Commentary from screenwriter William Goldman on the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Bluray, not transcribed but recalled: “We were lucky with Butch. We had a great director [George Roy Hill], and we had Connie Hall‘s phenomenal photography and a great crew and a solid script and a neat story and the casting was perfect. But if just one of these elements didn’t happen…it tells you that a good script and a good director and the right cast aren’t enough . The photography has to be right on, ditto the score and the editing…and if just one of these elements isn’t exactly right, you are dead. Nobody realizes how important the editing is, or how important the composer is…and there’s no reason for people outside the movie business to realize this, that movies are so fragile and anything can screw them up.” (Initially posted on 7.5.06.)

John Lichman was kidding when he tweeted this, but I would be over the moon with joy if a Greenberg sequel could somehow happen. Seriously. Noah Baumbach directing, of course. Ben Stiller and just about any strong costar. Adam Sandler could save…okay, half-save his career if he costarred.

In actuality: “Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, a potential Cannes title, will premiere in select theaters and on Netflix later this year. It stars Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Marvel (Homeland, House of Cards), Grace Van Patten (Tramps, Stealing Cars) and Emma Thompson.

“It’s described as an intergenerational tale of adult siblings contending with the influence of their aging father. Scott Rudin, Baumbach, Lila Yacoub and Eli Bush produced.”

“Big Greenberg Divide,” posted on 4.3.10: I don’t know where the below photo below was taken (the guy who sent it to me didn’t say, and he hasn’t answered my follow-up e-mails) but I’m really, really hoping it wasn’t taken at the Angelika in lower Manhattan. If it was this would imply that supposedly ahead-of-the-curve New Yorkers can be just as stubbornly conservative in their tastes as hinterland types. Please tell me it was taken in Orlando or Natchez or Des Moines.

13 or 14 years ago screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man, All The President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) explained what a “drop-out” moment is — i.e., when something happens in a film that just makes you collapse inside, that makes you surrender interest and faith in the ride that you’re on. You might stay in your seat and watch the film to the end, but you’ve essentially “left” the theatre. The movie had you and then lost you, and it’s not your fault.

I was with Moonlight during the first two chapters of Chiron’s life, the ones that starred Alex Hibbert as “Little” and Ashton Sanders as the teenaged version. Both were “soft” in the same ways — tender, slender and frail — and I felt for their sadness and trepidation. But I dropped out when the muscular, panther-like Trevante Rhodes came along to inhabit the adult Chiron.

There was simply no believing Rhodes used to be a slender little wimp…no way. And the idea of this studly, good-looking guy having never had sex with anyone since that one heart-stopping handjob on the beach…no way again.

Caspar Phillipson‘s casting as JFK didn’t cause me to lose interest in Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie, but the instant I laid eyes I said to myself, “This guy is supposed to be Jack Kennedy? I don’t think so!” He was too short, for one thing — shorter than Peter Sarsgaard‘s Robert F. Kennedy, which was fairly ridiculous knowing that Jack was a good two inches taller than Bobby in real life.

Phillipson didn’t “kill” Jackie for me, but his presence did persuade me that it wasn’t a home run and that my only option was to wait for interesting stuff to happen. I said to myself, “A movie about the Kennedy White House uses a fucking Danish actor and then shaves his hair too closely so you can see whitewalls? Scalp was never visible on the sides of JFK’s thick thatch, and the makers of this movie didn’t know that when they prepared Phillipson for the part? Forget it.”

I “drop out” of a lot of movies the instant I hear they’re being made. Don’t get me started but there are hundreds in this camp. If any movie is costarring Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel, I’m gone. If Ben Mendehlson is in a film, I’m 90% ready to to jump ship, sight unseen.

Entertainment journalist-critic Chris Willman caught three of the four highly ballyhooed nitrate screenings shown during last week’s TCM Classic Film Festival. These films were Otto Preminger‘s Laura, Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much and Mitchell Leisen‘s Lady in the Dark. (Willman missed Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger‘s Black Narcissus.)

Willman went each time with genuine eagerness, but he couldn’t quite see what the big deal was. Here’s his report:

“I saw three of the four nitrate screenings at the TCM Fest. I’ve been hesitant to publicly riff on them because I’m one of those non-audiophile people who would fail a vinyl/digital comparison test, so I may be equally blind when it comes to certain visual subtleties. That said, I was underwhelmed, at least after impossible expectations had been set up for how these prints would change our lives.

