Otherwise the Sydney fuzz might have presumed he was with the bad guys and plugged him.
And by the way, why didn’t the Sydney fuzz respond sooner? Onlookers said the shooters were unchallenged for quite a while…15 minutes or longer. Early reports are hazy, but the general impression is that cops definitely weren’t Johnny-on-the-spot.
If a snowfall is intense enough and if you make the mistake of staring at the onrushing snowflakes instead of the road and the barely visible white lines, you can lose your bearings. This video doesn’t capture the visual deluge like my naked eyes were doing this morning around 1:30 am, but it conveys some of the odd visual envelopment that I’ve just described.
I knew Steven Spielberg’s 1941 would be a tank less than five minutes after it began. Spielberg used a few seconds of John Williams’ Jaws theme (“dent-dent-dent-dent-DENT-DENT!”) to aurally announce the arrival of a Japanese sub off the California coast. Right away I said to myself “Spielberg is paying satirical tribute to his own, relatively recent blockbuster?” It was such an unfunny egoistic instinct that I knew 1941 would be a bust.
“AS THEY ROARED INTO BATTLE, ONLY ONE THING WAS MISSING….LAUGHS!” A 8.30.21 piece by Rolling Stone‘s Angie Martoccio reported that Dennis Rodman‘s wacky, wild-ass 48-hour vacation in Las Vegas in the middle of the Chicago Bulls’ 1997-1998 season would be chronicled in a narrative feature titled 48 Hours in Vegas.
That was four and 1/3 years ago. The Lionsgate project obviously languished and then petered out. Now it’s back ‘on” and ready to roll with LaKeith Stanfield as Rodman. The script is by Jordan VanDina with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller producing, blah blah.
The Rodman incident was covered in episodes #3 and #4 of The Last Dance, a ten-episode, ESPN/Netflix doc that streamed in the spring of 2020.
The Lionsgate project — is Rodman still exec producing? — will take some “creative license” with the actual story, blah blah. It will center around Rodman’s adventures in Sin City with his skittish assistant, “GM”, and chronicle their unlikely friendship.
“Dennis refused to follow the herd,” Lord and Miller said in a 2021 statement. “That is what made him a target and it’s also what made him a star. His weekend in Las Vegas is full of fun and hijinks, but it is also full of important questions about the way public figures, and workers are treated, especially when their individuality is expressed so vividly,” blah blah.
Bulls head coach Phil Jackson allowed Rodman to take a break in the middle of the NBA Finals. Alas, party-animal Rodman didn’t return within the timeframe he told the Bulls he would, prompting both Jackson and Michael Jordan to go to Vegas and retrieve Rodman themselves, blah blah.
Edge-of-a-steep-cliff character actor Peter Greene was “found” dead yesterday in his East Village apartment. The N.Y. Daily News broke the story, but my first awareness came from Mark Ebner, a onetime friend of Greene’s, on Facebook. Greene had “demons”, as the saying goes. Smack and crack in the ’90s and perhaps beyond.
There was a fascinating, well-written Premiere article about Greene that appeared in November 1996. Here’s an excerpt:
“In many industries, an employee found getting high on the job might get one shot at a hush-hush rehab, and then be shown the door. Unless they’re just fired on the spot. That’s not how they do it in L.A., where industry mechanics can be somewhat more perverse.
“Here, sometimes the trick is to keep ‘edgy’ stars sated with just the right amount of drugs to enable them to function (if merely for the benefit of the cameras), but not enough to push them over the brink. One-take wonders like Jan-Michael Vincent can be propped up in front of cameras until the day their liver explodes, their last ancillary market is exploited, and they become yesterday’s tabloid news–or until they break their neck in a car wreck, as Vincent did recently.
“If they’re luckier, like recovering cocaine addict Gary Busey, they get a chance to cycle through the Hollywood system again and again, making more comebacks than mere mortality can explain.
“Unlike some no less tragic has-been actors, the fiercely talented Peter Greene delivers. Marginally talented or charismatic screwups are a dime a dozen, but a true junkie artist is a rarity. And in Hollywood, such creatures are deified for living outside of the lines of self-control and responsibility until an industry of celebrity winds up flourishing around their tombstones.
“During filming on The Usual Suspects, Greene luxuriously improvised a memorable filmic moment by flicking a lit cigarette into Stephen Baldwin‘s face. Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie calls Greene a ‘million-dollar day player,’ which could be translated as ‘Get him in, nail the money shot, and get him out before he wreaks havoc.'”
If I could spread the Best Supporting Oscar wealth by way of re-categorizing, I would arrange for Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgard to win the traditional BSP trophy with One Battle After Another‘s Benicio del Toro winning a Best Supporting Underground Smuggler Chill Bro Oscar.
