‘Preview Henry’ Bond, Famed Film-Goer, Dies

Henry Bond, a diminutive victim of autism whose presence at a film premiere was considered a fortuitous sign by many in the motion picture industry, has died.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that “Preview Henry” died Saturday from complications of blood poisoning. He was believed to be in his late 50s.

What began on a street corner in 1954 when he was given a free ticket to a sneak preview of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz picture “The Long, Long Trailer,” resulted in Bond’s viewing literally thousands of screenings over the years.

And if he didn’t happen to have a ticket to the screenings--usually reserved for critics and industry members--he would soften up those who guarded theater entrances with a smile or an imploring phrase. They almost always permitted him inside.

He was a lonely figure who spent his days caring for his mother and the remainder of his time catching buses from his Hollywood home to the sites of his favored previews.

“He’d get wind in his own secret way of where and when the sneak previews were,” Warner Bros. publicist Ed Crane said. “Then he got to know the people in the publicity departments in all the studios. They’d invite him.”

Over the years the tiny man, a baseball cap perched atop his balding head, became not just a familiar but a welcome sight at Los Angeles theaters.

Producers and film publicists began asking his opinion of their wares and they found that what Bond liked translated into big box office. (Not that he ever “disliked” any picture. He just chose not to comment.)

Wearing his customary sports shirt, a string tie looped idly around its collar, he was drawn particularly to melodramas, action and suspense pictures and disdained films that “talk-talk-talk.”

“I enjoy your pictures,” Bond once told John Wayne after a screening.

“That’s your fault,” was the fabled actor’s riposte.

Bond told The Times in 1985 that his all-time favorite film was “The Sound of Music,” and more recently he had liked “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Trade Tidbits

Bond began to see himself as part of the film scene, scanning Variety and the Hollywood Reporter each day for tidbits of the trade.

Bond even got to see himself on the silver screen. He was an extra in “Hello Dolly!” and “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.” He also was in a close-up in “Young Doctors in Love”--eating popcorn in a surgical amphitheater as a patient was worked on below.

In 1976 actor-director Tom Laughlin staged a premiere of his “Train Ride to Hollywood,” and singled out Bond as the screening’s guest of honor.

“I am most appreciative,” said Bond as he was given a lifetime theater pass by comedian Jack Oakie.

Four years later thieves broke into the modest home that was filled with movie posters, programs, press kits and other remembrances of Bond’s past. The thieves tied up Bond and his mother and stole, among other items, his treasured pass.

Bond’s mother died as a result of the incident and he was hospitalized. During his hospitalization, he missed the preview of what was ballyhooed as the greatest movie of 1980 if not the century.

It was Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.” The film has lost $55.5 million.