Jarmusch doesn’t mention the teal desecration of John Boorman‘s 1967 classic, but then how could he? The Criterion guys probably sat him down and said “Jim? You can’t even allude to the concept of teal tinting or teal vandalism, much less say the actual word. We’re sorry but we’re going to need your signature on this form, Jim. We’re just being careful.”

There’s a real art to taking interview transcripts and making regular-guy gab sound like clean, well-shaped, high-end prose…prose that reminds you, no exaggeration, of the lean, elegant, unpretentious simplicity of Ernest Hemingway and the well-honed sentence stylings of Norman Mailer‘s “The Executioner’s Song” (’79), which was described as Hemingwayesque when it first popped in ’79.

This is what former Gannett film critic, novelist and documentarian Marshall Fine has managed to do, ghost-editing-wise, with an autobiography about Rochester radio legend Alan Levin, better known as Brother Wease. The book is called “At Ease With Brother Wease,” which not only isn’t on Amazon but (wait for it) has no direct-purchase URL. But the word-, sentence- and paragraph-sculpting is just wonderful.

Fine: “I can’t imagine that there’s much of a market for [this book] outside of upstate New York, but Wease has a pretty good story to tell. Essentially about a Rochester ne’er-do-well who volunteered for Vietnam, came back to sell drugs and promote rock concerts, and wound up becoming Rochester’s top-rated morning radio guy for 40 years.”

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David Field was the United Artists exec whom Michael Cimino completely ignored (i.e., walked right by him, not saying a word) during the Montana filming of Heaven’s Gate. Field and co-production chief Steven Bach tried and failed to control the disastrous overspending that doomed this infamous 1980 western.

Field on “L’affaire Huppert” — a sharp casting dispute between Cimino, who wanted Isabelle Huppert in Gate‘s lead female role, and Field and Bach. The two UA producers had come to a verbal agreement with Cimino that if they felt that her accent was too thick and that she wouldn’t work out, he would agree to find someone else. So they flew to Paris to hear her read dialogue. After listening to Huppert struggle with the English language, Field and Bach decided she was really wrong for the part. A hard decline.

Field: “A couple of days after we said said no, the phone rang and it was Cimino, and he said ‘I’ve been thinking about [your decision] and it’s still Isabelle Huppert.’ And I said ‘you know, this is a problem now because it’s no longer about isabelle Huppert. This is now about your word. You and I had an arrangement which now doesn’t mean anything. Cimino said ‘what’s your point?’ I said ‘my point is that I’ll give you 48 hours to tell me you didn’t mean this phone call, or I’m going to do my level best to make sure we never make this movie.’ He told me go fuck myself and hung up.

“[Transamerica honcho] Andy Albeck asked me what my problem with the movie was, and I said that my problem with the movie is (a) I no longer know what Cimino’s word means and (b) I don’t know what the movie could cost. I don’t know anything any more, I said, because of what just happened.”

Watch and listen to Field’s remarks in Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (’04):

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Good news all around…the Croisette interest-and-intrigue level just bumped up a notch.

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Last night I burned through the final six episodes of Beef 2, having watched #1, #2 and #3 the night before. It certainly becomes faster and crazier and more whack-jobby as it hurtles toward the Seoul climax. But the more hellzapoppin’ it gets the more desperate it feels.

I started frowning and shaking my head and saying “this is just nuts.” Everyone is so willing to betray everyone else. The high level of craft and grade-A acting is good to absorb, but when all the characters except one are this ruthless, this endlessly selfish and totally cutthroat, a certain kind of boredom is inevitable. Seoyeon Jang ‘s “Eunice” is the only decent, true-blue human in the whole thing.

By the end Beef 2 feels like an insubstantial, surface-skimming Michael Bay film. Carey Mulligan would never star in a Bay vehicle (not smart or classy enough for the British Streep) but she’s sure as hell toplining a relatively shallow, almost-Daffy-Duck-level-during-the-final-episodes Lee Sung Jin film…same difference!

It’s obvious that Paris Jackson, 28, isn’t the biological daughter of the late Michael Jackson. But that’s been the legend from the get-go, and nobody’s challenged it. No one’s saying she’s not the daughter of Debbie Rowe, who, in her capacity as Jackson’s post-Lisa Presley “beard” girlfriend in the ’90s, became pregnant and gave birth to Paris in ’98. Biological basics tell us someone other than Michael contributed the necessary seed.

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Going with monochrome seems like an odd call. If I had chosen the poster, I would have created an AI image (full color) of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as their car plunges off the cliff, excited and terrified and yet decisive, and therefore somehow triumphant.

It’s such a shame that the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni court case, currently slated for 5.18.26, won’t be televised. Federal courts don’t allow cameras to record or broadcast. If broadcasting was allowed the trial could be a media-circus reboot of Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case, and it could be glorious.