When the well is dry and you have to wash the car (not to mention pay money to see Black Effing Widow), post Times Square marquee photos.

The word along the Croisette is that certain distributors have either pulled their films out of the 2021 Toronto Film Festival or are seriously thinking about same. Why? Because (a) the Telluride and Venice festivals, unlike Toronto, are not leaning on streaming, and (b) distributors greatly prefer live-audience projection screenings.

Why is Toronto a mostly-streaming festival this year? Because the Canadian government is being extremely cautious about the new Delta strain of Covid, despite high rates of vaccination.

In short, this is not Toronto’s year. Which is a good thing, of course, as Toronto, like Sundance, has become a repressive and prejudicial wokester festival. All hail Telluride and Cannes…festivals that believe in art, freedom of ideas and fair access.

Ingmar Bergman‘s Scenes From a Marriage (’73) was originally a six-part Swedish miniseries that ran 281 minutes; the shorter, theatrically released version ran 167 minutes. It costarred Liv Ullmann, HE nemesis Erland Josephson and Bibi Andersson.

In Hagai Levi’s remake of the Bergman series, a multi-episode thing that will air on HBO in September, a woke switch scheme has been hatched. Instead of Jessica Chastain playing Ullman and Oscar Isaac playing Josephson, Isaacson plays Ullmann and Chastain is doing Josephson. (Or so I’m told.)

The miniseries is exec produced by a boatload of people, but Isaac, Chastain and Williams are among them.

The good-looking Isaac (i.e., Poe Dameron) is only 42, but with his gray hair and beard he looks at least 50 if not 55. It’s obviously a choice and there’s nothing “wrong” with this…just saying. Chastain is no spring chicken (the clock never relents), but she looks fine. Ditto Williams.

…should’ve been on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight this morning. Because without a Joe Schmoe presence it’s just a brash elitist stunt…”look at what this billionaire can do…hah! Because I can!”

What is weightlessness? It’s nothing. 53 years ago that Pan Am space stewardess wearing “grip shoes” was weightless in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it was almost nothing even then. Ditto Gary Lockwood, Keir Dullea and William Sylvester…who cares? The Apollo 13 guys — Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, director Ron Howard — were weightless on the vomit comet 25 or 26 years ago, and most of us shrugged and said “okay, cool, but what else can we read about?”

By “average schmoe” I don’t mean some person who works for Door Dash or Target or Southwest Airlines — I mean anyone who has to work for a living, which can obviously include six-figure earners.

Long-festering allegations about an alleged secret alteration of the 8mm Abraham Zapruder film of the Dealey Plaza murder…an alteration that allegedly began late in the evening of 11.23.63 and was completed sometime near dawn on Sunday, 11.24…this, I’ve been told, is a significant focus of Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass. Reading through all this stuff makes your brain ache, and my gut still says there’s something fundamentally flakey about the Zapruder alteration scenario, and yet…

Oliver Stone speaking to Deadline’s Tom Grater: