Year: 2020

Many of us have read Rob Cohen’s story about how he discovered David Ward‘s script of The Sting while working for Mike Medavoy at International Famous Agency (IFA), which later merged with Creative Management Associates (CMA) in ’75 to become International Creative Management (ICM).

Cohen told the tale to journalist Germain Lussier in late November of 2008. I reposted the story in April 2012, or a couple of months before the release of a new Sting Bluray; I reposted it on 11.14.18.

I’ve known Medavoy since the early ’90s, and have always found him to be a decent hombre. I happened to run into him during the Neon/Parasite Oscar night party at Soho House on 2.9.20. I asked him about Cohen’s recollection and Medavoy said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that story.” He not only has a completely different recall but thinks it was “pretty silly” of Cohen “to have put himself at the center of it.”

I called Mike yesterday for the chapter-and-verse. Here’s how it goes, straight from the horse’s mouth:

“Tony Bill had been my friend and client. Sometime in ’72 he said to me, ‘I want to option a con-man project from a very talented writer named David Ward. Ward was the author of The Sting, except when Tony got it hadn’t been written. It was just on tape. The option would be $5000, he told me, so how about you and I putting up $2500 each and you can leave the agency business and co-produce the film with me? I said ‘I don’t have enough money to leave the agency business but I’ll be your agent on it.’ On top of the fact that I had a lot of clients at the time and was in the midst of putting together Young Frankenstein and later on Jaws.

“Bill then found Michael and Julia Phillips to cofinance the option. Michael had been an investment banker in New York. Anyway the $5K went to David Ward. Then one day I was playing tennis in Malibu with Robert Redford, who had gotten the script. He decided he was interested in it. By this point I had listened to The Sting on tape, and I thought it was terrific. Then a script version came in, and I read it and liked it.

“Around the same time Cohen came to me for a job. I gave him the script and he liked it a lot. So based on our liking the same script I hired him as my assistant — that’s how he got the job.

“While in London Michael and Julia had given it to Dan Melnick while I was gone, and they were interested and got into a negotiation. At that time Ward wanted to direct the movie at MGM. Donald Sutherland and Peter Boyle, who were also my clients, had gotten the script first and wanted to play the leads. At the same time I gave it to Zanuck-Brown, who had just moved from Fox to Universal, and then they got it to George Roy Hill, whom they’d worked with on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

“Then they gave it to Newman, who passed. Paul had an apartment in Manhattan, and George lived there also. So one night George and Redford sat in Newman’s apartment and tried to convince him, and at the end of the meeting Paul said he wasn’t gonna do it. But as he walked them to the elevator he said, ‘I’m just kidding, I’ll do it.’ And that was it. They came into the office and we made the deal. Right after that I was banned from the MGM lot.

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Reader comment: “I hate to say this, but Pete needs to drop out now. Along with Warren and Klobuchar [and Steyer and Bloomberg]. The goodwill Pete would earn would do a lot for his future.”

His point was that stopping Bernie the Destroyer is the paramount thing above all, and that if the left-moderate voters could focus entirely on Biden there’s a half-assed chance that Bernie’s momentum might be slowed down or even sputter out.

HE to reader: “Disheartening as your suggestion feels to me right now, Pete sacrificing his candidacy in order to stop Sanders may be the smartest move he could make right now. Of course, Buttigieg and the others will stay the course until after Super Tuesday.”

Bernie Sanders may survive his first four-year term as President. Then again who knows? He’s a tough old goat, and he might trudge on through. But he’s also a 78 year-old man who had a heart attack five months ago. And the odds don’t seem to favor his being in robust health at the start of a theoretical second term in January ’25, when he’d be 84.

Bernie almost certainly wouldn’t run for a second term — be honest. Oh, and he’d better pick his vp running mate very carefully.

From Chris Cillizza‘s “The Delicate Issue for Bernie Sanders That His Democratic Opponents Won’t Touch,” posted on 2.28.20

“The scrutiny applied to a front-running candidate covers their policy positions, their personality and preparedness for the nation’s top job, and yes, even their health.

“Consider what President Donald Trump would do with the issue of Sanders’ health, given (a) that Sanders had a well-documented heart attack last fall while campaigning in Nevada and (b) the way in which Trump tried to make Hillary Clinton’s health an issue in 2016.”

Consider a 2.21 Slate piece by Jeremy Samuel Faust, titled “What Are the Chances Sanders Has Another Heart Attack Before November?”

Excerpt #1: “I considered the risk that, between now and Nov. 3, Sanders might experience any of the following: a second heart attack, another life-threatening emergency, any event that would require hospitalization (including any “false alarm”), or even death. The risk is not trivial, and is worth explaining in full.

“First, there appears to be little evidence that Sanders’ current health is a hindrance to the daily rigors of a national campaign. Considering the extent of his heart attack in October, he appears to be doing well, able to campaign vigorously, and likely up to the demanding position of president, from an endurance standpoint at least.

“Nor is his life expectancy the central question, though, yes, his remaining expected life span dropped from around 10 to five years after his heart attack.”

