Four and 1/2 years ago I posted a Vimeo embed of Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere and Simon Philippe‘s “The Red Drum Getaway.”
For some obscure but logical reason it began attracting fresh eyeballs sometime yesterday. “Wow! This is fabulous,” “Great job, sir!,” “Trippy,” etc. The always alert Sasha Stone, never one to surf behind the eight ball, sent me a link this morning.
Yes, of course — at the very end that’s the lifeless body of Scotty Ferguson lying in front of the apes.
And yet now that I’ve watched it yet again, the only thing I would change is to end it at 2:37.
A good guy, always candid, quick with the smile, joyful eyes.
The first time I met Scotty was at the salad bar in Fairfax Whole Foods (NE corner of Santa Monica Blvd.), and he couldn’t have been nicer to a stranger. We later conversed a couple of times during the promotion of Tyrnauer’s film.
I’ve been on the Scotty Bowers trail for about a year now, and so when the Brigade guys asked if I wanted to talk to Matt Tyrnauer, director of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, I figured “why stop now?” We met at BUILD studios (corner of Broadway and East Fourth Street), and retired to a kind of green room with free soft drinks and energy bars. Our chat lasted 29 minutes, give or take. A good interview, if I do say so myself. Then I watched Matt sit for an on-camera BUILD interview.
I’ve explained this six or seven times, but most of Tyrnauer’s surprisingly intimate, low-key, non-gossipy film is about old Scotty — a 90something, white-haired pack rat who owns two homes in the Hollywood hills and lives with a good-natured, seen-and-heard-it-all wife who loves him — and only intermittently about the mostly gay and bi movie stars and celebrities (Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Noël Coward, James Dean) who regarded Scotty as a trusted pimp and pleasure-giver who could and did set them up with same-sex lovers.
After studying Bowers for 98 minutes and listening to him talk about how terrifying things were for gay and bi actors in the intensely homophobic ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and considering the affection he has for his old gay friends and the strong feelings and immense respect they have for him…after the film is over you’ll probably be convinced, as I was, that Scotty is no bullshitter.
Last night at the Aero I caught my second viewing of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich, 7.27). Tyrnauer and the film’s subject, the legendary Scotty Bowers, sat for a post-screening q & a with Deadline‘s Pete Hammond. Like the film, the discussion delivered charm, candor and much laughter.
There’s one aspect of the doc that the politically correct brigade won’t like, and that’s Scotty’s declaration that he was happily and homosexually active when he was 11 or 12. And with several priests even! He wasn’t coerced or manipulated or taken advantage of, he says — he knew exactly what he was doing and was entirely the captain of his own ship.
A certain marquee-brand director told me the same thing back in the mid ’90s, that he was having sex with older guys when he was roughly the same age. I related because I was leafing through nudie mags when I was eight or nine. I wasn’t sexually active until my late teens, but if a pretty older woman had invited me indoors when I was 12 or 13 or 14, I would have been delighted.
Responsible adults don’t like to hear this stuff, and as a rule I realize that sexual activity at a tender age can be highly traumatic for many if not most. But certain people start earlier than others.
I will once again share what I came to believe during the watching of it, which is that Bowers, whose tell-all book has been challenged and mocked and who’s been described here and there as highly imaginative, isn’t lying about anything.
For most of Tyrnauer’s surprisingly intimate, low-key, non-gossipy film is about old Scotty — a 90something, white-haired pack rat who owns two or three homes in the Hollywood hills and lives with a good-natured, seen-and-heard-it-all wife who loves him — and only intermittently about the mostly gay and bi movie stars and celebrities (Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Noël Coward, James Dean) who regarded Scotty as a trusted pimp and pleasure-giver who could and did set them up with same-sex lovers.
After studying Bowers for 98 minutes and listening to him talk about how terrifying things were for gay and bi actors in the intensely homophobic big-studio era, and considering the affection he has for his old gay friends and the strong feelings and immense respect they have for him…after the film is over you’ll probably be convinced, as I was, that Scotty is no bullshitter.
Tyrnauer’s film will screen tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, which means I can finally…hold on…the embargo notice says I can’t review it until 11:59 pm this evening. Okay, so I won’t. But I will share what I came to believe during the watching of it, which is that Bowers, whose tell-all book has been challenged and mocked and who’s been described here and there as an unreliable bullshitter, isn’t lying about anything.
For most of Tyrnauer’s surprisingly intimate, low-key, non-gossipy film is about old Scotty — a 90something, white-haired pack rat who owns two or three homes in the Hollywood hills and lives with a good-natured, seen-and-heard-it-all wife who loves him — and only intermittently about the mostly gay and bi movie stars and celebrities (Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Noël Coward, James Dean) who regarded Scotty as a trusted pimp and pleasure-giver who could and did set them up with same-sex lovers.
