There’s a strictly enforced system in Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy (’55). Old-school mummies kill their victims by strangling them, but whenever Klaris the mummy (Eddie Parker) comes up behind Lou Costello, he can only stand 12 inches behind him with his arms out. When Costello takes a step, Klaris takes a step…but he can’t strangle Costello. He’s only allowed to give him a mummy bear hug. Then again Klaris couldn’t be too toothless. I’m presuming that director Charles Lamont told Parker to make a scary noise every so often. Parker: “What kind of noise?” Lamont: “I don’t know. Some kind of growl.” Parker: “A Wolfman growl?” Lamont: “Of course not. A dead man’s growl..filtered through tana leaves, whatever…the roar of dessicated centuries and ancient pyramids and dry-mouth.” Parker: “Dessicated?” Lamont: “Just don’t sound like the Wolfman.” And so Parker came up with “yaaawwwhrrrrr!”

Under the mandate of General Efraín Ríos Montt, a notorious Guatamelan strongman who belongs in the company of Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic, over 200 residents of Dos Erres — men, women, kids, elderly — were murdered on or about 12.6.82. The killers were an elite Guatamelan special forces unit, known as the Kaibiles. The killings were part of Montt’s scorched-earth policy, under which up to 200,000 indigenous and Mayan people died.

Wiki page excerpt: “[The Kaibiles] bashed the smallest children’s heads against walls and trees, and killed the older ones with hammer blows to the head. Their bodies were dumped in a well. The commandos interrogated the men and women one by one, then shot or bashed them with the hammer, and dumped them in the well. They raped women and girls, and ripped the fetuses out of pregnant women.”

Last night I caught a screening of Ryan Suffern‘s Finding Oscar (Film Rise, 4.21), a Steven Spielberg-sponsored doc about a long investigation of this notorious genocide. The invited crowd was obviously affected, impressed. So was I up to a point. It tells a horrific story but also an emotional one, and the combination works for the most part. But I was slightly bothered by Suffern’s emphasis on a humanistic, up-with-people, we-can-get-past-this approach.

Justice finally caught up with the bad guys 30 years later, but I didn’t want to be comforted or told “there, there.” I wanted, rather, to immerse myself in the details of this Central American horror. I wanted to sink into this realm and sort it all out like a special prosecutor. I wanted to channel the spirit of Jean-Louis Trintignant in Z.

Finding Oscar is not so much a detailed investigation of a massacre as an attempt to convey the emotions beneath it — the guilt shared by two older men who participated, the satisfaction and catharsis felt by investigators as they sifted through thousands of pieces of evidence over the years, and especially the emotions of two boys who escaped this slaughter and are now in their late 30s — Ramiro Cristales and particularly Oscar Ramirez, who now lives in Framingham, Massachusetts.

My just-arrived copy of the 2017 Elite Journalist Cannes Film Festival Instruction Manual says I need to see the following Directors Fortnight selections: (a) Claire Denis’ Un beau soleil intérieur with Juliette Binoche and Gerard Depardieu; (b) Cary Murnion‘s Bushwick (action thriller); (c) Geremy Jasper‘s Patti Cake$ (Sundance success d’estime, opening via FS on 7.17); (d) Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project (Tangerine followup, costarring Willem Dafoe); (e) Abel Ferrara‘s Alive in France (road trek doc); (f) Bruno Dumont‘s Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc; (g) Philippe Garrel‘s L’amant d’un jour (emotionally off-balance 20something woman discovers that her dad is fucking a woman her age); (h) Jonas Carpignano’s A Ciambra (follow-up to Mediterranea) and (i) Sharunas Bartas‘ Frost avec Vanessa Paradis.

In a 4.18 post titled “Last Days of Classic HE,” I mentioned a bothersome aspect of the redesign. The smartphone edition (different than the laptop version) will, I said, “be narrower than the wide-angle laptop version, which will result in some elements (like my headshot) being sliced off.” Yesterday (4.19) Toronto Star critic Peter Howell urged that I keep my mug on the smartphone version. “The vast majority of clicks these days come via smartphone, not laptops,” he reminded. “Hollywood Elsewhere is very much associated with your personality, and I think it would be a mistake to have your face clipped from the masthead for the mobile version.” I forwarded this to the tireless Sasha Stone, who’s handling the re-design. Late last night she sent along her solution — perfect!

Also: The redesign will definitely include a “Classic HE” sidebar (pear cake, “Loud Latinos“, cowboy hat, Oxford wifigate, Hispanic party elephant, HE vs. Jezebel, Paris, Hanoi/Vietnam, “What I’ve Learned“, neck wattle surgery, “Tale of Two Flophouses“, Schumergate, shrieking hyena laughter, etc.) along with a movie reviews sidebar.

