In a new episode of “Screen Talk,” IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio discuss the Sasha Stone situation. Go to the 12-minute mark. Do they get into the intrigues and undercurrents? The whys and wherefores? Nope. Do they talk about how people like Sasha aren’t pro-Trumpers as much as deeply anti-woke and anti-Robespierre? Naah. They just review the basic narrative and go “yeah, this happened, and that happened aso but we’ve known Sasha for years,” etc.

Vulture‘s Bilge Ebiri reported something wowser earlier today. And then Variety‘s Katcy Stephan verified and added her two cents.

Having done due research, both stated that in order to demonstrate that critics can’t be trusted when it comes to audacious films by Megalopolis helmer Francis Coppola, Lionsgate’s new Megalopolis trailer uses invented pan quotes from an array of 20th Century critics, citing review excerpts that trash The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Stephan: “In quotes attributed to their reviews of The Godfather, the trailer cites The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as calling it “diminished by its artsiness,” and The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris calling it a “sloppy, self-indulgent movie.”

“Other quotes from critics such as Roger Ebert, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Vincent Canby and Rex Reed similarly flash across the screen, offering harsh critiques of Coppola’s work on masterpieces such as Apocalypse Now.”

A purported review of Coppola’s Dracula by Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman is also fake-quoted (“A beautiful mess”).

My only quibble is that both stories rest upon sober, straight-fact reporting, and so Stephan’s attempt to end her story with sardonic humor doesn’t work. Her final paragraph states that “Lionsgate did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment,” and that “Reed, who still reviews for the Observer, also did not respond to a request for comment.” She concludes by writing that “Kael, Simon, Ebert, Canby, Kauffmann and Sarris are dead, which makes it hard to get their reaction.” Hard but not altogether impossible?

The final line should have read “no reactions, of course, from the departed-for-heavenly-pastures Kael, Simon, Ebert, Canby, Kauffmann and Sarris, none of whom were ever at a loss for words while living.”

Lionsgate has zotzed the inaccurate Megalopolis trailer in question…yanked, gone.

Actual excerpt of real-deal, highly positive Kael review of The Godfather, dated 3.10.72: “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather is it.

“The movie starts from a trash novel that is generally considered gripping and compulsively readable, though (maybe because movies more than satisfy my appetite for trash) I found it unreadable. You’re told who and what the characters are in a few pungent, punchy sentences, and that’s all they are. You’re briefed on their backgrounds and sex lives in a flashy anecdote or two, and the author moves on, from nugget to nugget.

“Mario Puzo has a reputation as a good writer, so his potboiler was treated as if it were special, and not in the Irving Wallace-Harold Robbins class, to which, by its itch and hype and juicy roman-a-clef treatment, it plainly belongs. The novel ‘The Godfather,’ financed by Paramount during its writing, features a Sinatra stereotype, and sex and slaughter, and little gobbets of trouble and heartbreak. It’s gripping, maybe, in the same sense that Spiro Agnew’s speeches were a few years back.

“Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the film, and wrote the script with Puzo, has stayed very close to the book’s greased-lightning sensationalism and and yet has made a movie with the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens’ used to have. With the slop and sex reduced and the whoremongering guess-who material minimized, the movie bears little relationship to other adaptations of books of this kind, such as The Carpetbaggers and ]The Adventurers.

“Puzo provided what Coppola needed: a storyteller’s outpouring of incidents and details to choose from, the folklore behind the headlines, heat and immediacy, the richly familiar. And Puzo’s shameless turn-on probably left Coppola looser than if he had been dealing with a better book; he could not have been cramped by worries about how best to convey its style.

“Puzo, who admits he was out to make money, wrote ‘below my gifts,’ as he puts it, and one must agree. Coppola uses his gifts to reverse the process—to give the public the best a moviemaker can do with this very raw material. Coppola, a young director who has never had a big hit, may have done the movie for money, as he claims—in order to make the pictures he really wants to make, he says—but this picture was made at peak capacity. He has salvaged Puzo’s energy and lent the narrative dignity.

“Given the circumstances and the rush to complete the film and bring it to market, Coppola has not only done his best but pushed himself farther than he may realize. The movie is on the heroic scale of earlier pictures on broad themes, such as On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity and The Nun’s Story. It offers a wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty. The abundance is from the book; the quality of feeling is Coppola’s.”

“During that first season in 1999, The Sopranos would grow deeper and darker. There was a point at which executives at HBO wanted Artie Buco’s wife, Charmaine (Kathrine Narducci), with her ability to see Tony clearly for who he was, to become the show’s ‘moral center.’ That’s classic network thinking.

“But what was radical about The Sopranos — and still is — is that Tony, the gangster we’re asked to identify with, is so far from being a moral center that the audience is prompted, at every moment, to test what it’s rooting for.

“The HBO brass pushed back against creator David Chase on the famous fifth episode — the one where Tony, driving Meadow around on her college tour, spies a Mob rat who’s been hiding in the Witness Protection Program and takes a detour to strangle him.

“But this was the show’s revolutionary daring, as bold as anything in ’70s Hollywood. We would now be in cahoots with a monster, obeying a compulsive code of loyalty that rendered his violence as ugly as it was badass. As Chase puts it in the film, every character on the show, even Melfi, has made a deal with the devil. That’s a major part of what kept the drama high-stakes, off-balance, mesmerizing.” — from Owen Gleiberman’s review of Alex Gibney’s Wiseguy.

Have you ever expressed a private thought or an observation or a clumsy joke or a dopey aside of some kind that you wouldn’t want to be publicly disseminated?