After studying Bowers for 98 minutes and listening to him talk about how terrifying things were for gay and bi actors in the intensely homophobic ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and considering the affection he has for his old gay friends and the strong feelings and immense respect they have for him…after the film is over you’ll probably be convinced, as I was, that Scotty is no bullshitter.
It follows that a high percentage of his recollections about the private sexual lives of movie stars are most likely true. I found this an inescapable conclusion. Just as your gut tells you that Donald Trump is one of the worst bullshitters in the history of western civilization, you can just sense that old Scotty is a straight-shooter. Okay, maybe he’s hazy on a few historical details but the man is 94, for God’s sake. Cut him a little slack.
I was informed earlier today by a Universal executive that my complaint about the appearance of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo at last Friday night’s TCM Classic Film Festival screening was “right” — accurate — and that the reason for the film’s poor appearance was a technical glitch. Somebody miscalculated and pushed the wrong button or entered the wrong code when the restored version of Hitchcock’s classic was scanned for a DCP, the exec confessed. Simple human error. It happens.
I thanked the executive for telling me this as I was starting to ask myself why no one else had complained. It was very comforting to hear that I wasn’t wrong. And it was admirable of Universal to admit to a mistake, I thought. I was also informed that Vertigo is currently undergoing preparation for a restored Bluray version, which will hit the market sometime later this year. I’ve heard from an off-the-lot source that a Rear Window Bluray is also being prepared.
The unthinkable is a curious feeling about the late, highly notorious Roy Cohn, the merciless pitbull attorney and fixer whom some regarded as “evil incarnate.”
I felt it last month while watching Ali Abbasi‘s The Appprentice…a twinge of sympathy for Cohn…you feel just a bit sorry for the guy.
This morning I shared this emotional detour with director Matt Tyrnauer, creator of an excellent 2019 documentary about Cohn, called “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”
HE to Tyrnauer: “I’m a huge fan of The Apprentice, which I saw last month on the Côte d’Azur. It’s right up your Roy Cohn alley, as you’ve no doubt read.
“The astonishing thing, for me, is that Abbasi’s film actually makes you feel a tiny bit sorry for Cohn when Sebastian Stan‘s Donald Trump more or less turns on him and essentially brushes him off after Cohn’s IRS troubles and AIDS affliction have taken their toll.
“For in so doing Trump violated a code of shady ethical conduct that was explained by William Holden’s Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch: “When you side with a man you stick with him. Otherwise you’re like some animal…you’re finished!”
“I wouldn’t have thought that generating a certain measure of sympathy for one of the 20th Century’s most loathsome men would have been possible, but The Apprentice manages this.
“There’s also a faint measure of irony in the fact that The Apprentice portrays young Trump (the narrative begins in ‘73 or thereabouts when Trump is 27) as not altogether repugnant. He’s essentially portrayed as hungry and ambitious but not yet venal or rapacious.
“Stan’s Trump performance struck me as just right — never flirting with parody, not Alec Baldwin-ish, no cheap laughs. And for my money Jeremy Strong’s Cohn performance is drop-dead brilliant. He should be Oscar nominated for it.
“Okay, there’s one cheap laugh when, early in their mentor-apprentice relationship, Cohn says to Trump, ‘You have a fat ass — you should do something about that.’
“Have you seen it? Do you have friends who’ve seen it? I’d love to hear your specific reactions, etc.
“All hail Scotty Bowers in heaven!”
Friendo: “Although I didn’t sympathize with Cohn in the last part of The Apprentice, I found him weirdly likable. That’s the paradox of Roy Cohn. He was a vicious operator but he was kind of like Tony Soprano. He’s…compelling.”
HE to friendo: “All I was saying is that there’s a code of honor, even among fuckheads. If you accept big favors and counsel from someone and thereby rise in the world, even if he’s the devil himself, you don’t throw him under the bus when he’s going through hard times. You stick with him through thick and thin.
“The film is actually less poetic than a smart, sturdy, well-assembled thing — an efficient portrait of a closeted, scabrous, old-school shithead. It’s a fully respectable as far as it goes, but Cohn’s legend doesn’t feel all that linked or connected in the current zeitgeist. He was raised and shaped in another era, a darker time.
“The only element that vibrates is the fact that Donald Trump admired Cohn’s fang-toothed approach back in the day. Yes, Cohn was an inspiration to the youngish Trump in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, but Trump’s hyper-aggressive approach to the rough and tumble of big-time politics, looking to exploit whatever fears and anxieties might be lying around…well, we knew that going in.
“How absorbing is Where Is My Roy Cohn? — how sharply assembled, how hard-htting? Very, but at the same time it never really sheds its skin and transforms itself into something you might not see coming. I’m sorry but I didn’t enjoy it as much as Tyrnauer’s Scotty and the Secrets of Hollywood or Studio 54 docs, both of which were released last year.
