Within the first 20 or 25 minutes of Allen v. Farrow (HBO Max, 2.21), co-directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering misidentify Berry Berenson, the late wife of Tony Perkins, in a 1979 New Year’s Eve photo.

Allen v. Farrow captions the 41-year-old photo as one of Perkins, Mia Farrow, and (far right) “Stephanie Farrow.” Except it’s Berry Berenson.

How could Kirby and Amy and their homeys (producers, allies, editors, publicists, Carly Simon) make a fairly glaring mistake like this? Who can say? But after working on this doc for three years and constantly, I’m sure, double-, triple- and quadruple-checking it over and over again, they did. So they’re fallible, capable of error. Like all of us.

Is there anything else they might’ve gotten wrong or misunderstood or otherwise dropped the ball on? Maybe not. Maybe they whiffed just this one time.

Repeating: Moses Farrow needs to answer Farrow v. Farrow on each and every wrongo or misunderstood or questionable assertion.

Screenshot of incorrectly captioned Allen v. Farrow photo — the woman on the far right is not Stephanie Farrow but Berry Berenson.

Over the past few weeks, we have received many requests to comment on the HBO documentary Allen v. Farrow. Below please find a statement, attributable to a spokesperson for Woody Allen and Soon–Yi Previn. Thank you.

“These documentarians had no interest in the truth. Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods. Woody and Soon-Yi were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days ‘to respond.’ Of course, they declined to do so.

“As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false. Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place. It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow. While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts.”

In HE’s humble opinion the most engrossing and ravishing X-rated or NC-17 film ever released is Lindsay Anderson‘s If…, closely followed (most of us have this list memorized) by John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Pedro Almodovar‘s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango in Paris, Louis Malle‘s Damage, Nicolas Roeg‘s Performance, David Cronenberg‘s Crash and Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Liuetenant.

I know I’m obliged or at least expected to include Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange but I’ve absorbed it too many times — I can’t really “watch” it any more.

On the 56th anniversary of the murder of Malcolm X, it somehow never sank into my thick head that the former Malcom Little was six-feet-four. I can’t blame Spike Lee or Denzel Washington — it’s basically my fault, my lack of focus. Nor had I paid much attention to the fact that Martin Luther King was only five-foot-seven. I knew he wasn’t Wilt Chamberlain but I never understood that he was what most people would consider “on the short side.” He shared the same height as Al Pacino. Then again he was an inch taller than Alan Ladd.

Actual conversation that took place yesterday (HE being one of the participants), mostly focused on Kylie Jenner:

Friendo #1: “You can be as shamelessly sexual as you want any time you want. You just can’t be a guy noticing or commenting or looking.”

Friendo #2: “I think that cognitive dissonance you’re talking about in the culture — i.e., encouraging male lust while demonizing male lust — is almost psychotic. And toxic in its hypocrisy. One can only weep for the vanished honesty of Sex and the City. The demonizing of male sexuality now symbolizes a kind of cultural death wish.”

Friendo #1: “Hah — I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up as a young white male right now.”

HE: “But wasn’t female sexuality (much less open expression of same?) rigidly of not punitively repressed in this country and throughout the world for centuries? Since forever? The pendulum has simply swung sharply in the other direction. Woke society to young males: We can’t stop your natural hormonal urges, but step out of line just once and WE WILL LOP YOUR HEAD OFF.”

Friendo #2: “True enough. But that repression of female sexuality took place within a more repressed culture, period. That didn’t justify it, but that was the context. Trying to make the pendulum swing the other way in a culture as openly, rabidly sexual as ours is insane. It doesn’t work. It only breeds…more Republicans!”

Kylie Jenner

HE: “Funny.”

Friendo #1: “What I’m noticing is the Kardashian brand…Cardi B or Miley Cyrus or any young female on Instagram or Tiktok, and even the rise of ‘only fans’ where young women are selling naked pictures of themselves. For instance, on Tinder apparently young beautiful girls attract a whole bunch of men who then pay them to send photos. Most of the young women only want that kind of interaction.”

