There was some sad news yesterday as we learned that Tombstone, Top Gun, The Saint, and, most importantly, Real Genius actor Val Kilmer died. I mention this because he was very likely the only movie star of that particularly rarified class that I actually knew, sort of, a little bit, because I briefly worked for him around 2012.
It was a time of a lot of transition for Val and for me, too. I had just started working at Jalopnik, starting the career I’m still excited to be in today, and I had a one-and-a-half-year-old kid, and was still climbing out of the financial hole that comes with a few years of trying to start a company and then teaching design at a public LAUSD school. So any side work was appreciated.
Val was transitioning from focusing on movies to his one-man show about Mark Twain, called Citizen Twain. At the same time he wanted to focus more on his art – he painted and wrote poetry, I think?– which he would feature and sell on his website. It was this site that led to me and my wife, Sally, working for him.
Sally did social media for him – this was just starting to be A Thing, and I did graphics/design and some HTML stuff for his site. I really can’t remember how the hell we got this gig? Oh wait – we had a friend whose girlfriend was his personal assistant! That’s right. Man, I forgot about whatshername!
Anyway, this meant that I ended up talking to Val on the phone an awful lot, usually as he was driving somewhere in his Jaguar convertible. He was a very approachable and kind person to talk with, witty and charming, but he also very often sounded high as a kite. I think it was just how he tended to talk, very slowly and with long pauses mid-sentence, but sometimes it made me a little concerned that the voice on the other end was piloting an automobile.
Speaking of cars, let’s note at least a couple car-related things about Val Kilmer to keep to our theme here. Perhaps most notable is that he owned, for well over 20 years at least, a 1969 Pontiac GTO, originally a light metallic blue:
…and then the car later had a full body-off restoration and emerged an imposing glossy black beast, which went to auction in 2017 and 2021, where it sold for, I think, between $120,000 and $140,000, I can’t find exactly how much, but somewhere around there.
(Photo: Mecum Auctions)
The car is quite stunning, with an interior so white and clean it gives me perverse anxiety fantasies of sitting in the back seat with a chilidog in one hand and a rapidly melting Rocky Road ice cream cone in the other.
Did these ever come with an all-white dash like that, or is that custom? Also, the massive 400 cubic inch V8 is numbers-matching, and, interestingly, this rides on a Ford 9″ rear end, which seems to be a popular mod for GTOs.
Also notable when it comes to cars and Kilmer is that while Val may have played the second-most forgettable Batman (I think maybe George Clooney is first place there), he had what I think was the best not-Batmobile, but Brucewaynemobile, this 1952 Jaguar XK120:
What a fantastic not-Batmobile! The cars Bruce Wayne drives when not wearing his getup tend not to get to much attention or are kind of lazy choices (Lambos, limos) but I think this one was inspired. It has a sort of below-the-surface Batmobile feel to it, while maintaining an external air of genteel gadabout.
There was also his role in the remake of The Saint in 1997, where he replaced Roger Moore from the original series and a then-unreleased Volvo C70 replaced the old Volvo P1800 used in the original show.
That was a big deal for Volvo at the time, and the movie acted as the car’s introduction, and was a big deal since it was Volvo’s first sporty coupé since that old iconic 1800.
Oh, and I suppose there is one more car-related thing to Val Kilmer: he was part of the Pixar Cars cinematic universe, as he was the voice of a jet fighter in the movie Planes, where his plane wore a helmet – I know, it’s weird – that had the same design as his character Iceman’s helmet in the 1986 movie Top Gun that helped make Kilmer a star:
As as the implications of wars being fought in the Cars universe, don’t worry, I asked all those hard questions to the creators years ago.
A commenter reminded me about the movie Top Secret that he was in, which was hilarious, and included one of my favorite jokes in any movie, a wonderful bit about someone feeling relieved to be tortured by Nazis:
Oh, and that movie also helped perpetuate the Ford Pintos-are-bombs urban legend!
Good stuff.
Val Kilmer was a good man and a talented actor, and even if my interactions with him were limited and short-lived, I feel fortunate that I got to know him, even in this limited way. He’s still our huckleberry.
I have always wondered if Val was short for something like Valerie, or Valtrex or Valcent vanGogh. Never bothered to look it up until now and it turns out, it is just Val.
While he has the benefit of recency, I suspect Affleck will ultimately end up being the most forgettable Batman. In no small part because he never actually got a standalone movie, and the ones he was in were universally terrible. I know some of the 90s ones weren’t great either, but I will maintain that they had infinitely more charm than BvS: DoJ.
