‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives’: the bizarre final onscreen appearance of Gene Hackman’s career
In an ideal world, the greatest actors to ever grace the screen would bow out with a project worthy of their talents. Of course, it doesn’t always happen that way, but that doesn’t make the final screen appearance of the legendary Gene Hackman any less bizarre.
It’s well-known that the two-time Academy Award winner hardly rode off into the sunset in a blaze of cinematic glory after deciding that the time was right to retire from the industry. After all, he’s one of his generation’s finest talents and a powerhouse performer who butted heads with the best in the business during his distinguished decades in the spotlight, only to bid farewell by taking second billing to Ray Romano.
Even though Hackman quietly retired and didn’t make a big song and dance about never setting foot on set again, 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport didn’t deserve to be the final flourish on his filmography. Playing a former president running against Romano’s shop owner in a local election, the turgid comedy took a pasting from critics and flopped at the box office.
One of his final two credits was Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, where he displayed the caustic charisma and world-weariness that made him the star he was, which would have been a solid way to say goodbye because it was a great movie that allowed him to showcase his formidable gifts, even if he hated the director with a passion.
His penultimate theatrical outing in Gary Fleder’s unremarkable John Grisham adaptation Runaway Jury would have been the perfect way to bring his career full circle, even if the film itself wasn’t anything to write home about after it finally gave him the chance to share the screen with longtime friend and former roommate Dustin Hoffman for the first time. And yet, Welcome to Mooseport will endure as Hackman’s last stand.
However, it wasn’t the last time he graced the screen. Four years after beginning his self-imposed exile, Hackman made the most unexpected of appearances in a 2008 episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives: a combination of travelogue, reality show, and celebration of distinctly American foodstuffs hosted by loud shirt and frosted tips enthusiast Guy Fieri.
The host stopped in at a roadhouse diner in New Mexico to sample the local delicacy of scrapple, which is basically mashed-up pork trimmings combined with flour, formed into a loaf, sliced up, and fried. Completely by accident, Hackman happened to be visiting the greasy spoon when Fieri and his video crew stopped by. By default, his brief interaction with the TV personality replaced Welcome to Mooseport as the final onscreen credit of his career.
Ironically, Hackman remarked that “nobody pays any attention” to either the diner or his status as a regular customer, only for his relative anonymity to be shattered when one of the best actors America has ever produced was coincidentally in the building at the exact time Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives descended to put him back out in front of the world.
