Industry impressions of Nomadland (mostly approving with some dissenters) have settled in. They are what they are. IMAX screenings aren’t going to move the needle. You know what I’d love to see in a first-rate, real-deal IMAX theatre? Tenet. With subtitles, of course.

The daily jazz-spewings and soul-searchings of Hollywood Elsewhere have been totally free-of-charge for 16 and 2/3 years, starting in August ’04. I really wish I could keep going like this, but ad revenue has been dwindling over the last three years, largely due to Khmer Rouge wokelisting. I regrettably have no choice but to convert HE into a paywall site. It breaks my heart but the situation is the situation.

I became a significant journo player in the early ’90s when I began with Entertainment Weekly and the L.A. Times “Calendar” section. I became a weekly LA Times Syndicate columnist starting in the fall of ’94, and then a biweekly online columnist (Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com) in October of ’98. HE independently launched in August ’04, and the daily bloggy-blog format kicked in in the spring of ’06.

HE was a moderately successful operation between ’06 and ’09, and then a flush site between ’10 and ’17.

Alas, Wokester Robespierre-ism (i.e., pushed by the sensibilities of Millennial and Zoomer-aged agency buyers) has resulted in moderately diminished ad revenues over the last three years.

Just to be clear, HE will NOT become a Patreon site but a similar self-created paywall site of my own specific design and contouring

I’ve been working on trying to transfer HE into a total paywall site (or a mostly paywall one) for the last three months or so. In December-January my son Dylan, who’s always been super-brilliant at this stuff, created a test system with Patreon. Except I’ve decided that I don’t want HE to be a Patreon site. I want to have my own paywall revenue going straight into my PayPal account.

And yet I want to create the same kind of deal that the Patreon thing would have been. Readers would be able to read the first four or five lines of each story before it fades into grayness and then nothing….unless they’re a subscriber. Or something like that.

In ’18 and ’19 I tried a separate paywall site called HE Plus — the idea was that one or two stories would be paywalled on HE Plus. But doing this made me feel overwhelmed, like my head was a cantaloupe being split in two. I tried and tried but it was driving me crazy. I couldn’t continue it. I was ready to shoot myself.

I’m figuring that for the new thing I would charge a $5 monthly cheapie rate OR $10 monthly for an enhanced HE experience — (a) regular daily column plus (b) access to bimonthly serialized HE novel installments plus (c) a bi-weekly podcast plus (d) access to ’90s and early aughts columns archived and re-formatted and re-examined. Or a $70 annual flat rate for the highest access of everything.

This is similar to what Graydon Carter‘s Air Mail and the Daily Wire charges.

I’m currently speaking to a couple of people to help install this new system. It’s not that tricky. WordPress has a paywall function. I’m sure it will all pan out. I want to be up and rolling by May 1st or May 15th…sometime around then.

HE to loyal readers who’ve been with me since ’98: I’m very sorry that economic conditions have forced me to do this. I wish I could just keep going for free. Alas, I can’t. Ad revenue will continue (Oscar + Emmys) but as long as wokesters are making the ad-buying calls it won’t be enough.

Seven days ago I raved about the Kino Lorber Bluray of Marty Feldman‘s The Last Remake of Beau Geste (’77), which is considerably enhanced by Alan Spencer‘s delicious, I-was-there-because-I-was-Marty’s-friend commentary track.

A day or two later I watched a KL companion disc — a Bluray of Feldman’s In God We Tru$t, a 1980 anti-religion, anti-corporate satire that proved to be Feldman’s undoing.

The film contained a brief riff that insulted Universal/MCA by comparing it morally to the Ku Klux Klan. Feldman was told to remove the bit but he refused, contractually fortified as he was with final cut. In so doing he effectively terminated his five-film deal with Universal.

Plus In God We Tru$t wasn’t very funny. Not a total wash (it’s an inventive effort and carefully assembled) but that mescaline-in-the-blood feeling was in low supply.

