From Owen Gleiberman’s “Drive, He Said” Variety essay: Quentin Tarantino “certainly needs to address the Kill Bill car scandal in a far more detailed and confessional manner. Because he’s in the murky middle of it, obviously, but also because Tarantino is in a position to shed light on how the vertiginous power dynamics of Hollywood operate, and how they might now change.

“There’s no denying that the car incident didn’t just happen out of ‘negligence.’ It was the result of a recklessness, an arrogance, a so-ingrained-it’s-taken-for-granted pattern of unchecked aggressive male dominion in the film business. Seen against the backdrop of #MeToo, against the pileup of accusations and a landscape that’s shifted, overnight, to a policy of zero tolerance, the Kill Bill incident looks, perhaps, like a second cousin of harassment: the cold exploitation of talent by those who surely knew better.”

“My dream is to retire. That’s not a one-liner; it’s true. To spend every year of your life with the abstraction of making a film, with a crew of 200 people and their passions and their stupid priorities, the pressure of having to deliver, the pressure of spending other people’s money and having to be nasty because you don’t want to give up your integrity? And then to show your film to the world and to have to talk about it and repeat your answer to the same questions again and again…? I used to see making films as a kind of paradise and I now realize it’s kind of a hell, to be honest.” — Luca Guadagnino in the fall/winter 2017 edition of Fantasticman.

I don’t know how many other directors share Guadagnino’s attitude, but he’s one of the very few with the balls to share it in a public forum. He’s said before that he could be happy doing something other than directing. I don’t entirely believe him. Being a hotshot, world-class director opens up so many doors and opportunities, after all. And Gudagnino is one of the few directors I would describe as genuinely happy and even joyful about his life, despite all the alleged negatives.

I say this as one who could never be where Luca is. I see life in terms of struggle and duty and working your fingers to the bone. “I went to sleep dreaming life is beauty / I woke and found that life is duty.”

It all boils down to that Robert E. Lee Pruitt line: “A man should be what he can do.” Whether it makes you happy or not is beside the point. A gift or a special ability has to be nurtured, developed and applied. Failing to do this is not only shameful but tragic.

Last night’s Virtuosos celebration at the Santa Barbara Film Festival — moderated by Dave Karger, attended by Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick), Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Hong Chau (Downsizing), Mary J. Blige (Mudbound) and John Boyega (Detroit) — was easily the loosest, funniest and most spirited I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve been watching Virtuoso events since whenever they began. Nanjiani and Chalamet were the stand-outs, closely followed by Kaluuya.

I love Najiani’s comic attitude — dry, droll, blunt. 100% truth, incapable of gush.

I exchanged greetings with Chalamet at the after-party, and I was kind and considerate enough not to mention his recent decision to throw Woody Allen under the bus. I understand why he went along with the mob on this one. He has a career to protect and obviously needs to be in league with the cool kidz. It’s very easy to stand outside the arena on Monday morning and say “I would’ve acted differently or more thoughtfully” or what-have-you.

By the way: Nanjiani said he’ll be starring in a “low-budget” thriller for director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, whose 2010 short, Diarchia, I happened to see last year. I personally know Filomarino as “Ferdy” via HE’s own Luca Guadagnino. Nanjiani didn’t mention a title, but it’s set in Greece and will begin filming in August, he said. Contracts are being ironed out as we speak.

SNL‘s “First Lady” sketch was, at best, mildly amusing, or not actually funny. To laugh “with” Cecily Strong‘s Melania Trump you need to have at least a measure of sympathy or compassion for the actual “Slovenian sphinx,” as Maureen Dowd described her on 1.27. The woman is a scruple-free opportunist, matrimonial arm candy for hire. I’ll respect Melania when she walks and sues for divorce sometime before 2020. As Kate Mckinnon‘s Hillary Clinton reminds her, “You married him.”

Natalie Portman‘s Jackie Kennedy: “Jack cheated on me with Marilyn Monroe.” Strong’s Melania: “Oh please. She was in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Donald’s girl was in Guys Like it Shaved.”

Every year the Santa Barbara Film Festival presents a panel discussion among screenwriters. It always happens on the festival’s first Saturday at the historic Lobero theatre. Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has been hosting this event for the last several years, and the sense of deja vu is very pronounced because it’s always the same softball session.

The screenwriters are given a chance to tell their stories in an amusing or colorful way and everyone has a nice easy time, and sometimes questions from the audience are allowed. But nobody ever pokes or prods.

Nobody asked Shape of Water screenwriter Vanessa Taylor why she and Guillermo del Toro decided against defining Doug Jones‘ Aquaman in any way you’d remember — no personality, longings, traits. Nobody asked The Post‘s Liz Hannah about the major Oscar-bait headwind that her film enjoyed before it was screened, and how it all collapsed when Steven Spielberg‘s film was quickly elbowed aside by the critics group and the guilds. Nobody asked Baby Driver maestro Edgar Wright about why he folded his campaign after the Kevin Spacey scandal. Nobody asked The Disaster Artist‘s Michael Weber about the sudden torpedoing of director-star James Franco over alleged sexual misconduct.

Every side-angle or hot-button question was avoided like the plague. But that’s why we enjoy this panel each and every year.

In Andrew Wagner‘s Breakable You, Holly Hunter (The Big Sick) is a newly divorced therapist who becomes romantically involved with her plagiarizing playwright ex-husband’s brother. I’m okay with Tony Shalhoub as the ex (as long as he keeps his shirt on), but Alfred Molina is a no-go as the amorous brother. There are actors you never want to consider or imagine in an intimate context, and Molina, no offense and God bless him, is one of them. Just as audiences of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s never wanted to contemplate Charles Coburn in a sexual light. Brian Morton’s source novel was published in 2006.

