There was a period between my 20th and 21st birthday when I had no job or goals or academic engagement…nothing. I was in my Bhagavad Gita mystical phase, no fooling, except the constant urge to party and frolic and basically pursue the spiritual pretty much dominated everything. Partying and then recovering the next day so I could party again the next night…well, there was actually more to it than just that. It’s not that I didn’t try to have a kind of “life.” I would land a job I hated and then lose that job. I read the New York Times every day but I ingested a lot of substances and did a lot of sleeping and day-dreaming. I dabbled as a dealer of pot and hallucinogens. Occasional tripping, hitchhiking, chasing girls, wherever the day took me…bars, parties, music and especially (this was huge) lying totally ripped on a floor with two smallish Marantz speakers on either side of my head.

Chance Browne painting of Seir Hill Road in Wilton, Connecticut. My parents’ home was around the bend and down the road a piece.

At some point my parents decided to strongly communicate their disfavor. They wanted me to understand that this lifestyle had nowhere to go but down so they kicked me out of their comfortable Cape Cod-style home in Wilton, Connecticut. I would crash here and there but occasionally I’d have nowhere to go. So I’d show up at the Cape Cod around midnight or 1 am and throw pebbles at my sister Laura’s window. To keep me out every night my father would lock the garage basement door plus the dining-room door that led to the basement stairs, so I needed Laura to let me in. After a couple of taps she’d come to the window and then meet me downstairs. I remember I had to raise the sliding garage doors one inch at a time so as to not make any noise. Laura and I would tiptoe upstairs in pitch black and I’d sleep inside the closet in my room. My parents both worked during the day and gone by 9 am so I’d come down around 10 am or so and get some breakfast, etc.

Apologies for not posting a note of lament and respect yesterday for the late Lesley Gore, and particularly for the ballsy instinct that led to her recording “You Don’t Own Me,” a 1963 chart-climber than came to be regarded as a landmark feminist anthem. Quoting from an app.com piece that popped yesterday: “In an era when being a silent girlfriend to the football captain was a teenager’s dream and the feminist movement was still underground, Gore’s ‘You Don’t Own Me‘ in 1963 became a girl-power statement of confidence, independence, and sexual rebellion.”

I’ve thought it over and I respect all the “down to the sea in ships” Oscar handicappers (13 on Gold Derby) who are still predicting a Boyhood Best Picture win. I get it. I’ve been there a few times myself. The old Masada impulse. Better to go down with your pony than to suck it in and say “okay, the other movie will win,” as Sasha Stone did yesterday. Sugar: “Water polo…isn’t that terribly dangerous?” Junior: “I’ll say. I had two ponies drowned under me.”

Sent this morning to Wade Williams, the Kansas City-based film archivist who owns the largest independent library of science-fiction film rights, and more particularly owns the rights to Invaders From Mars (’53) as well as, I presume, all material elements:

“Greetings, Wade — Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere here. Journalist for 35 years, former projectionist at Sono Cinema in Norwalk, former employee of Sid Geffen, friend of the late L.M. Kit Carson and big fan of William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders From Mars.

“When, if ever, will Invaders be HD scanned and made available for HD streaming? Or perhaps even for a Bluray? The 50th anniversary DVD came out…what, 12 or 13 years ago and nothing has happened since, and the world is moving on.

Todd Kessler‘s Bloodline, a 13-episode Netflix series beginning on 3.20, is a family melodrama set in what looks to be Southern Florida…cool. A story about the Rayburns with Kyle Chandler as John, the apparently responsible #1 son…fine. And Linda Cardellini as Meg, presumably his wife. Sam Shepard and Sissy Spacek appear to be playing the parents…fine. But oh, God…oh, please, no…dear God, help us all…Ben Mendelsohn, the grungiest and sleaziest-looking character actor working today, is playing Danny, the bad-news brother. I don’t know if I can take much more of Mendelsohn. Except for his low-key gambler in Mississipi Grind he always plays lowlife scumbags who are up to no good and probably have halitosis. He walks into the room and it’s “okay, here’s the sweaty scumbag who’s going to poison the well and drag everyone to hell.”

Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?
Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. How much do you want?
Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you’re worth. More than 150 billion?
Vladimir Putin: Oh my, yes!
Jake Gittes: Closer to $200 billion?
Vladimir Putin: Quite possible. I really don’t have an exact figure.
Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?
Vladimir Putin: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!
Jake Gittes: You need $200 billion to wrangle the future with? Some would consider a billion dollars to be an enormous fortune.
Vladimir Putin: It’s not the amount, Mr. Gittes. It’s the fact that it’s there for the taking and no one can stop me.

