Day: April 3, 2015

In my 4.1 review of Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), I called it “quite the loving valentine…a doc that is always looking to show understanding and affection…no judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away.” The reason for this, of course, is that the doc, which is expertly done and quite moving for the most part, had to go through Tina Sinatra and Frank Sinatra, Jr., who are the gatekeepers. “Rat Pack Confidential” author Shawn Levy commented the other day that “I’m sure Gibney had a very fine line to walk [with Tina and Frank, Jr.] and equally sure that the final product was gone over with extreme care.”

With that in mind, here’s a portion of a q & a between Gibney and Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir:

O’Hehir: “It’s probably not fair to say you go soft. But there are a lot of other narrative approaches one could make to this guy, looking at his history with women, his history with the Mob and the Kennedys, his relationship with race and politics, his switch from the left to the Reagan right, all of that. I completely agree that he’s the greatest popular singer of his period, a guy who blended the jazz and pop traditions like nobody else, an iconic American and an iconic performer. But while your film certainly brings up the darker stuff, you don’t dwell on it.”

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Just over five months ago a N.Y. Times story by Maureen Carvajal announced that a full-length version of Orson Welles‘ never-completed The Other Side of The Wind, which was shot in fits and starts from the early to mid ’70s, would be assembled and screened in May 2015. Carvajal wrote that the producers, particularly Royal Road Entertainment’s Filip Jan Rymsza and even more particularly Welles’ friend and colleague Peter Bogdanovich, who told Carvajal that he’d assumed the responsibility of cutting together the final version, “aim to have it ready for a screening in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth.”

In a 10.29 HE interview I was told by original Wind producer and Welles biogrqpher Joseph McBride that the film might also screen at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off next month.

Well, both scenarios are out the window, McBride now says. The Other Side of the Wind might screen somewhere later this year (Telluride? New York Film Festival?) but forget May 6th and forget Cannes.

“Post-production work on The Other Side of the Wind is underway in France,” McBride told me this morning. “But it won’t be ready in time for this year’s Cannes Film Festival” — a statement that obviously includes Welles’ 100th birthday, which is about five weeks away. “I never thought it could be finished that quickly. A considerable amount of editing and sound work still needs to be done. There are eighteen hours of negative. Welles edited 41 minutes of scenes [before he died]. As Welles used to say, ‘We will sell no wine before its time.'”

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“It is a good deal,” President Barack Obama said on Thursday, after the framework of an agreement to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb was announced. If it is good — and that will depend on getting the final settlement done and signed between now and June — it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity. And Republicans in Congress will have failed to thwart it because they embraced [those temptations].

“The G.O.P. did everything that it could to scuttle this deal. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader that will go down in the annals of diplomatic sabotage, and made it harder for American negotiators to demand a deal that the White House itself would find acceptable. They did so even though their ostensible goal—keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power—was the same as the President’s.

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