Day: September 26, 2021

So yesterday podcaster Josh Lewis pissed on a scene in Shawn Levy‘s six-week-old Free Guy (“One of the worst things I’ve ever seen a theatre crowd cheer for in my life”),” and 24 hours later people are still enraged.

HE to friendo: “So out of the blue and several weeks after Free Guy opened, Lewis gets attacked by Twitter flapjacks for dissing it. I don’t get it. What’s the big thing?”

Friendo to HE: “Yeah, I know, right? But the thousands of replies and quote retweets are really showing how horrible the state of affairs is with America being Marvel-ified, and these critics and screenwriters are trying to defend a movie so…okay, decent but calm down. It’s hilarious but also flat out insane. Have we really stooped this low? Are things so bad that a Ryan Reynolds film is the bastion of hope for moviegoers?”

So which directors besides Stanley Kubrick have carved a reputation for having a low opinion of human beings? Kubrick has long seemed the king of this sardonic attitude, but who are his competitors? Or is Stan the only game in town in this regard? I really haven’t given it much thought.

Posted on 8.25.07: Charles Mudede, a dispenser of tight, clean sentences and un-minced thoughts, has written a short unambiguous piece for The Stranger, “Seattle’s only newspaper,” about what a misanthropic hard-case Stanley Kubrick was.

“Kubrick hated humans,” Mudede begins. “This hate for his own kind is the ground upon which his cinema stands. As is made apparent by 2001: A Space Odyssey, his contempt was deep.

“It went from the elegant surface of our space-faring civilization down, down, down to the bottom of our natures, the muck and mud of our animal instincts, our ape bodies, our hair, guts, hunger, and grunts. No matter how far we go into the future, into space, toward the stars, we will never break with our first and violent world. Even the robots we create, our marvelous machines, are limited (and undone) by our human emotions, pressures, primitive drives. For Kubrick, we have never been modern.

“‘I’m in a world of shit,’ says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation.

“In Kubrick’s movies, progress, sustained enlightenment, and moral improvement are impossible because the powers of reason, love, and religion are much weaker than the forces of generation and degeneration, desire and destruction, sex and death.”

Bobby Zarem, the whipsmart, highly-charged, occasionally volatile New York publicist who “conceived” the “I Love N.Y.” campaign and represented a cavalcade of big Hollywood clients (Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Cher, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Caine, Sophia Loren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pee-Wee Herman) during his ’70s and ’80s heyday, and whom I dealt with as a Manhattan-based journalist from the late ’70s to ’83 and worked for in Los Angeles in ’85 and ’86….poor Bobby died today in his home town of Savannah.

Lung cancer got him. Zarem was 84. I somehow can’t imagine Bobby being in heaven or in hell. I kinda see him hovering over Savannah now, but without angel wings. That town is full of ghosts.

Somewhere along the way Zarem picked up the name “super-flack.” He certainly seemed to earn that title during his peak period. To me he became a p.r. legend when he was chased down a street by protestors during the shooting of Fort Apache, The Bronx, somewhere near City Hall. That’s when Zarem, already noted for his colorful manner and being a mainstay at Elaine’s and whatnot, seemed to become a brand…an embodiment of the spirit of rough-and-tumble, pre-corporate, pre-Giuliani Manhattan…the vaguely odorous city captured by Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City, and which no longer exists.

Bobby was a character…a tireless, Yale-educated, quintessential Manhattan operator…hustler, gadfly, human locomotive, idea man.

It’s not as if Zarem was often angry or arguing. He was primarily a charmer and an enthusiast. But when he got angry he was amazing. I remember being deeply impressed by his ability to tear people’s heads off without degenerating into sputtering incoherence. When Bobby was pissed he became a kind of dinosaur, a force of nature — the back of his neck and face would turn almost cherry red — but he was always lucid and razor-tongued. I remember saying to myself once, “Wow, I wish I could be that intellectually commanding when I get angry.” But I could never manage it, which is one reason why I’ve always turned it down.

Zarem was driven, neurotic, larger than life, meticulous, a bundle of nerves, occasionally volcanic and every inch a New Yorker. He was a magnificent schmoozer. His hair wasn’t as frizzy as that of Larry Fine of the Three Stooges, but I sometimes regarded him as Fine-like, if you could re-imagine Fine as one of the smartest stooges to ever walk the earth.

I last saw Bobby when he invited me to his Savannah home in…I forget, 2012 or thereabouts. I don’t want to dissect the arc of his wild career or his character traits, and I’ll leave the N.Y. Times-like obits to the Times and other major-reach organs, but Zarem’s Wiki page makes for great reading.

Here’s a rundown of things I’m thankful to Zarem about…things that happened or were made possible by his largesse or whim:

(a) By working with and for Zarem I savored occasionally glancing, sometimes fascinating face-time with Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Jane and Peter Fonda, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Kirk Douglas, Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar, Pee-Wee Herman…more names and faces than I can actually recall off the top.

(b) I became one of Douglas’s flirtations back in ’82 after an Elaine’s luncheon thrown by Zarem on behalf of the yet-to-shoot Eddie Macon’s Run. I was subsequently flown to Laredo to report on the shooting of that film for the New York Post. Universal publicity conveyed a certain disappointment that my article didn’t mention Eddie Macon’s Run more often, and that I spent too many paragraphs talking about Douglas’s career. Bobby dutifully called to inform me of their disappointment, adding that “this isn’t the end of the world.”

Douglas talked about anything and everything during our chats, and I remember his being fairly wide-open with his impressions about Stanley Kubrick (i.e., “Stanley the prick”), with whom he’d famously partnered on Paths of Glory and Spartacus. I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil’s Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and Lust for Life and Lonely Are The Brave.

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From Owen Gleiberman‘s 9.26 Variety piece about Dune‘s day-and-date, theatrical-plus-HBO Max opening on 10.22:

“3. It’s going to play a lot less well on television. Growing up, I once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on a 16-inch black-and-white TV set, and it actually worked. That’s how great a movie it is. Dune is a lot less great. I would argue that it’s a reasonably commanding sci-fi parable that begins to run out of gas in its last hour. That’s because Frank Herbert, in the Dune books, may have been a better world-builder than he was a storyteller.

“The world of Dune, like the world of Lawrence of Arabia or the original Blade Runner, needs to overwhelm and envelop you. But if you watch it at home, the film’s narrative — is Paul Atreides the Messiah? Watch the House Atreides go down to defeat, and look out for that sandworm! — is going to stand revealed as the rather patchy affair it is. When you shrink the grandeur of Dune, you shrink its appeal.

HE comment: I appreciate big-screen grandeur as much as the next guy, but given the high likelihood that the content of Dune (story, dialogue, pacing) is going to make me miserable and moaning and writhing in my seat, it might be a more interesting thing to watch it on a 16-inch black and white TV. Okay, I’m kidding. 16-inch black and white TVs no longer exist.

In 2012 I saw the digitally restored Lawrence of Arabia projected at the Salle du Soixentieme in Cannes, and it looked beautiful. Four or five years ago I saw a 70mm Lawrence on a moderately large screen at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre, and it didn’t look all that great — half the time I was thinking how much better my digitally streamed 4K Lawrence (issued around ’16 or thereabouts) seemed. After I watched Sony’s 4K UHD Bluray version in June ’20, I called it “the most exciting and orgasmic home video experience of my life — a mind-blowing eye bath.”

What am I saying? That 70mm isn’t what it used to be, that a big-movie presentation has to be a first-class, technically flawless thing or nothing, that watching a film without Millennial mongrels eating pizza and cheese nachos nearby can be a blessed thing, and that seeing a big movie like Dune on a 65-inch 4K HDR screen isn’t necessarily a tragedy.