This morning Louis C.K. confirmed that negative allegations in yesterday’s N.Y. Times story about his behavior with five women several years ago are true, and that his behavior in these instances was hurtful and abhorrent. He then fell upon the church steps and begged for forgiveness. His statement strikes me as honest and forthright and decent as the situation allows. No equivocations, no distractions, no wiggling-around bullshit. There’s one sentence in his statement that strikes me as odd, but that’s probably because Louis C.K. didn’t show it to a good editor friend before posting.

“I want to address the stories told to The New York Times by five women named Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia who felt able to name themselves and one who did not.

“These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.”

Wells exception: Over the course of my entire life I have never once asked a woman if I could show her my gross animal member. Not once. During each and every occasion it was just cool all around and we both knew it. The terms of consensual relations the world over state that disrobing always happens by mutual, silent consent, and certainly without the necessity of verbal approval before the fact.

Back to Louis C.K.: “I have been remorseful of my actions. And I’ve tried to learn from them. And run from them. Now I’m aware of the extent of the impact of my actions. I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position.

“I also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t think that I was doing any of that because my position allowed me not to think about it. There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for. And I have to reconcile it with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with.

“I wish I had reacted to their admiration of me by being a good example to them as a man and given them some guidance as a comedian, including because I admired their work.

A Rory Carroll Guardian piece about an atmosphere of fear and trepidation among the Hollywood elite popped this morning. This climate of paranoia is due, of course, to numerous allegations of sexual misconduct that have surfaced over the last few weeks, which in turn have everyone wondering “who’s next?” Carroll knows the Hollywood beat as well as any top-tier trade reporter, but it’s telling that the only person who would go on the record with him is Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.

“Anxiety pervades Hollywood,” Stone tells Carroll. “There’s a lot of nervousness. People don’t know where this is going. Everybody is asking who will be next. Publicists are paid to keep stories down and control the message but now they’re in a situation where the truth comes out faster than they can control the message. It’s like gasoline. As soon as a story breaks, whoosh.”

Honestly? Carroll reached out to yours truly, but I said I couldn’t help. When you give an interview you can never be exactly sure how your words will sound according to sentence structure, context and whatnot. “The whole town is skittish,” a journalist observed this morning. “I get it. You could talk to a journo for 20 minutes and make solid, nuanced, empathetic points, and then the one little bit that’s used triggers backlash.”

Not to mention that the slightest expression of concern about rush-to-judgment condemnations could result in the finger being turned around and pointed at anyone expressing such concern. Decent people everywhere agree with the general condemnation of inappropriate or assaultive behavior, but it’s wiser to keep it to that. Former Hollywood Reporter editor Janice Min can express concern about a “Robespierre French Revolution”-like mentality but if a guy says this in a major publication….forget it.

In a seven-year-old N.Y. Times video essay about Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown, A.O. Scott noted that “evil is elemental” in this 1974 classic. “It’s in the air, in the water.” If this piece had never been composed in 2010 and if Scott had been asked to assess Chinatown today, he would probably avoid this observation. Because this kind of resigned acknowledgment argues strongly with the current mood. Because today’s victims-deserve-payback mindset is that “certain forms of evil, including a particular form that a certain Paris-residing director was jailed for in the mid ’70s, will be rooted out and eradicated, and it’s about time.”

It goes with saying that this classic, Robert Towne-authored film would never be made today for various reasons, but will the time come when Chinatown will be downgraded in the same way that Gone With The Wind has been recently? Because it seems insensitive and a touch heartless by the measure of current consciousness among liberal progressives? Noirish fatalism, the stink of corruption, semi-consensual sexual relations between a father and a daughter, etc. Not a fit in today’s Hollywood culture.

Like most podcasters, Variety‘s Kris Tapley likes to keep things loose, chatty and breezy when he interviews a Hollywood guest. It’s fair to say that this mindset didn’t quite mesh with 82 year-old Donald Sutherland, star of Sony Pictures Classics’ The Leisure Seeker (1.19.18) and a trophy recipient at this weekend’s Governor’s Awards.

Sutherland is a truth-teller, a take-it-or-leave-it reality guy. He gushes about co-workers like anyone else, but if he didn’t get along with someone during the making of a film and still has a bad taste in his mouth about it, he doesn’t mince words. He went there this morning during a chat with Tapley, and it sounded to me as if Sutherland’s candor threw his host off-balance.

