Audio By Carbonatix
I can’t really say I knew Bill Cosford. I met him a few times at previews. He liked popcorn. He was usually the first one out of the theater when a screening was over, no doubt a pre-emptive maneuver designed to avoid becoming entangled in endless “So, whadjathink?” queries from strangers. He didn’t take many notes.
When I began reviewing movies for New Times, I called Bill to see if he had the phone number of a difficult-to-locate local film distributor. I had never spoken to Bill before. He was out of town on a ski trip in New England; I left a message on his answering machine, figuring there was a one in ten chance he’d call me when he got back to Miami. He returned the call that evening, from his hotel. We chatted at length about the local film scene, the scarcity of a good text on film criticism, and other esoteric film critic bullshit. It doesn’t matter what we talked about. I (and I dare say most newspaper folk of my acquaintance) wouldn’t return a call from my editor while I was on vacation unless I thought he was going to wire me money, and here was the grand poobah of local film criticism returning a business call to a writer from a rival paper when he could have been making one last run down the slopes.
I’m not saying that makes Bill Cosford a saint. It just struck me as the kind of thing a standup guy would do. I got the same sense from his reviews. I didn’t always share his opinions, but I thought he walked that tightrope between populist shill and elitist snob with the best of them. He didn’t brook a lot of pretentious navel-contemplation and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it when he liked the Hot Shots, Part Deuxs. Bill Cosford did not take himself, or the business of making motion pictures, too seriously.
This is not meant to be one of those, “Billy, we hardly knew ye” pieces. In a town where anything that lasts five years is an institution and anything that lasts ten qualifies as a historical landmark, Bill Cosford was one of the best things about the Miami Herald for the better part of two decades. He did not grandstand, he did not take cheap shots, and he called ’em as he saw ’em.
Adi centss, Tux Boy. Save me a seat.
