Year: 2011

I try to isolate myself from the Kardashian gas chamber as much as possible, but every now and then it flanks and surrounds. Yesterday I ran into two Kim posters — one on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, another in a Hollywood Blvd. parking garage near the Chinese. Nobody blames KK, of course, for pushing her brand and hustling around. I’d pocket the dough if I were her.

But what can be said for under-educated women who even half-believe that a Kim Kardashian endorsement = coolness and intrigue? Could there be a more unmistakable manifestation of 21st Century worthlessness? No striving, no singing, no intelligence to speak of, no acting, no book-writing, no athletic glory, no journalism, no filmmaking, no political passion, no charity, no oceanic exploring, no children…nothing. And yet she holds sway over millions of girly-girls.

Maybe the wacko Christians are right. Maybe we are living in end times.

Earlier this evening on Twitter: “In the latest chapter of Quentin Tarantino‘s lifelong effort to make movies about other movies or books, but NEVER, EVER about life as he’s lived it, thought it, felt it or dreamed it ALL BY HIMSELF & based on his own personal ‘walk the earth’ journey…

“…he’s decided to direct a remake or re-imagine or re-stylize or amplify upon a 1966 ultra-violent Franco Nero spaghetti western called Django, which he’ll be re-titling Django Unchained. Brilliant. Crawling even further up his own ass.”

I meant to say it took me three tweets to say this.

There’s a 4.29 Wrap story about how former hotshot Hollywood journalist Anita Busch is still pushing her civil lawsuit against Michael Ovitz and AT&T for damages stemming from the Anthony Pellicano wire-tapping scandal, which will always be linked, of course, to that June 10, 2002 episode with the dead fish on Busch’s windshield and the note that said “stop!,” etc. Almost nine years ago and counting.

I understand why it’s taken so long, and I definitely understand and respect tenacity and staying the course and snagging the dough if you can get it, but man…nine years of this? And how many yet to go? You gotta get what you can get — I get that — but you’ve also gotta let things go when you reach a certain degree of “fucking Christ enough already.”

Pellicano wire-tapped my ass in ’93 (or was it early ’94?) and bragged about it to me in a phone conversation, and instead of getting even by hurting him in some way I asked him for a favor seven or eight years later and he obliged because he knew he owed me one. And it was a pretty good favor. So it all worked out fine. I let it go and it came back to me like the tide.

I never liked Anita Busch, and I don’t like not liking people. Seven years ago I wrote that Busch was “like Old Faithful” in that “every time I saw her at a screening or a party, she always gave me a vaguely dirty look…Every. Damn. Time.” So I wish her well as long as I don’t have to see her again.

One of the reasons that hustlers like Elie Samaha and Don Kushner believe they can get away with what they’re apparently planning to do with the legendary cathedral that is Grauman’s Chinese is that they know that most Movie Catholics are caught up in their own stuff and will pay closer attention to Transformers 3 trailers than to Samaha and Kushner’s maneuverings.

HE is supposedly read and followed by a vocal and highly aware readership, and so far there are four lousy comments on the story about the Chinese-Studio 54 conversion (which was posted at 9 this morning)? if you’re not going to say something about a true temple of cinema being turned into a part-time temple of Charlie Sheen-style pleasuring, who and what are you?

What a drag that it all ended with Eyes Wide Shut — obviously engrossing and very carefully assembled but altogether the most lifeless and embalmed Stanley Kubrick film ever made. (Yet another hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)

Why go with this kind of photograph and particularly one with this angle if you’re going to apply subtle Photoshopping to a part of the anatomy that would be otherwise visible? I don’t really care and it’s obviously not a huge deal, but the absence makes it noteworthy. (Hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)

To get into this you need to think about the cadence and phraseology of Eric Burdon‘s “San Franciscan Nights.”

The first 25 minutes of Baz Luhrman‘s Moulin Rouge were so forced and frenetic that my head nearly exploded. (Just like that bald-headed guy with the glasses in David Cronenberg‘s Scanners.) On Monday, 5.2 at 3 pm, MTV.com is staging a livestream celebration of the film’s 10th anniversary with Josh Horowitz interviewing Baz, Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman and John Leguizamo.

The TCM Classic Film Festival began last night with a screening of An American in Paris, but they wouldn’t let me attend because…I don’t know why and don’t really care. There was a Vanity Fair-sponsored after-party following the Paris screening and VF reps are always giving off chilly-vibe, go-away, more-exclusive-than-thou attitudes. Or maybe Hollywood Elsewhere just isn’t cool enough in a general sense.

