Month: June 2022

Remember hang-ups? In the ’60s accusing a person of being hung up was a fairly serious put-down. Hang-ups were a key definer of middle-class neurotics — people who were into guilt and maintaining appearances, who embraced shallow concerns and inhibitions — people who believed in scrubbing kitchen floors and mowing their lawns on Saturdays, who did’t get high or drop acid or listen to Bob Dylan or attend the Newport Folk Festival.

I’m not saying that people who did get high and wear buckskin fringe jackets and listened to Dylan and so on weren’t hung-up, but the cliche prevailed — strictly embraced middle-class values and lifestyles and prohibitions were seen as a kind of prison.

I’m asking because I haven’t heard anyone accuse anyone else of being hung-up for decades. Excluding Republicans and conservative psychos like Lauren Boebert, are people hung-up about anything these days?

I think they are, yeah.

The first Urban Dictionary definition of “hung-up” reads as follows: “When all you think about is one person, and you can’t stop thinking about them.” The fourth definition: “Stereotyped, repetitive and seemingly purposeless movements. Compulsive fascination with and performance of repetitive, mechanical tasks, such as assembling and disassembling, collecting, or sorting household objects.”

Here’s another definition: “When you’re locked into processing the world according to (I’m sorry to mention this but it just came to me) woke doctrine….when all you can think about is whether this or that person or activity or political position is on the right side (i.e., yours)…when delivering or creating social justice for oppressed or less fortunate people and/or punishing their oppressors is pretty much everything.”

As it happens two of 2022’s finest films so far, Chloe Okuno‘s Watcher and Audrey Diwan‘s Happening, begin streaming tomorrow — Tuesday, 6.21. Both directed by women, of course, and both, coincidentally or not, are IFC releases. These films are X factor — they stick to your ribs. Plus Watcher is a ’60s or ’70s Roman Polanski film.

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I can’t fully convey…I can’t even half-convey what a pleasure it’s been to watch Lightyear (a) piss off traditional fans (Chris Evans…what happened to Tim Allen?), (b) inspire a Toronto theatre manager to post a warning, (b) trigger homophobes with a harmless lesbian kiss and then (d) open to a lousy $51 million domestic — a good $25 if not $30 million short of what handicappers had projected. And I never even saw the damn thing…that’s the best part!

Washington Post film critic and scholar Ann Hornaday has written a fascinating, exactingly researched, justifiably lengthy piece about the making of All The President’s Men. It includes three video summaries (pasted below).

The article is not very kind to the efforts of ATPM‘s late screenwriter William Goldman, but Hornaday did a ton of research (including in-depth discussions with producer-star Robert Redford and Bob Woodward, co-author of the same-titled book that the film was based upon), and this is how the chips fell.

The title is “How All the President’s Men Went From Buddy Flick to Masterpiece.”

The invisible subtitle is “How Everyone Involved In This 1976 Film Except William Goldman Saved It From Goldman’s Initial Drafts, Which Were On The Glossy and Rapscallion Side and Less Than Genuine.”

This despite Hornaday acknowledging that Goldman’s earliest drafts of All the President’s Men “included most of the key beats that defined the early stages of the Watergate investigation.”

Goldman, whom I came to know moderately well over a few lunches at Cafe Boloud in the early to mid Obama years, reported in his Adventures in the Screen Trade account that he had done much if not most of the heavy lifting.

During a meeting with Bob Woodward, Goldman “had asked him to list ‘the crucial events — not the most dramatic but the essentials — that enabled the story eventually to be told,” Hornaday summarizes.

“When Woodward named them — the break-in, the arraignment, his combative collaboration with Bernstein, his late-night meetings with confidential source Deep Throat in an Arlington parking garage, his and Bernstein’s interviews with such key figures as Hugh Sloan, and their work together on an article about a $25,000 check written to CREEP Midwest finance chairman Kenneth Dahlberg — Goldman, according to his account, looked at what he’d written and saw that he’d included every one.”

