A day or so ago Welcome to New York director Abel Ferrara pledged to call me around noon today so we could discuss the mild hoo-hah about the unrated vs. R-rated versions of his film, which originally screened at last May’s Cannes Film festival. (IFC Sundance Selects will make the R-rated version available for public consumption starting on March blank.) For whatever cavalier reason Ferrara didn’t call me today (thanks!), but Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn has spoken to both Ferrara as well as Wild Bunch honcho Vincent Maraval, and has combined their quotes in a piece posted a few hours ago.

Excerpt #1: “Maraval said when he approached Ferrara about delivering an R-rated cut of Welcome to New York, “his response was somewhere between ‘fuck them’ and ‘mmmrrrmmr.” After a shorter cut that mainly slimmed down the orgy scene was prepared, Ferrara refused [to sign off]. ‘The R-rated version has existed for eight months,” Maraval says. “[It] has been released all over the world by distributors to whom we gave the choice between two versions, and all unanimously preferred the shorter version not only for commercial reasons but because they found it much better.”

It was a standard part of the 70mm, reserved-seat, roadshow engagement experience of the ’50s and ’60s to play an overture before the film began. When the film went into wide release on 35mm prints the overture was often (typically?) dropped. But some films used another kind of musical prelude, a kind of mini-overture that was included on all prints, even wide-distribution versions. Here’s one example on Criterion’s Bluray of The Innocents. (Sorry for the imperfect framing.) I remember attending a commercial screening of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer in ’77 that included a Tangerine Dream mini-overture, but for some reason this wasn’t include in the restored Bluray. Michael Bay used a mini-overture for the very beginning of Pearl Harbor. Hans Zimmer‘s theme played for maybe 8 or 10 seconds on a black screen before the film began. I asked Bay about this during a Honolulu press conference in early May 2001, and he said he was proud of it but had to fight for it.

Universal announced today that fans, suckers and the idly curious have dropped over $500 million worldwide on tickets for Sam Taylor Wood‘s Fifty Shades of Grey. Think about that. This almost certinly means that the “us too!” crowd will be cranking out erotically titillating films for at least the next two or three years. Variety‘s Brent Lang has reminded that more than $350 million of the film’s box-office total comes from foreign markets, and that “while the film opened to record-breaking numbers domestically, it faded fast.” Perhaps because it’s basically a film about “cyborg power sex — sterile, bloodless and wealth-porny,” as I remarked on 2.10.15. The only interesting, dead-on comment on this site came from LexG.

Yesterday afternoon I once again took the DMV motorcycle operator written test, and once again I failed it. Four or five wrong out of twelve questions. My fifth failure since last fall. To say I felt exasperated and deflated doesn’t begin to describe it. I was only a couple of emotional steps away from weeping on the curbside. But it’s not me, dammit — it’s their deviously worded questions. I’m stopping all Hollywood Elsewhere duties at 2:30 pm today to sit down and study the evil pamphlet again and then drive down and take the quiz again. If those malicious DMV people would simply allow learning-disabled persons like myself to view 15 or 20 sample questions online I’d memorize the answers and we could all go home. There are sample questions available at a DMV.org cheat-sheet site but apparently they aren’t from the actual tests.

Any man of spirit understands that drunkenness and debauchery can be joyful in your 20s and 30s, but making a habit of it can be tiresome all around. And God forbid you’re behind any kind of wheel. But oh, the stories! I’m guessing that the late Peter O’Toole‘s visit to Late Night with David Letterman was part of his Venus promotional tour, or sometime in late ’06. Gravestone epitaph (originally from Sycamore Cleaners): “It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.” The camel bit (after the jump) is included, of course, because of the Heineken. Essential viewing.

Two days ago I posted a riff about how the 3.27 opening of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome To New York feels a little too late in the cycle. The next day I was informed that the version that IFC/Sundance Selects is releasing theatrically is R-rated and therefore tamer than what was shown in Cannes last May and subsequently on European VOD. The R-rated cut was apparently prepared for Showtime as part of a pay-cable sale and then IFC decided to use it for the theatrical release as well, despite Ferrara’s vehement objections. I got in touch with Ferrara yesterday and he’s agreed to speak with me about it tomorrow. Honestly? If the difference between the R-rated cut and the 2014 Cannes cut largely consists of images of the unclothed Gerard Depardieu, I might be okay with the R version. Update: I guess I’ll just buy the British Bluray (released last October) that contains both versions.

