Michael Bloomberg’s campaign has officially denied published reports that he’s considering asking (good God) Hillary Clinton to be his running mate for the 2020 presidential election — “We are focused on the primary and the debate, not vp speculation.” Even if he had briefly flirted with this idea, I’m sure Bloomberg has completely discharged it by now. If he goes with a woman it would probably be Kamala Harris or Stacey Abrams.

Sometime in the summer of ’84 I began working for hotshot publicists Bobby Zarem and Dick Delson, who’d recently become partners. One of our activities was handling promotion (i.e., not unit publicity) for Tim Burton and Paul Reubens‘ Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, which shot in the late summer and early fall of that year and opened in August ’85.

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My son Dylan didn’t declare this painting to be self-portraiture, but everyone presumed it was on some level. He was 19 or 20, as I recall. My heart went out. I never forgot it, wanted to see it again, asked my ex if she could send me an image. It arrived last night.

Painted by Dylan Wells at age 19 or 20, sometime in ’08 or ’09.

Posted on 12.18.07: “Throwing a bag of Mexican takeout food at a cab is not what anyone would call a mature or attractive thing to do, but that’s what I did last night after a Boston Checker almost hit me as I was crossing Commonwealth Avenue in slushy snow. I have to be honest and say it felt right for about three or four seconds. Then I felt like an idiot.

I turned to my left and saw a pair of killer headlights half-screeching and half-skidding towards me. Instead of leaping out of the way I went into a dead-freeze, deer-in-the-headlights mode. The cab stopped — no exaggeration — with less than six inches to spare.

Anyone who’s ever escaped getting hit like this knows that the usual reaction is rage. I think I said something really cool and clever like “what the fuck are you doing, asshole?” Their cab driver screamed something back in the same vein. That tore it — he almost kills me and then he yells at me? That’s when I threw the Mexican takeout, which hit the passenger-door window.

The cabbie, double-riled by the bean dip and guacamole splattered over the rear door and window, hit the brakes and jumped out, and I went into mock Sideways mode (Thomas Haden Church swinging the club on the golf course) and howled like an animal. The driver jumped back in and drove off. End of dignified altercation.

I doubt I’ll be seeing Ricky Tollman‘s Run This Town (Oscilloscope, 3.6). Mainly because of Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen, The Politician), who has one of those faces you can’t help but fantasize about punching or at least slapping. In this trailer Platt seems to radiate a certain dim-witted, candy-assed uncertainty and open-mouthed ambivalence, and hanging with him for 99 minutes would almost certainly be too much to bear. I hate this guy.

Pic follows Platt’s Bram Shriver, a Toronto reporter whose professional prospects are enhanced when he’s fed a cellphone video of then-Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (Damien Lewis in a fat suit) smoking crack. You’ll notice that the trailer never gives you a good look at Lewis’s obese mayor. To go by Joe Leydon‘s South by Southwest review (4.16.19), there’s a reason for that.

Posted on 4.16.19: “It doesn’t help at all that Mayor Ford — who looms large, literally and physically, despite his status as a supporting character — is played by a heavily latexed Damian Lewis in a less-than-convincing fat suit. Lewis so closely resembles Mike Myers’ Fat Bastard character in the Austin Powers franchise that it’s practically impossible to fully appreciate his spot-on portrayal of a man with an unstable id checked only sporadically by an image-conscious superego (Donald Trump, anyone?).”

Has a fat suit ever worked in a dramatic film? Yes — John Lithgow‘s Roger Ailes in Bombshell. Other instances?

They’d rather go down in flames waving their purity flags…