Has anyone ever said Cheney “battled” his heart disease? No. And the Left hoped he would die of it, sooner than later. But he endured.

I don’t know about the book, but in the case of the movie you actually can blame the editor:

When “The Man Who Fell to Earth” originally landed in the United States in 1976, it was shorn of some 20 minutes by its distributor in an effort to make the film more straightforward, with entire scenes removed, including a disconcerting love scene involving Bowie, Clark, booze and a pistol. The results were rather disastrous, distorting Roeg’s complex timeline and resulting in some poor press and audiences more confused than dazzled. A DVD and Blu-ray edition of the director’s cut put out by the upscale Criterion Collection relatively recently is already out of print.

“Very little was changed,” Roeg said. “Any cuts that are done to any film, they’re usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth of the piece. It’s something like having a suit made and then telling the tailor to take the right arm off. It doesn’t change the suit, it exposes the person who’s cut it.”

Clark is less circumspect regarding the original American release version.

“I totally hated it,” Clark said. “It shocked my system, all that work hacked to bits. It made me sick, it really did. Once I saw it I stopped promoting the film. As it was it was hard to follow, and it totally lost its momentum when it was cut because it was indecipherable. But once it got healed and put back together I never gave up on that film.”

I saw it when it first came out in the theaters. It was very interesting, and Bowie was amazing, but the film was incoherent.

Probably my favorite music of his was his late-70s funky period: Golden Years

And here’s an early version of “Space Oddity” which offers a plausible explanation of why Major Tom cut off communications with Earth: Space Oddity

That would be the Nineteen Fifties, not the age of Harold Godwineson.

There was some hyper-kinetic parody movie (imitating the late 1050s?) on cable years ago wherein he, (I think it was) played an advertising exec or something who went around saying “Fantastic !” all the time.

All that I recall besides that, was that he looked kind of normal. That, and the woman in the tight cocktail dress who lay on her back and kicked her legs.

Bowie’s son Duncan Jones is an artist, too, and directed two interesting movies, “Moon” & “Source Code.”