born 20 February 1970

Alain Deloin, birthplace unspecified, French porn star

Wait a minute. Stop right there.

There, Mesdames et Messieurs, is today's overwhelming favorite. That has got to be the single Greatest Highbrow Porn Moniker in cinematic history. (If you are at all puzzled as to why, here is some further reading for you.)

Also turning forty today:

Cal Rein, Traralgon, Australia, actor

Chandler Vinar, Minneapolis, Minnesota, set dressing gangboss

Dawn Landon, Dallas, Texas, actress

Hana Sevcíková, Prague, Czechoslovakia, actress

Julia Franck, Berlin, East Germany, novelist

Kerri Hoskins, Deer Park, Illinois, video game recurring character portrayer

Natacha Lindinger, Paris, France, actress

Per Jørgen Østby, Sarpsborg, Norway, producer

Shawn Woods, Los Angeles, California, actor

Stan Mak, Winnipeg, Manitoba, boom operator (IF you know what I mean)

Stuart Miles, birthplace unspecified, British drag queen/children’s TV host (there’ll always be an England)

Alain Deloin invites all today's children to join him in a filthy and degrading tape-recorded Francophone ménage-a-douze.

PLEASE BRACE YOURSELF FOR AN ABRUPT CHANGE IN TONE. THANKS.

Wait, here’s one more:

Karen Schmeer (died 29 January 2010), Portland, Oregon, documentary editor

What a dire situation. What a loss. Here we have an excellent example of the accomplished contributors to the moving picture arts who are lurking just outside the frame I’ve established. Today Karen Schmeer should have celebrated her fortieth birthday; but her birth date must only have been added to the Internet Movie Database yesterday. Certainly, earlier this week, her filmography must have been there, but devoid of her date of birth; when I prepared the first part of this post on Wednesday, her name was nowhere to be found.

It was Karen Schmeer’s terrifying fate to be killed by the hit-and-run driver of a getaway car of a trio of pharmacy thieves on the Upper West Side. She was crossing upper Broadway with an armload of groceries. The agent of her doom was a late-model Dodge Avenger, with a man named David McKie at the wheel. Transported from the scene by an ambulance, she died at the hospital later that night.

I spent a lot of time in January 2010 in the hospital where Karen Schmeer died, because it’s the same hospital where my daughter was born. What a cringemaking thing it is to see “2010” as the year of someone’s death, this early. I’m still dating checks “2009” for crying out loud. I don’t know; for all kinds of reasons, though a stranger, this death cuts close to the bone for me.

More than anything, I think it’s because I’m so grateful for her work. She edited Fast Cheap and Out of Control; Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.; and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It will be interesting to see how Errol Morris’s output progresses from here. She really elevated his art. Knowing what she worked on with Morris, I’m going to make it a point to track down other projects of hers.

In Karen Schmeer’s honor, there will be no actual Winner today. Instead I will encourage you to imagine an uncanny Errol Morris-style documentary, concerning a loose affiliation of inept drugstore shoplifters, and the brilliant film editor whose life’s ribbon they would haphazardly consign to the cutting-room floor of the universe.