“Truman Capote was short — 5 foot, 3 inches — and spoke in a strange, high-pitched Southern accent. He was a wildly camp gay who effortlessly held whole parties in thrall with his anecdotal brilliance and cool outrageousness. I have always remem- bered one story about him, which I hope is true. At the height of his fame, a lady spotted him in a restaurant, rushed over and asked him to autograph her breast. Capote did so. Her husband, incensed, strode over, took out his penis and suggested Capote might like to autograph that too. “Well,” responded Capote, “perhaps I could initial it.” — Brian Appleyard writing in the London Times about the mythology surrounding the famed nonfiction novelist.

“To his credit, Gavin Hood‘s meditation on truth and reconciliation doesn’t traffic in the cheap thrills of art-house exploitation, like City of God; he wrings tears with sincerity, not cynicism.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis on Tsotsi.

New York journalist Lewis Beale acknowledges there’s “no buzz” on Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle/Yari Film Group, 3.17), but says “it’s quite good and contains a really fine performance by no less than Vin Diesel. It’s the true story of the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, involving members of the Lucchese gang, and Diesel plays a low-level mobster who decides to defend himself. Given that 90% of the movie takes place inside a courtroom it’s still quite watchable (Lumet is an old hand at procedurals in this vein — Prince of the City, Twelve Angry Men). And it has one of those great casts of (mostly) New York character actors, including Ron Silver, Peter Dinklage, Alex Rocco (really great), Richard Portnow, and other faces you’ve seen hundreds of times. Linus Roache is also terrific as a driven prosecutor. Won’t do a dime’s worth of biz, but should get good reviews and definitely builds Diesel’s acting cred.”

In a run-up to tomorrow’s debut of Madea’s Family Reunion, here’s a Salon piece about the Tyler Perry phenomenon by Russell Scott Smith. “Blacks and whites don’t always understand each other,” it begins. “But in Hollywood, everyone’s favorite color is green. So movie executives of all races took notice last February when a movie called Diary of a Mad Black Woman hit No. 1 at the box office — despite no bankable stars, scant mainstream press attention and reviews that were almost laughably bad. ‘Downright awful,’ ‘an absolute mess’ and ‘one of the worst pictures in ages,’ critics wailed. Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek called it ‘the sort of movie that’s so bad, you just wish it would go away.’ Roger Ebert was offended by the movie’s star, a “Big Momma’s House”-style granny named Madea, who smokes reefer, keeps a pistol in her purse and slices up furniture with a chain saw. This ‘Grandma from Hell,’ as Ebert called her, was played in drag by Perry. ‘All blame returns to Perry,’ Ebert wrote. ‘What was he thinking?’ But there was no arguing the numbers. Perry made Diary on a shoestring $5.5 million budget, and as of last April it had grossed some $50 million.”

That website put up by old-line James Bond fans that’s basically about trashing Daniel Craig is back up after going down earlier today. The anti-Craig thing is a bore anyway. He’s a well-planted actor with a cold flinty interior, which is precisely what the Bond films haven’t had since Sean Connery walked. So he’s not quite as tall…big deal. As Roger Moore says….

I’m using this
conversation with Running Scared director Wayne Kramer to fill up most of today’s “Elsewhere Live” broadcast, but here it is in advance. Kramer talks for a bit about his next film, Evilseek, a satanic supernatural thriller mixed with social commentary that Kramer describes as “Heaven Can Wait meets Seven.” The Weinstein Co. production will star Thomas Jane (or Tom Jane…which is it?) with lensing to begin in the late spring or early summer.

Went to one of the most serenely cool parties of my Hollywood life last night — a gathering for Capote‘s director Bennett Miller, thrown by his agents at Endeavor, inside a candle-lit sixth- floor suite at the Chateau Marmont with a sizable, south-facing balcony. Low-key, not crowded, soothing (the view of West Hollywood is what did it), waiters constantly hovering with hors d’oeuvres. Plus a few prominent names to lend a certain punctuation — Naomi Watts, Adam Sandler (whose next film, Reign O’er Me for director-writer Mike Binder, will start shooting in a week or two), Jake Gyllenhaal, Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, Tobey Maguire, Annapolis and Tristan & Isolde star James Franco, Courtney Love (who scares me a bit), World Trade Center producer Michael Shamberg and Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman. That piece I ran two weekends ago from an agent who has beefs about Berman (“Scent of Toast”) made talking to Berman kind of a “naah, don’t think so” proposition, so I steered clear. The talk was private, but thanks to Bennett for paving the way and PMK/HBH’s Joy Fehily for facilitating.