“Cohn was a cold, bloodless, out-for-numero-uno creep, and seemingly a drag to be around. As a subject, I mean, as well as in real life.
“I guess I was looking for some kind of crazier current, maybe something borrowed from the realm of Mike Nichols‘ Angels in America. The film is “good,” as far as that goes. Tyrnauer is a gifted, highly intelligent filmmaker. I have no complaints with what it is — I just wish it had unfolded in a loopier, less conventional way.”
Co-authored by the highly esteemed Jon Frosch, David Rooney, Sheri Linden, Lovia Gyarkye, Leslie Felperin and Jordan Mintzer, the piece highlights several brilliant, important, well-chosen films, but for the most part it’s a DEI checklist roster…the same kind of diverse balancing act assessment that N.Y. Times critics A.O. Scott and and Manohla Dargis began to be associated with starting about five years ago….gay, Black, women, Asian + steer clear of any white male influence whenever possible…gay, Black, women, Asian + steer clear of any white male influence whenever possible…wash, rinse, repeat.
The key question must always be, “If you discount the DEI aspect, how good are these films on their own bare-bones merit?”
Most of these critics understand this is a fair way to winnow and select, but they’re fearful of not doing the DEI dance because doing so could be interpreted as exclusionary, elitist, racist or old-schoolish. In the old days (i.e., before 2017) such lists were sometimes driven by attempts to reckon with the best-of-the-best based on purely cinematic, dramatic, daring or transcendent, soul-drilling terms. Now it’s all about identity politics and Twitter and terror…about being afraid to say what they really think because this might get them into trouble or cause some kind of ruckus. They know this deep down but will never admit it.
Here’s what they chose (HE agreement in boldface)…HE enthusiastically approves of 12THR picks:
Bottom 25: Weekend (fine), Black Panther (gimme a break!), Time (difficult incarceration story), Bright Star (Jane Campion, John Keats, Fanny Brawne), Pariah (Dee Rees, Brooklyn lesbian saga), Bridesmaids (culturally important but not really good enough to make a serious “creme de la creme” list), Things to Come (Mia Hansen Love, Isabelle Huppert), Grizzly Man (great Herzog), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (weak tea abortion saga), Pan’s Labyrinth (top-tier GDT), Summer of Soul (found-footage POC concert doc…stirring as far as it goes), I Am Not Your Negro (gripping James Baldwin doc), Children of Men (brilliant, classic), Wendy and Lucy (good but basically a sop to the Reichart cult), Lover’s Rock (not the best of the five Small Axe films — the best is Mangrove), The Favourite (good Yorgos Lanthimos costumer but calm down), The Social Network (brilliant), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (blistering lesbian romance, emotional wipe-out), The Return (I’m more enamored of Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan), Manchester by the Sea (grand slam), Marie Antoinette (please!), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Romanian classic), A Serious Man (magnificent defeatism, peak Coen Bros.), At Berkeley (Wiseman tribute doc), Y Tu Mamá También (classic Cuaron but “unbearably poignant”?). HE approval tally: 6.
Top 25: Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino’s landmark romance), Timbuktu (Islamic nutters), 35 Shots of Rum (calm down), Before Sunset (not the best of Linklater’s relationship trilogy — that would be Before Midnight), Parasite (good but overrated — collapses when drunk con artists let the maid in and thereby ruin their whole con), Far From Heaven (commendable but overpraised Sirk tribute), Drive My Car (too long, too many cigarettes, exhausting, runs out of gas), Shoplifters (under-energized, over-praised), Talk to Her (magnificent Almodovar), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (fine), The Power of the Dog (no way in hell does this punishing slog of a film belong on this list), Wall-E (okay), Burning (corrosive and hard-hitting, but overlong and sluggish), Moonlight (way overpraised due to weak third act + too-muscular Trevante Rhodes, but Barry Jenkins‘ depiction of a world-class handjob on a beach will be long remembered), Boyhood (exceptional stunt film), Get Out (racially stamped Ira Levin zombie spooker…possibly the most overpraised film of the 21st Century), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (brilliant), In the Mood for Love (understated, appropriately respected romance, considerably aided by Chris Doyle‘s cinematography), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee‘s timeless classic about letting love slip away), Spirited Away (fine), Mulholland Drive (take away the spookiness and perversity and what’s left?), Zodiac (drop-dead brilliant investigation of an endlessly fascinating cold case), The Gleaners and I (never saw it), Inside Llewyn Davis (another serving of world-class downerism from the Coens) and Yi Yi (ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen it). HE approval tally: 6.
The official credit for the Crimson Tide screenplay was owned by Michael Schiffer (story by Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick). But the flavor, pizazz and cultural oomph came from three pinch-hitters — Robert Towne (the stateroom Von Clauzewitz scene), Quentin Tarantino (the references to Scotty and Star Trek warp speed and Kirby being the dominant artist of the Silver Surfer comic books) and Steven Zallian.