I had a traumatic birth, which gives you a certain antsy outlook on things. By the time I was six or seven I was feeling very angry at God for giving me such a miserable life in suburban New Jersey, and especially for giving me such strict, hard-nosed parents, particularly a mother who made me go to church every damn Sunday. In my tweens and teens I went through a period of mocking and taunting Him. Then I embraced and worshipped Him as a result of my mystical LSD trips in my early 20s. Then I came to an understanding that God is, depending on how lucky or unlucky you are in terms of parental or tribal lineage and birth location, at best impartial about whether you’re living a happy or miserable life. It’s up to you. If you want happiness and you’re not living under a horrible dictatorship, orchestrate your own version of happiness or fulfillment, being careful not to make things worse for others.

In a just-posted N.Y. Times piece, Uma Thurman has told Maureen Dowd some specifics about Harvey Weinstein having sexually assaulted her, but the main thing is her continuing rage at Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino for having forcefully cajoled her into driving a shitty, rickety Karmann Ghia during a sequence set in rural Mexico. She wound up hitting a palm tree.

Dowd’s Times story contains the actual video.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” Thurman says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again.’ When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Thurman’s then-husband Ethan Hawke let Tarantno have it.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he tells Dowd. It was like “Hey, man, she is great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

“Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, Thurman had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue. Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document ‘releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,’ she says. She didn’t.

“Thurman was in ‘a terrible fight for years’ with Tarantino, she says. ‘We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.’

Last night Darkest Hour‘s Gary Oldman, a lock for the Best Actor Oscar if there ever was one, did 90 minutes on-stage with Leonard Maltin. The specific occasion was a presenting of the SBIFF’s Maltin Modern Master Award, the festival’s highest honor, and it was like a coronation. The generic thing when you host one of these SBIFF tributes is to prostrate yourself and worship the honored guest like he/she is a combination of emperor, genius and living God, and Maltin did that, all right.

“You’re perfect, Gary…everything about you is wonderful, and it gives us such pleasure to celebrate that. Allow us to kiss the ring.”

What I’m saying, obviously, is that I wish these tributes could be a tad less kiss-assy and a little more like those witty, erudite 90-minute discussions that Dick Cavett used to do with Katharine Hepburn and others, but you can’t fight City Hall.

They had a conversation about Oldman’s pre-acting career (delivering milk in the wee hours, getting turned down by RADA at age 16) and so on. They also screened the usual clips. I was deeply disappointed that Oldman’s portrayal of Joe Orton in Stephen Frears‘ Prick Up Your Ears was ignored. I knew they’d show a Sid and Nancy clip and the famous one from True Romance when Oldman played a rasta-haired drug dealer who thinks he’s black…I knew it!

Oldman was unfailingly charming and gracious — he played the part that was expected of him. And Maltin, being Maltin, stayed away from every interesting side topic imaginable. He didn’t get within 10,000 feet of Oldman’s conservative beliefs and his disdain for political correctness. I respect Oldman for his atypical non-liberalism — it’s one of the things that makes him interesting, distinctive. But there was no way in hell Maltin was going to bring this up.

My other regret is that clip of Oldman dancing to “Get Up Offa That Thing” while in Winston Churchill makeup wasn’t shown — it would have been a huge hit!

Past recipients of the Modern Miraculous Maltin Mashable Masters award have included Denzel Washington, Clint Eastwood, Will Smith, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck, Christopher Plummer, Christopher Nolan, Bruce Dern, James Cameron, George Clooney and HE’s very own Peter Jackson.

The first and only time I sat down with Devin Faraci was in ’09 or thereabouts, in a midtown Manhattan restaurant. I’d been invited by Ed Douglas (now with Jeff Sneider‘s trackingboard), who was also at the table. Seven years later a long-dormant sexual assault charge surfaced and Faraci was soon toast. A week ago at Sundance I asked Douglas where Faraci is now, and he said he didn’t know. Tonight Faraci will appear in an interview on Zainab Salbi‘s #MeToo Now What?, a five-part series.

From “Faraci Goes Down,” posted on 10.11.16: “Apart from the issue of whether or not Faraci is widely liked or has created enemies, does an intelligent if abrasive writer-columnist deserve career ruination because of an unmistakably odious incident? Is it fair to send a drunken driver who has hit a pedestrian and who may be suffering from alcoholism…is it fair to sentence this offender to a long, life-destroying stretch in San Quentin? Some out there feel that capital punishment is the way to go, but I don’t know.”

Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin‘s old-hat hostility is still funny, but I doubt this kind of material would ever re-occur on Saturday Night Live, especially these days.

23 and 1/3 years ago David Mamet‘s Oleanna, a filmed version of his 1992 stage play, opened theatrically. A guarded relationship between a married university professor and one of his female students, who accuses him in Act Two of sexual exploitation and thereby ruins his chances of being accorded tenure.

Now comes Richard Levine‘s Submission, about another married college professor (Stanley Tucci) whose life turns into a raging sea when he’s accused of engaging in inappropriate behavior with a female student (Addison Timlin). Pic is based on “Blue Angel“, a 2006 novel by Francine Prose.

From Stephen Farber’s 6.25.17 Hollywood Reporter review: “Despite many script problems, Levine has kept the film tightly coiled and engrossing throughout. [And] the best performance comes from Kyra Sedgwick, who, as Tucci’s wife, conveys intelligence, sensuality and just the right dose of moral outrage. Her big scene, when she learns of Ted’s adultery and lashes out scathingly, ranks alongside two of the other great scenes of fury expressed by deceived wives: a monologue by Beatrice Straight in Network and another by Miranda Richardson in Damage.”

Submission will open in New York City on 3.2, and in Los Angeles and other markets on 3.9.