Spencer’s commentary is just as first-hand candid and knowledgable as his Beau Geste shpiel, but the God We Tru$t saga is basically a downer. I’m sorry but it’s hard to feel intrigued, much less turned on, by a story about a comic genius who simultaneously killed himself (Feldman smoked five to six packs of cigarettes per day) and deep-sixed his career at roughly the same time. It’s an emotional tale from Spencer’s perspective, but tinged with a wasteful residue.

Feldman died of a heart attack in a Mexico City hotel in 1982, while filming Yellowbeard.

Our favorite Sunday hiking path…Whittier Drive and Lexington, north to Bridle Lane and then left on Angelo Drive and up, up, up and winding like a snake, right on Davies Drive, up and down and winding down to Cielo Drive and down to Benedict Canyon south, right on Roxbury and back to Lexington. Roughly a two-hour journey including breathers.

I wouldn’t watch Godzilla vs. Kong under any conditions…not for free, not if you offered to pay me $50 or $100, not if you offered to pick me up at my home in an SUV limo…nothing would suffice.

Excerpt #1 from David Rooney’s 3.29 THR review: “The pinhead, pear-shaped figure and tiny hands perhaps inevitably mean Zilla will always be runner-up in both the beauty and personality portions of the pageant.”

There are many ways of describing the physique of Fatzilla, but “pear-shaped”? Okay, we get it. Critics can’t be too careful these days.

“In the sometimes laborious franchise-crossover tradition of Moneymaker 1 vs. Moneymaker 2 — think Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator, and ugh, Batman v Superman — Godzilla vs. Kong is a worthy enough match, and definitely a giant leap forward from their first battle, in the 1963 Toho production.

“If only it had the wit of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

HE add-on: Hell, if only it had the wit of Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy.

This is an image from a film that was regarded at the time of its original release as sorta kinda scary. By the standards of ten years later (or the early Dario Argento period) the film in question wasn’t that scary at all — it was slow, ponderous, pretentious and stiff-necked. I’m betting that right now nobody will be able to identify it. Hint: the film bears a faint resemblance to The Vanishing.

58 years ago the Bronx Zoo installed an exhibit called “The Most Dangerous Animal In The World”. It was between the Mountain Gorilla and Orangutan cages. The exhibit was a barred mirror with an inscription below it — “This animal, increasing at a rate of 190,000 every 24 hours, is the only creature that has ever killed off entire species of other animals. Now it has achieved the power to wipe out all life on Earth.”

In short, Bronx Zoo management had detoured into a vein of misanthropic contemplation — an exhibit that basically said “look at yourselves” and “think it over.” And that was during the Kennedy years. It was perhaps appropriate that I experienced a similar moment of Bronx Zoo insight a few years later.

I was there with four or five friends sometime around ’71 or thereabouts, and we were all fairly ripped. And I was hit with my first “holy shit” realization about the nature of borough people — suddenly confronted with the fact that average families were icky and unrefined (not elegant, pot-bellied, compulsive junk-food inhalers) and poorly dressed (shorts, sandals, loud shirts, pork-pie hats) and not the sort of folks that, say, the Kennedy family might not invite over for brunch in Hyannisport.

I remember huddling with three or four friends who were mulling the exact same impressions, and we were all shaking our heads and muttering “Jesus, look at these people…wow.”

Roger Corman‘s Teenage Caveman (’58) has been a joke movie for decades. Long ago Robert Vaughn (who died at age 77 in 2016) called it “the worst movie ever made”, and it may still be that.

But remember that it had a decent third-act twist: the prehistoric world of the film was actually a post-nuclear holocaust realm. In short, it ended like Planet of the Apes.

Vaughn obviously didn’t look teen-aged in the film. He was around 25 when it was shot, and looked 29 or 30. He would’ve been convincing if the film had been titled 20something Caveman With a Mortgage and a Baby On The Way.