Yesterday Nerdwriter posted an intelligent suggestion about how to fix Passengers, which popped on Bluray/streaming/DVD a month ago. Worth absorbing. He also offers a tip of the hat to David Ehrlich’s “Twilight Zone” suggestion, which Glenn Kenny characterized on 12.19.16 as “this movie could have been saved with a plot twist proving that the chick was as much of a shit as the dude.”

“Alternate Passengers Plotting“, posted on 12.19.16: “Everyone now knows that Passengers (Sony, 12.21) is saddled with a gnarly ethical issue.

“When engineer Chris Pratt is aroused from hibernation aboard a massive star cruiser in the midst of a 120-year voyage to a planet called Homestead II, he realizes he’s been accidentally revived — the other 4999 passengers will be in hibernation for another 80 years. Faced with a life of absolute loneliness and certain to die before the ship arrives, Pratt decides to wake up journalist Jennifer Lawrence, whom he’s fallen in love with after watching her video profile and reading her articles. On one hand his loneliness problem is solved — on the other he’s a creep and a kind of murderer.

From a producer pal: “Did you know there’s a relatively new industry newsletter called The Ankler? It’s daily and is written by Richard Rushfield, formerly of Hitfix. And every day it has ‘The Daily Wells’, which slags you off. Just being a friend in case you haven’t heard.”

Ankler greeting: “Welcome to this Beta edition of Hollywood’s own up-and-coming daily newsletter. Here you’ll find your morning round-up and dissection of the day’s parade in the business, featuring news, gossip, amazing tidbits and fearless, pointed analysis. If you like or don’t like, or really hate what you see, let us know — richard@theankler.com. And please, if you enjoy The Ankler pass this email on to your friends and colleagues!”

Apparently it’s some kind of subscription-only newsletter — i.e., no URL.

I’ve seen this footage so many times I feel as if I’ve seen Sofia Coppola’s feature-length version. It’ll play in Cannes, of course, and then open commercially on 6.23 via Focus Features. I have to really sit down and watch Don Siegel’s 1971 version sometime soon. I didn’t watch it all the way through the last time; I might have nodded off.

Matt Damon (or someone claiming to be him) delivers a pretty good impression of David Dao’s bobcat bitch howl at the one-minute mark…just saying. Are you going to tell me he did this impression out of respect?

Edward R. Murrow‘s Person to Person interview with Marilyn Monroe happened on 4.8.55. It happened at the Weston, Connecticut home of photographer Milton Greene, with whom Monroe had partnered the previous December on Marilyn Monroe Productions. (Two of the results were The Prince and the Showgirl and Bus Stop.) Monroe’s portion starts around 3:45 (or 4:20 if you watch the alternate clip after the jump). I’d never watched Monroe speak in an off-the-cuff fashion before this. Those eyes are amazing. She’s no Einstein but the vulnerability and empathy….wow.

It was announced today that the complications surrounding Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment issues have caused Fox News (i.e., the Murdochs) to cut him loose. Question: Is he toast everywhere eternally or can he submit to the usual remedies and wind up with another big-station or big-radio berth within a year or less? Can he do a Brian Williams or more precisely a Mel Gibson — a long exile followed by eventual rehabilitation via two or three soul-baring interviews in which he apologizes for having been a pig and a dog? Imagine that it’s the summer of 2018, and that O’Reilly has done all this and thereby achieved limited reprieve status (not among women or progressives but with advertisers). If you were the head of CNN, would you offer him a slot? You know that hinterland righties will tune in if he returns.

Guillermo del Toro and I did breakfast at the Hotel Majestic during the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. He was serving as a juror. While our chat was off the record, I think it’s fair to mention that he said he was tiring of making big, effects-driven movies (i.e., Pacific Rim) and that he wanted to tone it down and go in a more personal vein. I took that to mean he wanted to make more films in the vein of Pans’ Labrynth, The Devil’s Backbone, Chronos, Mama, The Orphanage, etc. (The last two he produced but didn’t direct.)

I’ve been presuming all along that The Shape of Water, a period fantasy-adventure which he directed and co-wrote, would be one of these. But will it be? The fact that Fox Searchlight has announced a 12.8 release date indicates a belief in its award-season potential. Or does a December release mean all that much when we’re talking about GDT’s fantastical realm? I’m saying in the most respectful and laudatory terms that GDT doesn’t do “Oscar friendly” as a rule. I mean that as high praise.**

HE readers need to understand…hell, I need to understand that this may be the last full week of classic Hollywood Elsewhere. Assembling the new design has been hell, but once the mock-up ads are created and put in place and I’ve sat down with Sasha Stone and learned the new WordPress scheme, the switch will be thrown. That may happen…I don’t want to predict but possibly by next Monday or Tuesday. Maybe. Advisory: The smartphone edition will be narrower than the wide-angle laptop version, which will result in some elements (like my headshot) being sliced off. HE’s classic design lasted 12 and 2/3 years — the site launched in mid-August 2004.