Month: May 2011

The Lisbon-based Portugese distributor Zon Lusomundo Audiovisuais had scheduled a Thursday, May 5th screening of Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. This would have been yet another violation of the Cannes Film Festival exclusivity assumption. Portugese journalists getting a looksee two days from now would have meant reviews written in advance of Cannes and in all likelihood tweets and whatnot appearing prior to the big unveiling.

But this morning I heard from a Lisbon-based journalist friend who said that “I’ve just received news of the cancellation of our screening by ‘international imposition’. According to the Portuguese distributor, they’ve just received information today that all screenings must happen after May 17th.” I presume this means that The Tree of Life will screen at the Cannes Film Festival on this date. Or one day earlier.

ABCNews.com’s Jake Tapper is reporting “top source” White House information that President Obama and his team are discussing the possibility of releasing a photograph of Osama bin Laden‘s bullet-riddled corpse later today.

(l.) the corpse of Moe Green in Francis Coppola’s The Godfather; (r.) one-eyed Bugsy Siegel on the couch after his 1947 murder.

“The photograph, according to sources who have seen it, is bloody and gruesome with a bullet wound to his head above his left eye,” Tapper writes.

Wait…above the left eye? I read yesterday that OBL was hit dead smack through the eye like Moe Green and Bugsy Siegel. Have we been lied to again?

You need to prove to the skeptics that Osama bin Laden is dead-dead-dead with the above-described photo (sharply focused, radiant red color, brightly lit), with video of his body taken after the killing, with video of the funeral at sea, with print-outs of the DNA proof…with everything.

I sent an email this morning to various journo pallies, but maybe I forgot to cc some others. It reads as follows: “Just assuming that the usual La Pizza get-together is happening on Tuesday, May 10th, at 7:30 pm. I understand there’s a plan to use La Pizza‘s upstairs flat screen for a post-dinner karaoke session. I know a local guy who rents mikes, speakers and pignose amps for a reasonable fee — perhaps we could all chip in a couple of euros? Shouldn’t be much.”

When I talk on the phone with personal assistants I don’t know or who don’t know me, I still get asked “what newspaper or magazine do you write for?” or “Hollywood Elsewhere…is that a weekly?” Either old concepts die hard or people are a lot thicker than you might think. I always answer politely and patiently, of course, but my inner smartass wants to go all David Letterman and say, “I run one of those newfangled doohickey online whachamacallits…”

The only thing that Justin Kroll‘s just-posted Variety story has that I didn’t have this morning about Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Kill Bin Laden script is this: Boal’s script “will definitely include the 40-minute firefight at the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden was found and shot to death Sunday.”

Except a military analyst said today on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” that it probably wasn’t a 40-minute firefight but a two-minute firefight — 38 minutes of casing the joint and landing the choppers and figuring the angles and preparing the line of attack, and then two minutes of action.

Osama bin Laden, a woman and a child were reportedly sitting in a bedroom on the third floor. They all ate lead. I’ve read/heard that Osama took a double-tap to the head with a bullet through the left eye.

A six-day-old draft of Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained arrived in my inbox this morning. I haven’t read much but it has the same old Kentucky-yokel misspellings (to Tarantino the plural of the word “dragon” is “dragon’s”), the same racial bluntness that was in Pulp Fiction (the word “nigger,” etc.) and it’s 168 pages. Figure a good two and half hours. Who’s gonna tell QT to compress or cut it down?

I love that our Secretary of State is the kind of person who doesn’t sit impassively but reacts emotionally when she sees, feels or senses violent activity. I mean, you can tell from Hillary Clinton‘s hand-over-mouth gesture that something hairy was going on when this photo was snapped during the White House national security team’s “live-time” witnessing of Sunday’s attack upon Osama Bin Laden‘s Pakistan compound.

