The video played on two consecutive episodes of Saturday Night Live that aired in December 1980. And sure enough, it ran two weeks in a row. He said to us, “I’m gonna get Fish Heads on Saturday Night Live!” And we were honestly, honestly, like ‘Yeah, right, Billy,” you know. What a go-getter! Completely enthusiastic, would not take no for an answer, took his own money, flew to New York. Years later, Mumy singled out Paxton for his tireless efforts to promote the video:Īll credit goes to Billy Paxton. Fellow Texan Rocky Schenck served as the cinematographer, and Haimer’s girlfriend at the time, Joan Farber, designed the costumes. Demento, was always something of an oddity in that it was produced before MTV had even started up-when it did play on MTV, it often felt like a deep cut excavated from the distant era of who-knows-when. Their first single, and to this day their most famous release, was the childlike 1978 song “ Fish Heads,” which had the infectious, Alvin and the Chipmunks-ish refrain “Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads, fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum!” If you were around in the 1980s, you definitely remember this song.īill Paxton had some ambitions as a filmmaker at that time, and it was he who directed the video he also appeared in it. In the mid-1970s he made his way to Los Angeles with ambitions of becoming an actor.īarnes & Barnes were an curious new wave duo starting in the late 1970s that consisted of Robert Haimer and Bill Mumy (who as a child had played Will Robinson on Lost in Space). Kennedy several hours before Lee Harvey Oswald abruptly ended Kennedy’s life. Paxton originally hailed from Texas-at the age of 8, he was prominently photographed in a crowd of people in Dallas to see President John F. His finest work may have been in Carl Franklin’s excellent 1992 B-movie One False Move, in which he played a cocksure Arkansas sheriff whose easygoing facade gets tested when a pair of homicidal maniacs make their way to his small town. Owing to his longtime association with James Cameron, he was in an unusual number of big-budget successes, like Aliens and Titanic, but he would also pop up in diverting stuff like Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire or Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow.
I never confused him with Bill Pullman but apparently some people did.
Paxton, of course, was a fine character actor who enhanced many, many movies. The actor Bill Paxton died over the weekend at the age of 61, an event that was awkwardly timed for the Oscar ceremony’s “In Memoriam” section but did assure him a special callout from the presenter of said segment, which turned out to be Jennifer Aniston.
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