I’ve been searching for decent shots of pre-1965 Times Square marquees for several years now, and the pickings are getting thinner and thinner. The best of this group is a reposting of the Spellbound-premiere-at-the-Astor shot, which was taken on 10.31.45. I just called Larry Edmunds Hollywood Bookshop to see if they had any large coffee-table books devoted to old marquees, and the guy said “naahh, not really.” Obviously the Google well is running dry. I’ve probably posted 60 or 70 shots over the years. If anyone can point me to a fresh supply…

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has questioned an Academy-member friend (i.e., an older liberal-minded white woman) about her Oscar preferences. She’s not that bright or hip, this woman, but she likes what she likes. For those who weren’t paying attention six or seven weeks ago, here are two Hollywood Elsewhere interviews — #1 and #2 — along similar lines.

Quote #1: “I don’t really understand the preferential ballot. But I prefer it when there are fewer choices. If there are too many choices, it waters everything down. Plus there are rarely more than five movies I really like in a year (not including foreign films).”

Wells reaction: This woman sounds quite lazy. Too many Best Picture nominees dilutes the field? Every year I compile a list of 15 or 20 films that I’ve categorized as excellent, very good or at least commendable, and she rarely likes more than five? This is a woman who feels overwhelmed by life, and who likes to nap in the late afternoons.”

Quote #2: “I had an odd experience with Darkest Hour. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but afterwards, when I found out the subway sequence was totally invented, it diminished the whole movie for me.”

Wells reaction: What difference does it make if a scene has been invented or not? If it works, it works. I am among those who feel that the subway scene, imagined as it is, is hands down the most rousing and emotionally affecting scene in Darkest Hour. Without question. This woman doesn’t have to agree with me, of course, but to say it didn’t work for her after she discovered it was made up? What an idiot.”

From 2.12.19 post by cnn.com’s Brian Lowry, “Three Billboards Backlash Flows From Debate Over Its Message”:

“Three Billboards is one of a handful of films perceived as having a legitimate shot at being named best picture — an unusually wide-open field, given that the focus by now has usually concentrated around two or three. Part of that likely has to do with (a) the absence of many truly great movies this year, and (b) the fact that key contenders — like The Shape of Water (the pick by the directors and producers guilds) and Get Out (the WGA’s original screenplay winner) — come from genres that seldom receive top awards recognition.”

Variety art by Jonathan Bartlett.

Did he just say “seldom”?

What Lowry meant is that fantasy flicks about aquatic creatures lusting after human females (i.e., 1954’s The Creature From The Black Lagoon) have never been regarded as Oscar fare in years past. Ditto dark social satires with horror-zombie undertones (i.e., 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Neither Get Out nor The Shape of Water would’ve even been considered as Best Picture contenders ten or even five years ago, much less favored to win. But now they are, thanks to the younger, fringe-y Academy members who’ve been ushered in over the last two or three years.

Posted on 10.23.11: “I’ve finally seen Sony Home Video’s Caine Mutiny Bluray and the best I can give it is a B. I don’t think it’s all that fabulous looking. It’s more vibrantly colored and offers more detail than the previous DVDs so yes, it’s an improvement. But for a film shot in three-strip Technicolor, it doesn’t have that natural glow and special richness that ought to be there. The color feels a bit grainy and “pushed,” and a little too blown-up looking at times. Too many pinkish or spray-tanned faces.

“And I honestly do feel, as I said a week or so ago, that the 1.85 masking diminishes the compositions. Many of the scenes feel somewhat hemmed in and pushed down, like they’re in some kind of jail. I say to hell with Universal and Columbia having decided to scam-crop their 1.37 movies down to 1.85 starting in 1953. Movies from that era don’t breathe at 1.85. The Caine Mutiny should have been masked off at 1.66. My eyes know what they know, and they know what’s right.”

I first saw Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea during Sundance ’16. As everyone knows by now the central tragedy in that film is a late-night house fire, caused by fireplace embers and the failure of Casey Affleck‘s soused character to properly contain them. The fire causes the death of Affleck and Michelle Williams‘ three children — two small daughters and an infant son.

It hit me during the summer of ’16 that a similar real-life tragedy that happened on 12.25.11 in Stamford, Connecticut and extinguished the lives of three small children, may have inspired the Manchester author to engage in a little borrowing.

The Stamford home, owned by divorced advertising executive Madonna Badger, burned to the ground due to mishandled fireplace embers, apparently due to careless actions by either Badger or her boyfriend at the time, the late Michael Borcina. The fire resulted in the death of Badger’s three small daughters as well as her parents.

