Singer, dancer, choreographer and director Alan Weeks, who made his big-screen mark as Willie the drug dealer in a memorable first-act scene in The French Connection and particularly for being racially harassed by Gene Hackman‘s Popeye Doyle for “picking your feet in Poughkeepsie,” has died at age 67. Weeks ironically taught theater in Poughkeepsie in the latter stages of his career; he also directed productions for the Capital Repertory Theater in Albany. Weeks had spent the last 30 years as a performer and educator in the Albany region, according to a Times Union obit. Weeks had lived in Rensselaer County since 1985. He had a featured role in Barbara Streisand‘s original 1964 Broadway production of Funny Girl at the Winter Garden. Weeks later performed in The Wiz and Ain’t Misbehavin’. He also directed and choreographed 1992’s The High Rollers Social and Pleasure Club.

Joan Leslie, James Cagney’s romantic costar in Yankee Doodle Dandy, passed three days ago in Los Angeles. She was 90. Condolences to family, friends, fans. Leslie was a plucky, likable second-lead type who could cry on cue. Her career peaked for two years due to (a) a small role in Raoul Walsh‘s High Sierra, and (b) two lead roles that followed — Gracie Williams, the fiance of Gary Cooper‘s Alvin York, in Howard Hawks‘ Sergeant York (’41) and Mary Cohan, the singing girlfriend and then wife of Cagney’s George M. Cohan in that nominee for the 1942 Best Picture Oscar, which was directed by Michael Curtiz. Honestly? I only remember Leslie from Yankee Doodle Dandy. I remember that Cooper’s mother was played by Margaret Wycherly (a.k.a., Ma Jarrett in White Heat) but I don’t remember Leslie, and I swear to God the only actress I remember from High Sierra is Ida Lupino.

36 and 1/2 years ago Saturday Night Live fans saw a musical skit called “Bend Over, Chuck Berry.” Season 4, episode 17 — 4.14.79. I don’t recall that this skit was included in the SNL 40th Anniversary Special that aired last February. It’s understandable if it wasn’t used because it’s obviously politically incorrect by today’s standards. It made fun of gays and gay culture as well as The Village People, who were riding high back then. But it was really about the horror that was late ’70s disco music. It was about the love that SNL writers felt for real rock ‘n’ roll and how much they despised the shit they had to listen to when they visited Studio 54. “Bend over, Chuck Berry / Put your guitar away / ‘Cause they’re playin’ disco music / From New York to L.A. / Take a look around you / There’s no more rock and roll today / So bend over, Chuck Berry / Disco is here to stay.” Don’t kid yourself — gay urban men were virtually required to worship disco back then, and in my eyes that made them the aesthetic enemy. In ’78 or thereabouts I owned a T-shirt that said “Death to Disco.”

I’m not surprised in retrospect when Charlie Kaufman‘s Anomalisa won the Grand Jury Prize at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. Esoteric originality will always find support and affection at that festival. Nor was I entirely surprised when Paramount Vantage acquired it for distribution. (The initial plan is open it theatrically on 12.30.) This despite my having felt, at best, a certain arms-length admiration when I saw it in Telluride about five weeks ago.

I called Anomalisa “another humanistic downhead visit to Charlie Kaufmanland — an amusing, occasionally touching stop-motion piece about a pudgebod asshole visiting a No Exit hotel in Cincinatti and slowly dispensing his depression-fueled mustard-gas vibes to one and all.”

The pudgebod — an author of books on customer service named Michael Stone –is voiced by David Thewlis. His brief romantic encounter with Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s Lisa, a fan, leads him to a moment of self-reflection and in fact confession.

Mine is a minority view. There are many others who were deeply touched if not amazed by Kaufman’s film; some are even saying it deserves a Best Picture nomination. That’s definitely not happening, but it could snag, appropriately, a nomination for Best Animated Feature.

“Leaving aside the simplistic focus on who won or lost, Bernie Sanders clearly appealed to many people Tuesday night, and his secret weapon helps explain why. The gift of plain speech. Not so much the content of Sanders’s remarks, though that matters, than the way he delivers them. He uses the kind of language ordinary people use themselves and speaks with a passion that makes it clear he genuinely believes what he’s saying. Sanders was the only person on that stage Tuesday night who talked like a real person, not a calculating politician or policy wonk.

“In a word, Sanders comes across as authentic. And authenticity goes a long way with Americans. We are a people for whom ideology matters a lot less than speaking plainly and sticking by your beliefs. — From a 9.14 Nation article by Mark Hertsgaard, titled “Bernie Sanders Has a Secret Weapon, and the Media Elites Just Don’t Get It.”

The Westwood all-media screening of John McTiernan and Joel Silver‘s Die Hard happened in early July of ’88, and I was there with bells on. It was thrilling and amusing, shamelessly manipulative, beautifully choreographed, bigger than life, a knockout. The crowd loved it. A week after it opened I went back to see it with then-wife Maggie and Jett, who was then about six weeks old. (Unlike the vast majority of parents who take their infant children to movies, I took Jett out to the lobby when he started crying.) Die Hard was a major-league gift — a well-engineered, big-concept actioner of the first order. If you didn’t love it there was something wrong with you.

But no act of pleasure goes unpunished, and for the sin of enjoying Die Hard 27 and 1/2 years ago, audiences have been subjected to sequel after diminishing sequel, four of them, each depressing or deflating in its own way and starring the ruggedly sassy Bruce Willis. There have also been six Die Hard video games. And now comes the latest corruption — a new franchise about the young John McClane called Die Hard: Year One. This, of course, is a standard changeover tactic — retiring the original actor and passing an iconic role to some younger fellow, which of course originated with the James Bond franchise.

