James Van Der Beek’s favourite cinematic subgenre: “I love those films”
The sad death of James Van Der Beek at far too young an age certainly threw up some questions about the cult of celebrity in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.
A GoFundMe set up to help out his wife and six kids quickly went north of $2.5million in donations, days before it emerged that he’d bought a house worth twice that in the weeks before he passed, and yet, such was the fondness for Dawson’s Creek, a TV show that concluded 22 years ago, a lot of people weren’t angry about it. Rather like they send money to television evangelists, and they did with Charlie Kirk, Americans threw cash at the fund, sometimes people who could barely afford to do so, sometimes people who would not even consider donating money to children’s charities or to those in need who don’t also have a $4m house in Los Angeles that they rent out.
But then those same people are free to do what they like with their money, and evidently Van Der Beek’s illness was hugely costly and debilitating, and for those who weren’t around when Dawson’s Creek was broadcast between 1998 and 2003, it’s difficult to convey just what an enormous deal it was; pretty much anyone under the age of 30 watched it religiously.
While it made stars out of all the leading cast members, including Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and especially Michelle Williams, Van Der Beek, who was Dawson himself, probably fared the worst in the end, perhaps because in the eyes of millions, he could only ever be that character, rather like Mark Hamill and Luke Skywalker.
He did have a number one movie toward the start of the show’s success with the comedy drama Varsity Blues in 1999, but post-Dawson’s Creek, there weren’t too many titles to write home about, with the actor taking on a succession of smaller TV roles, music videos and low-budget films up until the 2009 film Formosa Betrayed, which wasn’t a hit at the box office and received mixed reviews, but his performance in the political thriller was widely praised, and at the time he showed his cinematic taste by referencing some of the finest thrillers of the New Hollywood era as inspiration.
He told DVDTalk, “I love those films. I love All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, The Conversation, and Three Days of the Condor. I love those movies, and [Formosa Betrayed director] Adam Kane and I talked a lot about those films while making this.”
Each of those films is indeed of the highest quality, featuring some of the biggest names in history in Robert Redford, Gene Hackman and Warren Beatty. They lean into the paranoia that was rampant in America during and after the Watergate scandal, and two of them, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men, can rightly claim to be two of the finest films of all time, the latter featuring two astonishing performances from Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
Trying to reach those heights for any filmmaker would be a struggle, as Van Der Beek added at the time, “Some directors will throw those films around a lot, saying stuff like, ‘I want it to be like Three Days of the Condor, but shot like [2005 spy thriller] The Constant Gardner!’ You think that’s an amazing idea, and then when you get to set, they’re just not able to pull it off. It’s just where they’re wildly optimistic.”
He had completed filming on a couple of projects before he passed away, which will be posthumously released this year, namely the Legally Blonde TV spin-off Elle and a horror film called The Gates.