The thing that killed the belief in Will Ferrell being a hot star, I gather, is the relatively paltry $62 million and change earned by Bewitched last summer. It didn’t make more, producers and agents decided, because Ferrell can’t be and never will be a romantic star (not with that chest-hair problem). And now there’s a faint aroma of concern over his next big studio movie, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, November ’06). Directed by Marc Forster (Neverland, Monster’s Ball) from a clever script by last year’s hip-screenwriter-of-the-moment Zach Helm, it costars Maggie Gyllenhaal (as Ferrell’s romantic interest), Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson. Thing is, the cleverness of it feels to me like it might wear thin after 20 minutes, at which point the film will have to sink or swim based on the audience liking and identifying with Ferrell’s character, a dull IRS auditor. The hook is that he suddenly starts hearing his life being narrated as it happens. Helm’s script isn’t a cute-romance thing (it deals with death) but I don’t know. I started reading it a few months ago and went, “Okay…this is amusing…good idea”…but I wasn’t strongly pulled along and put it aside. I tried reading it again a couple of weeks later…ditto. (But I haven’t given up.) Meanwhile Winter Passing (Focus Features), a downerish drama about suffering writers that Ferrell costars in with Zooey Deschanel, is fizzling (the “cream of the crop” reviews were 42% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), but his next one, Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, an oafish, blue-collar NASCAR comedy (Columbia, August ’06), should do well. Ferrell’s next two films, apparently, are Blades of Glory, a sports drama about Olympic skaters, and David Mamet’s Joan of Bark: The Dog That Saved France.

This is most definitely a movie that I would pay to see. (A significant admission from a journo freeloader like myself.) Earlier this week six armed British thieves nabbed $40 million pounds in cash (which is what…roughly $75 million U.S.?) in the area of Kent. It’s not just the size of the haul that gets me, but how exactly do six guys hold on to that much dough (roughly $12,500,000 U.S. dollars each) without someone getting wind and ratting them out? How do they get the cash out of the country? Is it smarter to try to move the whole load and then split it up, or do they divide up in England and then it’s every man for himself? Where and how do you live with this responsibility? It’s a fascinating logistical challenge. Are these guys actual adults who won’t follow the Rififi script, or will most of them be arrested due to stupidity and panic within the next couple of weeks?

This Peter Howell blog riff (basically a q & a with himself) underlines the general consensus that the last possible cliffhanger element in the March 5th Oscar telecast — i.e., will it be Cinderella Man‘s Paul Giamatti or Syriana‘s George Clooney taking the Best Supporting Actor Oscar? — has been settled. Clooney will win it because he’s the charming get-around Guy of the Moment, and has been credited with doing the most to launch the current wave of political films, and because Academy folks want to hand him something for Good Night and Good Luck and most of them know that this black-and-white political film isn’t fated to win in the categories it’s been nominated for, so Clooney’s acting Oscar will be kind of a Good Luck gimmee. Plus he gave his career best performance in Syriana. Plus he got fat for it. So no contest.

Tom Cruise is reportedly keen to play the Glenn Ford bad-guy role in James Mangold’s forthcoming remake of 3:10 to Yuma, a 1957 black-and-white western directed by Delmer Daves and co-starring Van Heflin. (I’ve never seen this High noon-type drama, but something tells me I’ll be looking at the DVD fairly soon.) And yet, according to Variety‘s Michael Fleming, Cruise hadn’t even sat down with Mangold to chew things over. He just likes Stuart Beattie‘s rewrite of the Michael Brandt-Derek Haas script, and has funnelled news of his interest to Fleming. If the Yuma thing happens it’ll be Cruise going back to Collateral territory, playing another charming psycho type. A riff on the ’57 film says that “Ford practically steals the film in one of his best performances ever: calm, cool, and confident…a ruthless killer with polite manners and an honorable streak.”

Is Stuart Beattie prolific or what? The 3:10 to Yuma re-writer (who broke into the big-time with his Collateral screenplay) and Baz Luhrman have co-written “a sweeping Aussie [period] romance in the tradition of Gone with the Wind” that will costar Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, according to Dark Horizons. “Despite the amusing working title of ‘Project Oklahoma’, Luhrmann says that ‘it’s not a musical [but] uses the sweeping landscape of Australia and spans from the mid-1930s to the bombing of Darwin during World War II.” Luhrman says he’s going the non-CGI, Lawrence of Arabia route in the filming of the big outdoor eye-filling moments. The idea, said Luhrman, is “to do what David Lean did. He shot in Wadi Rum [in Jordan]. We’ll be shooting in the Kimberleys.” Filming will start in August “with backing from 20th Century Fox,” says the report. The budget is rumored to be somewhere around $30 million. Rehearsals begin in Los Angeles in two weeks.