Goodbye, Joel

An old friend of mine, film critic Joel Siegel, just passed away from cancer at 63. These days, that’s young. Years back Joel was part of a regular poker game at my house in Echo Park. I owe him big time for a review he wrote of my novel The Big Fix in the LATimes back in the Seventies. It helped jump start my career. Later on he would review movies I wrote on ABC, not always as kindly. By then we were living on opposite coasts and wouldn’t see each other as often. But when we did, it was always relaxed and amusing. Joel Siegel liked to laugh.