You may not recognize his name but you probably recognized his face. From his earlier appearances in Brian DePalma’s movies to his role in Used Cars where he gives a commercial during a hacking of a Presidential broadcast to roles in numerous sci-fi/horror movies, Gerrit Graham wss a jack of all trades.
In DePalma’s movie Greetings, he played a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist alongside an unknown Robert DeNiro. He would go on to appear again with DeNiro in the 1993 drama This Boy’s Life with a young Leonardo DiCaprio. He also had appeared as Beef, a glam rocker in DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise.
By 1980 he was appearing in Used Cars, a comedy directed by Robert Zemeckis as a superstitious and neurotic car salesman, Jeff, who tricks a family into buying a station wagon by making them think they ran over his beagle, Toby. He co-starred along with Kurt Russell, Jack Warden and Joe Flaherty. During anorher sequence, he appears as Marshal Lucky, dressed as a cowboy who appears in a commercial that is aired when hackers (David L. Landers and Michael McKean) break into a broadcast by President Jimmy Carter. The commercial has Jeff using a shotgun to destroy vehicles belonging to a rival dealership owned by Warden’s and even blowing up a Mercedes car with dynamite.
He appeared in many other movies and TV shows such as Child’s Play 2, Police Academy 6 and the titular character in C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. On TV he had a recurring role on Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, guest appearances on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager and voiced the senile Franklin Sherman on The Critic.
A longtime friend of musician Bob Weir, they wrote “Victim or the Crime” for The Grateful Dead and wrote other songs. His last acting credit was in 2012 as he had to step away for health reasons. He died on Sept. 15 from complications due to lung disease.
