Sidney Pollack had a pied-a-terre next door to my apartment in Manhattan. He was hardly ever here. I saw him in the elevator once, just after seeing his last film, and he was a nice, unassuming guy. Talking with a couple of my other neighbors, we all had the same impression. My neighbor Alka rode down in the elevator with him once and asked him if he had lived there long. Eighteen years, he said. "You should consider buying," she said, not knowing who he was. He said he lived in LA and France as well as New York, without any trace of "Don't you know who I am?"
After he did on Monday, his apartment door looked so lonely that I bought a bunch of flowers and put them there in his honor. The local video store, New York Video, listed some of Pollack's films on the sign out front. I had never seen "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" -- I was too young a sprout -- so I checked it out together with "The Yakuzas," and watched them that evening. The films weren't fun to watch, but they showed my neighbor Sidney to be a man of principle and passion. In a sort of cultural crosscurrent, I had tried to see Sex in the City that evening, but my online ticket order somehow got lost. My time was better spent with Sidney.