I’ve already missed the 9 am screening of Becket due to writing about Elie Samaha and Don Kushner, but here are some of the classic films I’d like to see projected on big (or at least moderately large) screens between now and Sunday night, not because I haven’t seen them all ad infinitum but because it’ll be cool to see them in presumably tip-top condition with an enthusiastic crowd:

All About Eve (1950), Bigger Than Life (1956), British Agent (1933), Carousel (1956), Citizen Kane (1941), The Devil is a Woman (1935), Girl Crazy (1943), The Godfather (1972), La Dolce Vita (1960), Manhattan (1979), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), The Mummy (1932), Niagara (1953), A Night at the Opera (1935), One, Two, Three (1961), Pennies from Heaven (1981), A Place in the Sun (1935), Reds (1981), Spartacus (1960), Taxi Driver (1976), The Tingler (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), West Side Story (1961), Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

Manhattan-based film curator Miriam Bale has called to complain about my having described a recent press release statement that the delayed Ishtar Bluray is “impending” as “apparent conjecture” on her part. I was told by 92Y’s Sarah Morton that the term “impending release” came from Bale, but Bale says it was Elaine May‘s “people” who submitted that term.

The press release about May’s 5.17 appearance at the 92nd Street Y in concert with the Ishtar Bluray release will be amended next week, she says.

I reported the other day that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment “will eventually, no doubt, release their Ishtar Bluray (i.e., the one that almost came out last January but then was pulled at the last minute) but to go by SPHE publicist Fritz Friedman nobody at that company has any specific idea when this long-delayed disc will finally appear. Sometime this summer, next fall, next year…we’ll get back to you.”

Here’s a screen capture of the offending sentence fragment in the original 4.25 press release:

LA movie fanatics need to savor the Old Hollywood aura of Grauman’s Chinese theatre as much as they can between now and May 20th because after that date the notoriously oily Elie Samaha and his partner Don Kushner, the film and video-game producer (Tron: Legacy), will be transforming the legendary Chinese into a kind of mixed-venue Studio 54.

This is what I’ve been told by a source I spoke to this morning who’s closely affiliated with the Chinese and has been observing walk-throughs by Samaha and Kushner and their associates and overhearing conversations, etc.

The currently-unfolding TCM Classic Film Festival may turn out to be the last serious film-buff event ever held at the Chinese, he suspects, in view of what Samaha and Kushner have in mind.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Daniel Miller reported last night that Samaha and Kushner are buying the theater and taking over the long-term lease of the adjacent Mann Chinese 6 megaplex from a joint venture of Warner Bros. and Viacom Inc. “for an undisclosed sum.”

Miller quoted real-estate broker John Tronson as saying that the “new owners are exploring ways to maximize ‘the real estate opportunity…they could do a lot of other things there that would drive people who come and visit and see it.”

The HE source is a regular reader and serious Movie Catholic who regards the coming Samaha-Kushner transformation of the Chinese as a vulgarization of a beloved venue that, despite its diminished business and faded glory, is still more or less considered to be the Notre Dame of LA movie theatres. The Chinese is a landmark that is deeply woven into Hollywood’s history and lore, and is a kind of spiritual institution that should be protected by the city and/or the state or some kind of high-minded, non-slimy consortium and managed by priests and choirboys, or certainly not by the likes of Samaha and Kushner, who are basically satanic figures in this context.

(l.) Elie Samaha; (r.) Don Kushner.

The Chinese has been a sagging or failing enterprise for a few years now, largely due to the competition from the Arclight, and the law of the jungle says that all weak animals will be eaten sooner or later by predators. But there’s something profoundly icky about Samaha and Kushner transforming the Chinese into a mixed-venue attraction — occasional screenings, special-event rentals, attracting sports fans, glitzy night-life empties and nocturnal pussy-hounds (i.e., the Charlie Sheen and Kim Kardashian crowd).

The HE source believes, but couldn’t provide proof, that Samaha was instrumental in arranging for basketball star Kobe Bryant to be honored with a hand-and-footprint ceremony at the Chinese.

The Chinese staff is off salary as of 5.20, the source informs, and that’s when the heartache begins.

Samaha, the former dry-cleaning entrepeneur who became a kind of funny-money movie producer starting in the late ’90s, has been running (via a sub-lease deal) the Vogue nightclub at Hollywood and Cahuenga as well as the Playhouse, a club that used to be the Fox Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, co-operated by Samaha (who also reportedly ran Roxbury, Sunset Room and White Lotus) and Rob Vinokur.

“Samaha has been doing walk-throughs at the Chinese for some time,” the source says, “and it is clear from conversations with his people that he wants to turn the Chinese into a mixed venue that can show films, hold concerts, be rented out with removable seats to accomodate dance floor or standing-room-only crowds, etc, along with adding a bar and kitchen.

“Samaha can sugarcoat this ‘mixed venue’ concept all he wants, but clearly his intentions are not for the preservation of a grand movie palace, but rather for a grand club,” the source contends.

Samaha “also intends to convert the Chinese 6 plex upstairs into a tri-level night club that would serve as after-party location for premieres and events that might be held at the Graumans, so the studios would be more or less forced to book a package with him if they want a film to premiere at Grauman’s Chinese.”