Burt Reynolds, March 1987 ("Heat" review)

Burt Reynolds in "Heat"

By DONALD PORTER
Standard·Examiner staff

Dear Burt Reynolds,

I feel compelled to write this letter because I've been a fan of yours for about 20 years. And the past 10 years, Burt, haven't been very pleasant. But I'm hanging in there, hoping for a respite from the drudgery you've been releasing. And I realize I'll be waiting a little longer, because your new film, "Heat," isn't exactly a redemptive effort.

Still, it's good to see you back in front of the cameras. You've been gone from the screen for two years, ever since "Stick" bombed in 1985. It may have been smart to duck and cover for a while. After all, you've made only two marginally good films -- "Paternity" and "Best Friends" -- since the fantastic "Starting Over" in 1979.

"Heat" is a move in the right direction, yet it, too, has serious flaws. The Nick Escalante character you play is an interesting man, an ex-mercenary who hires himself out as a bodyguard for high-rolling gamblers on the Las Vegas strip. You give Nick some depth and a few foibles, but William Goldman's script is abysmally boring and always predictable. Once Nick runs afoul of a mobster's son, we can see the final confrontation and ensuing shoot-out coming from a mile away.

Marcia Nasatir, Aug. 28, 1987

Marcia Nasatir

By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
Four and a half years ago, screenwriter Jim Carabatsos approached producer Marcia Nasatir with a proposal to write a movie about what it was like to be 19 years old and fighting in a war.

"He said no one in Hollywood would listen," Nasatir recalled. "I told him I'd listen. My son was in Vietnam."

Nasatir, speaking by phone from her Denver hotel suite, said she was committed to making a serious film about the Vietnam War from the soldier's point of view. The result of that commitment opens in theaters across the country this weekend -- it's a movie called "Hamburger Hill."One of the reasons Nasatir, who was the executive producer on "The Big Chill," decided to go with the "Hamburger Hill" project was due to her son's silence about his Vietnam experience.

Mary Steenburgen, Dec. 6, 1985

By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff

Mary Steenburgen isn't the air­headed wife of a fortune seeker, nor is she a frustrated author. She is, rather, an Oscar-winning actress who wears those roles as comfortably as Santa Claus wears a smile.

Some people might not recognize her name immediately, but if they frequent movie theaters and video shops they have surely seen at least one of Steenburgen's performances in films such as: "Goin' South," "Melvin and Howard" (for which she won an Academy Award as the wife of Melvin Dummar), "Time After Time," "Cross Creek," "Ragtime" and "Romantic Comedy." Currently, she can be seen on cable TV in an adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" and on the big screen with the lead in "One Magic Christmas."