“But the puritanism is played out on a much bigger stage where men are ‘creepy’ if they even comment on a woman’s looks (like Variety‘s Dennis Harvey). Maybe this ONLY applies to white men. Maybe black men or men of color can say or do whatever they want and it won’t matter. But I just find it all very odd — women seem to be at once infantilizing themselves as perpetual victims while also, and at the same time, feeling empowerment by displaying their hyper sexuality.

“I find it all really confusing. We know what the rules are who must obey them but they seem to change all of the time with the one constant being to remove the cultural power of straight white men.

“Like, for instance, how does this picture [of Kylie Jenner] get 12 million likes on Instagram:

HE: “What’s she drinking, iced tea? WHO CARES?”

Friendo #1: “I know. But she has 200 million followers. Barack Obama only has 34 million. The point is that ALL she’s selling is sexuality. That is it. Sold mostly to women, I would imagine.”

Friendo #2: “The power of EVERYONE is being removed. Women are coerced into these roles, and it only looks like ‘freedom.’ This is late-capitalist corporate control — Orwellianism in a thong.”

Jodi Shaw to Smith College as passed along by Bari Weiss: “I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself. Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”

…and native Roman architecture that I am and never having seen Meville Shavelson‘s The Pigeon That Took Rome (’62), which was shot in black-and-white Panavision (2.39:1) by the respected Daniel Fapp (The Joker Is Wild, One, Two, Three, West Side Story, The Great Escape)…being soft and susceptible I foolishly, unthinkingly and idiotically bought a $15 bootleg DVD of this all-but-forgotten comedy, which costarred Charlton Heston, Harry Guardino and Elsa Martinelli.

I was already annoyed about the DVD being advertised with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio, which apparently means the sides of the Scope image have been lopped off. Which is a huge fuck you to Fapp. HE to the guy who decided to present a 16 x 9 version: “If there was a God you would somehow suffer for this. Maybe you’ll suffer anyway. I hate you.”

And then I found a muddy looking, pan-and-scan clip from the film on YouTube, and my heart stopped.

One, the little kid (played by the native Italian child actor Carlo Angeletti (aka “Marietto”) somehow manages to sound like an American kid trying to fake an Italian accent. (Maybe Angeletti was dubbed,) Two, as he’s running toward his mother (Martinelli) across a field we see bullets from a German machine gun tear up the soil and the kid falls, presumably dead. Three, Heston comes upon the German soldiers who shot the kid and doesn’t shoot them with a .45 because they look too young. (“Give them to their mothers.” he tells Guardino.) Four, Heston and Martinelli come upon the groaning kid and discover “he’s all right,” as Heston says. So the young Germans missed him? Then why did the kid fall? What’s he groaning about — the dialogue?

From Bosley Crowther’s 8.23.62 review: “Forget Rossellini’s Open City and any other films you may have seen about the hardships and tensions among the people in occupied Rome during World War II. Conditions were tough, but everybody had a jolly, jouncy, topsy-turvy time while the Nazis were in control of the Eternal City — even the Nazis.” (Here’s the whole review.)

In short, I’d paid $15 to watch a side-cleavered WWII comedy that is clearly, obviously shit-level. All I have to look forward to is the Roman architecture. I hate myself.

Let’s hear it for the Brooklyn-born Melville Shavelson! — Bob Hope pally and screenwriter of several Hope films — The Princess and the Pirate, Where There’s Life, The Great Lover, Sorrowful Jones, The Seven Little Foys, Beau James. (He also directed the latter.) He also wrote Houseboat. He also wrote and directed The Five Pennies, It Started in Naples, On the Double, A New Kind of Love, Cast a Giant Shadow and Yours, Mine and Ours.

Yes, I’m aware that Texas has a non-regulated, pick-and-choose, market-driven utility system and that California will never go there. I nonetheless wonder what I would do if God or fate had determined that my SoCal Electric could suddenly surge to $20K or thereabouts. Rest assured I wouldn’t pay it. I know that if they pulled this shit back in the early ’70s that Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy would pick up a 12-gauge pump shotgun on his way down to the local utility company.