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Writing this column a week after the death of Tony Scott by apparent suicide is proving to be an emotionally turbulent affair. An acquaintance bleakly (but truthfully) noted a few months back that while the celebrities of yesterday seemed to pass in appropriately florid manners, this past year was filled with cancer, cancer, cancer. In the case of Mr. Scott, I felt more than a little sense of (selfish) helplessness. The suicide of someone by all accounts happy and healthy in the twilight of his life brought back in a wave my own despondency and suicidal feeling and would-be actions from decades past and the swell of the thought: “Well, if he wasn’t safe…”

I quickly realized that I had a conception of “Tony Scott”, but little to no inkling of the real person via interviews or recollections of others, to the extent that I couldn’t vouch for certain if I had even seen a publicity still of him on the set or a red carpet shot at the premieres of one of his features. For the last 30 years, it just seemed inevitable that there would always be another Tony Scott film, one that more often than not would be commercially successful (critically perhaps less so), that would get lauded for style over story, ambience and sleekness over emotional accessibility and narrative coherence.

And as is so often the case, that “general consensus” consists of surface appearances alone (which might be an appropriate allegory for someone who worked with producers Don Simpson and/or Jerry Bruckheimer on over 1/3 of his oeuvre). Aside from his first film being a horror film, all of his other features might best be described, retrospectively, as Tony Scott action films. His biggest financial successes came very near the beginning of his career (back to back with 1986’s Top Gun and 1987’s Beverly Hills Cop II) but his smaller successes and even his commercial “busts” (his debut with 1983’s The Hunger, 1990’s Revenge, 1993’s True Romance, 2005’s Domino) are perhaps a better evocation of his strengths and trademarks: the ability to craft live-action cartoons that paradoxically possessed emotional resonance; fragmented hyperkinetic editing that could become viscerally wearying or punishing but that seemed necessary to capture his protagonists’ frequently upended lives , jittery nerves and tortured below the skin psyches (re: his four collaborations with Denzel Washington in the ‘00s), and ensemble casts that centered around a big name or two but that often allowed bit parts to make an impression, often in only a few minutes, even in the midst of all the sound and fury.

The portrait that emerged in the pieces of praise and memoriam over the last week painted a picture of a larger than life figure, very nearly a caricature (who might be at home in one of his own features), but one who was generous with his success and with his on-set collaboration. Clad in an always present pink t-shirt and pink baseball cap, with a history of speed-car racing, bare hand rock climbing, and chomping stogies for breakfast, he looked like Lawrence Tierney’s more chipper brother and seemed as if he would have been at home grappling with Ernest Hemingway (if not the man, if not the myth, then at least the serenely machismo portrait on display in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

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