.

'Fat Man in the Bathtub'

A Richie Hayward Drum Solo

— Bill Schenley

If you don't have a good command of the English language, you don't want to work with me. I don't expect perfection and I certainly don't achieve it, but I am completely irritating on the subject of me, myself and I, for example. I have written the following more times than I care to divulge: The apostrophe is your friend. The good news is that the very young workers are appreciative. I'm gentle with my corrections and they want to learn. They've just started working and they want to make a good impression. The bad news is that no one else in the corporate world gives a shit and they laugh and roll their eyes behind my email back. And it's getting worse and worse and even worser. The jargon is bad enough. (Oh, man, when did agree become align? When did call become reach out?) But when I sit in meetings conducted by the people in the C suite, and these PowerPoint presentations are lousy with typos and misspellings and apostrophes in all the wrong places, as well as painfully constructed business speak, I try to keep quiet, but I don't always succeed. But what's the point. No one seems to care and it just serves to peg me as the old fart. Soon enough, I will be gone, and I will take with me the good grammar, the intelligent punctuation and the clear writing. And it won't make a goddamn bit of difference.

Edwin Newman didn't know me, but he felt my pain. Jargon set his teeth on edge, too. You know him as a TV newsman, a moderator of Presidential debates, and even an actor, but he was also the "caretaker of proper grammar and usage" as the Washington Post so nicely put it. When the language needed protection, he was there on defense. He was polite about it, but he held his ground. So imagine what he would have said if he could have responded to the umpteen blogs that announced that he had "passed away" or even "on." Imagine what he would have said had he known that all the major obituaries called him "rumpled" and "grumpy." Imagine how disappointed he would have been at the Times for that silly "using a preposition to end a sentence with."

Here's a lovely NBC film, a 1964 World's Fair diary with his grumpy, rumpled narration.

Edwin Newman was 91. Garrett, Kixco and the Wiz, each with a perfect command of the AO Deadpool, get three points apiece. Two for the hit and one for the trio.

— Amelia

I'll start with the mundane deadpool stats. I had him. Deceased Hose had him. EdV had him. We each get three points.

You haven't lived until you've heard Edwin Morgan read his own poem, The Loch Ness Monster's Song.

Then you haven't lived until you've heard his Glaswegian fans (I suspect poet friends and literary figures) read his poems.

He was a national treasure, Edwin Morgan was. And I can't do him justice. Here's a lovely piece from the Guardian, from another of Scotland's well-known poets.

— Amelia

Edwin Morgan: a sunburst of possibility amid the grey

Edwin Morgan, who has died aged 90, brought Piaf, Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe into his verse life and opened doors to a joyous new world

Alan Spence
The Observer, Sunday 22 August 2010

Edwin Morgan at his home in Glasgow. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Earlier this year, to mark Edwin Morgan's 90th birthday, the Scottish Poetry Library and Mariscat Press published a festschrift in his honour and called it, simply, Eddie@90. The title is sufficient, its affectionate shorthand entirely appropriate, and there can't be many poets of whom that would be true. (Seamus Heaney? Carol Ann Duffy? Both, incidentally, contributed to the book.)

There's a story that when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, at the age of 80, the doctor breaking the news to him said there was no way of knowing how long he had left — it might be six months, it might be six years. Eddie replied: "I'll have six years, please."

When he'd made it through those six years, he was determined to hold on until he was 90, and that landmark was cause for much celebration — events in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen; a new collection of poems, Dreams and Other Nightmares; and the tribute book itself (in which one contributor imagined him smiling wryly at the premature tribute books). Those 10 years, from 80 to 90, were the most remarkable late flowering, even for a poet so accomplished and prolific. When he could no longer physically write or type, he dictated, and the poems kept coming until the effort was just too great. Ian Campbell of Edinburgh University, who visited him just over a week ago, marvelled at his "steadfast refusal to give in to self-pity or pessimism" and found him "still witty, even cheerful," still looking out of his window at worlds far beyond.

