Early Sunday evening we visited Masala King (Park Ave. and 34th Street), easily one of the best Indian restaurants I’ve ever patronized.

HE truly respects George Clooney for playing Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway stage version of Good Night and Good Luck.

It must have been hugely intimidating as Clooney’s last stage performance was in the 1986 play Vicious, in which he played a prostitute and drug dealer.

A portrait of Sex Pistols’ star Sid Vicious, it premiered at Hollywood’s The Complex theatre (6476 Santa Monica Blvd.).

That said, HE slightly disagrees with Clooney’s 2022 assessment of Paul Newman‘s decision to play an alcoholic attorney in Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (’82).

Clooney: “Newman figured out that he was a character actor, and he accepted that role. He didn’t fight it or try to get his face done [in order to] look younger. He just said,’Okay, that’s who I am now’, and in doing this he changed expectations a little bit.”

Born in 1925, Newman was around 56 when he starred in The Verdict, and he looked fantastic, of course — intense blue eyes, beautifully cut gray hair, lean physique, not even a hint of a neck wattle. Lumet guided Newman into playing a certain down-at-the-heels, frayed-at-the-seams vulnerability, but Newman was clearly projecting a movie star aura in that film. Plus he got to fuck 35 year-old Charlotte Rampling.

So Newman was not playing a grubby, seen-better-days character — he was playing a gleaming silver fox with a receding drinking problem.

Hollywood Elsewhere is proudly announcing that last week’s GoFundMe Venice Film Festival campaign has not only reached its goal but has brought in enough dough to cover principal expenses for both the 2025 Cannes and Venice film festivals.

I’m hustling to submit my Cannes press credential application as we speak, and I’ll be doing the same for Venice very soon. Thanks to everyone (a couple of exceptionally generous fellows in particular) who stood up and pitched in…really meant a lot, opened great emotional floodgates.

The toxic pisshounds (two of whom I admittedly wished cancer upon earlier this year…regrettable emotional statements on my part) were full of dire predictions about how the GoFundMe thing might not work out, but these proved unreliable. I really despise a small number of HE comment-thread uglies. Wokeys mostly. All they want to do is urinate over everything.

I am otherwise ecstatic and extremely grateful that everything panned out. I’m trying to find a Venice pad as we speak. I’ll be sharing a THX-1138 Cannes pad with Jordan Ruimy.

…isn’t necessarily a bad idea, and yet I’m not sure. The optics of a Maher-Trump handshake and some kind of amicable discussion…I honestly don’t know how I feel about this.

An X-factor boomer with a well-established cut-the-crap attitude, Maher comes from a sensibly Democratic, JFK-admiring, middle-class New Jersey culture, as I did, and he’s made it clear that he loathes woke fanatics as much I do, and perhaps more so. He’s been equally clear that he thinks Trump is a crude demagogue…an unstable, egoistic authoritarian with no respect for the norms of a healthy democracy.

And yet he’s motivated by his belief that sensible, practical-minded Democratic centrists need to take charge of the Democratic party and…okay, perhaps not kick the wokeys totally off the bus but firmly explain to them that the Great Cultural Revolution insanity of 2018-to-2024 (nonwhite-identity-festishing, white-male loathing, DEI meets 1619 Project, biomale trans athletes competing in women’s sports, anti-normie gender-switch trans theology in schools) made for an electoral disaster, and that they have to put that shit away and embrace the tenets of sensible moderate left-centrism.

Forget the cults of Kamala and AOC strongly influencing the 2028 Democratic pitch…not happening. Gavin Newsom‘s talk-to-righties podcast indicates that he’s into pivoting toward the sensible center, etc.

So it’s not necessarily a terrible idea for Maher to meet Trump, but it’s also fraught with a potential for image trouble. Maher certainly has to be careful about looking like he’s kissing the MAGA ring on some level. He would never do that, of course, but the optics could be tricky.