In an interview with Variety‘s Elizbaeth Wagmeister, Don’t Worry Darling director and costar Olivia Wilde has shot down a report that boyfriend & costar Harry Styles was paid more than three times Florence Pugh‘s fee.

Wilde denied the claim but in a curious way. In an emailed response, she lamented “a nonexistent pay disparity between our lead and supporting actors…[it] really upset me. I’m a woman who has been in this business for over 20 years, and it’s something that I’ve fought for myself and others, especially being a director. There is absolutely no validity to those claims.”

HE to Wilde #1: I thought Pugh and Styles were playing married-to-each-other leads in the film. You’ve described one as a lead and another as supporting. Given the “secretive evil men meets moralistic truth-seeking woman” scheme, Pugh has to be the lead, I gather. So Harry is the semi- marginal sideline character. Check.

HE to Wilde #2: You said there’s “no validity to these claims,” but you didn’t say that Styles and Pugh were paid the same amount. Were they? Or perhaps your denial strictly addresses the “Harry was paid three times more than Florence” rumor? Perhaps he was paid twice as much? Or slightly more? Or was given more back-end points?

Pugh, by the way, declined to be interviewed by Wagmeister. The reason for being unavailable, her publicist said, was that she was filming Dune: Part Two in Budapest. That’s total bullshit, of course. If Pugh wanted to talk to Wagmeister, all she had to do was pick up the phone between takes, or after shooting had wrapped at the end of a given day.

HE question to readership: If you were the Warner Bros. honcho or the producer in charge, would you calculate that Styles and Pugh should be paid the same fee? Or would you reason that Styles is much more famous and has a much bigger fan base than Pugh, and therefore deserves to be paid more?

NASA recently tweeted an eerie audio clip that represents actual sound waves rippling through the gas and plasma in the Perseus cluster, which is 250 million light years from Earth.” — posted yesterday (8.22) by Vice‘s Vicky Ferreira.

The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e

— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022

You could say that Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light is a past-tense, memory-lane, movie-theatre thing. But it isn’t really. Or not that much.

Set in rural England (Margate) in 1980, it’s about an interracial May-December affair — a strapping, good-looking black dude in his mid 20s (Michael Ward, the main protagonist) and a white, middle-aged, past-her-prime British woman in her mid to late 40s (Olivia Colman). Separated by more than 20 years. Such affairs are always short-term.

So it’s not so much about a Cinema Paradiso-type atmosphere (The Blues Brothers and All That Jazz on the marquee) as a stew of race and sexuality and mental health issues and callous paternalism. One could infer, even, that Empire of Light primarily occurs within the Mendes sensibility of here and now.

Colman is a movie-theatre manager with an unstable, schizzy temperament; Ward is working for her (selling and tearing tickets, selling popcorn). They eventually fall into a sexual relationship, but problems surface. Such affairs were highly unusual if not what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking? in working-class circles.

Colin Firth is a crusty theatre owner who exploits Colman sexually, casually, off and on. Anti-immigrant skinheads and an act of particular brutality figure into the narrative.

Things were a lot different in England and the U.S. in 1980, racially speaking. If you ask me the likelihood of such an affair pushes the limits of credibility, or certainly the 1980 norm. Honestly. I visited London in ’76 and ’80…such affairs just weren’t in the cards. Interracial, sure, but older white woman-younger black guy? There was certainly a lot of racism among brutish working-class types. Gangs of skinheads roaming the London Underground…I was there, I saw it, I felt it.

May I ask something? Why would a smart, good-looking dude like Ward be interested in an unstable white lady on the far side of 45? What about all those foxy 20something girls running around town? I don’t get it. If Colman was in her early 30s, maybe. (I was into women in their 30s during my early to mid 20s.)

However unstable and erratic, Colman’s character would have had to nurse a streak of serious self-destruction to engage in a May-December affair like this. But if the director-writer of a film depicting such an affair adopts an attitude of presentism, a Ward + Colman-type affair is well within the realm of possibility.

A totally woke movie in 2022 has to cover at least two of the three fundamentals — race, gender, sexuality — and if it’s a 1980 period film the old presentism thang figures in. Empire of Light doesn’t do gender, but it covers the other three, you bet. Or so it would seem. I won’t see it until Telluride.

Flanked by his parents (Paul Dano, Michelle Williams), 7 year-old Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryna Francis-Deford) is wow-wow-wowed by Cecil B. DeMille’s recently released The Greatest Show on Earth (‘52). It’s an early scene from Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans (Universal, 11.11), which will premiere during the ‘22 Toronto Film Festival.