Then on Friday came the phone call, from his editor, publisher and friend Hamish Whyte: "Eddie's gone."

To Scottish writers of my generation, who came of age in the 1960s, Edwin Morgan was an inspiration and a revelation. Here was a world-class poet who was one of our own. In grey postwar Glasgow, his work was a sunburst of hope and possibility. He wrote about the world we inhabited, but placed it in a global, even a universal, context — From Glasgow to Saturn.

Like a great many young writers starting out at the time, I owed him a great debt. In my case it was quite specific — in 1966 he judged the Scotsman's school magazine competition and awarded a prize to one of my poems. I hadn't yet read any of his work — his early collections, published in the 1950s, were out of print. But I remember the thrill of excitement I felt on discovering his 1968 collection, The Second Life. (In Eddie@90, Catherine Lockerbie describes the same experience — the sheer beauty of the book, its coloured pages, the joyous explosion of language.) There were poems on Hemingway and Piaf and Marilyn Monroe, poems set in Glasgow — Glasgow! — and the exhilarating experimentation, the virtuosity and playfulness of his concrete poetry. It was a book to stimulate and move and delight, and it was like nothing I'd ever read before. In retrospect I was to realise it was like nothing much anyone in Scotland had read before, in fact it was a radical departure for the poet himself, a stepping out into new forms and subject matter. It opened doors for all of us.

That same year I was doing readings at the Edinburgh Fringe with a loose-knit group of writers and musicians calling ourselves The Other People, inspired by the anarchic Tom McGrath, who persuaded Eddie to join us as a guest reader. His performance was glorious, adding another dimension to the work. In contrast to his mild, self-effacing, almost shy persona, the reading was powerful, profound, moving and at times uproariously funny. If he was a magician, a conjurer with words, his rendition of them could be incantatory, almost shamanistic, especially when delivering those mesmerising sound poems. (Seamus Heaney writes: "In that combination of shyness and certitude, his intellectual and artistic authority were unmistakable.")

As an academic too, in his long teaching career at Glasgow University, he could captivate his student audience, bring literature to life. (Marshall Walker spoke of his clarity, his conversational style, and said: "You always wished his lectures would keep going past the hour.") I remember sitting at a lecture he was giving on the Metaphysical poets, and looking along the row and seeing a friend of mine who was an engineering student. I asked why he was there, and he said: "To hear Eddie."

By the mid-'70s, with a reference from Eddie, I was back at Glasgow as writer-in-residence, and he was happy to give advice, take part in readings, contribute to publications, always with humility, graciousness and goodwill. That held good in all the years since, at other events I've organised. The last of these was at the WORD Festival in Aberdeen, some 10 years ago. That must have been just as his illness was beginning to manifest itself, but you would never have known.

Seated on a bar stool, surrounded by Tommy Smith and the young musicians of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, he gave an electrifying performance of his poem-suite Planet Wave, dealing with nothing less than the history of life on Earth. It was sublime, an absolute high point.

Over these last few days, many tributes to the man and his work have been published and broadcast. Carol Ann Duffy called him "a great, gentle, generous genius." She said: "He was poetry's true son and blessed by her. He was, quite simply, irreplaceable."

In addition to a host of literary awards and prizes, he was declared Glasgow's first Poet Laureate, and Scotland's own Makar. He was commissioned to write the inaugural poem for the opening of the Scottish Parliament building in 2004, and a fine scathing job he made of it, before exhorting: "Don't let your work and hope be other than great." But like his great contemporary, Ian Hamilton Finlay, he was truly international in his outlook, his appeal, his vision, and he published translations of poetry in a score of languages.

The appeal of his work was broad and his readership spanned the generations. His poetry has long been taught in schools and in recent years he collaborated with the likes of Roddy Woomble and his band Idlewild. His honesty, his humour, his humanity and compassion enabled him to reach across any age gap. And his dazzling technique, the verbal pyrotechnics, were always in the service of something more, something deeper.

His love poems in particular ring in the heart as well as the mind — perfect little lyrics that resonate. This is all the more amazing since he revealed at the age of 70 that he was gay. It hadn't been too hard to work out! But in a country where homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1980, he had to be circumspect. In fact, perhaps it was the fact that the poems were coded that gave them their extra charge and intensity. They are in the moment, the specific place and time, and yet they are transcendent, timeless, universal.

I ended my own piece for Eddie@90 looking at my personal archive — all Eddie's books from these past 40 years (most of them signed), a couple of manuscripts, quirky handwritten postcards and revisiting it all with gratitude and love.

At this year's WORD Festival, in May, a few of the writers taking part read their favourite Edwin Morgan poems. I read a well-known piece called A View of Things. ("What I love about poetry is its ion engine.") And I wanted to read another but ran out of time. The one I'd chosen was Fires, a rare autobiographical poem about his childhood and his parents, recounting a happiness that was only a moment before being reduced to almost nothing. Then he ends, as only he could, with what seems to me a credo: The not quite nothing I praise it and I write it.

Alan Spence is one of Scotland's leading poets

Another terrific update from Hulka. Great writer, he is.

* * *

For better or worse, George D. Weiss is responsible for giving the world "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Sure, Zulu singer Solomon Linda wrote the basic song, and Pete Seeger brought it to American ears and Anglicized its "uyimbube" hook into "wimoweh," but Weiss was the man who turned it into a timeless pop hit, adding a gently shuffling rock 'n' roll beat, not to mention the business about the quiet jungle and the peaceful village. Nowadays, they call that sort of thing "interpolation" — splicing your own song into someone else's, or vice versa — and everyone gets paid; back then it was just business, and while Weiss and his collaborators cashed in on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," Solomon Linda died in poverty.

Rian Malan's excellent article about the song's history claims Weiss was "always a bit diffident about his revisions, describing them as 'gimmicks,' as if ashamed to be associated with so frothy a bit of pop nonsense," and why not? The man had written for Broadway, Hollywood, Sinatra, and Elvis, and contributed "What a Wonderful World" and "Lullaby of Birdland" to the canon of standards, yet his most ubiquitous contribution to popular culture turned out to be a few verses of faux-African doggerel written for an obscure doo-wop group from Brooklyn. Given the song's tangled backstory, one can discern some irony in the fact that, late in his life, Weiss spent eighteen years as president of the Songwriters' Guild of America, with a particular focus on copyright issues. Karmic atonement, perhaps?

In 2006, Solomon Linda's heirs settled with Abilene Music, publishers of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," for 25% of past and future songwriting royalties, a sum surely totaling in the millions. Now that Weiss has died at 89, I get rather less: 10 points (5 for the hit and 5 more for the solo).

— Hulka

Laurent Fignon, who has died at 50, was French. And although on the surface that doesn't seem like much information, it is enough to let you know that he was unlikable. Not your regular French-take-a-fucking-bath unlikable, but a major, major French-fucking-asshole unlikable.

Twice the winner of the Tour de France, he will best be remembered for losing, in spectacular fashion, the 1989 Tour to the great American racer Greg LeMond. His loss to LeMond that day remains one of the most dramatic and emotional moments in the world of sport.

On the evening before the final stage of the race, Fignon had a fifty-second lead — a lead almost everyone thought was too great for the American to overcome. Almost everyone except LeMond. All the juice Fignon injected, all the amphetamines he swallowed, would be of no help to him as LeMond pushed furiously through the streets of Paris.

1989 Tour de France Final Time Trial

Laurent Fignon said in his final days, "I am not afraid of dying, it's just I am not ready to die." Well, you willful, arrogant, selfish, cruel French fucktard: Bill Schenley, DDT, Deceased Hose, EdV, Mo and Roxanne Wiggs were all more than ready for you to die. They each are graciously awarded 14 deadpool points. Hey, Froggy, how ya like those steroids now? Total: 14.

— Bill Schenley