“But his one-year risk is low, meaning his chance of surviving the campaign is good. When Sanders entered the hospital in October (given what we’ve been told by his doctors), his calculated six-month risk of death was rather harrowing, likely between 11 and 19 percent. Fortunately, by virtue of surviving his initial hospitalization, and the incident-free intervening four months, those numbers have improved, to better than 95 percent.”

Excerpt #2: “Using Medicare claims data, researchers at Yale analyzed millions of patients who suffered heart attacks like Sanders’. (As an aside, using adjectives like mild, moderate, or severe to describe Sanders’ heart attack is not helpful. What we can say is that these researchers were looking precisely at patients like Sanders who had experienced approximately the same problem as his, in the same time frame.)

“Here’s what they found: From the day they left the hospital, the one-year risk of at least one rehospitalization for any reason in Medicare beneficiaries who suffered a heart attack like Sanders’ was about 50 percent (the baseline annual risk among his age cohort is more like 1 in 6).

“Again, by virtue of four incident-free months on the trail, that number is now lower for Sanders. But his chance of another hospitalization between now and November alone likely remains between 30–35 percent. While the daily risk is low, around 0.17 percent, we have more than 250 days to go until Election Day. The risks add up.”

Who in the HE community has the courage to stand up and tell the #MeToo kowtow crowd that they’ve gone overboard in their praise for a decent shock-scare flick?

“Unraveling the dusted bandages of H.G. Wells’ classic 1897 science-fiction novel, writer-director Leigh Whannell has refashioned The Invisible Man as a bracingly modern #MeToo allegory that, despite its brutal craft, rings hollow. Whannell has the talent and cunning to turn The Invisible Man into a chilling and well-crafted B-movie. But if you’re looking for anything more than that, you’ll probably come up empty.” — AP critic Jake Coyle.

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There are two vaguely irksome problems with “And Then He Kissed Me“, the 1963 doo-wop song that became legendary when Martin Scorsese used it to score the famous Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas.

The naive and drippy lyrics (written by Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry) comprise irksome problem #1. Irksome problem #2 is the lead vocal track by the proficient Dolores “LaLa” Brooks, whose nasal singing style serves to underline the banality of the fairy tale that the song is selling.

But the arrangement by the legendary Jack Nitzche is rhapsodic and transportational — so much so that the song works better without the vocals. Not to mention the engineering by Larry “Wall of Sound” Levine. The song was recorded at Gold Star Studios (6252 Santa Monica Blvd., near Vine Street) in April 1963.

Mohammad Rasoulof‘s There Is No Evil has won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear prize. Here’s an excerpt from Peter Debruge’s 2.28 Variety review:

“In Iran, executions are often carried out by conscripted soldiers, which puts an enormous burden on the shoulders of ordinary citizens. And what are we to make of the condemned, for whom guilt can sometimes be a capricious thing, dictated by a severe and oppressive Islamic regime — the same one that accused Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof of ‘endangering national security’ and ‘spreading propaganda’ against the government?

“When Rasoulof returned from Cannes in 2017, following the premiere of his film A Man of Integrity, he was banned from filmmaking for life and sentenced to a year in prison. But as a man of integrity himself, the director could not stop.

“His latest film, There Is No Evil, premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, where instead of being silenced, Rasoulof launches his most openly critical statement yet, a series of Kafkaesque moral parables about Iran’s death penalty and its perpetrators, made in open defiance of the restrictions the government put on him.

“The resulting feat of artistic dissidence runs two and a half hours, comprising four discrete chapters, each one designed as a standalone short film exploring a different facet of the subject. By subdividing the project like this, Rasoulof was able to direct the segments without being shut down by authorities — who are more carefully focused on features — and, in the process, he also builds a stronger argument.

“The truth, the film clearly understands, is more complicated than its title: There is evil in the world, and it corrupts us when we don’t take a stand. What would you do in the characters’ shoes? What will you do in your own?”

Gavin O’Connor‘s The Way Back (Warner Bros., 3.6) looks like a redemption drama — a former basketball star turned boozing middle-aged construction worker (Ben Affleck) lands a gig as a high-school basketball coach, and despite problems and potholes and setbacks along the way a certain feel-better catharsis…well, we can all sense where it’s going. Which is why we pay to see this kind of film. I’m hearing, however, that it’s not Hoosiers. That’s all I’m going to say.

Rahm Emanuel (starting around the 50-second mark): “[Bernie Sanders‘] candidacy is built on a false premise, both strategically and policy-wise. On the political side, if you look at President Clinton’s two wins and President Obama’s two wins plus the ’06 and 2018 midterms…they all come with the same paradigm of a victory. Which is a big urban and big suburban turnout which leads to a majority. Bernie Sanders’ view is ‘I don’t want these moderate fickle voters…we just have to turn out our base.’

“And to me, in six elections we have won one simple way, and very straightforward — a center-left strategy. [Bernie’s] view is ‘forget the center…we just want to be left.’ And that’s never been tried, and the turnout in three elections…not a big number but at least you can look at it…has not been generated the way he says it has.

“I don’t think there are 70 million socialists waiting to be woken, but don’t know that they’re socialists yet. He’s upending six successful national models of an election.”