I read Michael Fleming‘s Deadline story about Steven Spielberg bailing on American Sniper. Four of the five basic w’s of journalism — Who, What, When and Where — are answered for the most part, but the Why feels threadbare. “Spielberg couldn’t square his vision of this movie with the budget,” Fleming writes. I wonder what really happened. Hasn’t Spielberg heard about smaller budgets having an upside because they lead to creative cost-cutting?

I’ve been moaning for years about the absence of a Bluray of Martin Ritt‘s Hud (’63). James Wong Howe‘s Oscar-winning black-and-white widescreen photography cries out for a high-def mastering. You can watch a high-def Hud via Amazon HD, and I’m sure I’ll eventually figure out how to install Amazon HD on my 55″ Vizio. But there’s something about owning a Bluray that trumps access to a high-def download. I want a Hud Bluray to have and to hold. Paramount Home Video put out a DVD about 10 years ago, but I presume they’ve since licensed the rights to Warner Home Video.

In June 2011 I was sent a copy of Diablo Cody‘s Lamb of God, which eventually became the now-completed film called Paradise (out 8.9 via Direct TV, theatrically on 10.18). “That Michael Fleming logline about the main character, who’s literally named Lamb, being a Christian who turns to stripping is incorrect,” I wrote. “It is, however, a moral tale about a Christian girl among the hapless heathens. The Vegas strip but no stripping, Cheetah Club, cash gifts, a dead fiance, a skin graft, Vicodins, etc. A well-written, sometimes sassy but more often plain-spoken drama about sins, values, generosity, growth.”

Alan Spencer‘s delivery reminds me a bit of the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue in The Social Network and His Girl Friday. I understand Spencer’s affection, but I wasn’t that much of an Eastwood fan in the early days. I wasn’t even a fan of his directing until Unforgiven. Okay, I respected Play Misty For Me and Breezy and maybe Pale Rider, but I wasn’t knocked out by them. Forget the orangutan movies. But everything changed after Unforgiven. From that point on I was on my knees.

My Bluray and DVDs represent my taste and appetites, of course, but primarily they’re a kind of refuge and watering hole for the soul — emotional foxholes that I’ve sunk into many, many times and am ready to sink into again whenever the mood strikes. I look at them and I feel proud and accomplished, and I love that I don’t keep them in alphabetical order. I had nothing to do with making them, of course, but at least I’ve reached a point in my life in which I can recognize and revel in “the best.” Much like a wine connoisseur who derives profound satisfaction from owning several dozen bottles of really good stuff, etc.

On the same day that Peter Landesmann‘s Parkland opens stateside (9.20), an anti-Parkland book called “Reclaiming Parkland” will hit the stands. The author is JFK assassination-conspiracy authority, researcher and finger-pointer James DiEugenio. Parkland embraces the “Oswald did it alone” theology in Vincent Bugliosi‘s “Reclaiming History” and DiEugenio is a sworn opponent of this. The apparent result is that Parkland producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman plus their failed attempt to make Bugliosi’s book into a miniseries will face scrutiny in his book.

With Adam Sandler stooge-helmer Peter Segal (Tommy Boy, Anger Management, 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard) setting the tone and a flip, smart-ass script by Doug Ellin, Tim Kelleher and Rodney Rothman, Grudge Match (Warner Bros., 12.25) might be a half-tolerable comedy. Maybe. But you never know with these lowball enterprises which (let’s be honest) are aimed at Joe and Jane Popcorn from Paramus, New Jersey. You can bet that Grudge Match will be drenched in amyhdrous butter fat and covered with handfuls of salt. Alan Arkin as a trainer will be funny — you can tell that right off the top. Whose ex-wife or disapproving girlfriend will Kim Basinger play?

I was told today that three significant award-season films that are probably going to play the 2013 Telluride Film Festival — Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost and Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis — will not make the trek to the Toronto Film Festival, which starts just a few days after Telluride ends. Telluride films almost always go to Toronto so this is…well, it’s interesting.

