The flying monkey commentariat will go “hee-hee hah-hah hoo-hoo” when I extend heartfelt thanks to Breitbart’s John Nolte for his words of admiration and support, which were postedtoday in a riff about Rebecca Keegan’s THRhitpiece on Sasha Stone.
Two small corrections are in order.
One, Nolte suggests I’ve been writing Hollywood Elsewhere for 15 years — it’s actually been 20 years and a bit more than 25 if you count Hollywood Confidential on Mr. Showbiz (launched in October ‘98), plus subsequent versions on reel.com and Kevin Smith’s moviepoopshoot.com.
Two, Nolte says I got into trouble in March ‘21 for suggesting that Chloe Zhao’s chances of winning a Best Director Oscar might have been augmented, sympathy-vote-wise, by the ghastly Atlanta massage parlor killings. I actually didn’t write that — a friend did during a back-and-forth discussion, and I decided to post this observation for intrigue’s sake. The identityoutragepolice freaked out at my lack of sensitivity (however accurate the post may have been at the time) and so I took the post down after 45 minutes or so. Threesimilarincidents (i.e., tragicnewsaffectingOscarfortunes) had been written about in the early teens and nobody said boo.
If, back in the summer of 2007, James Mangold had been a man of honor, precision and decency he would have only forwarded the portion of my sixteen-paragraph letter that he thought would be of interest to Lionsgate marketing hotshot Tim Palen — a portion in which I discussed my having recently spoken to Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, original author of “3:10 to Yuma” (the short story published in March ‘53) about Mangold’s adaptation of same.
I can’t recall if Dutch had seen Mangold’s film at the time (I don’t think he had) but we did discuss Delmer Daves’ 1957 adaptation with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. I definitely recall that mild-mannered Dutch of Bloomfield Hills thought Daves had missed the essence or messed it up to some degree.
Anyway THAT, in Mangold’s view, was the most compelling portion of my long letter and not the digressive, adolescent, piddly-dick paragraph about Vinessa Shaw, which I, coasting along on the white-water rapids of my second glass of Pinot Grigio, had forgotten about two minutes after tapping it out .
Alas, Mangold wasn’t enough of a tech-savvy fellow of precision and discretion to simply copy and paste the Dutch section of my email and forward it to Palen. That, for Mangold, apparently required too much vigor, too much technical exactitude.
So Mangold, Sloppy Joe-style, just forwarded the whole damn email to Palen, who, as fate would have it, was miffed over my having characterized the Beau Brummell western duds worn by costar Ben Foster, images of which were used in ads for Lionsgate’s 3:10toYuma, as gay cowboy-ish or metro-sexualish or otherwise disrespectful of the Old West atmosphere.
This was why Palen, a genius photographer and marketing wiz** but also a vicious & scheming flying monkey if there ever was one, forwarded the letter to Nikki Finke, the vindictive, green-faced, broom-riding Wicked Witch of the West who was determined to get me for having passed along a second-hand tale about Finke to a couple of N.Y. Daily News guys…a loose-talk story about Finke having allegedly faxed an early draft of an EW story to a source — a story I had only “heard” and knew almost nothing about, but which seemed of mild interest to a couple of N.Y. Daily News colleagues during a no-big-deal water cooler moment in ‘94.
And that was what happened, o my howling, screeching, petty and profoundly detestable winged monkeys of the HE sewing circle.
Despite sharing what I’ve shared, the privacy provision still absolutely applies. For I did not post the 16-paragraph letter on Hollywood Elsewhere, or on Facebook or on the just-emerging format called Twitter or any other public forum. The letter was hellishly snagged and exploited by Palen and especially by the wicked Finke. Anyone who says “it doesn’t matter…you wrote that paragraph and you need to burn in hell for it!”…anyone who says this is, in my humble view, an insect and absolutely deserving of contempt, and I will certainly boot their ass off HE if they persist…take that to the bank and leave it there.
Being a straightforward, high-thread-count T-shirt-wearing straight guy I am not calling myself the Dorothy figure in this Wizard of Oz saga. I am, rather, an Average Suburban Joe who is one-part sentimental Tin Man, one-part Cowardly Lion, one-part brainy Scarecrow and one-part Professor Marvel. In the shower or in the car I tell myself I can sing as well as Jack Haley and certainly better than Ray Bolger or Bert Lahr.
I’m not going to lie and say I absolutely adored Gena Rowlands‘ many sterling performances over the years. I always admired her but never quite fell for her.
I respected the hell out of her chops — she was obviously a top-of-the-line, Barrymore- or Streep-level performer and then some — but I never felt all that emotionally entwined with her characters. She always seemed propelled by ferocious integrity, intensity and technique, and less propelled by an interest in reaching out to Joe and Jane Popcorn.
To keep the engine chugging for 94 years in relatively good health (except for the awful Alzheimers affliction of the last few) is a blessed thing. Good for Rowlands living a long full one. Her last gig (Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks) was 10 years ago.
Rowlands peaked between the late ’60s and late ’80s — call it 20 years. Her Mount Everest achievement was A Woman Under the Influence (’74), made when she was 43 or so. Her most vulnerable, least attention-seeking performance was as Kirk Douglas‘s understanding but frustrated girlfriend in Lonely Are The Brave (’62), made when she was 32 or thereabouts.
10 Rowlands essentials: Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, The Brink’s Job, Gloria, Tempest, Love Streams, Light of Day. Another Woman.
