The shaking and rattling of mailboxes and railroad signal poles is ridiculous…makes no sense at all…but the first 100 seconds are perfect. The set-up comes when the first pair of headlights comes along, Richard Dreyfuss signals him and the guy pulls up and yells “you’re in the middle of the road, jackass!” And then the payoff: A second “car” appears behind Dreyfuss’s truck, he signals it to go around and….
If only the rest of Close Encounters was this clever, this subtle.
The lyric goes “and all the joy within you dies”…not “hope.”
The internet’s psychotic thrashing of Timothee Chalamet in the wake of his losing the Best Actor Oscar…the binge lasted five days and is finally done. (I think.) But one last article in this vein appeared yesterday in the right-leaning New York Sun — not another witch-burning piece but a calm and rational assessment of why it happened.
The author, Tom Teodorczuk, interviewed yours truly and posted a two-paragraph quote. My agreeing to discuss the Chalamet thing with a Sun staffer doesn’t mean I’m a rightie. I remain a sensible centrist.
Jordan Ruimy is hearing (but doesn’t definitely know) that the following films won’t play Cannes ’26 — Ruben Östlund‘s The Entertainment System Is Down, James Gray‘s Paper Tiger, Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind, Lukas Dhont‘s Coward, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland (previously titled 1949), and Mike Leigh‘s untitled whatever.
Posted on 3.2.13: I had a nice 20-minute chat this morning with actress Valerie Perrine, who’s best known for her Oscar-nominated performance as Honey Bruce in Bob Fosse‘s Lenny (’74). (And for which she won Best Actress at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and Best Supporting Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle.)
As I mentioned yesterday, Perrine will be doing a q & a with Larry Karaszewski between screenings of Lenny and George Roy Hill‘s Slaughterhouse Five on Thursday, 10.7, at Santa Monica’s Aero.
Perrine started in show business as a Las Vegas topless revue dancer, which she did for several years. She didn’t land her first screen role in Diamonds Are Forever, she says — that’s an IMDB error.
She was around 28 when she lucked into the supporting role of Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse Five (which came out in June 1972). She then made history as the first actress to do a boob-baring scene on American televison during a May 1973 PBS airing of Bruce Jay Friedman‘s Steambath. And then came Lenny — her career peak.
Perrine costarred in the first two Chris Reeve Superman films, of course, playing Lex Luthor’s (i.e., Gene Hackman‘s) girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher.
Her career peak era ended after costarring in Nancy Walker‘s Can’t Stop the Music (’80), which Perrine believes pretty much killed her career or at least kept her from being cast in first-rate films.
Perrine costarred in Tony Richardson‘s The Border (’82), although, she says, she had signed for that film before Can’t Stop the Music. And from then on acted in whatever came along — TV, indie movies. Never say die, keep on plugging, tomorrow’s another day. Perrine’s last mainstream score was a costarring role in Nancy Meyers‘ What Women Want (’00).
Perrine isn’t given to expansive answers but that’s cool.
She’s a bit like Jennifer Lawrence in that she’s not into arduous preparation for a part — she just likes to walk on set and keep things as spontaneous as possible. She didn’t have a huge amount to say about working with with Fosse on Lenny or about Lamont Johnson‘s Last American Hero (’75), an excelllent film in which she also co-starred. But she told a pretty good tale about getting the attention of Slaughterhouse Five casting agent Marion Dougherty.
She mentioned that her health isn’t in the greatest condition these days but that it might be just a temporary setback (let’s hope). Really nice lady, good to touch base.
…is if the film in question is still locked in the DVD dungeon…no high-def streaming, no 1080 Bluray, no 4K.
This is the situation with Alan Pakula‘s Rollover (’81), a noirish thriller set in the world of high-stakes banking. Whoever owns the home video rights has calculated that it’s a loss leader…”fuck it…nobody remembers this film, and the financial world shenanigans no longer apply…and nobody cares about Kris Kristoffersion or Jane Fonda in a romantinc context”…something like that.
Rollover has been written off…extinct.
In ’80 I was treadmilling along as a Manhattan journalist when portions of Rollover were being shot there, and I remember talking to a very sharp, well-connected female journalist who had written a profile of Kristofferson, and she said that he and Fonda had an affair during production.
It was strictly one of those “only during principal photography” deals that never crossed over into their off-set lives, she said, and so nobody (including Fonda’s then-husband Tom Hayden) was the wiser. Or gave a shit…whatever.
…can go fuck itself. I watched it late yesterday afternoon and didn’t so much as crack a smile. I didn’t just dislike it — I turned it off after 45 minutes. It’s silly and oafish in a forced kind of way. Costello’s adolescent antics are truly, excessively unfunny. All the supporting players (including Crocker Jarmon from The Candidate**) just stand there like bowling pins as they watch Bud and Lou recite their jibber-jabber material. Plus Lou yelps too much.
** Don Porter
Throughout the 20th Century each and every actor with an excessively ethnic-sounding name knew they had to adopt an easy-to-pronounce, vaguely whitebread marquee name (no more than four syllables) in order to crash the big leagues.**
Hence Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, etc. No funny-sounding names…no names that Ma and Pa Bumblefuck couldn’t say or spell with ease.
In 1937 aspiring actor Mladen Sekulovich, a 25 year-old descendant of Bosnian Serbs who’d grown up in Chicago and worked in Indiana steel mills, was reportedly persuaded by Group Theatre colleague Elia Kazan to simplify his name.
So he changed the spelling of Mladen by switching the “la” to “al” and using Malden as his last name, junking his suspiciously Commie-sounding, four-syllable last name altogether, and chose “Karl” (in honor of his paternal grandfather) as his first name. Simple.
Karl Malden’s career took off after Kazan, who’d given up acting for directing, cast him as the basically decent, lunk-headed Mitch in the B’way stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947.
Malden felt proud of his Bosnian Serb ancestry but there’s no way in hell he “regretted” using a simplified name for professional purposes. If he hadn’t done that he never would have made it as a screen actor (perhaps not even as a stage actor), and he wouldn’t have wound up rich and famous and living in a flush home in Mandeville Canyon.
Oh, and he didn’t “insist” that this or that character in movies and TV shows that he starred in be called “Sekulovich”— he asked or urged or cajoled certain producers and directors into allowing the name to be heard.
“I despise inexactitude” — Hal Holbrook’s “Deep Throat” in All The President’s Men.
** Except for Allen Garfield and Keith Szarabajka.
Not to mention the hugely expensive logistical challenge of transporting Gojira all those thousands of miles.
I’m going to charitably ignore Jessie Buckley‘s years-ago remark about not liking cats. I can understand certain folks preferring dogs to cats because dogs are more openly emotional and affectionate, but how can anyone literally “dislike” cats? I’m a dog and a cat person….even steven, no prejudice or favoritism.
Sasha Stone‘s dog Jack passed away from cancer a couple of days ago. Hugs, condolences…a very tough thing to go through. Jack was part of the family. He went to the Telluride Film Festival many times.
,/p?
Mr. Nobody Against Putin won the Best Int’l Feature Oscar, but I somehow never caught it. Did anyone? Just rented HD version. The DVD (480p) debuts in a week or two. Looking forward.
They earned a mountain of dough on Project Hail Mary’s opening day, and you have to respect that. Pic instilled feelings of vague irritation and hard-science gloom, but that’s me. We learn via flashback that Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace had refused to join the rescue mission, thus leading Sandra Huller to forcibly put him aboard. What kind of a wimpy, petty-minded dweeb ducks out of a project that might save humanity from starving to death?