“Martin Scorsese introduced the first night and spoke in predictably entertaining terms about his own religious experiences with nitrate, dating back to seeing something at the old Melrose Theatre in the ‘80s. He and other speakers left the impression that we were about to see something that would be more vivid and startling than 3D, high frame rate and an acid trip combined.

“And then we saw the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, and it looked to me like a really good, albeit normal, 35mm print. I figured that might just be the limitations of 1930s photography and that Laura the following night would be the conversion experience. Again: I would not have thought it anything but a really strong 35mm print if I didn’t know any better. I missed Black Narcissus, which I think would have been the ultimate knockout of the four, if anything was going to be.

I don’t like buying Twilight Time Blurays because they’re always jacking up the price — TT always charges $30 for Blurays that should, according to God’s benevolent scheme, be priced at $20. Which is why I chose to purchase the recently popped British Bluray of Hal Ashby‘s The Last Detail for 15 pounds, or $18.72 U.S. I watched the movie a couple of weeks ago — definitely the best it’s ever looked or sounded. Then again I haven’t seen the UHD 4K streaming version, which you can actually buy via British Amazon.

Alexander Payne as he appears in Robert Fischer’s “About a Trip: Alexander Payne on Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail“

Last night I watched a supplementary Bluray video containing Alexander Payne‘s thoughts and ruminations — “About a Trip: Alexander Payne on Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail,” and it’s almost worth the price in itself. Charming, open-hearted, highly intelligent.

Here is an audio excerpt in which Payne (a) describes his favorite scenes in this 1973 film, (b) laments the absence of long, slow dissolves in today’s films (along with the use of zoom shots and voice-overs), (c) flat-out calls The Last Detail “a love story,” which of course it is, (d) mentions that he was very impressed with Daryl Ponicsan‘s script for Last Flag Flying, and was thinking about directing it back in ’10 or thereabouts, and (e) further mentions that the plot hangs on the three characters (Buddusky, Mulhall, Meadows), now in their 60s, getting together to deliver the body of Meadows’ son, killed in the Iraq War, to his mother or to a funeral service or something along those lines.

Richard Linklater wound up directing Last Flag Flying. It costars Bryan Cranston as Buddusky, Steve Carell as Larry Meadows and Laurence Fishburne as Mulhall. The Amazon release will probably open sometime in the fall.

Update, clarification: My initial reaction to yesterday’s United Airlines bloody-beat-down episode (which happened in Chicago on Sunday evening, or the night before last) was not that David Dao, the bespectacled Vietnamese doctor, wasn’t entitled to keep his seat, but that he became a screaming two-year-old once the security guys tried to throw him off. And that his bizarrely repeated chant of “I have to go home, I have to go home, I have to go home” indicated some kind of obsessive, primitive mentality.

The United guys obviously caused the trouble and are taking the hit, but at the same time I can’t throw in with people who howl like bobcats. The entire twitterverse has condemned United — 100% agreement. But nobody will acknowledge, much less react to, Dao’s primal screaming.

I saw the first episode of Jill Soloway‘s I Love Dick, an Amazon series that begins on 5.12, at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. I liked Kevin Bacon‘s titular character, a studly, cigarette-smoking Thomas McGuane-type guy out of Marfa, Texas, but I really, really didn’t like anyone else. I didn’t care for Kathryn Hahn‘s character, who is closely based on original author Chris Kraus, and I absolutely, definitely didn’t want to watch any sexual scenario involving Griffin Dunne, who plays her graying, saggy-bellied husband. Nor did I care for costars Roberta Colindrez, Adhir Kalyan, India Menuez and Azita Ghanizada…no offense. Kraus’ 1997 book was especially popular with feminists. Bacon’s depiction excepted, I felt a general vibe of contempt and distaste for men in general. A sassy, jaded, cynical vibe — get me the hell out of Marfa. (Episode #1 is currently streaming for Prime members.)

I’m sorry but when airline employees regretfully inform you’ve been bumped from a flight, that’s it. You’re not going to stonewall them into changing their minds — you’re taking the next flight. And if you howl in protest when they insist you have to give up your seat and then make them drag you off the plane, you’re the asshole, not them. This incident happened last night on a domestic United flight (Chicago to Louisville) that was about to leave. United decided at the last minute that four seats on this fully-booked flight had to be given to airline employees — bad idea. When no one accepted their offer of $800 in vouchers plus a hotel stay in exchange for a seat, they chose to eject four passengers at random — even worse. The unbalanced Asian guy (“I have to go home, I have to go home”) was among them but he refused to deplane, apparently persuaded that he’d been singled out because he’s Asian. All kinds of mayhem broke loose when security tried to drag him off.