It’s been reported that the initial idea of a grief-struck handyman was pitched by Matt Damon and John Krasinski sometime after the release of Margaret. Lonergan worked on the Manchester script for about three years, finishing it sometime in ’14. Even if the New York-based writer had begun work in the fall of ’11, or not long after the release of Margaret and a few weeks before the Christmas Stamford tragedy, it would have been a natural enough thing for him to have read about it, etc.

If Lonergan cooked up the idea of a family house fire all on his own, fine. But it’s quite a coincidence. The details are awfully similar.

The more I think about the finale of last year’s Oscar telecast, the more I enjoy the memory. Nothing like it will ever happen again, of course. But some kind of jolt needs to punctuate the March 4th telecast. Some unexpected, totally-out-of-left-field winner. I’ll take anything. 20 days from now.

Whatever happened to star-struck Price Waterhouse screw-ups Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz? The 2017 Best Picture snafu will be the lede of Cullinan’s obituary when he dies, but he’s still on the PwC board. A search for Ruiz on the company’s website turns up nothing.

If only I could time-travel back to pre-1920 Los Angeles for a single day, back when it was mostly pastures and farmland and dirt streets and Victorian homes and few buildings higher than two or three stories. It felt a bit opaque and rundown in the late 20th Century (the air quality was rancid in the ’70s) but it’s always been a culturally formidable town.

I haven’t compiled a long list of films that have best captured the richness and complexity, but off the top of my head I’d include Kiss Me Deadly, No Down Payment, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Barton Fink and Michael Mann‘s Heat and Collateral.

But overhead drone-photography travelogues…please. Everything looks great from “above.” If GoPro drone videos existed in the mid ’40s and you used a similar music track you could create a serene essay about gliding over Auschwitz or Dachau or Bergen-Belsen.

It’s the City of the Fallen Angels, for one thing. Unless you’re hiking or hibernating or motorcycling along Mulholland or through the winding hills above Malibu and Trancas, 90% of the Los Angeles experience is about traffic, storefronts, stoplights, gas stations, billboards and spiritual fatigue. Most of it stemming from that vague feeling of possibly being trapped here for the rest of your life. Two things make it half-tolerable: riding around on two wheels (changed my life, a whole different realm) and the blessings of using Waze.

In the late ’90s or early aughts director-writer Jonathan Kaufer (Soup For One, Bad Manners) would invite a select group of pallies to his Beverly Hills manse to eat great food and watch DVDs. I was one of the regulars; so was David Poland. And a couple of times Tom Arnold dropped by.

Kaufer was married to Pia Zadora at the time. She was always upstairs. I think she may have come down once to say hello. My sense was that her relations with Kaufer were a bit strained. You could feel the vibes.

One night I was approaching Kaufer’s home in the dark, and I noticed a group of four or five standing by the main gate, seemingly unable to gain entrance. Arnold was among them. “Hey, how come you guys are all just standing around?” I said. “Because we’re assholes?” Arnold answered. From that moment he became one of the coolest dry-humor guys I’d ever met.

The movie that night was Norman Jewison‘s The Thomas Crown Affair (’68), and boy, what a disappointment. A hamstrung, perfectly groomed Steve McQueen in a three-piece suit. Everything he did in that film was so cool and polished and neutered. There was nothing the least bit edgy or bad-ass about him. At one point Arnold got fed up and said aloud, “Wow, everything he does is just so wonderful.”

The only portion that works is the chess game scene. Particularly the footage between 3:40 and 4:45. Otherwise, forget it. The 50th anniversary Kino Bluray pops tomorrow, on 2.13.18.

Kaufer died on 10.2.13 while driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. He swerved off the road, the car rolled and he was thrown from the vehicle. Regrets and affection — a good fellow.

The below shot was Instagram-posted by Thalys train attack hero Alek Skarlatos on 7.17.16, or 11 months after the world-famous incident that resulted in Clint Eastwood‘s The 17:15 to Paris.

“Caught this…rainbow trout on Strawberry Lake in Utah with nothing but a screwdriver on a stick, my Trump shirt, and the will to survive,” Skarlatos wrote. In other words, the Trump shirt provided some kind of spiritual fortification in this pitched battle between man and trout.

Alek Skarlatos on Utah’s Strawberry Reservoir on 7.17.16.

Seriously, the guy’s a friggin’ true-blue hero but also (this has to be said) some kind of resentful, vaguely bigoted, intellectually-stunted asshole? Or something in that realm?

Does anyone know if Spencer Stone is a Trumpster also? No way Anthony Sadler is, right? Being a Trump guy isn’t the same as being for McCain in ’08 or Romney in ’12. Standing by this appalling and malevolent sociopath isn’t some kind of style or attitude choice — it’s venal and unpatriotic.

HE to Skarlatos: Just because you did the hard, brave thing in the face of terrorism doesn’t mean you’ve got your act together in other ways. Take your Trump love and, no offense, shove it up your ass.

A struggling working-class type haphazardly falls in with a rich and arrogant fussbudget, and after initial complications and against all odds they somehow strike up a romance.

It all started 44 years ago with Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away. Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini played the warring lovers. The best scene was when Melato asked Giannini to sodomize her, and Giannini said “sodomy…what’s that?”

Thirteen years later Gary Marshall and screenwriter Leslie Dixon delivered a differently plotted, broadly comedic American version called Overboard (’87), with Kurt Russell as Giancarlo and Goldie Hawn.

15 years later Guy Ritchie‘s Swept Away remake (’02) appeared with Madonna in the rich bitch role, and the less said about that the better.

Now comes an Rob Greenberg‘s Overboard remake (Lionsgate, 4.13), but with the genders reversed — Ana Faris as Kurt and Eugenio Derbez as Goldie, and with Dixon back as a cowriter. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn than Greenberg doesn’t even know who Wertmuller is. Hollywood film culture has really downgraded and mongrelized itself over the last 25 or 30 years.

“The fact is that two of the hottest Best Picture contenders — Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water and Jordan Peele‘s Get Out — are pretty close to B movies, or at least what used to be regarded as B-level material — a romantic monster flick and a dark horror-zombie satire.

“In the mid 50s the forebears of these films — Jack Arnold and William Alland‘s The Creature from the Black Lagoon (’54) and Don Siegel and Walter Wanger‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56) — never had a chance of any kind of Oscar attention, much less respect, but The Creature from the Love Lagoon and Invasion of the White Suburban Obama Lovers are right at the top of the heap today. Along with Three Billboards and Lady Bird, of course.” — from “Oscar Bait Movie Is Over,” posted on 1.13.18.

“Shape, Three Billboards and Get Out are the leading soft default picks across the board. But Shape is the apparent darling.

“The reasons for Shape‘s possible victory: (a) it’s a lot warmer than Dunkirk and certainly warmer than the somewhat jagged-edged Three Billboards, (b) it isn’t dealing gay cards (which is a seeming disqualifier among older white male Academy members given that last year a meditative, under-stated gay movie won the Best Picture Oscar), (c) it’s an emotionally inviting fable with a Johnny Belinda-like lead performance from Sally Hawkins, and (d) you don’t have to believe in socially progressive largesse or be on the ‘woke’ bandwagon — you just have to be susceptible.

“Accept it — a Best Picture Oscar for a very handsomely composed genre film about rapturous mercy sex with the Creature From the Love Lagoon might soon be placed alongside the statuettes for Birdman, Spotlight, The Hurt Locker, 12 Years A Slave, Platoon, The Godfather Part II, A Man For All Seasons and The Best Years of Our Lives in the Academy’s golden display case in the upstairs lobby. Probably. Maybe.

“It will therefore cinch a hard-fought triumph over (a) one of the boldest, most avant garde and stunningly captured war films ever made, (b) the most emotionally affecting and transformational gay love story since Brokeback Mountain and probably of the 21st Century, and (c) one of the sharpest, punchiest and most fetchingly performed coming-of-age tales about a young woman at the start of her adult life, and in a year that obviously cries out for a top-tier woman-directed film and/or a female-centric story to be celebrated above all.” — from “Maybe It’s Not Over,” posted on 1.12.18.

Even within the fake-poster realm, what is that thing on the lower left portion of the image? Some kind of prosthetic stump? A broken-off robot arm? Klaatu barada nikto?

The latest reporting claims that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman is costing north of $140 million. But unlike Quentin Tarantino‘s “not Manson” movie, the period gangster flick, which will almost certainly open at year’s end, appears to have a reasonably decent chance of recouping costs.

Incidentally: The negative cost of Scorsese’s Goodfellas (’90) was $25 million. A dollar in 1990 is worth roughly $1.87 today, so in 2018 dollars Goodfellas would cost $46,750,000. Do the math, tell me I’m wrong.