These three are the only ones I know about…there may have been others. But they primarily served as sauciers rather than heavy-lifting screenwriters.
“Don & Jerry: Go The Gay Way,” posted on 4.14.14: “In April of ’95 I did a hotel-room interview with producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer during the Crimson Tide junket.
“A few months earlier I’d laughed hard at Quentin Tarantino‘s ‘go the way way’ riff in Sleep With Me (’94), in which he discussed a struggling-with-homosexuality undercurrent in Top Gun. So I proposed to Don and Jerry that they should reach out to gay moviegoers by re-marketing all their films as secret gay movies that were fraught with homosexual themes and iconography (i.e., the phallic-shaped submarines in Tide).
“Bruckheimer froze with a grin on his face but Simpson smirked and kicked it around.
“When I asked them to sign my Crimson Tide script at the end of our chat, Simpson suggested that the gay subcurrent thing was more in my head than in their films.”
Years ago Variety‘s Joe Leydon mentioned the scene in Vertigo in which Judy Barton (Kim Novak) comes out of the bathroom with her Madeline Elster hair and outfit complete, and how this melts the heart and arouses the libido of Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) and leads to heavy breathing.
Leydon suggested that if Hitchcock had bravely ended Vertigo with this scene, it would have been hailed as an art film all the more. The message would have been “who cares who killed the wife?….what matters is that Madeline has been reborn and Scotty is making love to her once again…glorious!”
Leydon was correct, but of course for this ending to work Hitchcock would have needed to omit the earlier flashback scene in which we learn that Judy was part of Gavin Elster‘s attempt to make Scotty an unwitting accomplice in the murder of Elster’s actual wife.
Imagine the balls of a movie that is ostensibly a drama about ghosts and murder…imagine such a film ignoring the murder plot in order to focus on the love story and the forcible transformation of a murder-plot accomplice (Judy) into the victim…mind-blowing!
A few years ago I suggested an alternate art-film ending for Michael Mann‘s Thief. The film should have ended, I said, with that big Los Angeles safe-cracking job involving a super-sized blowtorch. Forget Robert Prosky and the settling of scores and the nihilistic finale — what mattered was doing the job well.
HE is requesting the readership to come up with other alternative endings to classic films — endings that might not have satisfy from a conventional climatic perspective, but which would deliver on a whole ‘nother level.
In the matter of the stunning, inexplicable suicide of Anthony Bourdain, it has long been my belief…okay, my strong suspicion that Bourdain was tragically triggered by the behavior of his turbulent girlfriend, Asia Argento.
I’m sorry but there was just too much sensual and philosophical and person-to-person pleasure in Bourdain’s life…he was seemingly all but smothered by the stuff, perhaps not by the reality but certainly the appearance of one orgasmic Zen delight after another…not to mention the charge of travelling from one place to another on a near-constant basis.
Of all the people who’ve ever offed themselves, Bourdain has to be the least likely of all time. And hanging himself just doesn’t make sense without some kind of emotional trigger, without some kind of brief drop into despair…some kind of cause-and-effect.
It is my belief that in the parallel realm of the last scene in Vertigo, Asia Argento was Scotty Ferguson and Anthony Bourdain was Judy Barton.
How do I mean that? I mean that Asia unwittingly (or carelessly) pushed Anthony over the cliff as surely as that shadowed nun in Vertigo scared Judy Barton into fearfully leaping out of that San Juan Batista bell tower.
Did Scotty kill Judy? No, he did not. She leapt out of her own sense of panic, clearly of her own accord — but Scotty was damn sure part of the reason why her life ended so suddenly and tragically.
And you’d better believe that without Asia Argento in his life, Anthony Bourdain might well be with us today.
To what extent does Roadrunner, Morgan Neville‘s just-premiered doc about Bourdain’s life, get into the whole Asia Argento mishegoss, or at least fiddle around with the possibility that Argento’s influence served as a fatal trigger in Bourdain’s psyche?
According to early Roadrunner reviews as well as a heads-up from a friendo, Neville “barely” goes there. Which sounds to me like he glances at the Argento factor without getting into it. He takes a snapshot or two and then moves on.
Here are some notes and thoughts I assembled this morning…partly from past HE posts, partly not:
So Roadrunner doesn’t get into the whole Asia Argento flagrant-infidelity-in-Rome thing? Various reports stated that she was fucking Hugo Clement, a younger journalist, just before Bourdain hung himself. It seemed to many of us that this may have tipped the secretly depressed Bourdain into nihilist despair and self-destruction. Maybe.
And therefore the film barely ponders the distinct possibility that Bourdain’s suicide was significantly influenced by Argento’s messy (i.e., human) appetites and messy (i.e., human) life?
