Gone at 83, Jesse Colin Young lived a healthy, vibrant, productive life. Strictly a boomer, hippie-heyday guy. Beautiful, velvety, high-pitched voice. I stopped listening decades ago, but not out of boredom or anything. I just moved on for whatever reasons. Full respect.

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In HE’s 2025 GoFundMe pitch, which is primarily about raising enough scratch to attend the 2025 Venice Film Festival, is up and rolling. Going a bit slower than last year’s pitch, but the feeling is real.

I’m just reminding the open-hearted, fair-minded contingent that I’m no longer paywalling this site, and that the content is entirely free and wide open, and this is the only pitch I’m making. $25 or $50….whatever’s affordable. Oh, and if you’d rather keep your donation anonymous, please send it to my Venmo account — @gruver56.

My mind is currently blown and spinning by a $500 donation that came in Tuesday afternoon…wow.

3.18, 7:45 pm update:  The total donations have almost reached $2500 (including Venmo).  I need another $1K to make the Venice funding  goal….gettin’ there, gettin’ there.  Thanks to all the generous HE friendos.  Love you guys.

With the Telluride Film Festival (which I’ve been attending since 2010) no longer an option, it’s really important to attend Venice. I can’t just be a Manhattan-centric guy. I have to get out there and engage with the world-class sharpies. I’ve visited the city of Venice six or seven times as a regular wanderer, but I’ve never attended the Venice Film Festival before.

Should enough dough rolls in I could use to it to also attend the ’25 Cannes Film Festival, which is only eight weeks off. But I don’t think this will happen. If I can only raise enough for Venice, so be it and thanks from the bottom of my heart.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’ll be attending a Being Maria post-screening q&a at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema. Thursday evening (3.20) at 7:15 pm. Director Jessica Palud and Matt Dillon (who does an excellent job of portraying Marlon Brando in the film) will be taking questions.

Being Maria, which I saw last night, explores the ramifications and results of trauma visited upon poor Maria Schneider, who died of cancer in 2011. Her troubles were due to the shooting of the infamous anal sex scene, the film says, and especially due to the persistent toxic reactions to that scene. The main topic is the jagged relationship between Schneider, Brando and Last Tango in Paris director-cowriter Bernardo Bertolucci.

I for one believe that it’s a dishonest film as Schneider (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) states that the sexual assault scene was a Brando-Bertolucci idea that was sprung on her at the last minute, which wasn’t the all of it or so I strongly suspect.

Bertolucci stated in 2016 that the only surprise visited upon Schneider was the use of butter as a lubricant, and that Schneider, having read the shooting script, knew that the scene would depict sexual assault.

I’m presuming that Bertolucci was speaking honestly when he said this, and yet Schneider claimed years ago that the anal sex scene wasn’t scripted but was cooked up on the morning of filming between Bertolucci and Brando…an improvisational thing altogether and not just regarding the use of butter.

And yet before shooting the scene Bertolucci (played by Giuseppe Maggio) tells Schneider that it will represent a breaking of trust between the Paul and Jeanne characters.

I have reason to believe that the Tango shooting script spells out the assault with some clarity, and I may even have proof that it’s actually in the shooting script, as I received a 100% authentic Tango shooting script PDF earlier today.

The 201-page script is all in French, but if the scene is in there I’ll find it.
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A friend says that the Tango shooting draft “indicates the scene in question will depict a sexual violation.”

Before shooting the scene Bertolucci tells Schneider that the scene will enact rape and represent dominance.

I won’t know for sure until I’ve read the 201-page shooting draft cover to cover, but I do trust (or WANT to trust) that Bertolucci, being a first-rate artist, a legendary sensualist and an immaculate truth-teller, was not fibbing in 2016 when he recounted the 1972 filming episode in question.

