From Paul Schrader’s Facebook: “This signed photo (I believe it’s from the Harry Ransom archives) captures a moment in male Hollywood identity. Marty and I (counter-culturalists to the core) appear at a New Years Eve party [12.31.73] at Michael and Julia Phillips’ Malibu house in three-piece suits. All our friends are hippies, yet here we are. We wanted to be grownups. Our cultural DNA. What filmmaker today wants to be a grownup? Why am I so much taller? [Because] I’m wearing platform shoes. Those were the times.”

Mean Streets had opened a couple of months earlier. Scorsese was beginning work on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, which shot in the late winter or early spring of ’74 and opened on 12.9.74. Schrader and his brother Leonard would soon begin work on The Yakuza. Their script sold for $325,000. I’ve forgotten when Schrader wrote Taxi Driver, but it was during a down-and-out period (Schrader had broken up with a girlfriend, had been living in his car) and sometime before this photo was taken. I think. I need to bone up.

According to Elle.com’s Alyssa Bailey, “Lady Gaga‘s photographed kiss with her audio engineer Dan Horton wasn’t just a public declaration of their really new romance; it was also her way of definitively shutting down tabloid rumors that she and her A Star Is Born co-star Bradley Cooper could become romantically involved now that he and his girlfriend of four years, Irina Shayk, are no longer dating.

“Entertainment Tonight was told by a source close to the singer that Gaga is done letting that talk circulate. “All the talk of Bradley was all in fun, [but] she’s ready to dispel those rumors once and for all,” the E.T. source said.”

Earlier this month a producer who’s been around and gets around told me that for what it was worth she believed the talk about Bradley and Lady Gaga being a couple, “otherwise Irina would not have walked out [on him]. And they are going to deny it because it makes both of them look like home busters. Bad for their images. People already think he’s too full of himself.”

Apparently “no one” is surprised that Gaga is “dating Horton now,” Bailey has written. “She likes to date men on her team…she is known as a workaholic, so it fits her lifestyle to meet someone while working.”

If I was Gaga or in fact any intriguing woman, I would never become romantically entwined with a guy who wears a “Hitler Youth” haircut — surely one of the ugliest style trends to happen to urban hipster males since the turn of the century. Undercuts have been happening for at least five years now. One of the first acknowledgments happened when Jezebel‘s Kate Dries posted “Every Dude You Know Is Getting This Haircut” on 4.16.14. I didn’t mention it until a year later (“Surrounded by Hitler Youth“).

Oh, to look like Heinrich Himmler while roaming around WeHo on the rumble-hog! No, actually…forget it.

Or the black Thelma and Louise?

My one big error of my 2019 Cannes Film oFestival experience was missing Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite, which would up winning the Palme d’Or. 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I’ll be catching it this evening.

What am I getting from KStew’s Vanity Fair cover shot? Mainly that she’s loaded. Which is supposed to be beside the point, but now it’s not. What is the scale of my indifference if not repulsion to the new Charlie’s Angels? No offense but somewhere between 8 and 9. The thing to watch and wait for is Seberg, which, I’ve heard, is a keeper from the perspective of Stewart’s performance. The quality of the film itself is allegedly another matter.

“My response is Flint is the tip of the iceberg. I was in Denmark, S.C., where there is a lot of talk about it being the next Flint. We have an administration that has gutted the Clean Water Act. We have communities, particularly communities of color and disadvantaged communities, all over this country, who are suffering from environmental injustice.

“I assure you…I lived in Grosse Pointe, [and] what happened in Flint would not have happened in Grosse Pointe. This is part of the dark underbelly of American society. The racism, the bigotry and the entire conversation that we’re having here tonight, [and] if you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.

“We need to say it like it is — it’s bigger than Flint. It’s all over this country. It’s particularly people of color. It’s particularly people who do not have the money to fight back. And if the Democrats don’t start saying it, why would those people feel they’re there for us. And if those people don’t feel it, they won’t vote for us, and Donald Trump will win.” — Marianne Williamson during last night’s Democratic debate in Michigan.

From “Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist Conversation With Richard Nixon“, posted yesterday by The Atlantic‘s Tim Naftali: “The past month has brought presidential racism back into the headlines. This October 1971 exchange between current and future presidents [Nixon and Reagan] is a reminder that other presidents have subscribed to the racist belief that Africans or African Americans are somehow inferior.”

The discussion happened after the UN had voted to expel Taiwan while recognizing the Communist government of mainland China. Nixon had led opposition to the measure, but it passed after gaining support among European, Asian and among African delegates. After the vote, members of the Tanzanian delegation reportedly danced in the aisles of the General Assembly. Regan called Nixon to vent.

Reagan said, “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did…”

“Yeah,” Nixon interjects.

“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries…damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!’ Reagan quips with Nixon laughing in agreement.

“The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public,” Naftali writes.

The racist term “monkeys” was used by others in the early ’70s. On 9.24.73 ABC’s Howard Cosell exclaimed “Look at that little monkey run!” He was referring to Herb Mul-key of the Washington Redskins, and particularly his 97-yard kickoff return for a touchdown in the fourth quarter against the St. Louis Cardinals. And don’t forget that in Joseph Sargent‘s The Taking of Pelham 123 (’73), Walter Matthau‘s character referred to a group of Japanese businessmen as “monkeys,” incorrectly assuming that they didn’t speak English.

