Month: December 2015

A N.Y. Post description of a passage from Carly Simon‘s “Boys In The Trees,” which popped on 11.24: “About a month into a romance with Warren Beatty, Carly Simon got a call from him saying he was flying to New York from LA and absolutely had to see her. He’d be getting in at around 12:30 a.m. and would have to be gone by 5:30 for an early-morning shoot. He arrived, and the couple ‘made love like in a movie.’

‘“Warren was such a professional…the pressure points he knew about stirred a tremor in me,’ Simon writes. “Warren seemed to have created a brand new manual on how to make love.”

“After he left, Simon slept, then went for an 11 am appointment with her longtime therapist, whom she identifies as ‘Dr. L.’ She was raving to Dr. L about her night and what a ‘superman’ Beatty was in the sack, when she saw ‘Dr. L looked unwell.’ She asked what was wrong, and he told her.

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I’m sorry for not posting more quickly about the 11.25 passing of editor Elmo Williams. He was 102 years old. The High Noon tick-tock sequence is the reason Williams won the 1952 Best Editing Oscar, but if you watch it very closely Williams’ metronomic timing is sometimes very slightly off. Watch it again — the one-two-three-four montage was edited to match Dimitri Tiomkin‘s music, Williams wrote in his memoir, so every cut was supposed to happen at the precise instant of the final beat…but it doesn’t quite happen that way. Sometimes a cut will be a millisecond too early or late. I love this sequence but if I allow myself to get too anal about the timing it’s almost infuriating. Almost, I say.

Out of my once-active friendship with Matt Drudge and out of appreciation for his having posted a JEFFREY WELLS link on the Drudge Report for 15 years or so, I sent him the following message this morning: “I’ve seen The Revenant and the bear-attack scene your source has told you about is NOT a bear ‘rape.’ Paul Gleason got raped by a gorilla in Trading Places but this is a different deal. There are two or three bear cubs nearby — the scene is obviously about a mama bear going after Leo to protect her cubs. Terrifying aggression but no rape. Your source is off.”

For his historic performance as the young Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, HE’s own Paul Dano won the Best Actor award tonight at the 2015 Gotham Awards — champagne cocktails! Spotlight won the Best Feature award (totally expected) and Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer‘s Spotlight screenplay won also. And the Spotlight actors collected a previously announced Special Jury Award for Ensemble Performance. I was kidding when I wrote the headline — the Gotham wins for Spotlight are a good start but only that. I suspect that Spotlight will probably go all the way but who knows? The big thing tonight, in my view, is the Dano win — a compelling and perhaps even decisive argument for the Academy nominating Dano for Best Supporting Actor, at the very least. Gotham for Best Documentary: The Look of Silence; Gotham Independent Film Audience Award: Tangerine; Gotham Best Actress: Bel Powley, The Diary of a Teenage Girl; Gotham Best Screenplay: Spotlight.