Day: October 4, 2023

Early in the evening of Tuesday, 10.3, I chatted with respected Hollywood historian and biographer Joseph McBride about Billy Wilder‘s Stalag 17 (’53), and more particularly about Joe’s commentary track for Kino Lorber’s upcoming 4K Bluray version (out 11.21).

I haven’t seen the 4K Stalag 17 but…well, let’s wait for it. I own an older Bluray version which I’m happy with, but I’m always hot to own the latest upgrade.

McBride’s book on Wilder (“Dancing on the Edge“) came out in September ’21. He’s also written authoritative studies on John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, the Coen Brothers, Steven Spielberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, etc.

Here’s part one of our discussion (roughly 29 minutes)…

And here’s part two (around 27 minutes):

It’s very easy to talk to Joe about Hollywood histories and backstories and just kick it all around. It was generally a fine, wide-ranging discussion, not just about the genesis and the making of Stalag 17 but about William Holden, Wilder, John Ford…everyone and everything. McBride can chew this kind of fat for hours on end without breaking stride.

Please forgive the occasional intrusions of purring and meowing Katya.

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…sometime in the fall of ’97, or so I recall. 26 years ago, and you know what? I could feel the lingering spirits of Joseph Cotten, Theresa Wright, Hume Cronyn, MacDonald Carey and Thornton Wilder.

No daily movie columnist has visited more famous movie houses than yours truly. Okay, I don’t know that for a fact but probably. The John Robie / To Catch A Thief house in St. Jeannet. The Jack Woltz horse’s head house in Beverly Hills. Phyllis Dietrichson’s Double Indemnity house. Plus the private abodes of Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty…all the classic-era hotshots. Not to mention North by Northwest‘s cropduster junction. I could tell stories all night long.

The Victoria-styled Shadow home is at 904 McDonald Ave in Santa Rosa, only a couple of blocks from the main commercial drag (4th Street).

Julia Ormond, the 58 year-old English actress who peaked between the early and mid ’90s (Young Catherine, Stalin, Legends of the Fall, First Knight, Sabrina, Smilla’s Sense of Snow), is suing Harvey Weinstein, CAA, The Walt Disney Company and Miramax over a sexual assault that allegedly happened in 1995.

Harvey has been fair legal game since numerous sexual allegations and charges were made against him in ’17. I realize that it’s unusual for accusers like Ormond to go after alleged enablers, but why did Ormond want until late ’23?

Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister: “In a lawsuit filed Wednesday morning in New York Supreme Court, Ormond claims that Weinstein sexually assaulted her in 1995 after a business dinner when he lured her into giving him a massage, climbed on top of her, masturbated and forced her to give him oral sex.

“After the alleged assault, Ormond informed her agents Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane what had happened with Weinstein, according to the lawsuit, which states that the CAA agents cautioned her from speaking out and did not protect her. (Lourd and Huvane, who today are co-chairmen of CAA, are not named as defendants, but are frequently mentioned throughout Ormond’s suit as her representatives at the time.)

“Ormond is suing CAA for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.”

Am I a non-compliant suppressive person in the realm of gay cinema?

In my 9.1.23 review of Andrew Haigh‘s All Of Us Strangers, I praised it for being “a classy, meditative, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship” while admitting that the beard-stubble sex footage made me squirm a bit. Which resulted in attacks, of course. For in today’s realm, if you don’t sing arias about bare-backed slurpy kissing scenes you’re a homophobe.

“Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris,” I wrote, “except instead of hanging with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish Andrew Scott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.

“Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.

George Clooney speaking in Boys in the Boat featurette: “These guys at the University of Washington are taking on the seniors, and then taking on the fraternity [something], and then taking on the Nazis.”

Clooney is using the usual shorthand, of course, but does he really mean that the young athletes who belonged to Germany’s 1936 Olympic rowing team were devout “seig heil” guys? Yes, Adolf Hitler saw the Berlin ’36 Olympics as a a potential proof of Aryan supremacy (Jesse Owens screwed that pooch), but how many German citizens were ardent supporters of the Nazi party that year, and how many were playing along to get along? A third or less?

How many blue-state liberals today pretend to be wokester sympathizers but are just keeping their heads down in order to stay out of trouble?

Let’s imagine, God forbid, that The Beast might win the ’24 election. He would therefore be president during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Would it then be fair or accurate to describe the U.S. Olympic team as “the MAGAS”?

[3:10 mark] “…and the party of a great man who should have been president and would’ve been one of the greatest presidents in history….Hubert Horatio Hornblower! Humphrey!”