In late ’85 I caught Jose Quintero‘s Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill‘s The Iceman Cometh, in which 63-year-old Jason Robards played Theodore “Hickey” Hickman. Quintero and Robards were the original fathers and life-givers of this play, which had opened in October 1946 and closed after only 163 performances. Their 1956 Off-Broadway production, staged just after O’Neill’s death, bestowed the proper lustre. The ’85 revival was a kind of half reunion, half celebration of this feat. I remember that Robards dyed his hair brown as Hickey was supposed to be somewhere in his early 40s. Barnard Hughes and Donald Moffat costarred. It was a really long sit (the 1973 John Frankenheimer film version ran 239 minutes) but Robards, man…wow. Glad I was there.

Does anyone remember Music Plus, the music-video retail chain? Sometime in late ’89 Music Plus management, inspired by the success of Tower Records’ in-house publication Pulse, decided to publish their own in-house magazine promoting CD and VHS titles. I was eventually hired by self-styled publisher Jeffrey Stern to be the senior editor, and we came up with the name Prime. Our fledgling publication, which Music Plus management liked but did almost nothing to promote in their stores, was TV Guide-sized. We worked out of offices in Santa Monica near the corner of Ocean and Wilshire, and then out of an Ocean Park Blvd. office building. I forget how many monthly issues we produced (eight or nine?) before relations between Stern and I started to go south. I worked for him for maybe 15 or 16 months, something like that. I began as an Entertainment Weekly stringer in the spring of ’91, and it’s been nothing but fun and games since.

Why am I posting a 26 and 1/2 year-old magazine cover (it was dated December 1990) in April of 2017? Last weekend the SRO cleaned out the bedroom closet and dumped a lot of stuff. This is one of the publications I saved.

This awful “aaahh” idea started with one person working for HBO, and then it spread to another and another. And now millions have been subjected. HBO’s “aaah” anthem actually isn’t an “aaah” but more of an “ohm” mixed with the eerie Martian choir out of Invaders From Mars. The Invaders score was composed by Raoul Kraushaar.

A recent Born in China trailer suggested it might be a cut above the usual Disney hash (cutesy, sanitized, kid-friendly). It seemed to promise compelling, rough-and-tumble stories about three families in the hills and mountains of southern China — a snow leopard and her two cubs, a mommy panda and her cub, and a snub-nosed monkey clan. So last week I caught a screening in the Disney Animation building, and within five minutes I knew I’d been film-flammed.

Born in China is the same old stew. Stunningly beautiful, drop-dead photography. Adorable animals (especially the monkeys). Folksy-kindly narration (voiced by John Krasinski) aimed at eight year olds. But with much of the sadness, harshness and occasional brutality of nature sidestepped or flat-out ignored. Because the kiddies have to be shielded from the realities. Raise them in McMansions, give them sedentary lives in front of screens, gently poison them with fast-food diets but never let them see what real life is really like. There’s plenty of time for that later. Keep them in fantasyland for as long as possible.

Wells to Disney corporates: YouTube is filled with hundreds of videos of hyenas, wild dogs and lions eating the intestines of still-living zebras, antelopes, gazelles, wildebeests and buffalos. Are you under an impression that kids don’t watch this stuff?

When I was eight and nine I was dying to know what life was really like outside of the suburban membrane my parents raised me in. All I remember about the regimented, rule-following aspects of my life back then was that I was dead bored. My parents shielded me from all the fascinating things happening in the news. Which is why I liked movies so much because at least they offered a taste of life outside the gulag — adventure, color, risk and danger. My childhood was an enforced system of mind and behavior control that all but suffocated my spirit and drained my juices. I died a thousand deaths sitting through Sunday morning services inside our local Episcopalian church.

Thank God for my hunger and curiosity. I was leafing through nudie magazines when I was eight. I remember an older kid shooting a park pigeon with a bow and arrow and soon after getting cuffed by the cops. When I was nine I remember watching a YMCA instructor (I was sent there for swimming lessons and summer recreation) stepping in a pile of gooey dog shit as he was talking to a colleague, and not realizing it and all the kids giggling and elbowing each other. I was busted for shoplifting around then, and I remember begging the supermarket manager not to turn me over to the cops. I was playing touch football one afternoon with friends when I was ten or so, and we all happened to see a major car crash — WHAHM! — less than a block away. We all ran over for a closer look, and one of the drivers, a guy in a convertible, was groaning and moaning as he reclined in the front seat.