In this morning’s “Playback” podcast, Sutherland dissed (a) the late Great Train Robbery director Michael Crichton, basically calling him a cold, heartless prick; (b) spoke about what a shit director Richard Marquand was for arranging for Sutherland to smash his hand through real glass during the shooting of Eye of the Needle (’81); and (c) expressed disdain for the late Robert Altman when producer Ingo Preminger told him that Altman was against casting Sutherland in M.A.S.H. and, when told Sutherland was a keeper, said he didn’t want Sutherland to get top billing.

Sutherland also talked about what a serious and personal heartbreaker it was when the Dodgers’ Rick Monday hit a home run against the Montreal Expos in ’81.

“This is not the detour I was expecting,” Tapley said. “Why would you expect a detour?,” Sutherland replied. “What’s the point of expecting anything? You just concentrate.”

“The specter of sudden and brutal death hangs over everyone all the time in Hostiles, a mournful, sorrowful, persistently powerful Western set in a world of beauty, tears and blood. There’s little new that writer-director Scott Cooper, in his fourth and best feature, can really add to what other films have said about the terrible inevitabilities embedded in the epic story of the settling of America’s frontier. But potent dramatic dynamics and the filmmaker’s self-evident deep immersion and investment in his material enrich this vivid account of the last spasms of Native American resistance in the 1890s.” — from Todd McCarthy’s 9.3.17 Telluride Film Festival review.

Hostiles will receive a N.Y. and L.A. platform opening on 12.22, followed by a 1.19.18 expansion. The distributor is Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures.

No, it’s not a “gulp” or an “oops!” that Louis C.K.‘s I Love You, Daddy was included in The Orchard’s screener package, which arrived a few minutes ago. Despite the career torpedo and distribution-plan-destroyer delivered today by that N.Y. Times story, I Love You, Daddy is a serious, subversive film with a different agenda than you might expect. As The Daily Beast‘s Richard Porton wrote, “Despite its longueurs, the most intriguing aspect of I Love You, Daddy is the film’s ambivalent view of its main characters.”

Update: HE’s own Mark Frenden has stepped into the breach and improved Joe Tate‘s mildly amusing idea. The only thing bothering me now is that Plummer’s face seems too well lighted. In the original shot Kevin Spacey wasn’t illuminated to this degree.

Click for larger version

Former Facebook president Sean Parker hits the company for its effect on society: "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains" pic.twitter.com/8GI0DykJGB

— Axios (@axios) November 9, 2017

I caught my second viewing of I Love You, Daddy (The Orchard, 11.17) the other night. You’ve probably read it’s about a hot-shot TV writer-producer (played by producer-director-writer-editor-star Louis C.K.) who’s increasingly disturbed by his 17-year-old daughter China (Chloe Grace Moretz) falling into a relationship with a famous 68 year-old libertine (John Malkovich), and about his weak, barely noticable parenting skills.

After my first viewing I was saying to myself that while I don’t exactly “like” I Love You, Daddy I respect what it’s saying, which is that wealthy showbiz types and their liberal, laissez-faire approach to morality, relationships and especially parenting is a fairly vacant proposition. After my 2nd viewing I believe this all the more. The film is basically an indictment of “whatever, brah” liberal lifestyles and relative morality.

It is almost assured of getting a rave review from the National Review‘s Kyle Smith as well as other conservative critics and commentators. Which is all the more noteworthy because it was made by a successful stand-up guy known for his mostly liberal views.

I Love You, Daddy doesn’t play fast and loose with the notions of showbiz relationships and May-December romances. It’s not endorsing or winking at inappropriate older guy-younger girl relationships. It’s actually a sly capturing of a problem sometimes found within the entertainment industry and super-wealthy lah-lah circles. Louis C.K. doesn’t try to erotically or amusing entertain as much as push those “oh, shit” or “ahh, yes” buttons. It’s obviously a doleful Woody Allen-esque comedy of sorts, but it’s also a kind of familial tragedy.

And Malkovich is quietly brilliant as the libertine, Leslie Goodwin. Maybe I was tired or in the wrong kind of mood when I saw ILYD two or three weeks ago, but I somehow didn’t quite realize how mesmerizing his performance is until last night.

But that’s all out the window now because of a just-published N.Y. Times report about Louis C.K. having masturbated in front of (or asking to masturbate in front of) four female comics — Dana Min Goodman, Julia Wolov, Abby Schachner and Rebecca Corry — and a fifth woman who experienced something similar but asked The Times for anonymity.