Most of the reaction to Die Hard: Year One has been negative, of course — this is pathetic, let the franchise die, is there no limit to the greed?

I don’t know why this is called “The Red Drum Getaway” but it was edited by a Parisian outfit called Gump Studios. Brilliant work but I have to say I was disappointed that it wasn’t Scotty being beaten to death by the apes with the bones. Or was it? (Thanks to HE commenter “Magga” for the heads-up.)

This is one of the greatest and saddest endings of any film ever. Because there isn’t anyone with four or five decades under their belt who doesn’t have a memory or two like this one. The idealism of youth never holds; one way or another it detaches and falls away like dried leaves. In 99% of The Godfather, Part II Michael Corleone is a calculating ice man, at best a shadow of a remnant of the guy he was at 19 or 20. And then at the very end we finally meet that guy, and it’s heartbreaking to think of how young Michael was gradually bled to death, how his family’s tradition gradually caught up to him and forced his dark hand.

I have to say that while HE favorite Bernie Sanders came off like a ballsy boxer during last night’s Las Vegas debate, Hillary Clinton did pretty well also. She didn’t flub anything, she looked good (somehow the eye bags have been largely scrubbed away), she sounded confident, she had a good attitude. This plus the Saturday Night Live appearance as “Val” were her two best moments so far, and yet Bernie’s “people are sick to death of your damn e-mails” lines was easily the best of the night. I didn’t see the debate until last night after returning from the Beasts of No Nation after-party. Thoughts?

The Bill Pohlad metaphor is enormously appealing to anyone who has longed to build a career as a director but has put it off for years or even decades. That’s what Pohlad did for nearly a quarter-century after directing Old Explorers, a Jose Ferrer-James Whitmore 1990 relationship drama that was barely noticed. Pohlad stopped directing, and after the turn of the century gradually made his way into producing.

He exec produced Brokeback Mountain, A Prairie Home Companion and Food, Inc., and produced Into the Wild, The Tree of Life and 12 Years a Slave. And then, after a hiatus of 22 or 23 years, Pohlad returned to directing with Love & Mercy, and in one of the most unlikely scenarios ever seen in this town he turned his creative life around by delivering easily one of 2015’s best films and a possible Best Picture nominee.

Love & Mercy director Bill Pohlad on the roof of Beverly Hills Peninsula Hotel — Tuesday, 10.13, 12:10 pm.

Don’t kid yourself — a born-again director is something to be.

I spoke to Pohlad yesterday morning on the roof of the Beverly Hills Peninsula Hotel. There were a lot of corporate-looking guys sitting near us. It felt like Palm Springs up there, like a blast furnace. We were near a pool but no fetching bikini babes to speak of. Pohlad was the most casually dressed rich guy up there, and I was the second most casually dressed except I was just an interloper in a black T-shirt. When I took the elevator back to the street I shared it with two Japanese guys in black suits. Very corporate, very conservative.

Again, the mp3.

Pohlad is now working on a new film with Love & Mercy screenwriter Oren Moverman that he wouldn’t say much about, but it involves some kind of manifestation of PTSD.

Restoration guru Robert Harris has generously paved the way for Hollywood Elsewhere to visit the Library of Congress film storage vaults in Culpeper, Virginia, which is otherwise known as the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The visit will happen on Monday, 10.26, following my four-day visit to the Middleburg Film Festival. I’ll be staying in D.C. on Sunday and Monday nights, 10.25 and 10.26, and the campus, I’m told, is a 90-minute drive from Washington in good traffic. On Tuesday morning I’ll fly down to the Savannah Film Festival where I’ll be saying for five days and a wakeup — Tuesday, 10.27 through Sunday, 11.1.

I’ll be hosted at the Packard campus by Kenneth Weissman, who manages the motion picture preservation laboratory, as well as Mike Mashon, who heads the Moving Image section. 

I asked Mashon about Jerry Lewis‘s The Day The Clown Cried, and he reminded me that the Library’s agreement with Lewis ensures that no element associated with it will be available to the public for another ten years, or until 2025. “I can’t even look at the cans that The Day The Clown Cried is stored in?”, I replied. “Just the CANS? Otherwise, great…looking forward & thanks.”

A respectful anti-Spotlight narrative is already beginning to take hold among older, conservative-minded Academy members. It’s a very good film, they say, but not really the Academy’s cup of tea. A very traditional movie in a building-blocks sense — it’s certainly not audaciously designed, they say — and therefore more of a B-plus than an A. Just because journalists flipped for it in Telluride and Toronto doesn’t mean it’s one of “our” favorites so don’t try and push us around. We like what we like.

And you know what they do like? The Martian, of course (there’s no stopping that one), and Bridge of Spies, believe it or not. 

When an Academy friend told me last night that Bridge has played very well with Academy types, I went “ohhh, God!” He said, “Will you calm down, please? You have your opinion but other people are entitled to theirs, and I’m telling you that it’s a very well-liked film and if I had to predict I’d say it’s going to become a Best Picture nominee.” It’s an okay film, I said — not bad, acceptable, reasonably well done. But a Best Picture nominee? What, are they looking to kiss Spielberg’s ass for the 37th or 38th time because he’s worth over $3 billion? Obeisance before power.