The fact that Jack Nicholson was “that guy” between the late ’60s to the mid ’90s, especially the first few years when he was relatively slender and had decent hair…that, for me, was part of the joy of living, fan-wise, absorption-wise. Nicholson’s hot run began with Easy Rider (’69) and lasted over 25 fucking years. Okay, he didn’t really start to downshift until after his last great role, in The Departed (’06).

It’ll be a sad, sad day when “that day” comes.

Posted on 3.29.16:

This morning a producer friend told me about how Jack Nicholson saved Jim Harrison‘s financial ass in 1978 with a loan of $15K.

The late author-poet (whose recent death prompted yesterday’s post) became friendly with Nicholson through novelist and screenwriter Thomas McGuane, who had written The Missouri Breaks (’76). McGuane and Harrison had met from their mutual base of Livingston, Montana. Harrison published three books in the early to mid ’70s — “Wolf: A False Memoir” (’71), “A Good Day to Die” (’73) and “Farmer” (’76), but the income from these works was negligible and by ’78 he was “broke and all but starving,” the producer relates. Harrison was working on “Legends of the Fall” (which was actually three novellas — “Revenge,” “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” and “Legends of the Fall”) and so Nicholson, advised by McGuane of Harrison’s desperate situation, stepped in with the $15K, which gave Harrison enough breathing room to finish. “Fall” was published in ’79. It became Harrison’s biggest success of his life at the time, and he lived more or less comfortably after that.

Here, by the way, is a nice Outside piece on Harrison (“The Last Lion,” published on 8.31.11) by Tom Bissell.

Greenwich Entertainment will release the new Bonjour Tristesse sometime in the summer. Otto Preminger’s 1958 version used both color and black-and-white. In the newbie Lily McInerny plays Jean Seberg, Chloë Sevigny is Deborah Kerr, Claes Bang is David Niven, and Aliocha Schneider plays Goeffrey Horne.

My favorite aspect of the Preminger film? Saul Bass‘s poster art.

In a lengthy 2.10.25 New Yorker profile, White Lotus creator Mike White laid out the basic game plan of The White Lotus. The default idea, as always, has been to “find ways of depicting gay life as transgressive or even perverted.” White: “It’s not all harmless, but it’s not inherently harmful.”

Over the show’s three seasons White has made certain that the quivering pleasures that come from the heavenly stimulation of men’s anuses…giving and receiving analingus, guys being fucked in the ass, slurping bro kisses, the visual savoring of ripped male bods…are always lurking or hovering or what-have-you. Women also seek and receive a fair amount of hetero dick action, of course, but anal bend-overs are obviously closer to White’s heart.

Last night Sam Rockwell‘s Frank, a longtime friend of Walton Goggins‘ Rick…a dude who’s obviously straight…delivered a long confession about his once active and very bacchanalian Bangkok sex life, and the main part of his confession was about…well, lots of anal action. Frank wanted to feel what it’s like to be a hot Asian girl, and so he gussied himself up in feminine apparel and invited a series of white dudes to fuck him in the ass, over and over and over. And then, gradually, he decided to forego the endless cycle of lust, frustration and anxiety and become a Buddhist.

Rockwell delivered Frank’s anal soliloquy in a certain whack-ass, wide-eyed fashion…the kind of acting that says to the audience “this is kinda ridiculous…you know it, I know it. I’m a hetero dude…there’s nothing the least gay or Mike White-ish about me…and here I am talking about getting fucked by lots and lots of guys….logjammin’, logjammin’, logjammin’. I’ve never taken it up the ass but listen to my White Lotus shpiel…I’m goin’ nuts here.”

Outside of gay porn, there hasn’t been this much devotional attention paid to the pleasuring of male anuses since Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or The 120 days of Sodom (’75). White would probably never admit it, but I began to develop an idea that his basic White Lotus goal is is out-Pasolini Pasolini. All White has to do to even things up is to arrange for a young straight woman to take it up the ass…I shouldn’t say any more. All I’m saying is that White is really playing the transgressive card this season.

Next week, more brotherly incest with a beneath-the-sheets handjob!