Day: July 31, 2024

In ’74 or thereabouts I happened to run into David Janssen at LAX arrivals. The luggage carousel, I mean. Late in the evening. I didn’t gawk or try to strike up a conversation, God forbid, but I couldn’t help but feel a certain familiarity with the man. Who didn’t back then?

I walked out to curbside to wait for a friend, and noticed Janssen as he strolled out of the terminal and especially the extremely subtle way that he hailed a cab. He didn’t raise his arm or wave or ask a uniformed taxi commandant to do it for him. It was just the slightest hand gesture, and right away a cabbie flashed his lights to signal acknowledgment. I remember saying to myself, ‘Now that is a cool way to hail a cab!”

Janssen’s life and career peaked with the four-year, 120-episode run of The Fugitive (fall of 1963 through August ’67) in which he played the wrongly convicted Richard Kimble, the doctor who didn’t kill his wife and wound up lamming it for four years before finally nailing the the guilty party, a one-armed man with a grim, gorilla-like face (played by Bill Raisch).

Janssen was only 32 when The Fugitive began filming, and 36 when it wrapped during the summer of love.

It always seemed as if Janssen lived with serious anxiety and ambivalence about…well, everything. Who smokes four packs a day with any expectation that he’ll live a long and healthy life? Plus he drank like a fish. Janssen’s heart gave out at age 48…he didn’t even make it to 50!

HE: “Thomas Alva Edison is not wrong, and many billions of earthlings have found the idea of lights-out finality intolerable and terrifying and have therefore constructed comforting mythologies to fend off the sense of devastation that many philosophers have used to describe contemplations of The Big Sleep. And yet…

“I experienced a seminal and transformative LSD trip when I was 19, and at that moment and forever after I knew that as indifferent and scientific or mathematical as the universe could be defined in the minds of your average wannabe Albert Einsteins out there, it was nonetheless magnificent and unified and sublime and finally spellbinding in the George Harrison lotus position sense of that term.

“I knew that an eternal hum of profound cosmic perfection hovered above, within and without my mortal coil.

“Einstein himself spoke endearingly of a sense of soul-soothing tranquility that permeated when he, without dropping a tab of Orange Wedge or sipping from a ground-up Carlos Casteneda broth of peyote buttons and whatever else, had sailed into the mystic. He wasn’t expecting to flutter around on angel wings or hover over the earth like Dave Bowman at the end of 2001, but he felt profoundly settled and comforted by the infinite eternal-ness of it all.”

Franny P to HE: “What the heck are you saying? Sounds like you’re still on LSD.”

HE to Franny: “That’s because when you finally slip into the mystical, it never leaves you. So in a sense I am still on LSD, or swimming in the spiritual waters that my long-ago LSD awakening introduced me to.

“I’m saying that the eternal perfection of the cosmic scheme of things has been in place for eons and will remain in place for eons, and if you, Franny P., don’t want to tune into the altogether because it doesn’t interest you or because you feel too constrained by logical rules and regulations, then that’s on you and go with God. I’m okay and you’re okay.

“Travelling into the mystic means giving up thought and reason and boilerplate logic and just ‘letting it in.’ Read the Bhagavad Gita or listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows‘….it’s all there.”

From Columbia Journalism Review chat (7.25) between Politico‘s Eugene Daniels and CJR’s Josh Hersh:

HE-posted on the night of the 6.27 Trump-Biden debate:

It was announced yesterday (7.30) that Jason Reitman‘s SNL 1975 has been retitled Saturday Night, which in my mind is a safe, boring, candy-ass title that damn near puts you to sleep. (The rationale is that SNL was originally called Saturday Night during its first season).

But if it was called Jane, You Ignorant Slut, the entire civilized world would beat a path to the megaplex when it opens on Friday, 10.11.

No, no, wait….it can’t be called Jane, You Ignorant Slut! It can’t because the #MeToo brigade would take offense and possibly even picket the megaplexes where it’ll be showing.

This is the difference between the sensibilities of 2024 and 1975. There was a certain impudent, irreverent, hornet’s-nest-poking attitude in ’75, and today there’s mostly squeamishness, which is a polite term for cowardice.

No, it doesn’t matter in the slightest that the Dan Aykroyd-Jane Curtin “Point-Counterpoint” skits launched in 1978…a non-issue.

Here’s hoping Saturday Night plays at Telluride.

Yesterday Politico‘s Holly Otterbein and Eugene Daniels reported that Kamala Harris will appear with her chosen running mate next Tuesday (8.6) in Philadelphia. Would it make any sense at all for Harris to trek to the City of Brotherly Love to announce that she’s chosen Arizona senator Mark Kelly? Or Kentucky governor Andy Beshear? Doesn’t it seem obvious that the pick is Pennsyvania governor Mark Shapiro, a whipsmart, bespectacled, razor-tongued 51-year-old GenXer?

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The story never got much traction when it broke last Friday (7.26) but now the woman in the video (i.e., the recipient of Francis Coppola’s on-set affection during the shooting of Megalopolis) has posted on Instagram that it’s mostly bullshit and at the very least misleading by way of over-inflation.

Deadline’s Mike Fleming, a longtime Coppola ally, has scolded Variety’s Tatiana Siegel and Brent Lang for being over-zealous, etc.

I have no dog in this hunt. I do know that #MeToo zealotry has instilled a hunger in some to take down older white guys…yum! Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Frank Langella and others were fine when the media first pounced, but the outrage machine needs to be constantly fed fresh meat.