Wow. This one hits close to home in a lot of ways. It’s one thing when we have to write obituaries for the people who make or star in the films and television shows we cover here at AICN, but these three guys... they were our peers. These are people who also wrote about films, who worked the same beat we work. Writing about their passing... it’s a splash of cold water for any of us who do this for a living.

Anderson Jones, as he was sometimes known, was larger than life, a huge personality who was unavoidable if you worked the film beat in Los Angeles. Many people knew him from his on-camera exposure via E! and VH1, but he was also an early advocate of online writers as being equal to anyone else writing about film. He had a lot of friends and a fair number of detractors, and I’m sure it’s because he refused to tone himself down for anyone. Flamboyantly gay, a shameless gossip, Andy was also one of the few people I know who really seemed to enjoy the junket scene. I don’t do many junkets, so I would only run into him occasionally at screenings or occasionally at parties, but it seems incredible to me that he’s gone now. There’s a horrible dark joke in the idea that he died of a heart attack while seeing a screening of A MIGHTY HEART at the Arclight, and Andy would have been the first person to make that joke. He’ll be missed by his many friends, and I think that Mark Wheaton, better known to many of you as Smilin’ Jack Ruby, summed it up best with his tribute to Andy over at CHUD.

Dan Epstein was primarily an East Coast guy, so I didn’t see a lot of him, but what I really admired about him was his interviewing technique. I was interview by Dan at one point when we were both in New Mexico on the BEERFEST set, and that’s what I noticed about him... he’s one of those guys who could take any trip or any event and somehow wring three or four or five stories out of it. He took every opportunity he got and made the most of it. He was a damn good interviewer and was just starting to get some traction with some side writing projects of his own. Dan seemed incredibly young to me, so it’s shocking to think he’s gone and we won’t run into him on any other sets in the future.

Joel Siegel is, by far, the best known of these three men. He was the film reviewer and interviewer on GOOD MORNING AMERICA starting in 1981, and he’s definitely left his mark on pop culture. He was an Emmy winner, and he also wrote the book for a Broadway musical in the ‘80s. In recent years, he’s been struggling with cancer, something made even more poignant by the birth of his son. That collision of circumstance led him to write a book called LESSONS FOR DYLAN, filled with the knowledge he wanted to leave behind in case he didn’t beat the cancer. For a while, he held it at bay, but he finally succumbed to it last week. He led a long and varied career, and I may not have always agreed with him, but I respect the way he led his life and the passion he obviously had for film.

Our condolences go out to the friends and families of all three of these guys, and it just serves as a reminder that we are all lucky to be doing what we do each day. I don’t take a single moment of the past eleven years that I’ve been publishing here at AICN for granted, nor do I take a single reader for granted. All any of us can do is make the most of the time we’ve got, and on a personal level, I’m glad to have met and spoken with and shared professional encounters with all three of these guys in the time they had.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles