Brian Desmond Hurt and Alistair Sim‘s A Christmas Carol (’51) will always be the finest version of Charles Dickens‘ holiday tale, and the 2011 Bluray version is easily the best-looking — excellent detail, mine-shaft blacks, wonderful monochrome palette. Then I came upon this new 4K version on YouTube, completely free and deserving of the highest praise. It might even be a touch better than the Bluray.

One dreams that in honor of the life and lore of the great Joan Didion, who passed yesterday at age 87…one imagines that an HD scan of Frank Perry‘s 1972 adaptation of Didion’s Play It As It Lays — a film that totally captures the detached Didion mood and vaguely nihilistic disdain she felt about this town — might finally be streamed.

You can watch the movie and read Didion’s book at the same time. They’re almost the same thing.

I accepted a long time ago that this film will never be HD’ed or streamed. Somebody out there really hates it with a passion, and wants it kept on YouTube.

It’s the most curiously arresting film ever made about cold, jaded, corroded Hollywood. Weld’s performance as sad, spaced-out Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-ah) Wyeth is easily her best ever.

Kim Morgan: “Play It As It Lays floats and swerves and cuts with observations and weirdly timed statements throughout, brilliantly matching the fragmented time fame and switching POV of Didion’s novel, while wandering from place to place and person to person with Maria’s depressed but succinct sensitivities.

“It’s often genius-level, and so the fact that Play It As It Lays was poorly to adequately received at the time (though Roger Ebert loved it) seems unjust to me. Many critics thought it very pretty, and Weld and Perkins fantastic (they are), but very empty (it’s not, and it is, precisely the point). Or that Perry was all wrong for Didion (he’s not).

“Didion’s novel has sometimes single-paragraph sentences, terse observations met with deadpan responses, and Perry visualizes her manner stunningly. And he does so as a Perry film, not just a Didion film — this is what happens when another is helming your own work, even if you write the screenplay — you cannot control your narrative once it’s in the eyes of the other beholder.”

I loved Dominick Dunne‘s Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Netflix). Well worth watching

White wokester attitudes about people of color boil down to this: POCs (particularly African Americans) have been so consistently and systemically marginalized, held back and shat upon for four centuries, that we now need to level the playing field by tilting the game in their favor as much as possible to counterbalance generations of white preferentialism.

John McWhorter and many other people of character, higher education and candor believe this is more or less a valid assessment of things. But if white people tweet or verbalize this observation they might be labelled as white supremacists and suffer professionally as a result. McWhorter doesn’t have to sweat this one.

I knew Sterling Hayden personally. Not well but somewhat. I ran into him here and there in the late ‘70s, interviewed him once or twice. I was a fan and a friend as far as it went. His manner was a bit odd and curious but only because there was so much going on inside. I actually loved that about him. At times peaceful and reflective, at other times anxious or even turbulent, I could always feel — sense — where Sterling was at. He was like a surly uncle with a kind heart and a beautiful half-smile that he only revealed in rare moments.

I watched him act in two locations during filming of Frank Pierson’s “King of the Gypsies” in ‘77. He was happiest as a roamer, a wanderer. He once lived on a river barge in Paris — a life for me if I could’ve managed it! Sterling was magnificent in “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Dr. Strangelove.” and “The Long Goodbye” and Bertolucci’s “1900.”

Quote: “Fasting is the precise opposite of debauch. I’m always torn between the two. The hard thing is to hold that middle ground, hold that middle ground.”

Hayden reminded me of my big, tall, eccentric paternal grandfather, although he wasn’t that far from my father, age-wise. A nearby resident of Wilton, CT. He used to take long morning walks. He was a great writerly fellow, like a character out of Melville. A writer, a dreamer, the soul of a poet, Wonderful Zeus-like gray beard, walking stick, Irish tweed cap. Deep purring voice, and occasionally a bellower when irate. Enjoyed an occasional hash pipe. Loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

Hayden was one of the most spiritual actors I’d ever had the pleasure to know or speak with.

There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time.

Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents. He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.

Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, Proud but insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved getting high. And (I’ve already said this) he loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, but I said it before he did — “I’ve always loved the wind”. Sterling loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said “God love ya.”

I thought this morning that my Omicron condition might be improving somewhat. No such luck as it turns out. Today it just stayed in the same draggy place. I feel so vaguely weak and fatigued right now that the idea of going outside and visiting my local CVS seems like too much of a challenge. I don’t feel miserable — I feel “okay” but drained.

All day long I’ve been trying to write some thoughts on the passing of the great Joan Didion, whom i began worshipping as a young buck (particularly due to “Play It As It Lays” and “The White Album”) but whom I never quite befriended or even met, despite a good phone-interview rapport with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, whom I regarded as an excellent fellow. And despite running into her at a “21” press luncheon seven or eight years ago.

But I don’t seem to have the energy or something. I don’t like this at all.

Three writer-producers are quoted in Richard Rushfield’s latest Ankler column. They’re basically asked “how bad are things now?”, “did anyone in Hollywood accomplish anything good this year?”, “how negatively has streaming affected bare-bones creativity?” and other questions in this vein.

Writer-producers #1 and #3 sound like smart, attuned, reasonably cool people, but writer-producer #2 is an absolute woke Torquemada. He says Netflix should have thrown Dave Chappelle under the bus, for heaven’s sake. Talk about a geyser of woke vampire saliva and an absolute absence of X-factor, clear-light consciousness…seriously, this guy is scary.

Here’s an observation about award shows from writer-producer #3:

In other words, if the Academy wants to bury itself even deeper in the hole of irrelevancy and over-ness, do four things: (a) Double down on the Steven Soderbergh mindset (woke Tony Awards) behind last April’s Union Station debacle; (b) Make certain to only award films with shitty Rotten Tomatoes & IMDB audience scores and which did next to no business theatrically; (c) choose winners based on woke-driven political narratives; and (c) completely ignore the phenomenal audience reactions to Spider-Man: No Way Home

Bruce Feldman, the seasoned publicist who founded Clein + Feldman (with late partner Harry Clein) and who later battled it out as Universal’s vp publicity during the Waterworld era of the mid ‘90s…it was Bruce who suggested that Maggie and I might want to name our first-born son Jett, drawing upon the lore of James Dean’s Giant character, Jett Rink.

Here’s Bruce holding Jett sometime in the late summer or fall of ‘88. Just below is the latest shot of Jett and Sutton, who’s now four and a half weeks old.

This environmentally friendly email from director-writer Adam McKay [below] is part of an overt virtue signaling tendency that sinks “Don’t Look Up”.

Imagine “War Games” if only Matthew Broderick’s character were the only smart one and everyone else was labeled as a shallow, one-dimensional idiot. “Don’t Look Up” would have worked if the deck weren’t stacked, if Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence weren’t so earnest and portrayed as unable to get their message out in a very real world as opposed to an SNL sketch where vacuous talk show hosts are oblivious, libidinous and banter with showbiz patter.

The portrayal of the president by the world’s greatest actress [Meryl Streep] sank the movie. Peter Sellers’ president in “Dr. Strangelove” is STILL a president — analytical, seeking answers, striving for calm in the midst of chaos, and that’s part of what makes the escalating madness distressing and funny. Imagine Sellers’ president taking the McKay approach and talking about approval ratings and contending with an idiot son. “Don’t Look Up” negates verisimilitude in every scene, offering a polemic and not a satire.

Sketch characters, as a rule, have a single trait, not dimensions. If DiCaprio and Lawrence were forced to seek out a vacuous media personality to front them, yet another music star or media influencer, in order to get on a talk show, or engineer some stunts to get their message out to a fatuous populace, then you’re dealing with Sellers’ impassioned RAF officer who’s begging for spare change and sanctioning the shooting of a Coca Cola machine.

Without verisimilitude, the exaggerated personas from “Don’t Look Up” turn wearying and cutting from idiots to the sanctified liberals feels forced and preachy, which it is. Leonardo’s portrayal and rants are pitch perfect, but he’s playing the intention of the piece… not what’s on the page.

Faye Dunaway‘s “Network” executive is a very real person, as are all the characters in that 1976 film, but McKay only shows legitimacy towards the characters he personally sides with and that’s his biggest mistake… along with not having good jokes.

This is a bigger budgeted “An American Carol” and saddens me as I love McKay and satire.