Wrong, Clooney had unforgettable Bat-nipples.
Love the saint. I even owned a c70 coupe for a little while. Mainly because of how cool I thought it looked in the movie. His range of ability was crazy though. Iceman, batman, a kid genius, Even Jim Morrison and did all of his own singing. He will be greatly missed.
I can confirm how cool of a guy he was. I missed my opportunity to engage. We sat next to each other in a PATH train to Hoboken in NJ. Yes, celebrities take public transit. He was not the first celeb I sat next or a row from.
Anyways, as I sat next to him I thought…this guy looks like Val…but it can’t be. This was when he had put on some weight as seen in MacGruber. He just looked back at me and gave that classic smile of his. Once I saw MacGruber I realized it was him and I missed my opportunity to chat with one of my favorite of all time actors!
Lesson in life: Just say hi.
Heat. Excellent movie. I cant picture Val Kilmer as older because everything I know him in was released 30-40 years ago. Real Genius, Top Gun, Batman, etc.
Unfortunately, as a great lover of the movie “Tombstone,” I can certainly imagine him looking like hell and being in poor health.
As long as we’re just listing stuff, something something Madmartigan. Look at these comments–what range on this guy!
I had a massive crush on Val Kilmer growing up. Someday I was going to figure out cold fusion and he would fall in love with me and we would live some sort of glamorous spy/physicist lifestyle. (I was 13 when it came out …)
He was great in so many things. Let me just add Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to what everyone else has mentioned.
OOHH – forgot that one.
He is one of the few Hollywood stars my wife has ever expressed any sort of crush on. She said she never gave him a second thought until he took his turn as Batman, with nothing but his luscious lips showing underneath the Bat-cowl. Then she said they were all she could see anytime she saw him on screen. In the kitchen the other morning, she said, “Aw, did you see? Mr. Lips passed away. And I never got to kiss him!”
For many years, he would have qualified as her “celebrity freebie.” That’s a tradition we’ve carried forward in our marriage that originally was a deal my parents struck back in the ’80s – if my mom would forgive my dad for sleeping with Loni Anderson if he ever had the chance, he would in turn forgive her for sleeping with Tom Selleck if she had the chance. At the time we started dating, mine would have been Catherine Zeta-Jones. It’s an easy promise to make, when there’s not a chance in hell it would ever, ever happen anyway.
HA- he did have wonderful lips. It’s nice that you two can joke like that.
My freebie is Tom Hardy and my husband’s is that lady from Weeds.
If you have never seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, do yourself a favor and watch it. It’s an absolutely entertaining movie. It has Val at his most smart assiest.
Totally agree, awesome film, but then again Heat.. so..
Another gone too soon.
RIP Val.
I am NOT surprised that Jason and others here regard “Real Genius” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ as among Mr. Kilmer’s finest accomplishments. When I first saw that movie as a teen, I was beyond delighted for so many reasons. Plus, that actress with the bangs who played the female lead… it was decades ago and I’m still smitten.
“And stop playing with yourself, Kent.”
This was the first article I have seen to mention he passed.
There was a CItroën DS in that movie, too!
The sleeping DS was one of my favorite bits from the movie. Total classic.
Yes, that scene! I specifically remember being a kid watching it with my dad, a mechanic at an import specialty shop, and him laughing and saying something about those weird green balls being the reason why the gag worked. Honestly among the earliest memories of moments that sparked a lifelong interest in cars.
I loved Real Genius. One of my all time favorite movies.
And the way he played Doc Holiday in Tombstone was magnificent. What an amazing actor.
So sad.
Looks like I have a lot of movies to re-watch this weekend.
I did my undergrad and grad school in engineering at a small, top-flight university in the 1990’s. (Colorado School of Mines, go Orediggers!)
My grad school research was sponsored by DARPA, and we were fiddling around with a powerful (for the time) Nd:YAG laser, robots, and titanium. Real Genius is partially a documentary!
Ok, not really, but we did have a few run-ins with the campus safety folks, who were concerned that we were going to mis-program the robot and shoot a laser beam through the roof, possibly taking down a passing airliner. (No. Actually not possible with our equipment). I blame Real Genius for those concerns. The safety people even made us take down our “WARNING: Invisible Laser in use, do not look into beam path with remaining eye” sign, because it wasn’t official.
I like to think Val would have enjoyed a day in our lab, though. RIP.
Loved Real Genius, not least because some of it was filmed at my alma mater (though I think most of the outside shots were a different So. California small college) and I had a friend who worked on the film. It did manage to somewhat capture the student experience at Caltech or similar small STEM oriented universities.
