Jeffrey Wells

Producer friend: “Of course you know that the original filmed ending of Fatal Attraction had Glenn Close committing suicide and leaving a note behind that framed Michael Douglas for her ‘murder.’ The final scene is Douglas being taken away in handcuffs. The studio didn’t like the way it played and demanded that James Dearden write a new ending where Close is punished and Douglas gets off free. Close was so upset about the change that she refused to reshoot it, resulting in the studio threatening her with a massive lawsuit unless she complied. To this day Close loathes the movie and doesn’t even have it listed in her publicity bios.”

Me: “She really and truly doesn’t have Fatal Attraction listed in her studio bios? That’s ridiculous. That movie, manipulative and cheap as it was in some respects, was a high-impact H-bomb in cultural terms. It totally made her career. If Close hadn’t broken out of her domestic mom persona from The World According to Garp her career would have stalled. On top of which it wasn’t Paramount as much as advance-screening audiences who hated the original — HATED it. They loved it when Anne Archer got on the phone and told Close she’d kill her if she tries to destroy her marriage again. Read Sherry Lansing’s recollection in her new book. Test audiences wanted the witch to be killed.”

Producer friend: “Yes, of course — I know all this. My comments were about Close and how broken up she was about the change.”

Me: “Close needs to get down on her knees every day and thank God that she finally manned up and performed the exploitation ending. If she’d flat-out refused her career would have been toast 30 years ago, and she’d be doing off-Broadway stuff today, maybe, and living in a rent-controlled, one-bedroom Chelsea apartment, if that.”

Producer friend: “Of course I know this too. She was the 30th choice in line to play the part. No one in town wanted to play it. But not the point. My point was understanding why she was so upset. And remember that she got nominated for an Oscar for the role for a reason. Terrific job, total pro.”

Me: “Close was deeply upset because she thought Alex Forrest, however unbalanced, was a half-decent person who had a point…right? Alex Forrest was dangerously unhinged. Harboring a form of insanity. Hostility unbound. AF felt that because she and Michael Douglas ravaged each other over a single weekend that their fates were thereafter eternally intertwined — that their paths would henceforth be one and the same. Togetherness, parenthood…decreed by fate.

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The beginning of the end for Steve Bannon? The neutral view is to call his removal from the National Security Council a strategic shift within the Trump White House, but if Bannon had any pride he’d quit today and go back to Breitbart.

Farley Granger didn’t come out until he was 70 or thereabouts, after discussing his homosexuality in The Celluloid Closet (’95). Tab Hunter half came out when he made John Waters‘ Polyester and Lust in the Dust, but not officially until ’05, at age 74, in a co-authored autobiography, “Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star.” Richard Chamberlain was outed at age 55 but didn’t come out until ’03 (when he was nearly 70) in his autobiography “Shattered Love“. Liberace, who died at age 67 from AIDS, might have come out if he’d lived into his 70s. Have there ever been any Barry Manilow fans who weren’t completely aware of his orientation going back to the late ’70s if not earlier, and yet he never came out until just now, at age 73. Deep-cave lifestyles are a generational thing for guys reared in heavily closeted times.

The President Show (Comedy Central) kicks off on 4.27. Anthony Atamanuik does an excellent Trump, but Trump himself “does” Donald Trump. He’s his own parody. And how do you pronounce Atamanuik? (Like “automatic” without the “t” and ignoring the “u”, I’m presuming.) If I’d been in Atamanuik’s shoes I would have changed my last name to “Atomic” or “Adverse.” There are many, many people out there who don’t know who the late Vaughn Meader was. The poor guy’s bigtime career lasted a year and a half, from the spring ’62 release of “The First Family” to 11.22.63.

From Meader’s Wiki page: “According to several sources, Lenny Bruce went on with his 11.22.63 nightclub show as scheduled. Just hours after Kennedy’s death, Bruce walked onstage, stood silently for several moments, then said sadly, ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The joke proved true. Meader discovered that he was so completely typecast as a Kennedy impersonator that he could not find anyone willing to hire him for any of his other talents.”

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I used to get stomach aches when I was seven or eight. I would eat too much of my grandmother’s cornbread and wind up groaning in my bed at 2 am or even throwing up. I haven’t suffered a stomach ache since. Occasional fevers but never any need for Maalox, Pepto Bismol, Ranitidine. Until last night, I should say. Today was worse. It felt like a hot copper coil was sitting in my stomach. My first thought was a possible ulcer, but don’t ulcers manifest gradually? Then I thought it might be stomach cancer, but that seemed overly dramatic. All I know is that I’ve felt weak all day (napped once) and barely able to write. As I noted 15 or 16 months ago, I don’t “do” illnesses as a rule. 10:30 pm update: Three or four hours ago “the pain stopped,” like Mia Farrow said in Rosemary’s Baby. I’m out of the woods.

Yesterday’s “Greatest Female Villains” post led me to this Fatal Attraction clip, and a realization of how unrealistic and miscalculated Michael Douglas‘s acting is in this scene.

Like any husband who’s indulged in an impulsive weekend affair Douglas would naturally be focused on keeping his wife, played by Anne Archer, in the dark. However angry he might be about finding Glenn Close chatting with her, not getting busted would be absolutely paramount. The normal way to handle this situation would be to play along, be polite, adopt a pleasant demeanor and not give Archer the slightest reason to suspect that something’s up.

But Douglas, performing under the direction of Adrien Lyne, plays it the stupid way. He’s rude and sullen, giving Close a death-ray look and saying as little as possible. In the real world Archer would spot in a second that Douglas and Close not only know each other but that some kind of bad business might have gone down.

Lyne didn’t care about that. He wanted Douglas to echo the same negative emotions that the audience was going through when they saw Close sitting with Archer, and to hell with anything else.

This, in a nutshell, is what mediocre directing and acting are all about. Ignoring recognizable human behavior and focusing on goosing the audience.

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The latest HE header logo is the old logo with the photo switched out. I’m fine with this. Site re-designs are traumatic — people always recoil and complain and ask “what was wrong with the original?” — so it’s good to keep the same old thing at the top.

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It’s funny, but I don’t think I want to present myself as the Anton Chigurh of Hollywood columnists. I relate a lot more to Josh Brolin‘s No Country For Old Men character. I certainly don’t want to project myself as some kind of fearsome cyclops. The idea is funny, but over and over again it might be a bit much. (This is just a rough idea of how the revised HE logo might look on a regular basis.)

The screenplay for Ingrid Goes West (Neon, 8.4) “adeptly sets the scene for some classic comedy of embarrassment and then sets things in motion smoothly,” says Hollywood Reporter critic Leslie Felperin. “But as whirlwinds are reaped and revelations tumble out, a not-in-a-good-way sourness emerges that makes the last act more unpleasant than perhaps the filmmakers intended.

“Although one wants to praise the screenplay for not spelling everything out, sometimes the characters’ motivations feel just a little too opaque and their decisions seem more motivated by plot mechanics than real human desires.

“On the other hand, that may be exactly the point, and the film might be read as a gloss on how shallow, whimsical and aimless these sort of people are. Certainly, hummingbird-fast editing, courtesy of Jack Price, makes the montages of emojis, hashtags and filtered phone-shot snapshots feel just as hyperactive and dizzying as one would expect, and like social media itself, the final effect is both weirdly entrancing and cloying.”

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