How do you pronounce Yvonne Villarreal‘s last name again? I’m not too bad with Spanish, but I’ve listened to her pronunciation three times…no dice.
Christopher Nolan’s six-minute Odyssey prologue is currently playing in IMAX theatres that are showing (choke, gag) Sinners and One Battle After Another. Well, there’s no effing way I’m paying $20something to catch Sinners again and I’ve already seen OBAA twice so eff that jazz. It’s being reported that the full prologue will be attached to Avatar: Fire and Ash 70mm IMAX screenings starting on Friday, 12.19. (I hate the idea of watching Cameron’s latest but I might submit.) Non-IMAX screenings will be getting a truncated version of the prologue. Nolan’s Odyssey flick pops on 7.17.26.
Will it be fair to call The Odyssey a sword-and-sandal flick? I’m asking. Swords, sandals, helmets, beards and loincloths.
Legendary architect Frank Gehry died exactly a week ago at age 96. His spirit ascended from inside his home in Santa Monica. I don’t know why I didn’t jump on this right away as I’ve always loved Gehry’s creations and was deeply moved and honored to meet him in Toronto 19 years ago — a handshake at an outdoor cocktail party for Sydney Pollack‘s Sketches of Frank Gehry, on 9.10.06.
HE-posted 19 years ago: Sydney Pollack‘s Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sony Pictures Classics, 5.12.06), which I caught yesterday at a public screening at Toronto’s Elgin theatre, is a stirring, hugely likable portrait of the most daring and innovative architect of our time.
Corny as this sounds, Sketches left me with a more vivid feeling of celebration and with more reasons to feel enthused and excited about life than anything I’ve seen so far at this festival.
I knew a few things about Gehry before seeing this film, but not a whole lot. Now I feel like I know a few things. The man is the Pablo Picasso of architects. He’s a risk-taker who lives big and tosses the creative dice all the time and really goes for it. And I now know about his significant creations (the most famous being Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles and a seaside museum in Bilbao, Spain), how he creates, who he mostly is, where he’s been.
Sketches is more than just a meet-and-understand-Frank-Gehry movie — it’s a contact high.
Here’s a discussion I did with Pollack about Sketches….apologies for the sound quality. Poor Sydney passed less than two years later (5.26.08).
It’s a film that lets you into the head of a genius in a very relaxed and plain-spoken way, and it lets you share in the sense of being a person of Gehry’s magnitude — a guy who has created a kingdom out of a supreme confidence in his dreams, but at the same time someone honest enough to admit he doesn’t precisely know what he’s doing much of the time.
This is partly due to Gehry having been very open and unguarded with Pollack as the doc was being shot, and partly due to Pollack having sculpted this film in a way that feels more personal and congenial and relaxed than your typical portrait-of-a-noteworthy-person movie.
And yet Pollack doesn’t relent in passing along all the information we need to know about Gehry. It’s all done with total thoroughness and clarity of purpose.
I met and spoke with Gehry and Pollack at a nice cocktail party on Wellington Street late yesterday afternoon, courtesy of publicist Amanda Lundberg. What a pleasure to hang with these guys. I left the party feeling wise and steady and optimistic about everything.
Sketches of Frank Gehry will air on the PBS “American Masters” series in late ’06, but Pollack first wants it to play theatrically. This should happen. I can see this film being an essential “see” with people of a certain stripe, and yet a ten year-old kid could watch it and understand almost everything.
I can only repeat that the film is much more than just a sturdy documentary — it’s a profound turn-on. I’ve looked at Gehry’s buildings and designs — those weirdly bent and sloping pieces of steel and sheet metal and glass and what-have-you — but I never really “saw” them until yesterday.
There’s a wonderful edit right at the beginning of the film, which I won’t spoil by describing in too much detail. Suffice that it takes Gehry’s doodly drawings and brings them into full-metal aliveness in a single stroke.
There’s another delicious moment when Julian Schnabel is asked about Gehry’s press critics, and he refers to them as “flies on the neck of a lion…they’re the sort of people who complain that Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now is over the top.”
Ethan Hawke‘s Dano riff begins at 1:35…Will Hawke’s Lorenz Hart performance snag the Best Actor Oscar?…it’s either him or Timothee Chalamet.
In a “live” chat this morning with Telos subscribers, Olivia Nuzzi’s seemingly revenge-driven ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza asked for and replied to various questions.
Here’s what I asked:
“Boiled way down, what in your view is Olivia’s default rationale or susceptibility when it comes to older guys…Olbermann, yourself, RFK, Sanford? One naturally presumes that her relationship with her dad is at the root of it, but what was the exact basic nature of that relationship? What precisely happened or didn’t happen? Surely you’re familiar with the backstory. This is the nub of it.”
Zip reply so far.
From Lizza’s latest Telos chapter (“Loyalty Test”, posted on 12.11):