RIP Val.
It was my great pleasure to accept an invitation from a men’s honors assembly at my alma mater, that was self-governing and had its own dorm. The atmosphere was pitched to me as “Real Genius meets Animal House.”
Accurate. If only I had chosen my major as well as my housing.
Apparently at one point in the 1970s, the assembly was listed by the FBI as one of a number of American groups that potentially possessed the capability to self produce a nuclear device. Of course, by the time I joined, we had all seen “WarGames” and were not at all keen to get up to that particular sort of mischief – but COULD they have? Ehhhhhh, that’s… not unreasonable to suspect.
I assume that concern was for a dirty bomb? Stuff that can undergo proper fission usually takes the resources of a nation state.
I’m envious of anyone’s actual experience that emulates (even in a paler, reality-based way) life at school in Real Genius. I guess there’s sort of the same thing going on (but with much less joy and much more calculated commercial intent) on Big Bang Theory.
Though it was more than 40 years ago, I can recall my mom driving me to the Bronx High School of Science for some kind of interview/tour/whatever and being the anxious, overthinking kid I was (and still am, to some extent) I hoped it would be something, anything like what’s portrayed in film/tv. Sadly, it was not, but I suspect that failing had more to do with the prospect of having to commute by city bus and subway from my parent’s home in Flushing, Queens all the way to the Bronx just to go to school every day. I wound up going to a regular high school (where at least I eventually managed to lose my virginity and spent way too much time sitting in smoke-filled rooms listening to new wave music on WLIR and WDRE) and though I later started college as a laser/fiber optic tech major, I eventually switched to journalism (big brain move there on my part ;-)) and graduated with a film degree from NYU.
There’s no way for me to know about the path not taken, but I can’t help but suspect that maybe I’d be happier now if I’d stuck it out and become some sort of engineer or researcher. I still love keeping records, organizing data, using tools, and establishing cause-and-effect.
Are you okay?
[Removing helmet and talking rapidly] No, not emotionally, no I’m not. I’m disappointed, not terribly, but still. It should have gone much further much faster. It’s okay, though, I know what the problem is. It’s obviously the drag coefficient. I’ll just have to redesign the blades. I can do that no problem. I can do that here. But after they’re designed I got to cut them and that takes tools and time. Do you know how long this stuff is supposed to last?
Michelle Meyrink. Unsung, underrated nerd crush of the 80s who will always hold a place in the dorkiest part of my heart. She was so weird and cute.
Agreed. I knew her name was Michelle (there’ve been a few notable Michelles in my past) and even remembered the last name probably started with an M, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall details.
She might have been the ultimate nerd crush (or admired female protagonist… the same thing to some ;-)) of all 80s movies.
I totally forgot about the snoring Citroen till it was mentioned above. I should probably have a couple glasses of wine tonight (to lower my critical facilities just a bit… offsetting the accumulated ennui of age) and re-watch Real Genius.
I wanted her hairstyle… all these decades later, I still do!
Many more than a handful of truly iconic roles over a lifetime. I watched his heartbreaking and inspiring documentary a few years ago.
Let’s not forget him embodying Morrison in “The Doors”. His Batman was meh, but his Bruce Wayne was superb. Good actor in a bad movie.
Saw The Doors in the theater when it came out, and he did a terrific job of singing as Morrison.
For years I’ve been pointing at his career as proof that the Oscars are nothing but political bullshit. How can the Academy justify a career like his with so many memorable performances and not a single nomination?
My favorite movie of his will always be Real Genius, I picked my college dorm based on expectations set by that movie only to be disappointed when reality didn’t resemble Hollywood in the slightest.
Val Kilmer was never nominated for an Oscar.
Nolan Ryan never won the Cy Young award.
Don’t get me started on who HAS won the Nobel Peace Prize in recent decades.
“Poor soul, you were just too high strung.”
Val Kilmer will be missed. He made some the best characters ever created come to life on the screen.
“I don’t know, Ike, maybe poker’s just not your game. I know: let’s have a spelling contest!”
I could never decide if I truly liked Kilmer as an actor. He delivered some of the best and worst performances of his generation. I came to believe that at his worst, it was a combination of poor material, inferior collaboration and his own rather uncompromising method that sank productions. At his best, he could be transcendent. Most of us only dream of transcendence, but to actually achieve it, even just once, is rare. We are all the sum total of our virtues and flaws; in the end, I reckon Val Kilmer weighed more on the virtuous side of the life’s scales. He had a good life.
