I went back to the Holiday Inn Express a little after 1 pm to get a laptop charger, and made the mistake of lying down. I woke up around 2:55 pm, and in so doing missed the Santa Barbara Film Festival writer’s panel, which began at 2 pm. My apologies to moderator Anne Thompson, Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter-producer Mark Boal, Looper screenwriter (and HE’s own) Rian Johnson, The Perks of Being A Wallflower‘s Stephen Chbosky, Moonrise Kingdom co-writer Roman Coppola (an admitted wearer of gold-toe socks), Flight‘s John Gatins and Life of Pi‘s David Magee.

Coppola’s publicist got in touch and asked if I’d like to chat with him. I would have, naturally, if I’d been at the Lobero theatre. We could have just shot the shit, kicked it around. But in terms of a phoner I paused. “What would we talk about?,” I asked her. “Moonrise Kingdom is a fine film but what is there to say at this point? I still haven’t seen and in fact haven’t been invited to see Coppola’s A Glimpse Inside The Mind of Charles Swan III, which opens six days from now.

“Would Coppola consent to debate the aesthetic merits or demerits of gold-toe socks? He’s said he’s a devout wearer and I’m not. We could have a little debate.”

Coppola’s publicist ignored my question.

Coppola and Wes Anderson‘s screenplay for Moonrise Kingdom has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay along with Michael Haneke‘s script for Amour, Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, John Gatin‘s Flight and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty.

This morning I attended the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s directors panel. Moderated as usual by Variety‘s Peter Bart, the participants included Les Miserables helmer Tom Hooper, Silver Linings Playbook‘s David O. Russell, Wreck-It Ralph‘s Rich Moore, Beast of the Southern Wild‘s Behn Zeitlin, Searching for Sugar Man‘s Malik Bendjelloul and Brave‘s Mark Andrews. Here’s a clip of Russell responding to a slightly needling question from Bart about bipolar behavior.

Ben Affleck, the Oscar season’s comeback kid with Argo‘s Golden Globe and BFCA wins following his Best Director Oscar nomination snub, took the stage last night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival to receive the Modern Master Award. All bets are off if Argo fails to win Best Picture tonight at the Producers Guild Awards, but right now Affleck is The Guy With The Momentum…a smart, smooth pro who knows how to play the game and who knows everyone and knows what’s good and what isn’t, and is basically on the Shining Path.

Argo director Ben Affleck as he accepted the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Modern Master Award — Friday, 1.25, 10:25 pm.

Taste is a result of a thousand distastes, and Affleck has learned the difference after going through the furnace in the early to mid aughts. He knows in his soul that he’ll never go back to the mute, flared-nostril horror of Pearl Harbor and Gigli and Bennifer. He’s learned, he’s grown, he knows what matters. And that’s what people will be voting for, I think, as well as the fact that they all really like Argo. Hell, I like Argo. I just don’t think it has enough subtext to be considered “great.” But it’s a very good film.

If Argo or Silver Linings Playbook don’t win the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards tonight, and more to the point if Lincoln wins, I’m going to jump off the Santa Barbara pier.

Bearded and affable and dressed in a dark, well-cut suit, Affleck submitted to a two-hour chat with Leonard Maltin, who never even mentioned the Best Director nomination snub or Affleck’s thoroughly honorable rep as “the new Sydney Pollack.” Not did Maltin ask about Affleck’s political passions or his recent encounter with Bill Clinton at the Golden Globe awards.

Their discussion was nonetheless pure pleasure. The 40 year-old hyphenate went into his usual appealing personality tapdance routine. Affleck is loose and likable and always with the clever, self-effacing quips, fast footwork and whipsmart assessments. He’s been professionally humping it since he was 14, or just over 25 years. Affleck knows everyone and has a ton of great stories to tell, and he’s a gifted raconteur.

Matt Damon, Affleck’s childhood pal, a fellow Bostonian and creative partner on Good Will Hunting, showed up and at the end and handed Affleck the festival’s Modern Master trophy.

I went over to the small after-party, and Affleck came in soon after and started talking with Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and…I wanted to say hi and offer good wishes (50% of me wants Argo to win Best Picture because it’ll be a good thing for Affleck, whom I personally like and admire, and 50% of me wants Argo to win because this would mean the stopping of Lincoln). But then the travelling fatigue wrapped around my soul like a banshee and took me down.

I slipped out and walked back to the Holiday Inn Express on Haley Street. Honestly? This is a cooler, spiffier place than the Hotel Santa Barbara, where the festival has been hosting me for the last four or five years. The hi-def flatscreens are much better (i.e., made within the last three or four years) than the semi-rickety ones at the Hotel SB.

Question for Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, who took this video last night from his orchestra seat inside Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre: what about your camera’s zoom function, ace? Who am I to talk, right? I was sitting just a few seats away with my Canon 300 Elph and was too lazy to shoot anything myself.

Everything took longer than expected yesterday. My SLC-to-LAX Southwest flight left a half-hour late, and then we ignored the usual eastern landing approach and flew out over the Pacific three or four miles before banking hard right and finally landing from the west. (This almost never happens.) And then 25 or 30 people were waiting for a cab. And traffic was snarly. And then I realized I had the wrong set of keys and couldn’t get into my pad. At least no one Road Warrior-ed me on my way up to Santa Barbara.

