Day: July 19, 2017

Over the past decade or so I’ve devoted more than a little ink to Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy. Let no one doubt this is a highly unimaginative, under-budgeted B-level thing — the best term is tedious — but for some curious reason I’ve always found its silliness comforting on some level. A couple of years ago I mentioned the old saw about how the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies, and that basic levels of scriptwriting have been dropping, certainly when it comes to CG-driven tentpolers, since the turn of the century if not before. I’ve also been saying with some irony that there are “relatively few big-studio whammers that are as well-ordered and professionally assembled as Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy, as silly and inconsequential as that 1955 film was.”

In a Daily Beast interview with Tim Teeman, playwright Tony Kushner confirms that Steven Spielberg really is planning a big-screen remake of West Side Story, and that Kushner is working on the screenplay.

The story will still be set in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the ’50s, he said, and Leonard Bernstein‘s classic score won’t be touched. “I’m interested that we see love at first sight, as opposed to lust,” Kusher says of his version. “By the time they’re singing ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight,’ things are at a much deeper plane than just two horny kids.”

Kushner is a wonderful writer, but I tremble with dread at what Spielberg will do with this sad Romeo and Juliet-inspired tale.

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I’ll be ignoring the forthcoming Bluray of Journey To The Center of The Earth, the dismissable 1959 adventure flick with James Mason, Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl. The Eureka release will pop on 9.18.17. But I’ll always remember the film for two elements: (1) A line in Charles Brackett‘s screenplay, spoken by Thayer David‘s “Count Saknussemm”, in which he describes our nightly slumber ritual as “little slices of death.” (Which is true — going to sleep is like dying in a sense, and waking up the next morning is a little like being reborn.) And (2) Bernard Herrmann‘s musical score. Other than these, forget it.

Roughly nine months ago I posted a favorable reaction to a West Los Angeles research screening of Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, 11.10). It came from an anonymous HE reader whom I trust as far as it goes. At the end of his remarks the guy wrote that FS “will probably launch Three Billboards during next year’s fall festivals…probably Toronto, since Seven Psychopaths played there…and then come out in the fall.” Apparently this guy knew or had heard something. Apparently McDonagh’s ties to Team Toronto are still in place. Because word around the campfire is that Billboards is more likely to debut at Toronto than Telluride, presumably with a big gala during the first three or four days. Nothing confirmed, just hearing, etc.

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DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze has posted an interesting screen capture within a review of an upcoming Bluray of Arthur Penn‘s Mickey One. It’s a shot of Warren Beatty walking in front of Chicago’s Wood theatre while Otto Preminger‘s The Cardinal was playing there. Preminger’s low-tide drama opened on 12.12.63 so you’d have to figure this was captured in February of ’64. (Or maybe a bit later to judge by the Woods’ “nominated for 6 Academy Awards” proclamation.  As The Cardinal began playing on a reserved-seat basis and was therefore regarded as a high-prestige film, it wouldn’t have been unusual to linger at the Woods for a few months.) But Mickey One didn’t open until 9.27.65, which obviously indicates a prolonged and difficult post-production period. Under routine circumstances it would have opened in late ’64 or at the latest in early ’65.

Warren Beatty, 26 at the time, striding under the Woods marquee, mostly likely in early ’64.

The Cardinal billboard in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, 1964 — the arrival of the Beatles and the beginning of the general turning of the culture was only a month and a half away.

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