Hillary, in short, reacted like an average cultivated woman with a normal civilized aversion to violence. And that’s cool. I want a person who’s somewhat appalled by violence representing this country’s interests in diplomatic realms, and not some frosty Dick Cheney-like macho prick. Notice how none of the guys in the room are batting an eye. Joe Biden could be looking at a football game. President Obama is apparently reacting in some clenched way to what he’s watching or hearing, but he’s keeping his cool.

I have one observation. Remember how Hillary presented herself during the ’08 primary campaign again Senator Obama? As the governmentally experienced tough-ass who could handle scary foreign-policy problems at 3 am, and hinting that the inexperienced Obama might not be as cool, calm and collected as she when push comes to diplomatic shove?

I’ve done a little follow-upping on Mike Fleming‘s 5.2 Deadline story about Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Kill Bin Laden project, which they’ve been working on since ’09 if not earlier.

Oscar-winning Hurt Locker screenwriter-producer Mark Boal and I had dinner in downtown Manhattan a couple of years ago, and as we said goodbye he mentioned he was off to meet some commandos about something or other. That was the Bin Laden project.

The casting of Joel Edgerton, the 36 year-old Australian actor who played Stanley Kowalski opposite Cate Blanchett‘s Blanche DuBois in the BAM stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, is “probable but not done,” a production source told me this morning.

The title of the Biggy-Boal-Bin Laden project “is probably not Kill bin Laden,” he says. “Not sure. We have another title idea but don’t want to say yet.”

Boal “has been following the hunt for Bin Laden closely,” the source says, “and of course, the script will naturally incorporate” last night’s announcement about bin Laden’s death, he informs.

Shooting locations are not finally determined, but the project would presumably be shot in locations that could simulate Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, etc.

When will the Biggy-Boal-Bin Laden project begin shooting? Pretty damn quickly, I would think. Today if not yesterday. This is supposed to be the lower-budget quickie, mind, that Biggy-Boal were looking to do before the bigger-budgeted Triple Frontier flick.

Fleming wrote that while the film “isn’t specifically about the Al Qaeda leader,” Biggy-Boal “certainly [have] a celebratory ending to that dramatic story” with last night’s announcement that U.S. troops have killed Bin Laden.

Fleming also mentioned that he’s “heard that Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle chief Larry Ellison, is ready to fund it.”

The second-to-last Oscar Poker before Sasha Stone and I fly to Cannes, etc. (I was wrong in describing this weekend’s Oscar Poker as the last domestic one for a while — we’ll be recording #33 here in Los Angeles next Saturday. and #34 in Cannes.) Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

So Osama bin Laden didn’t quite live to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which is only four months and 11 days from now. Tip of the hat to the Navy Seals guys who reportedly put bullets in him…or whatever. That’s all I can muster at this juncture. This is a very, very big death. Can we go home now?

“President Obama’s announcement late Sunday that Osama bin Laden had been killed delivered not only a long-awaited prize to the United States, but also a significant victory for Mr. Obama, whose foreign policy has been the subject of persistent criticism by his rivals,” wrote N.Y. Times reporter Jeff Zeleny.

“The development is almost certainly one of the most significant and defining moments yet in his presidency. It allows Mr. Obama to claim the biggest national security victory in a decade — something that eluded President George W. Bush for nearly eight years — and instantly burnishes his foreign policy credentials at a time when he has been questioned on his decisions on the Middle East.”

“Mr. President, look at your hair! If it gets any whiter the Tea Party is going to endorse it.” Look at Trump’s reactions — a grumpy dick.

As I was re-watching Reds yesterday, it occured to me that Patton Oswalt bears a bit more resemblance to the real John Reed than Warren Beatty did in 1981. I’m not saying Beatty’s performance doesn’t work or that Oswalt could have pulled it off if he’d time-tripped back to the late ’70s and been cast by Beatty, etc. I’m saying Beatty resembled Reed as much as young Peter O’Toole resembled the real T.E Lawrence.

(l.) John Reed, Louise Bryant; (center) Patton Oswalt; (r.) Warren Beatty as John Reed in Reds.