I finally saw Randy Moore‘s Escape From Tomorrow late yesterday afternoon. Set entirely in Disneyland and shot in black-and-white, it’s basically a riff on The Shining with a vein of social criticism about pudgy, desperate, flabby-brained Americans indulging themselves with sugar, booze and fantasy while corporations control and exploit them like cattle. Is this not the central middle-class affliction of the 21st Century?

The Shining parallels: (1) Weak, economically strapped dad has (or has had) an alcohol problem; (2) Dad and family submit to extended stay within a large, imposing, surreal realm (hotel/theme park) with gradually revealed ghosts and sexually tempting witches preying on dad, exploiting his barely suppressed lusts; (3) for spooky reasons two young girls openly invite a major character to come and play; (4) Dad succumbs to drink, is wounded and bloodied, goes loony and staggers around until the hotel/theme park finally eats him up and takes his soul.

Escape is definitely an interesting sit. It’s brave, absorbing, original as far as it goes, subversive, occasionally funny, and it has a thematic point. I was never bored and was/am glad I saw it. I hope that it finds some way to be seen by Joe Popcorn. I’m presuming that Disney attorneys will do what they can to block it.

Few things make me more irate than driving-and-talking scenes in which the driver primarily looks at the person riding shotgun (usually a woman) and only glances at the road sporadically. Five or six seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching. That’s exactly the opposite of what real driving is like, even in the case of reckless drunks. I never, ever look at a passenger except when we’re at a stop light or stalled in traffic.

Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller in James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now

And yet directors are constantly telling actors during driving scenes that they can eyeball the passenger all they want. I flinch and seethe when this happens. I twitch. “Asshole!Watch the road!”

Most actors don’t care about driving realism. The car they’re acting in is usually being towed by the camera-and-lighting car so what do they care? They just want as much eye-contact as possible with the person riding shotgun so they can show the audience how personable and sensitive they are. And 90% of the time the director indulges them when he/she should be saying, “Do you drive like this in real life? Glancing at the road in one- and two-second bursts while staring soulfully at your passenger?”

I’m mentioning this tendency because director James Ponsoldt and actor Miles Teller have taken the ignore-the-road aesthetic to a whole new level in a scene in The Spectacular Now, a decent Sundance flick about a teenage drunk that I saw two or three days ago.

Teller, a 25 year-old playing an 18 year-old, is driving down a suburban road when a car with a couple of girls pulls up on his left side and starts cruising at the same speed. Both parties roll down their windows and start chatting, and Ponsoldt and Teller blow Hollywood’s “four or five seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching” rule out of the water. Teller — this guy is bold as brass — just fucking stares at the women in the car and ignores the road altogether…nine, ten, twelve seconds! Go for it, Miles!

Two little kids could have run out in front of Teller’s car and he would have flattened them like a flesh pancake. An elderly man who’s fallen out of his wheelchair could be crawling across the road and Teller would have come along and turned him into a pile of blood, broken bones, brain matter and hamburger.

I mentioned this to Ponsoldt yesterday when I ran into him at the Prospector, and he laughed in his usual charming way and said I need to ask Teller about this. Ask Teller?

It’s time for directors like Ponsoldt to man up and admit that they’re consciously trying to defy the reality of the road when they shoot driving-and-talking scenes, and once they’ve done that they need to man up and push it farther. One of these days a truly bold and visionary Kubrick-like director is going to tell his behind-the-wheel actor to ignore the road altogether when he/she is driving. Don’t glance at the road every five or six seconds or, in the case of guys like Teller, every ten or twelve seconds. What road? Make your own world, man!

JJ Abrams will direct the seventh Star Wars movie, it was reported today. There will be pressure, obviously, for Abrams to ensure that his film blends with the previous six. Is there any chance he’ll tell those episodes to go eff themselves and make his very own Star Wars flick? I suspect Abrams wants to. It shouldn’t matter what George Lucas wants because he’s taken the cash and is out of it, but if Lucas holds any sway at all (and I’m sure he does in a Obi-Wan Godfatherly way) the 7th will walk and talk and race around like all the others. Resist this impulse, Mr. Abrams. Please.

About an hour ago I briefly sat down with Upstream Color director-writer-producer-star Shane Carruth inside the Prospector Cinema’s “green room.” He even allowed me to take a couple of snaps. He wrote yesterday to suggest a meeting. Carruth says he’s “been a lurker for a while” on Hollywood Elsewhere, which is flattering.

Upstream Color director-writer-producer-star Shane Carruth — Thursday, 1.24, 2:35 pm in room adjacent to Park City’s Prospector Cinema.

Carruth may or may not evolve into the new Terrence Malick in terms of journalist-dodging reclusiveness, but there’s definitely a certain tension between his having acted in Upstream Color and his previous film, Primer, and the vague dread he feels about being invaded or probed. He’d like to just make films and drop them into the marketplace, he said, without any of the hoo-hah. That’s unrealistic, but Carruth seems like a nice enough guy. Friendly, patient, respectful, impish smile.

And I admire his decision to self-distribute Color — theatrically in April, VOD/digital in May. I offered to run ads gratis if I have any space to spare.
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He also told me he had a chance to meet Malick in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, during shooting of what was then being called The Burial but eventually become To The Wonder. Malick’s soft manner belies, etc

Carruth’s shoes.

Jessica Winter‘s profile of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and the torture-related controversy that KB and producer-screenwriter Mark Boal‘s film has sparked is essential reading. Will it help to wake Academy members up and remind them — shake them into recognizing — that ZD30 is by far the year’s finest? Time offers an analysis of the Oscar situation.