Maestroleon concept poster is, at the very least, an excellent start. Visual designer: “I couldn’t find a good high-rez Leonard Bernstein so I just enlarged Joaquin’s nose and gave him glasses.”

Posted on 8.15.23:

I know this expression. I’ve worn it myself a few times. It says “I’ve been practicing this hard-ass glare in my Bedminster bathroom since this morning.”

Borrowed from the N.Y. Post…thanks.

Merch for sale!

He clearly rehearsed and refined the glare and achieved a certain “don’t tread on me” theatricality.

I’ve no intention of seeing Dune: Part Two no matter when it gets released. It had been slated to open on 11.17.63, and before that on 11.3.23, and prior to that on 10.20.23. It’s now scheduled to open on 3.15.24, or roughly seven months hence. Because of the SAG/AFTRA strike. Whatever.

The candidates who helped themselves the most during last night’s Republican debate were Nikki Haley (the most sensible and presidential sounding) and Vivek Ramaswamy. Tbe best of them, Chris Christie, didn’t do as well as he should have, but he said some good things. Haley came off the best.

Two or three times in my teens I ran away from home. Briefly, I mean. My friends and I wanted to see the world by way of hitchhiking adventures during spring vacation or summer holiday.

I never asked for my parents’ permission as it was understood they’d never approve. Everything was always “no, no, too dangerous, too late, too reckless, too rowdy,” etc. Not to mention “you need to buckle down and study harder or your life will be ruined.” My 16 year-old view was “how could my life be any worse?”

I would be grounded when I returned, of course, but at least my friends and I got to be Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady for a few days. Kings of the road.

Anyway it was this impulse that led to a brief episode when I sat in a rural South Carolina jail for a day and a half on suspicion of murder. In the mid ’60s.

A friend and I were hitching in some off-the-highway area west of Charleston. The cops, we later learned, were on the lookout for some guy with longish hair who had killed a middle-aged woman, or something like that. Beatle-length hair was a semi-exotic thing in the rural south back then. My hair was John Lennon-on-the-cover-of-Rubber Soul-styled, and that was all the local fuzz needed. They pulled over, asked where we were headed. One of the cops, adorned in a jacket and tie and a pair of reflector shades, smiled and said he needed to take us in and check our stories out. He called me “Ringo.”

We were booked on a vagrancy charge and put into a two-bunk cell. It was one of those mid-sized jails with eight cells, four on either side of a middle walkway. The lighting was on the darkish side.

There was a young African American dude in the cell across from ours, and he, too, was impressed by my Lennon hair. He was staring and grinning as his hands gripped the bars of his cell. The light was such that his white eyeballs and white teeth stood out as he smiled and sang “she loves you, yeah yeah yeah…she loves you, yeah yeah yeah.”

After 36 hours I somehow managed to get myself verified as non-dangerous and law-abiding without giving the cops my parents’ phone number. Maybe my friend’s father vouched for me. Or a cousin or someone. I forget.

There’s a new Rebecca Keegan THR article about Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24), and the support she got from Priscilla Presley, whose life with Elvis Presley from age 14 to 24 (barely pubescent girlfriend to wife-mother) is the subject of the film.

Repeating for emphasis, the article says that the Tinkerbell-sized (4’11”) Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla “from age 14 to age 24.”

In other words Coppola’s film omits the last three years of Elvis and Priscilla’s strained and occasionally tempestuous relationship (they separated in February 1972 and divorced the following year), not to mention Presley’s untimely death in August ’77.

Priscilla wasn’t around at the time, of course, but c’mon…it’s about her long relationship with Presley and Coppola ignores his death, which happened only four years after their 1973 divorce?

To go by Keegan, the film’s 14-year saga happens between Priscilla’s first meeting with Elvis in 1959 at a party in Germany (she was born in May 1945) and sometime in mid 1969, or roughly two years after their Las Vegas wedding on 5.1.67. Exactly nine months later the now-deceased Lisa Marie Presley was born (2.1.68).

A few weeks or months later Priscilla “began taking private dance lessons” while the constantly-catting-around Elvis was filming Live a Little, Love a Little (released on 10.23.68), and she fell heavily for the instructor, identified only as “Mark” in Priscilla’s “Elvis and Me.” They did the nasty but not for long.

Priscilla had another, longer-lasting affair with Afro-haired karate instructor Mike Stone in ’72, but that, apparently, was after her separation from Elvis. There was apparently some back-and-forth, some push-pull variance of feeling. Presley forcefully had sex with Priscilla after he got wind of the Stone affair, or something like that. They did, however, divorce the following year. And yet they were seen holding hands after it was finalized.

The forceful-sex story seems to contradict reports that Elvis declined to have sex with Priscilla after Lisa Marie’s birth. (He apparently had some kind of bizarre hangup about mothers being used goods.) As many Presley biographers have reported, Elvis was totally into jailbait, or young teens starting around the age of 14.

All in all, Coppola’s film bypasses a lot of dramatic potential. It doesn’t even include their separation and divorce…c’mon.

Keegan’s story ends with this paragraoh: “[Last] May, Coppola screened the film for Priscilla. ‘When I saw the movie, I tried to separate myself and live it as if I was just a fan or just someone that’s wanting to see the movie,’ she says. ‘At the end, I actually…I was quite emotional. Only being 14. You look back and you go, ‘Why me? Why am I here? Why am I driving in a limo, going through the gates of Graceland with Elvis?’”

She meant that? Priscilla, 78, knew who Elvis was as well as his many biographers, and she was actually wondering why she was being driven through the gates of Graceland at age 14 or 15 or whenever it was?

It goes without saying that Keegan never mentions the bizarre 18-inch height disparity between Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis in Coppola’s film.

The real-life Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 59-inch-tall Spaeny (roughly the size of a ten-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.

Any film starring or costarring Paul Mescal gets an HE demerit. I really, really don’t like this guy, and I’ll repeat what I said yesterday, which is that if I were gay I wouldn’t “do” him on a bet. (Somebody replied that Mescal wouldn’t “do” me either…fine.) I’ve only seen Mescal in Aftersun and I’m already sick of him.

This aside, Garth Davis‘s Foe looks and feels like a bummer. Mescal’s character is “informed by a stranger that he’ll be sent to live on a large space station, and his wife (Saoirse Ronan) will be left in the company of someone else”?…eff that jazz. I know this film is going to put me into a very bad place. Saoirse Ronan clearly gives another first-rate performance…sorry.