Tom Skerritt Has Left the Grand Illusion

Tom Skerritt died on October 21 of natural causes. He was 93. I last saw him in 2022 during a dinner party thrown by Michael Hebb on Vashon Island. Low clouds covered that mid-September day, but no rain fell. And Skerritt, who arrived at dusk, sat at the head of a table we shared with the choreographer Donald Byrd. The subject of the night was Generations Over Dinner.

His thoughts were not with the gathering of 10 or so people but somewhere deep within his mind. We spoke a little about this and that. He asked what I was working on, and after I gave him a brief summary of my doings, he politely receded to his thoughts. As the island’s sea-soaked dusk around us grew, and the conversation of human generations (those about to go, those who are new) expanded, Skerritt became more and more pensive. This was not the Skerritt I was accustomed to; the Skerritt who, as an educator and activist for local film production (he moved to the Seattle area in the late ’80s), was committed to everything that had to do with the art of motion pictures, particularly storytelling. This was the substance and vastness of the conversation I had with him in 2018 in a Lower Queen Anne cafe. We talked for nearly two hours, and I left his company feeling a bit special.

Skerritt first came into my world when I was just 10. He had a leading role in a movie, Alien, that, at the time (1979), was reported to be so frightening it caused a person to faint during a screening. More amazing yet, this person had to be carried out of the theater on a stretcher. I had to see this flick, but was prevented from doing so at the box office of a cinema close to my school, Janney Elementary, in Washington, D.C. It was rated R. I wasn’t even close to 17. No can do for you, my guy, said the box office clerk.

I finally watched the movie four years later on a video cassette I rented from a Harare video store (my family returned to Zimbabwe in 1981). And I was drawn not so much by the horror of the alien, which occupied the second part of the film, but the labor disputes that Skerritt’s character, the space-weary Captain Arthur Dallas, had to deal with. My Marxism was born around this time.

A few years after that, I saw Skerritt in the movie Top Gun, which played at a Harare movie theater, Rainbow Cinema. And six years after that (now back in the States), I caught him again in Singles (he played the mayor of Seattle), and also in Contact (he played a government bureaucrat who wasn’t as keen about this alien business as Jodi Foster’s character, Dr. Eleanor Arroway). Of course, these are only a few films in a career that spanned seven decades, and included hits and classics like M*A*S*H, The Dead Zone, Steel Magnolias, and A River Runs Through It. He had a good number of TV shows under his belt, the most noted of which is Picket Fences.

The last movie I saw Skerritt in was East of the Mountains, which my cousin S.J. Chiro directed. Based on a novel of the same name by David Guterson, and released in 2021, the film wasn’t easy to watch because of the directness of its subject and subject matter: an old man, Ben Givens, dealing with death, with personal extinction. As a consequence, Mountain contains moments when the difference between Skerritt and his character seem indistinguishable. Always, the one thing our minds can’t get around, can’t solve, can’t come to terms with is death. How can you be totally something today, and totally nothing tomorrow?

The first time I met Skerritt in person was in 2005, after my film Police Beat screened at SIFF. He attended the movie’s post-show party at Barcça Lounge. He walked through the door, spotted me with a big smile on his face, strided to me, and gave me the biggest hug ever. And he didn’t let go. And all I could think was: I’m finally in Dallas’s arms. Maybe it’s my turn to faint. Goodnight, Skerritt.