I think we can all agree that callous or physically abusive behavior on a movie set is a bad thing, no matter who’s dishing it out or taking it. Simply acting like a dick….that doesn’t fly either.

Earlier today Bella Thorne accused Mickey Rourke of giving her a hard time during the making of Girl. If her accusations are valid Rourke owes her an apology and a general pledge not to behave this way again with anyone.

Thorne’s apparent goal in making a stink about this is presumably to obtain said apology…right? She hasn’t filed a lawsuit so the idea is apparently to make him sweat or pay on some social or professional level.

Why didn’t she forcefully confront him after the film wrapped in late 2019 or or during the pre-release promotion in the late summer or 2020? Why did she wait almost five years to lower the boom?

I’m sorry about the passing of director Ted Kotcheff, whom I first met in the early fall of ’82 when he was promoting First Blood. I liked Ted — my idea of an excellent fellow — smart, friendly, engaging in a laid-back way. And he knew how to direct efficiently, and by my sights he wasn’t just a rote get-it-done guy. He had balls, character. His better films had a certain gravitas.

Kotcheff was fortunate enough to enjoy a 15-year peak period from the mid ’70s to late ’80s — The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (’74), Fun with Dick and Jane (’77), Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (’78), North Dallas Forty (’79), Split Image (’82), First Blood (’82), Uncommon Valor (’83), Joshua Then and Now (’85), Switching Channels (1988) and Weekend at Bernie’s (’89).

Of these ten films, the best were North Dallas Forty (Nick Nolte as an aging football player, dependant on painkillers), First Blood (still the best Rambo film ever, and a huge financial success) and Uncommon Valor (former Marine Gene Hackman leading a crack team of commandos to rescue his son from a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp).

Weekend at Bernies was also a sizable hit, of course (it gradually became a cult film), but I personally hated it — coarse and crude, made for the animals.

During the First Blood promotion Kotcheff was kind enough to feed me a lot of good info on the troubled making of Tootsie. I wrote a big labored piece about this for The Film Journal, which I was managing editor of. I met Kotcheff and screenwriter Robert Kaufman at Joe Allen one night in early October, and I was given me a big rundown on the convoluted pre-production and production experience…excellent stuff.

The gist was the then-astounding notion that a present-day New York comedy about an actor who can’t get a job could cost $21 million, which at the time was way above the norm.

Kaufman was one of the uncredited Tootsie writers (along with Don McGuire, Murray Schisgal, Elaine May, director Dick Richards) and the stories were fairly wild, or certainly seemed that way at the time.

Kotcheff had 94 mostly good years — we should all be so fortunate.

In Richard Lawson‘s 4.10 Vanity Fair review, he calls Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners “a vampire movie, one that has tense fun with all the old rules — garlic, wooden stakes, needing an invitation to enter a building — but uses them in service of a sad, harrowing evocation of history.”

A second Lawson quote reads, “One could look at the two sides of Sinners — Black entrepreneurs, artists, and revelers versus predacious white fiends — and see an obvious intent. That is certainly a foundational tenet of the film’s thinking.”

Lawson is describing some kind of wicked, anguished social situation in the Mississippi Delta of the early 1930s, but seems reluctant to just spit it out. I guess “the film’s thinking” will be clear enough when I catch Sinners next week.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Vampire metaphors are almost always erotic, but despite the rather steamy atmosphere of Sinners (at the juke joint, there’s a whole lotta hookin’ up goin’ on), that’s not what it means here. The vampires are presented as extensions of the racist white culture that wants to stop the party.”

From Peter Bradshaw‘s 4.10 Guardian review:

And “in its forthright way, Sinners is a riff on the idea of blues as a kind of music that is avidly consumed by its producers’ enemies. As Delroy Lindo’s character says: ‘White folks like the blues just fine…just not the people who make it.'”

Lawson again:

There’s no discernible difference between digital and celluloid these days. Not to my eyes, at least. But Coogler sure knows his varying film formats and aspect ratios! And he’s a big believer in 2.76:1.

Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther and Creed, breaks down each film format and the many ways you can see Sinners on the big screen. Sinners, shot on KODAK 65mm film is only in theaters April 18. #SinnersMovie pic.twitter.com/5t4ld8wjyt

— Kodak (@Kodak) April 10, 2025

Over the last few days I’ve been on a Brooke Hayward jag. Okay, a Brooke Hayward-and-Dennis Hopper thing…quite a pairing + the lore of ‘60s Hollywood and Joan Didion-ville…the counter-cultural turnovers, upheavals and whatnot.

This led yesterday to Mike Rozzo’s “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy”, a 2022 book about the fraught but exciting eight-year marriage (‘61 to ‘69) between Hayward, author of 1977’s “Haywire”, one of the better torn-and-frayed Hollywood memoirs, and the eccentric Hopper.

I initially wrote “nutso” to describe the late Easy Rider director and Blue Velvet costar. This might sound unkind but it takes one to know one. Not the druggy stuff, mind, as I never went down that hole. I meant it as a like-minded compliment, actually, because a paragraph in Rozzo’s book about a seminal moment in Hopper’s Kansas childhood reminded me of my own.

I didn’t feel that my childhood was less “real” than the realms I sank into when I began to catch films as a kid, but it was far less attractive. If anything it was too real.

All I wanted in my tweens and teens was to obtain parole from the repressive suburban gulag I’d been raised under and thereafter blend into (taste, know more intimately, in some way contribute to, anything) the extra-level pizazz of movies.

My Hayward dive began with an opening lecture scene in Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin (‘73), in which the mid-30ish Hayward, whose ‘60s acting career never took off, asks George C. Scott about governmental dolphin research.

Hayward is one of three female questioners in this scene, but she seems like the most knowledgable and grounded on some level…there’s a whiff of character and conviction in her WASPy features and confident tone of voice…you can feel it. On top of which she’s quite beautiful.

I’ve also been flipping through the almost half-century-old “Haywire”, which digs into Brooke’s Hollywood vs. northeast corridor upbringing and her turbulent young adulthood.

The late Buck Henry, an old friend who wrote the screenplay for The Day of the Dolphin and was probably instrumental in getting Brooke that cameo, wrote a forward intro for a 2010 re-issue of “Haywire”. It ends with this line: