Year: 2017

You’re Pushin’ Too Hard

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From a producer pal: “Did you know there’s a relatively new industry newsletter called The Ankler? It’s daily and is written by Richard Rushfield, formerly of Hitfix. And every day it has ‘The Daily Wells’, which slags you off. Just being a friend in case you haven’t heard.”

Ankler greeting: “Welcome to this Beta edition of Hollywood’s own up-and-coming daily newsletter. Here you’ll find your morning round-up and dissection of the day’s parade in the business, featuring news, gossip, amazing tidbits and fearless, pointed analysis. If you like or don’t like, or really hate what you see, let us know — richard@theankler.com. And please, if you enjoy The Ankler pass this email on to your friends and colleagues!”

Apparently it’s some kind of subscription-only newsletter — i.e., no URL.

Eyes Have It

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Edward R. Murrow‘s Person to Person interview with Marilyn Monroe happened on 4.8.55. It happened at the Weston, Connecticut home of photographer Milton Greene, with whom Monroe had partnered the previous December on Marilyn Monroe Productions. (Two of the results were The Prince and the Showgirl and Bus Stop.) Monroe’s portion starts around 3:45 (or 4:20 if you watch the alternate clip after the jump). I’d never watched Monroe speak in an off-the-cuff fashion before this. Those eyes are amazing. She’s no Einstein but the vulnerability and empathy….wow.

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Ethical-Political Quandary

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It was announced today that the complications surrounding Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment issues have caused Fox News (i.e., the Murdochs) to cut him loose. Question: Is he toast everywhere eternally or can he submit to the usual remedies and wind up with another big-station or big-radio berth within a year or less? Can he do a Brian Williams or more precisely a Mel Gibson — a long exile followed by eventual rehabilitation via two or three soul-baring interviews in which he apologizes for having been a pig and a dog? Imagine that it’s the summer of 2018, and that O’Reilly has done all this and thereby achieved limited reprieve status (not among women or progressives but with advertisers). If you were the head of CNN, would you offer him a slot? You know that hinterland righties will tune in if he returns.

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What Does Shape of Water’s 12.8 Release Mean?

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Guillermo del Toro and I did breakfast at the Hotel Majestic during the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. He was serving as a juror. While our chat was off the record, I think it’s fair to mention that he said he was tiring of making big, effects-driven movies (i.e., Pacific Rim) and that he wanted to tone it down and go in a more personal vein. I took that to mean he wanted to make more films in the vein of Pans’ Labrynth, The Devil’s Backbone, Chronos, Mama, The Orphanage, etc. (The last two he produced but didn’t direct.)

I’ve been presuming all along that The Shape of Water, a period fantasy-adventure which he directed and co-wrote, would be one of these. But will it be? The fact that Fox Searchlight has announced a 12.8 release date indicates a belief in its award-season potential. Or does a December release mean all that much when we’re talking about GDT’s fantastical realm? I’m saying in the most respectful and laudatory terms that GDT doesn’t do “Oscar friendly” as a rule. I mean that as high praise.**

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Last Days of Classic HE

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HE readers need to understand…hell, I need to understand that this may be the last full week of classic Hollywood Elsewhere. Assembling the new design has been hell, but once the mock-up ads are created and put in place and I’ve sat down with Sasha Stone and learned the new WordPress scheme, the switch will be thrown. That may happen…I don’t want to predict but possibly by next Monday or Tuesday. Maybe. Advisory: The smartphone edition will be narrower than the wide-angle laptop version, which will result in some elements (like my headshot) being sliced off. HE’s classic design lasted 12 and 2/3 years — the site launched in mid-August 2004.

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Image of Yeshua Has Never Sunk So Low

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Jesus Christ has long been imagined by U.S. heartland types as a handsome, Anglo-Saxon guy with kindly brown eyes and gleaming, shoulder-length hair. Then came Jeffrey Hunter‘s blue-eyed Nazarene in Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings (’61) and jokes about Christ being retailored to suit pop-culture tastes — “I was a teenaged Jesus.” With the ascent of the Christian right in the late ’70s Jesus became a more staunchly Anglicized figure — a vaguely conservative Orange County guy with pearly white teeth and broad shoulders, and who always wore freshly-pressed white robes. Since Donald J. Trump‘s inauguration some fringe-y conservative Christians (like Joshua Feurstein) have publicly embraced a belief that Trump’s political agenda and the spiritual tradition of Jesus Christ are more or less aligned. Did I say “fringe’y”? I meant foam-at-the-mouth insane.

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Good As It Got

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The first and only time I saw Robert Bresson‘s L’Argent was inside one of those little shoebox theatres in the old Beverly Center. It was either during the fall of ’83 or the winter of ’84. Based on Leo Tolstoy‘s “The Forged Coupon”, and Bresson’s final film. Dry, subtle, precise. Bresson never faked anything — movie-pretend wasn’t in his vocabulary. When his protagonist (Christian Patey) killed a family with an axe near the end, Bresson only suggested the killings, and chastely at that. The Criterion Bluray pops on 7.11.17.

Later that month Criterion is also releasing a Bluray of Albert Brooks’ Lost in America (’85). Will Criterion’s 2K restoration deliver the necessary “bump”? Let’s hope so. I’ll buy it for (a) the conversation between Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide, (b) interviews with Julie Hagerty, executive producer Herb Nanas and director James L. Brooks, and (c) an essay on this seminal Reagan-era film by Scott Tobias.

Steamy Habits

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Don’t tell Glenn Kenny but there were two hot lesbo nun movies at Sundance ’17 — Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, which delivers a single, highly affecting erotic scene in the third act, and Jeff Baena‘s The Little Hours, which I’m told was the “real” hot lesbo nun movie to see. Obviously more bawdy than “hot”. The Boccaccio-inspired comedy stars Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Kate Micucci, Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon. It opens on 6.30.17 via Gunpowder & Sky, which bought John Sloss‘s Filmbuff last fall.

Persistence of Dance Camera West

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Dance Camera West is an annual two-weekend Los Angeles film festival about…you’ll never guess.  Okay, the transportation of dancing.  It’s been a thing for 16 years, but I didn’t know that until this morning. Because I’m not exactly a dance enthusiast. I respect and admire great dancing (I’ll never forget a Twyla Tharp show I saw at the Winter Garden in the ’80s), but it doesn’t make me levitate as a rule. But I like it.

The Dance Camera West Film Festival, a selection of dance-themed shorts with a feature or two thrown in, kicks off on Thursday night (4.20) at Royce Hall, and will continue over the weekend at UCLA’s Fowler Museum ($12 admission). Free stuff will occur the following weekend at the Santa Monica Pier.

Tonia Barber, a friend of HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko, has been running the operation and programming the films for six years now. She’s paid a modest salary, works hard, consults with a board…the usual razmatazz. But she’s mainly doing it for love, or so it seems.

“The films we show don’t capture dance…we show films in which dance was made for the camera,” Barber says. “The festival has a certain history, a certain audience and it has to exist. It has to be out there, and I would feel really sad if it wasn’t.”

Weren’t the legendary dance numbers of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly all about integrating dance, atheleticism, camera moves and production design? Sure, she says, but “the technology of that time created that product…dance films today are more fluid and free-form, more about improv, nativism.. shot hand-held, drones, GoPro…how people have come to capture the form.”

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