It was almost exactly three years ago (8.25.19) that HE suffered through an early evening visit to Moonshadows, the obnoxious tourist-trap beachside restaurant in Malibu. Here’s what I wrote:

Last weekend I made the mistake of taking Tatiana to dinner at Moonshadows Mailbu. I hadn’t been there in decades, but it’s a famous Malibu mainstay as well as the place Mel Gibson got drunk in before being arrested for DUI in July ’06. It will always appeal to gawking tourists and Lookie Lous because of the surfside location.

I took an instant dislike to the place, and when I got home I made a list of the reasons why. There were five of them. (1) Too many loud people congregated in a tight setting and generating so much conversational racket that I had a headache almost immediately; (2) Too many unattractive people who were either over-dressed or lacked that certain je ne sais quoi X-factor coolness that everyone needs to project when they’re out on the town; (3) Seriously ugly decor (baby blue seating booths with small and kitschy amber-toned lamps); (4) Decent but far from phenomenal food; and (5) A bizarre table-seating policy that may or may not have involved some kind of unsavory arrangement.

All I know is that the hostess declined to seat us next to an oceanview window, and when Tatiana asked why the hostess explained that a certain table in question was being held for a party of four that hadn’t yet arrived. In the politest terms I could muster I asked, “Well, are they royalty? What’s the special dispensation? We’re here in good faith and money in our pocket, and we’d like to sit at that open table so why can’t we exactly?” The hostess said that the party in question has paid a thousand bucks to Moonshadows so they’d always get a windowside table when they ate there.

Me (slightly agog): “Really?” Hostess: “Yeah. A thousand sounds like a lot, I agree, but…”

For the rest of the dinner I couldn’t think of anything else except this alleged thousand-dollar payoff. I was wondering how it worked exactly. Was it a thousand a year or twice annually or…? We asked our friendly waiter but he didn’t know of any such arrangement. I called the next day and spoke to a manager, a guy who said he’s worked at Moonshadows for many years, and he also said he was unaware of any such system.

All I can tell you is that the hostess said what she said, and that I didn’t imagine it.

I will never, ever go to Moonshadows again. I would rather eat a hot dog while sitting on the beach. I would rather go to Jack in the Box. On top of which Pacific Coast Highway is such an aggressive, high-speed thoroughfare. They say that the ocean is calming and restorative but not out there. I’ve been to beachside communities all over the globe, and Malibu is easily the worst of them. It has no sense of peace or tranquility.

Last Saturday (8.20) Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were re-married (following their quickie Las Vegas ceremony on 7.16) at Ben’s sprawling, semi-historic 87-acre plantation south of Savannah. Dozens of guests, catered up the wazoo, champagne on ice, no expense spared, a splendid time had by all.

All the press reports have described Ben’s spread as being either “in” Savannah or “just south” of it. In fact the Liberty County residence (which includes a 6,000 sq. ft. main house, a cottage house and a 10,000 sq. ft. guest house) is well south of Savannah, and in fact south of the Savannah suburb of Richmond Hill.

The hard truth is that Bennifer plantation is located between 35 and 40 minutes south of downtown Savannah…okay? Don’t lie about this. It’s way the hell out of town.

The luxurious spread sits on the banks of historic Blackbeard Creek — named after Blackbeard the pirate. It’s basically in the blue-collar boonies. The property isn’t that far from the moderately noisy interstate 95 and a little more than a mile south of a huge Target distribution center, and just east of Newport Timber in Riceboro.

Midway, Georgia is three or four miles to the northwest.

The home actually lies near an old settlement called Seabrook. Wikipedia says Seabrook “was originally built up chiefly by former slaves”…whoops! Couple this with Affleck’s Savannah-residing ancestor, Benjamin Cole, being a slave owner…okay, leave it there.

HE to Larry Karaszewski: Paul Newman aside, Cool Hand Luke (‘67) was an ensemble thing, and if you ask me the six…make that seven standout supporting players are George Kennedy, Strother Martin (“failure to communicate”), the icy prison guard with the reflector shades, Jo Van Fleet, J.D. Cannon, Clifton James and Joy Harmon, the soapy blonde who was washing the car.

I know Dennis Hopper was in it but I don’t recall him saying or doing anything especially stand-outish.

I recall young Lou Antonio’s face from the film, but he didn’t have any stand-out dialogue or business that leapt to the forefront. He’s 88 and apparently in a wheelchair — hope he’s feeling okay and everything’s cool. Is there any video of your discussion? Love to listen in.