Did director Martin Scorsese and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker cut this Irishman trailer? Let’s assume they did. The rhythmic, hard-punch, slam-bam cutting is obviously expert and tense as a mofo, and I love how they withhold a good look at the de-aged Robert DeNiro (as legendary hitman Frank Sheeran) until the very end. I’m not seeing any “uncanny valley” or dead shark eyes here — I’m seeing DeNiro after a visit to the best Prague plastic surgeon who ever lived. The tone of steely menace is unmistakable. Scorsese is back in his comfort zone…goombah gangster shit. Sidenote: Hollywood Elsewhere apologizes for posting this reaction 75 minutes after the Irishman trailer surfaced at 5 am Pacific, or an hour late. No excuse.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg: "Nominate me and you get to see the President of the United States stand next to an American war veteran and explain why he chose to pretend to be disabled when it was his chance to serve." #DemDebate #DemocraticDebate pic.twitter.com/OnJDK3dNAK

— The Hill (@thehill) July 31, 2019

Over the last decade geiger-counter readings of the Noah Baumbach-Greta Gerwig creative partnership have been steady and consistent, but over the last few weeks they’ve abruptly changed.

Over the last 14 or 15 years Baumbach has been the grade-A guy who made smart movies that the film festival elites loved or liked a lot — The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, Frances Ha, While We’re Young, Mistress America, DePalma, The Meyerowitz Stories — but which the popcorn munchers have been less than roused about.

With Greenberg Gerwig began carving a rep as Baumbach’s spirited soul partner, and stepped out big-time with the brilliant, co-written Frances Ha (’12) and Mistress America (’15). With Ladybird (’17), which she directed and wrote, Gerwig connected with the swells as well as the ticket-buyers in a much bigger way ($78.6 million worldwide gross) than any Baumbach film has managed.

But now the tables have suddenly (or at least seemingly) turned with Baumbach’s Marriage Story receiving great pre-festival-season (is there another film that’s playing Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York?) while Gerwig’s Little Women, which has been testing for quite some time, is still being worked on and sidestepping the season.

Word around the campfire is that the first half meanders while the second half connects, and that Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh are the standouts.

The best man in the Democratic race for President — the smartest, the most pragmatically left-centrist and the most generationally dynamic guy to potentially succeed Donald Trump in 2021 — hasn’t the faintest prayer of winning because of African-American voters. A CNN poll released on 7.1 showed that Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana mayor, has “continued to receive zero support” from this constituency.

By the same token Senator Bernie Sanders was also zotzed by African-American voters, particularly after winning only 14% of the black vote vs 86% for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 South Carolina primary. (In an inter-campaign memo read by the N.Y. Times, Sanders staffers wrote that “the margin by which we lost the African-American vote has got to be — at the very least — cut in half or there simply is no path to victory.”)

Basic math tells us that Buttigieg’s situation is even worse.

And so, because of African-American voters, we have three admirable but vaguely unsettling choices — Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. All are fine in terms of who they are and the humanist policies they’d pursue, but a seat-of-the-pants feeling tells me that Warren and Harris, admirable as they are, might not prevail against Trump (although they also might), and that Typewriter Joe, if he wins, will be at best a doddering one-termer. Biden is a good man and a far better human being than Donald Trump, but he’s the wrong guy to steer the sip in the 2020s. Because baby, baby, baby he’s out of time.

Here’s a small but curious oddity in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, which will open just after Labor Day.

The film begins with footage of Ronstadt, 73, visiting the Mexican town of Banamichi, where her grandfather was born, and listening to a music festival. A significant portion of the doc is about Linda’s ethnic as well as musical identity. The last 25% is about Ronstadt’s decision to musically celebrate her Mexican heritage with 1987’s “Canciones de Mi Padre” as well as “Mas Canciones” (’91) and “Frenesi” (’92).

The film conveys a clear sense of Ronstadt having found spiritual fulfillment and completion by way of embracing her family’s history and traditions.

Except all through the ’60s, ’70s (her biggest commercial decade) and most of the ’80s nobody knew Ronstadt was of Mexican descent. For the simple and obvious reason that she has a German last name. In the doc media mogul David Geffen and fellow troubador Jackson Browne both say they didn’t know about Ronstadt’s Latin ancestry. Nobody did until she went ethnic in the late ’80s. All fine and good, but that’s a significant cultural-identity issue — German last name vs. Mexican heritage — so you’d think that Epstein and Friedman would include a line or two of explanation. But they don’t.

In a statement provided to Hollywood Elsewhere, the filmmakers said that “we only went back as far as her grandfather, the generation she would have personally been acquainted with. Otherwise it was just too much backstory to work in, and didn’t seem relevant to her musical story, which was our focus.”

I understand this answer, but ignoring where “Ronstadt” comes from still seems a bit odd. The Wiki fact is that Linda’s great-grandfather, graduate engineer Friedrich August Ronstadt (who went by Federico Augusto Ronstadt) “immigrated to the Southwest in the 1840s from Hanover, Germany, and married a Mexican citizen, eventually settling in Tucson.”

It’s a minor omission and unimportant in the greater scheme of Ronstadt’s musical life, but the decision to avoid mentioning Friedrich or Federico is still a head-scratcher.

So here’s a theory or, if you will, a suspicion. The reason Linda’s great-grandfather is completely ignored is because it would have been politically incorrect to have mentioned him. [Full disclosure: My mother’s family, named Grube, was half-German.] The arc of the last third of Linda’s life was about reconnecting with her Mexican family roots. The movie, as mentioned, is all over this aspect, but no one wants to hear about some knockwurst-and-sauerkraut guy from Hanover, Germany who came to this country 175 years ago. Even if a brief mention of same would have explained the basics.

Because whiteness, let’s be honest, isn’t especially cool these days. Certainly by the standards of the progressive community. The basic agreement in media circles is that white culture (whether descended from England, Germany, France, Russia or the Nordic countries) can be acknowledged but is better off ignored. Because we’re living in an era of positive progressive redefining in which non-white cultures are experiencing a significant upsurge, media-recognition- and ethnic-celebration-wise.