I hope this information is wrong, or that the distributors of these films will think things over and change their minds. I saw all three at Cannes and suspect they’d all get a rousing reception at Toronto.

Seven years ago I ran a piece called “The Old Toronto Sidestep.” It was about a decision by Sony Pictures to not screen Ryan Murphy‘s Running With Scissors at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. A week earlier I had written that Fox Searchlight had made the same decision about Nicholas Hytner‘s The History Boys.

Three days ago A.V. Club’s Drew Fortune posted a q & a with The Canyons screenwriter Brett Easton Ellis. And there’s something that Sasha Stone said during our Oscar Poker chat a few hours ago that feeds into a similar comment that Ellis made. Stone said that J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost has to be seen in a theatrical environment because it really needs to be be front and center — it needs to dominate or command a viewer’s attention, and that viewers needed to give it their all and not watch it home with all the distractions. Here’s the Ellis quote:

“I have to admit that I might have been faking it for the last two or three years in terms of not accepting the fact that American film, as an art form, is nowhere near the place it once was, and that people have drifted over toward television and content on the internet. Basically, film and serious, auteur-driven movies…no one’s interested. I experienced the disconnect really powerfully for the first time this year. I do go to movies, and I still have that habit from when I was young: I want to drive to the theater, and I want the movie to control me. I don’t want to sit in my bedroom able to control the movie, and turn it off whenever I want. I like the fact that the movie demands things of you, and that’s what was always exciting about the moviegoing experience. I think for younger people, that just doesn’t hold an appeal. I’ve seen a lot of movies this year, and nothing’s good. I was really kind of depressed by it, but this idea that movies were no longer at the center of the culture definitely was announcing itself to me within the last three years. Sometimes an art form can lose popularity, and it’s not speaking to the masses in the way that it once was. This has been going on for a long time in American film, and yeah, it’s mildly depressing.”

I’m hearing that Ralph Fiennes‘ The Invisible Woman, a feminist-minded romantic drama that no one in the loop has spoken about for even a five-second stretch, will play at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival. The screenplay by Abi Morgan (Shame, The Iron Lady) is about a secret 13-year love affair between Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and young actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones). The affair began in 1857 when Dickens was 45, and ended with his death from a stroke in 1870. (At age 58?)

Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones in the possibly Telluride-bound The Invisible Woman.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I kicked it around late this morning. The 2013 New York Film Festival, Lovelace, Life of Pi vs. All Is Lost, predictions for the Telluride Film Festival, etc. I had just finished writing that longish “Into The Nightmare” piece and was feeling a little…deflated? I’m not happy with the tinny sound of this recording. It lacks fullness and volume.

JFK assassination conspiracy mania peaked with the 1979 conclusion by the House Select Committee that President Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” But the tide began to turn in the wake of Oliver Stone‘s fascinating but much-assailed JFK (’91) and the subsequent publishing of Gerald Posner‘s “Case Closed” (’93), which argued that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I not only feel that JFK is one of Stone’s finest films, but that it’s close to absurd to completely dismiss the scores of hints and indications that Oswald wasn’t the only shooter that day in Dealey Plaza. I’ll admit that it’s theoretically possible that Oswald acted alone, but this has always seemed highly unlikely to me. There is simply too much smoke. Nonetheless Posner’s and Vincent Bugliosi‘s book “Reclaiming History” (’07) have made viewpoints like mine seem a bit dated and outre.

This background makes the recent publishing of Joseph McBride‘s “Into The Nightmare: My Search For The Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit” — an unregenerate, balls-against-the-wall JFK conspiracy book that thoroughly and painstakingly dismisses the lone-gunman theory — seem extra-nervy. Especially considering that the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder on 11.22.63 is less than four months off, and the fact that two films that embrace the Posner-Bugliosi scenario are opening this fall — Peter Landesman‘s Parkland (Open Road, 9.20) and the National Geographic Channel’s Killing Kennedy, which will air sometime in November.