I will write more on this later... boarding a plane. But this long-anticipated loss is one of the big ones for the film world, in this year or any other.
He was not only an important filmmaker, but an important supporter of filmmaking... the old and the new. He was, in so many ways, a traditionalist, yet he broke the rules at will, with style and real insight into what else was possible.
We all go, but few in this game will be remembered as fondly and respectfully by so many that they have been to war both with and against.
And on a personal level, Pollack is a bridge between the old and new Hollywood for me, his films coming of age just before I would and then, as I did. He romanticized the past and was raw and real (in a Hollywood context) about the present. So his loss represents the real starting line for the exits of an era of filmmakers that touched my life profoundly and more directly than the greats of the past.
Sadness...
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/05/sydney_pollack.html