An Olive Films Bluray of Billy Wilder’s old-hat, close-to-excruciating Kiss Me Stupid streets tomorrow. No way am I buying or watching it. I’ll watch almost anything in black-and-white Scope, which I happen to be queer for, but I draw the line at Kiss Me, Stupid. It’s not so much the overbearing lead performance by Ray Walston, who was hired at the last-minute when Peter Sellers suffered a heart attack, and Kim Novak is…well, not too bad even though Polly the Pistol is a pathetic character. It’s Dean Martin I can’t stand. He’s playing himself here — a rich, big-name Italian crooner who’s so smug and lazy he can barely say his lines without putting himself to sleep…thinks he’s the center of the universe but in fact is completely out of swing with mid ’60s culture and doesn’t know it and doesn’t care, and who has no funny lines…just a smug, oily-haired lech trying to bang Novak while getting half-bombed.

(l. to r.) Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Dean Martin in a rare color snap from the set of Kiss Me Stupid.

From a 3.27.11 Glenn Kenny Some Came Running piece called “I’m With Stupid: “One thing I find perverse enjoyment in with Kiss Me, Stupid, is its coarseness, or more precisely the way that coarseness manifests itself. It was made just as the sexual revolution was revving up and the studio system was circling the drain. While Wilder’s comic sensibility was always at least partially about pushing a joke or double-entendre past whatever the acceptable breaking point for the Breen Office was, the man himself was in some ways a bit of a prig. His ’60s films were getting more and more frantic, but with Kiss Me, Stupid, there’s an almost palpable sense of Wilder saying ‘screw this.’

With the Best Picture Oscar nearly in the bag for Birdman, this morning I wrote the usual Oscarologists a question many didn’t want to hear. Who has attempted an honest, warts-and-all, what-really-happened explanation about why so many Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby-ites predicted a Boyhood Best Picture victory for so many months? Me: “Some of you have to ask yourself and your Boyhood brethren, ‘Were we just smelling our own asses the whole time or was there something out there that seriously conveyed that Boyhood was a winning horse?”

This morning Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and I discuss the current state of Oscar-releated mea culpas and second thoughts in the wake of the Birdman surge.

Only three responded to my letter — Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil (with whom I recorded a 25-minute discussion” about an hour ago) Variety critic Scott Foundas and an entertainment journalist who asked for anonymity.

But first, an excerpt from an “oh, fuck it, fine…Birdman wins!” piece posted this morning by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, a longtime Boyhood ally who is basically ascribing the popularity of Birdman to old-boy industry narcissism, which is an idea advanced earlier this month by Grantland‘s Mark Harris.

Birdman‘s Emmanuel Lubezki won the top prize Sunday night at the American Society of Cinematographers Awards at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on Sunday night. The ASC honor makes it…what, the seventh big guild award for Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s film? Producers Guild, DGA, SAG Ensemble, art directors, Cinema Audio Style and makeup/hair stylists. Whatever lingering doubts there might have been, etc.

I was half-watching and half-texting during the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary special when the all-new Will Ferrell-as-Alex Trebek Celebrity Jeopardy skit began. I put down the phone. It was mainly between Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery (“whore ads for $40”) and Norm McDonald’s Burt Reynolds, I thought, with Taran Killaim‘s Christoph Waltz a close third. Jim Carrey repeated his Matthew McConaughey Lincoln car commercial bit…fine. Kenan Thompson’s Bill Cosby went over and around my head. Yes, an embed code for the Jeopardy skit happened to appear on the EW.com site, but it really….to hell with it, I’ve said it.

In order to avoid alienating those who believe the earth is only about 10,000 years old and that Adam and Eve had to stay clear of dinosaurs, presumed GOP presidential contender Scott Walker recently avoided challenging this batshit mythology. Or maybe he believes in it. Either way the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York reported yesterday that a May 2014 Gallup poll states that 42 per cent of those questioned said that God created humans in their present form — i.e., no evolution. 31 per cent believe that humans evolved with God’s guidance (i.e. intelligent design, which I don’t have a huge problem with) and only 19 per cent side with Bill Maher.

I would probably enjoy Jurassic World (Universal, 6.12) a bit more if it actually lived up to this parody trailer and delivered an Airplane-like goof. But minus the CG foolery. Nobody’s interested in this franchise like they were in the ’90s. You can’t go home again. I’m not saying the dinos are done, but you can’t re-ignite a spent match. I wasn’t even that thrilled by the Jurassic Park 3D re-release. But you know what still plays? The Lost World: Jurassic Park (’97), which I just watched in HD a week ago.