Universal is looking to make money off the 30th anniversary of John Hughes‘ The Breakfast Club. Who cares about seeing a restored version of this mildly okay, far-from-earthshaking detention hall character piece? Those who were in their late teens or early 20s when it popped in ’85, one presumes. Which costar has had the most engaged or interesting or productive career? Emilio Estevez, right? Followed by Anthony Michael Hall, who’s done fairly well as a character actor. Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald have hung in there in various modest ways. Every generation enjoys a blaze of glory kickoff in their early to mid 20s, and then the real-life challenges kick in and we all get to see what the players are made of.

Steven Spielberg reportedly intends to direct a film about war photographer Linsey Addario, which will be based on Addario’s recently published memoir “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.” The 25 year-old Jennifer Lawrence will portray the 42 year-old, still-very-much-active photographer, but where’s the movie? Addario is a brave, tough adventurer who has photographed conflicts in Iraq, Darfur, Libya and Afghanistan and gone through a lot of trauma and cast a special focus on the victims. But where’s the movie?

Just capturing the emotion, excitement and danger of a real-life professional putting herself on the line does not comprise, in itself, anyone’s idea of narrative engagement. Ask any professional screenwriter. Movies can’t just be built on a series of adventures. You have to have a story, a theme, a dramatic surprise or two, a pivot point, an unspoken undercurrent and an actual ending as opposed to just downshifting and bringing things to a close.

In short, Spielberg’s Addario flick sounds like cultural propaganda by way of “you go girl” hagiography. It’s basically going to be a film that will say the following to the audience: (a) “Whoa…here’s this ballsy woman who’s doing what Robert Capa did and has written a book about it, except she’s still fairly young and is still doing it big-time!” and (b) “Okay, we don’t really have a great story to tell, we admit that…this is basically a movie in which this happens and that happens and then this happens and then that happens and then this happens…but it’ll give Spielberg an opportunity to deliver some intense action photography in the Middle East.”

Right away I sensed that Neil Blomkamp‘s Chappie (Columbia, 3.6) was a likely no-go. I could smell the old “ghost in the machine” notion of a robot having a semblance of a human heart and perhaps even a soul, and decided I wanted nothing to do with it. So I had my own reasons for really not looking forward to seeing today at 5 pm, but now reviews from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and Variety‘s Justin Chang have filled me with even more trepdiation. Chappie “represents a further downward step for Blomkamp in the wake of the highly uneven Elysium,” McCarthy has written. Chang has similarly warned that “intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is one of the major casualties of Chappie, a robot-themed action movie that winds up feeling as clunky and confused as the childlike droid with which it shares its name.” It suffers from “a chaotically plotted story and a central character so frankly unappealing he almost makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like tolerable company by comparison“…hah!

“A large portion” of the Academy’s board of governors has been pushing for a return to five Best Picture nominees, according to a piece filed last night by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway. A “high-level source” is quoted saying the Academy “tried” the current system of allowing up to ten nominees “but it didn’t do us any good.” What an idiot. The point of allowing for more Best Picture nominees is to include a people’s favorite or two. If you nominate American Sniper or The Dark Knight or The Blind Side you’re presumably engaging a wider audience…right?

You don’t want to just nominate the kind of high-calibre films that Hollywood Elsewhere readers prefer or…you know, elitist foo-foo movies. You have to strategically lower or democratize the real-estate value and try to liberally redefine the idea of “best” (at least for appearances’ sake) if you want to keep the riff-raff in the pen.

The underlying reality is that cultural devolution will continue regardless of how many Best Picture nominees are allowed. The cinematic interests of Joe and Jane Popcorn have never been very sophisticated, but they’re even more degraded now with most of them agreeably submitting to soul-suffocating big-studio franchises and the indie sector pretty much generating all the Best Picture nominees. The whole idea of average mainstream ticket-buyers hankering to see quality-level films has been gradually losing currency for at least the last 20 to 25 years. But on other hand how can it not be good for ratings if one or two Best Picture nominees offer at least some general appeal?

The hip thing was to visit Cuba when it wasn’t that easy. It’s still fairly cool now but in three or five or seven years you’ll start to see American corporate franchises pop up here and there, and while I’m sure the Edsels and cheap hotels and native food stands will hold their ground that old romantic Havana thing that Graham Greene used to write about and Wim Wenders captured in Buena Vista Social Club and which you can sense and almost smell if you watch Carol Reed‘s Our Man in Havana…that thing will eventually start to disappear. So get down there soon before MacDonald’s does. Who am I to talk? I’ve never even been.