“I think it was just how he tended to talk, very slowly and with long pauses mid-sentence, but sometimes it made me a little concerned that the voice on the other end was piloting an automobile.”
I have no idea what he actually sounded like, but I would just add that I get a little anxious when someone’s in a car and they’re speaking just like they’re on the couch at home.
Talking slowly with pauses can mean their first priority is driving and thinking about the goofball a few car lengths ahead who looks like they could cut across three lanes at any second.
That’s not really what this felt like, but I hope that was the case.
I’m just impressed you could hear him while he was driving a convertible.
Agreed. If you’re talking to me while I’m driving–hands-free or in the car with me–expect to have to repeat yourself a LOT while I focus on the task at hand.
Me to my wife via Bluetooth while driving, probably: “Whoa! Jesus, guy, you can’t take your half out of the middle! …I’m sorry, honey, what were you saying?”
Yeah, my wife explains the mysteries of the universe to me while I drive, along with important dates, phone numbers, etc… I’m actually DRIVING and process/recall only a fraction of this. It’s why when driving alone I probably have on some mindless album I’ve heard a zillion times yet will sing along poorly too. No mental processing required but keeps the forebrain occupied.
My fiancée barely talks while I’m in the car because she knows I’m focused entirely on driving and can’t hold a conversation at all. If I try it often gets interrupted by cursing due to someone failing to signal (which is… almost always? here in Texas) or some other dumb thing that someone has done, or muttering to myself about needing to exit soon and getting over. And anything has to be repeated a dozen times. Normally she reads or plays games on her phone until we get to where we’re going.
Yes! I freak out a little bit when the driver is explaining something quickly and logically… Talk to me while driving and it won’t make any sense because I am not thinking about the conversation at all. But then maybe I have less processing power upstairs than some others…
Speaking slowly and taking long pauses is the trademark of a serious actor/speaker.
We were taught to do that in Toastmasters.
It’s far better than filling the air with useless “Um”s and “Like”s.
If you watched me just finding and then tapping the answer button on a modern touchscreen while driving you would think I was wasted out of my mind.
Val Kilmer will forever be Doc Holliday to me because my dad watched Tombstone an excessive amount times even for a suburban dad in the 90s.
Still watch it almost every time it’s on.
A great movie.
The 4K UHD is up for pre-order, but at $55 I may have to live with my ancient BD until the price drops. Oof.
“Thanks for always bein’ there, Doc.”
“Doc, you ort’ to be in bed, what the hell are you doin’ this for?”
“Wyatt Earp is my friend.”
“Hell, I got lots of friends.”
“I don’t.”
No, your dad watched Tombstone a perfectly sufficient amount of times. It’s simple algebra.
Let n = the number of times you’ve seen Tombstone
The perfect number of times to see Tombstone: (n + 1)
B/c its criminally underrated, he also had a great turn in The Spartan, a David-Mamet-does-an-action-movie thing from the 2000s that took full advantage of his sometimes odd vocal cadences.
You left out Top Secret!
oh shit! I did! Let me add it in, with a great clip!
The one with the exploding Pinto?
Edit to add: just refreshed the page and saw that you did indeed rectify the situation with the requisite clip, kudos!
Although I’ve got to admit… I prefer Real Genius!
Fun fact: based on the fact that those two were Val Kilmer’s first two breakout movies, he had a hard time in the early days being taken seriously as dramatic actor. It basically took “The Doors” to fully get him over.
“Skeet Surfing!!!”
That is *not* Mel Tormé. 🙁
No, Mr. Potato, it is not. ????
Many years ago, a buddy of mine in LA had an interview w/ Val to become his new PA.
The meeting was in the late evening at the Bar Marmont, and Val’s entourage was seated all around them during this episode.
It was apparently a very bizarre, drunken interview.
My friend did not take the job.
In vino veritas.
Age quod agis.
Ugh pneumonia, so treatable, yet it got him.
You were so young, and will be missed!
He had throat cancer, the pneumonia was a complication of that, or the cancer treatment
Pneumonia used to be called the dying man’s friend, or at least it was when my grandfather died. They didn’t treat his pneumonia because it was a better way to go than waiting for the colon cancer to kill him.
Talk about a Hobson’s choice, Jesus. Yeah, I think I would in fact prefer to quietly drown in my sleep.
Godspeed, Val. You can be my wingman anytime.
Real Genius was the first movie my wife and I saw together- it was our first date.
Long-ass time ago.
RIP Val, you were great in Heat.
I’m glad Heat was the first comment; he was surprisingly, like astonishingly good in that.