A key passage in Hornaday’s piece: “The journey of All the President’s Men from mediocrity to triumph tells an alternately sobering and inspiring truth about movies: The great ones are a function of the countless mistakes that didn’t get made — the myriad bad calls, lapses in taste and bouts of bad luck that encase every production like a block of heavy, unyielding stone.”

As noted, the piece presents a case that many if not most of the “mistakes” were Goldman’s. If Goldman is reading this piece in heaven, he’s most likely howling and shaking his fist and punching his refrigerator door.

Hornaday: “This is the story of how producer-star Robert Redford and director Alan Pakula, and the cast and crew they assembled, bullied Goldman’s flawed but structurally brilliant script into art. It’s the story of a perfect movie and imperfect history, a cautionary tale whose lessons — about impunity, abuse of power and intimidation of the press — have taken on new urgency nearly 50 years after its release.

“It’s the story of how what was intended as a small-bore black-and-white character study featuring unknown actors became one of the finest films of the 20th century, one that marked the end of a cinematic era, changed journalism forever and — for better or worse — became the fractal through which we’ve come to understand the dizzyingly complicated saga known as Watergate.”

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Later today and for the very first time, HE will attend a Juneteenth celebration. Fairfield County-styled, I should add…food, music, exurban vibes. And down in the wilds of New Jersey, Jett Wells (along with Cait) will celebrate his very first Father’s Day as Sutton savors the aged-wine experience of being seven-months old — born seven months and two days ago, to be precise.

One year ago, more or less…

Friendo to HE (received last night, 6.18): “I noticed you did not mention today what would have been Roger Ebert’s 80th birthday. Today is also Paul McCartney’s 80th.”

HE to friendo (sent this morning): “Yeah but I don’t want to cherish the past too much. It sends the wrong message in a cosmic, God’s eye, wheel-of-time sense, and it gives Millennials and Zoomers one more reason, etc.

“For every riff or recollection about the in-and-out cinematic glory days (late ‘30s to 2008) I try to summon at least one daily acknowledgement that things are better (or at least could be better) than they sometimes appear.

“Remember the nostalgia for the ‘30s and ‘40s between the late ‘60s and mid ‘70s (Chinatown, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Crazy Mama, Bound for Glory, Play It Again Sam, The Godfather, The Way We Were, Gable & Lombard, Day of the Locust) and those somewhat gaudy, emotionally needy celebrations of ‘40s and ‘50s Hollywood musicals (That’s Entertainment! + No No Annette on Broadway)? And the concurrent grim despair & paranoia of the Nixon years?

“Roger was an excellent writer and a wise, ballsy, first-rate critic but let’s not forget that he could be & in fact was overly generous at times, especially during the last 10 or 15 years of his life. Kindness doesn’t always age well. And at the end of the day, Roger wasn’t a God soaring above us on gossamer wings.

“McCartney turning 80….good health & long life to a guy I’ve loved all my life but 80 bums me out a bit…’will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m 80?’ doesn’t have quite the same ring.

“You can’t stop the gradual graying and withering of gifted people or the eternal process that necessitates a million daily sparks of light and birth and creation (Sutton’s arrival on 11.17.21 was one such spark) along with the necessity and brutality of death…but if it’s all the same I’d prefer to ignore the exact present-tense numerology of Paul McCartney…a bit of a “holy shit” moment, if you don’t mind me saying.

“Remember the shock of John Lennon’s murder 40-plus years ago and how an entire generation was suddenly hit with the slap of cruel happenstance and random destruction and that No Country for Old Men moment when Barry Corbin told Tommy Lee Jones that “you can’t stop what’s comin’”?

“Macca turning 80” is an uh-oh out of that same hymnbook.

“The metaphor of dead leaves lying in heaps on those well-manicured northeastern suburban lawns and how those tidy, old-time curbstone neighborhoods in Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Long Island and throughout New England (especially during the fossil-fuel eras of Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ & Nixon) used to smell of burning leaves in the fall months, as dusk and then nightfall settled in…that’s all fine but Macca turning 80? Not so much.”