Does anyone remember Bud Cort? My guess is that Johnny Depp does; more than a few of his early, quirkier performances — like the wide-eyed naifs of "Arizona Dream" or "Benny & Joon" — owe a great debt to Cort's work in the 1970s. Wes Anderson does: he cast him in "The Life Aquatic" as a nod to Cort's influence. But the rest of the world?
Everyone now recognizes the 1970s as the great renaissance of American film, where the balance of power shifted from the studios to the directors, with the result being a vast number of creative, gritty, and uncompromising films . . . and an equal number of quixotic, drive-off- the-cliff indulgences, which were dumped by their studios and then died at the box office.
Many a director became the victim of being too creative for his own good, and Cort's fate was to star in two of these great cinematic vicissitudes, both on revival this month in Tokyo. Cinematic stardom probably wasn't in the cards for Cort even if his career hadn't been cut short by a near-fatal auto accident in 1979, but cult fame is now his for eternity.