From Sasha Stone‘s “Frank Langella and the Climate of Fear,” posted today [5.6.22] on Awards Daily:

“If there is more to the story, let it be told. If it was more than an actress upset that Langella broke rules that the ‘intimacy coordinator’ laid out, then fine — let’s hear it. But if this was IT**? If this really was the whole thing? The actress [who went nuclear] on the set of The Fall of the House of Usher really should not be an actress. She is in the wrong business. Acting requires you to access authentic humalk behavior. If a man and a woman are doing a love scene and he has to be told where to put his hands, it is not going to look authentic. It’s going to look artificial and stupid.

“If we’re talking about Last Tango in Paris or Don’t Look Now when going for authenticity really did blur the lines, that’s one thing. Here, they were both fully clothed. If THAT is too much for this actress, if she is THAT fragile…? She should do something else, or play a different part. She should look at the script and say ‘a love scene with a grown male?…oh, I’m not strong enough to do that because I’m easily triggered by hands on my body.’ That is called protecting yourself.

“But having to pull back on authenticity because the actress can’t handle it? Netflix should film a series about THIS story. I can promise you it would be a lot more interesting than one frozen in fear with intimacy coordinators scurrying about.

“At some point, we have to stop treating grown women like children, or like they’re made of glass. Actors this nervous should not be actors. I would not even want ‘intimacy coordinators’ on set. I don’t like ‘sensitivity readers.’

“The problem is that young adults [Millennials, Zoomers] seem to have been raised to believe that the world must be safe for them. But guess what, folks? That isn’t how it works. Take a look at Ukraine. Do you think any of those young people have a world made safe for them? The world is not a safe place. It is a dangerous place. Micromanaging art to accommodate overly sensitive feelings renders art useless.

“Someday there will be great books and great movies written about this moment. No one is ever going to believe that we once lived through a time when a famous and talented actor was fired because he touched a woman on the leg during a love scene where both were fully clothed.

“The truth is, Langella wasn’t fired for that reason. It was because he didn’t apologize, or, in effect, confess as a witch and live. To have apologized, he would have sold himself out, and admitted he’d done something ‘wrong.’

“Every young person should be told that the world is never going to be made safe for them. They have to become strong to survive it. Strong inside, strong outside. The last thing we need is writers, directors, comedians, and yes, actors to play it safe. We need art to express authentic human experiences — good, bad, and ugly so that they can be wrested from our own hearts. We need this to prevent madness. Frank Langella knew that. Edgar Allen Poe certainly knew that.”

** off-color jokes, a single instance of leg touching, cavalier boomer vibes.

Humor has to be simultaneously accessible to the dumbest sector of the audience, and at the same time enjoyed by the sharpest and most ahead-of-the-curve tools in the shed. Fuxley covers are satirical but not nonsensical. So what’s the idea here? The horse has been ramming the flannel-shirt guy and is now suspicious that he’s being cheated on with the guy and the dishy blonde about to have a little hey-hey in the hayloft? If that’s not it, I’m honestly stumped as to what the title could mean.

Why did Isaiah Lee, 23, attack Dave Chappelle the other night? Rolling Stone is quoting his 31 year-old brother, Aaron Lee, who says, almost anecdotally, that Isaiah “has been in and out of Los Angeles homeless shelters for the past decade and struggles with mental illness.”

Aaron added that Isaiah “doesn’t have any type of animosity toward [Chappelle] that I know about…it could have definitely been a factor, but I really don’t know.”

I’ve just been through a grueling moving period, and it hasn’t ended yet.

Attending to endless details and packing endless boxes in WeHo and taking them to the post office, sending the VW Passat back east on a big hauling truck, and then flying with Anya and a wailing Katya on an Alaskan Airlines red-eye last Tuesday night, and without a wink of sleep.

My system was knocked flat by this. Now I’m consumed by unpacking. Fatigue, lack of mental focus, sudden nap attacks.

Try doing all this crap and see how productive you are with a daily column, ya pricks ya.

That aside, I’ve been genuinely terrified of sitting through Everything Everywhere All At Once, and I’m certainly not paying good money to see it. (No streaming options as we speak.) Plus I would rather shove razor-sharp Exacto knives into my eyes rather than see the new bullshit Dr. Strange flick.

I apologize for not seeing Vortex, the latest Gaspar Noe which screened in Cannes last July but has only just shown up theatrically. (There’s no trusting the 90% Rotten Tomatoes score, of course.) I’ll catch it this weekend in Manhattan.

The next significant screening will be Top Gun: Maverick, on the morning of Tuesday, 5.10. I leave for Cannes on Sunday, 5.15.

99.4% of the time, a woman is a human born with XX chromosomes, a uterus, female sexual organs (i.e., no schlongola), smaller feet and a mellower, more humanistic, less territorial attitude about life.

I’m sorry if that upsets a certain percentage of well-meaning persons out there.

Geraldo Rivera on “The Five”: “Shame on Neil Gorsuch, shame on Amy Comey Barrett, shame on Ryan Kavanaugh” for saying they would uphold Roe in confirmation hearings and then doing the opposite…”they lied.”

I never thought I’d be praising a Rivera opinion voiced on Fox News, but this is one such occasion.

Gerardo’s rant begins around the 3:10 mark:

I know that the general view is that Johnny Depp & attorneys have presented a better case than Amber Heard and counsel, at least as far as public opinion is concerned. But Heard’s testimony today struck me as earnest and compelling.

So who’s partly lying and who’s mostly telling the truth? Watch Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. My presumption is that neither Depp and Heard are as pure as the driven snow.

After being bruised and body–slammed during last night’s show (Tuesday, 5.3) at the Hollywood Bowl, the intrepid Dave Chappelle joked that his assailant was “a trans man.”

Or not. The perpetrator might simply be a maladjusted, garden-variety impulse performer. The world’s full of such fellows.

Nobody knows anything except that (a) Chappelle was definitely assaulted by a dude of color (THR reports that Chappelle referred to his assailant with the “n” word), and that (b) the attacker was subsequently roughed up by either Chappelle’s bodyguards or the HB security guys or both.

I’m not speculating about motive but c’mon, do the math. That or Will Smith’s Oscar slap unleashed something primal in the populace. Or perhaps last night’s altercation was caused by a combination of both.

Anya, Katya and myself are sitting in the spacious, strikingly designed Alaska Airlines lounge at San Francisco Int’l Airport. (It has a Pinkberry.) Our SFO-JFK flight leaves at 10:20 pm; arrival at 7 am.