What Louis C.K. is accused of having done is obviously appalling and reprehensible and serious as a heart attack, but at the same time it’s a shame that an unusually interesting and even subversive film like I Love You, Daddy will now most likely be shunned and tossed into the waste basket.

But those are the rules. Once you’ve been outed or accused of sexual harassment or assualt by reputable journalists who’ve spoken with named and verified sources, your work is discredited, your friends and colleagues don’t want to know you, and your career is most likely over, at least for the foreseeable future.

The Orchard, the distributor of I Love You, Daddy, is apparently thinking of washing its hands. The New York premiere of I Love You, Daddy has been canceled. The comedian’s planned appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert has also been deep-sixed.

The headline for this piece sounds cruel and harsh, but how does Louis C.K. recover from being the latest powerful, perverted famous guy to be exposed and shamed by a reputable publication (in this instance The N.Y. Times)? He’s just been thrown into a leaking lifeboat already occupied by Brett Ratner, Kevin Spacey, James Toback and Harvey Weinstein. The Times story reports that four female comedians — Dana Min Goodman, Julia Wolov, Abby Schachner and Rebecca Corry — and an anonymous source are claiming that several years ago Louis C.K. either jerked off in front of them or asked to do same or something along these gross lines. No assault but what asinine behavior! What is this “jerking off in front of women” thing? I’d never even heard about it until recently. What kind of blithering idiot even thinks about doing such a thing, which seems to be mainly about hostility and aggression?

It was one thing for Ridley Scott to replace the disgraced Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in the role of J. Paul Getty in the forthcoming All The Money In The World (TriStar, 12.22). But his intention to shoot and insert the brand-new Plummer footage into the film within the next 30 days in order to stick to the locked-in release date…whoa! That’s one hell of a ballsy and dynamic move, especially for an 80- year-old. I haven’t done the research, but I’m almost certain this kind of casting switch-out has never happened to a major film only a month and a half before opening. HE to Scott: Please, please don’t junk Spacey’s scenes. Hang onto them and use them as an extra on the Bluray. By the way: When will the Academy expel Spacey from the Academy a la Harvey Weinstein and perhaps even demand that he return his two Oscars?  Not advocating for this, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

(l.) Brand-new All The Money in the World costar Christopher Plummer; (m.) director Ridley Scott; (r.) former All The Money in the World costar Kevin Spacey.

I’ve seen Arthur Miller — Writer, an intimate, not-uninteresting, years-in-the-making portrait of the late playwright. Scheduled to air on HBO next spring, the doc is a highly personal project by respected director Rebecca Miller, the playwright’s daughter by his third wife. I’ve admired Miller and his plays all my life, but the doc acquainted me with a semi-intimate, unguarded version of him, which was new. Miller was a crusty, somewhat brusque fellow when it come to being interviewed — you could use the word “blunt” or even “craggy” — but he never seemed less than wise or perceptive.

Born in 1915, Arthur Miller led an interesting life as a fledgling writer from the mid ’30s to mid ’40s, but led a ferociously fascinating life when he began to produce important, critically respected plays. His big creative period began in ’47 (All My Sons), peaked in ’49 (Death of a Salesman), rumbled into the ’50s (The Crucible, A View From The Bridge) and concluded with his last two big-league plays (’64’s After The Fall and ’68’s The Price) — a little more than 20 years.

Miller’s Marilyn Monroe period (’56 to ’61) made him into a paparazzi figure, and also seemed to bring on the beginning of his creative decline. Miller and Monroe divorced in ’61, and of course she died in August ’62, an apparent suicide. Miller still “had it” for a few years after this period. After The Fall, a thinly disguised drama about his turbulent relationship with Monroe, opened in ’64. Then came the less ambitious, more emotionally engaging The Price in ’68.

It sounds unkind to note this, but from ’68 until his death in ’05 Miller was more or less treading water (trying but never getting there, working on his Roxbury farm, the great man who once was, writing less-than-great plays, writing travel books with his wife) and never managing the comeback that we all wanted to see.

A little more than half (maybe 60%) of Miller’s doc covers her father’s life from his birth to ’68, or roughly 53 years. A little less than half covers the 37 years between The Price and his death in ’05. I’m sorry to note this, but the film runs out of gas around the 60% mark just as Miller himself ran out of creative high-test gasoline in the late ’60s. Arthur Miller — Writer is therefore half of an interesting documentary. I’m sorry if this sounds cruel, but the doc actually becomes a semi-downer once his life and work start to downshift. Your heart starts to slowly crack and break, watching the poor man go through this long, drawn-out, soul-draining, relatively infertile period.