In tribute to a man who touched my life and the lives of countless others in brilliant and lasting ways, I am repeating my blog post from last year (with slight modifications). Blake — your work lives on, but you are greatly missed.
There are 28 Blake Edwards DVDs on my shelf. 27 of those are productions he directed. For many of them, he wrote the screenplay. He acted in one, at the beginning of his career. Those DVDs represent only two-thirds of the movies Blake Edwards directed over the course of his amazingly diverse career. (Someday, I hope to have a complete collection!) Most people know this man for his Pink Panther movies, and, like most people, that’s where I first came to know his brand of dark humor and hilarious slapstick. (Note that I don’t, as a rule, enjoy slapstick. His take on the genre makes me laugh no matter how many times I’ve seen the film.) The Pink Panther movies were, for the most part, a delight — but there is so much more to the directing talent of Blake Edwards. In fact, writing this post made me feel I could write a book about this multi-talented man and his contributions to our world. Perhaps some day I will.
One of the chief objections a young reader had to the first version of my middle grade manuscript was that it wasn’t funny. She said she likes funny books. In the comments about genre-identity yesterday, Erik (about the same age as the reader mentioned above) said that he liked writing funny stuff. There’s a message there, and it’s the message I got from the title that suggested today’s post (a rather unlikely source, I must admit…)