Have you ever said a proverbial “wrong” thing — verbally or whispered off in some dark corner of a restaurant booth or bar or party somewhere, obviously intended as private — have you ever muttered an unattractive thing to someone that, God forbid, you would not want someone else overhearing and transcribing and printing verbatim?

If your answer is “no” then you are a liar.

If I see you in Telluride I’m going to give you a dirty look. Fair?

With everyone understanding that the chances of Donald Trump defeating Kamala Harris are a lot less likely than indicated a few weeks ago (if not flat-out unlikely), surely the theatrical + streaming distribution of Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, the Cannes-premiered movie about the conflicted relationship between young Trump and the demonic Roy Cohn, is now regarded as a far less risky proposition.

The film has apparently been acquired by Tom Ortenberg‘s Briarcliff Entertainment, and given the presumed likelihood of The Apprentice surfacing by sometime in the early fall (late September or October, I’m guessing, not to mention a rumored appearance next weekend in a little town in Colorado), I’m kind of wondering why a trailer hasn’t been seen.

Ortenberg obviously knows that as dramatically sturdy and engrossing as the film is with stellar co-lead performances by Sebastian Stan (Trump) and Jeremy Strong (Cohn), there’s not much commercial potential if the film is released after the 11.5 election. The clock is ticking. Surely the Harris-Walz ascendancy has emboldened Ortenberg and his backers.

The Apprentice is not so much a lacerating Trump hit piece as a fascinating, well-crafted character-driven drama. Well-written, finely acted realism. It doesn’t portray Trump in especially flattering terms, granted, but it’s not an assassination either. He’s actually portrayed as moderately, half-sympathetically human during the first half.

“[Trump] has no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth. He used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, say it enough, and people will believe you.’ But it does matter, what you [say] matters and what you don’t say matters. On January 6, I asked Melania if we could at least tweet that, while peaceful protest is the right of every American, there’s no place for lawlessness or violence, she replied with one word, ‘No.'”

“Francis Coppola has seemingly lost his mind. Watching Megalopolis just now and listening to random moo-cow boos as the closing credits began to roll was a very sad and sobering experience. It’s not just an embarassment and a calamity — I almost feel like weeping for the poor guy — but a film that hasn’t a prayer of attracting any Average Joes or Janes whatsoever, and you can totally forget any sort of fall awards campaign or any distributor even flirting with paying for same…no way, man!” — posted from Cannes on 5.16.24.

Note: Lionsgate has zotzed the inaccurate Megalopolis trailer…yanked, gone.

Five days ago (8.16) World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy posted a limited consensus view (i.e., three viewers) that James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown, recently research-screened, is allegedly “just okay”, partly due to an opinion that it runs a bit long (two and a half hours).

The law west of the Pecos says that we should never, ever put much stock in research-screening reactions. Still, the Ruimy piece instills a slight feeling of concern. My guess is that Mangold being Mangold, A Complete Unknown may (I say “may”) be leaning toward the usual game plan of a generic biopic, and very much not in the vein of Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There.

Way back in ’22 I wrote the following:

Remember the aggravated conflict between Steve McQueen and director John Sturges on Le Mans, the ’71 racing flick? It came down to Sturges wanting to tell a story about a race car driver…a story that would deliver some kind of emotional resonance for the audience…and McQueen wanting to make a boundary-pushing anti-movie about the racing experience. He didn’t want to invest in the usual strategies and beats — he wanted to immerse audiences in the reality of what big-time racing is really about…how it sounds and smells and makes the bones vibrate.

I’m wondering if a similar conflict has been animating the development of A Complete Unknown (previously Going Electric) since 2020.

HE to Mangold: Be Steve McQueen, be Steve McQueen, be Steve McQueen.

Somebody (Mangold?) wants to fashion a semi-traditional musical drama set in the early to mid ’60s…a script with a solid three-act structure and the right kind of dialogue from the right characters and so on. Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan (this could be the best role he’s ever had) and God-knows-who as Albert Grossman, Pete Seeger and the boys in The Band, etc.

And somebody else is saying “fuck all that…I don’t want a regular-ass popcorn movie that quote-unquote ‘tells the story’ of Bob Dylan’s musical journey between ’63 and ’65…I want a movie that feels and unfolds like ‘Murder Most Foul‘ except delivering a theme about birth rather than death and finality.

But the way to do this is to not try and fashion a traditional-feeling James Mangold film. If you make another Ford vs. Ferrari but with a story focused on Dylan vs. Folkies Who Don’t Like Electric, it’ll be a disaster.

I’m not saying don’t write a good script or don’t use it as a structural diagram or launchpoint, but you can’t make “a Mangold film”…you have to find your way into a different psychology and more of a Hoyte von Hoytema shooting style. Mangolr did quite well with Walk The Line, of course, but this is 2022 and the old Mangold ways have to give way to the new. (Or in this case to the “old”.)

Listen to me, you HE antagonist: The way to make this fucking movie is to just sink into the music, man, and shoot as the story evolves…make it feel like an acted-out Don’t Look Back…use the kind of raw, Dogma-like documentary approach that Lars Von Trier might have gone with if he’d shot Going Electric 15 or 20 years ago…make the kind of film that Luca Guadagnino or David O. Russell or Paul Greengrass might make if they were on a roll…something loose and jam-sessiony and semi-fragmented…find your way through it because you know where it’ll end up at the end so the pressure’s off.

Make a film about Dylan’s folk-to-electric transition that’s as good as Greengrass’s 9/11 movie.

To paraphrase Hal Holbrook‘s “Deep Throat,” just “follow the music.”