Producer Mace Neufeld was a gentleman and a smoothie. He knew everyone and everything about making grade-A, top-tier action films. He was born into wealth, managed a Yale education, married in the mid ’50s, became a talent agent starting in the late ’50s, entered TV production in the ’70s and became a hot-shot movie producer soon after. He hit his big-time stride in the early ’90s — The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Beverly Hills Cop III, Clear and Present Danger (the best film that he and Phillip Noyce made together), The Saint, The General’s Daughter, The Sum of All Fears, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, The Equalizer and The Equalizer 2. I knew Mace very slightly (social occasions, junket chit-chat) and I’m sorry that he’s left for realms unknown. He was 93.

In a 1.21.22 column titled “How Oscar Voters Could Make the Best Picture Category Even Weirder This Year“, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond allows that Spider-Man: No Way Home landing a Best Picture nomination “wouldn’t seem to be a stretch.”

Did you hear that, Sony Pictures marketing? Steve effing Pond, TheWrap‘s cautious-minded, somewhat stodgy, vaguely long-of-tooth handicapper who’s been around for decades and knows this realm as well as Anne Thompson or Richard Rushfield or any other older journalist or industry pulse-taker, says Spider-Man No Way Home might, you know, “make it”. As in, you know…maybe!

But what was Pond saying with the “seem to”? Why didn’t he simply write that such an Academy decision “wouldn’t be a stretch”? Because it wouldn’t be. In the real world it would and should be, in fact, a slam-dunk.

Because given the fact that Spider-Man: No Way Home is the only film that has really and truly connected with your popcorn inhalers deep down (as in, like, emotionally) and is generating not just astronomical grosses but Titanic-style repeat viewings, and given that Oscar nominees have traditionally sought to reflect some kind of half-assed acknowledgment of actual popularity among ticket-buyers, why would Pond feel the need to insert the words “seem to“? Is he afraid of sounding too popcorn-ish in his own estimations? Is he concerned about not sounding judgmental enough?

While The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg recently suggested that S-M: NWH is in 17th place as far as the likehood of landing a Best Picture nom is concerned, Pond seems to be saying “nope, that’s too conservative…it appears as if Spider-Man: No Way Home is in 15th or 16th place.”

I can’t believe how snooty-sounding these guys are! Only Hollywood Elsewhere, it seems, is down in the mosh pit with the commoners. At least in this instance.

Pond’s hangup or hesitancy about Spider-Man: No Way Home possibly being nominated (or not) is that “there’s really no recent precedent for a movie like that getting in, Black Panther being an exception because of its landmark status.”

What Pond means, of course, is that Black Panther‘s landmark status was about race — that it wasn’t really good enough to be a Best Picture nominee on its own dramatic terms, Marvel formula being what it is, and that it was granted a Best Picture nomination on the strength of it being a Black superhero flick that catered to a certain Black mythology.

Spider-Man, Pond is saying, doesn’t have an identity-politics hand to play in this poker game, and that being a mostly all-white enterprise (except for Zendaya and Jacob Batalon) could amount to a slight problem.

Then again, he allows, “Expanding the [Best Picture] category to 10 nominees could increase variety, but only if voters take advantage of the opportunity they’ve been given.”

I sometimes watch settle-down films, or my idea of an ambien or a glass of warm milk. I always begin around 10 pm, sometimes a bit earlier. The other night I watched, for at least the third or fourth time within the last 20 years, Kevin Burns and Brent Zacky‘s Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood.

Released in 2001, the two-hour doc is included in the Cleopatra Bluray package. It’s also on YouTube.

I’ve said two or three times in this space that the Burns-Zacky doc is far more absorbing, entertaining and dramatic than Cleopatra itself (which is actually a moderately good film, certainly in terms of the highly eloquent and literate script and fortified with the most sumptuous production values ever).

And if you can’t handle a two-hour commitment, at least read David Kamp’s April 1998 Vanity Fair piece about the whole clumsy, flamboyant, drawn-out adventure (“When Liz Met Dick“).

Burns-Zacky is such a wise, tasty and fascinating consideration of…well, the basic stew of things within the Hollywood film-making community and culture of 60-plus years ago. A scenario for all kinds of folly and hubris and large-scale delusion and boredom and indulgence and tenacious uphill determination. It’s about what happens when an ambitious, extremely large-scale film isn’t wisely prepared or planned for. It’s about how a never-ending spigot of studio spending will inspire a torrent of waste, connivance and corruption among the best people.

Who were the “bad guys”? Definitely 20th Century Fox chief Spyros Skouras, who sank over $7 million into the first attempt to shoot the film in England (directed by Rouben Mamoulian, and costarring the constantly ill Elizabeth Taylor plus Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd). It was this initial wasteful investment that put the studio into a hole, and which led to the second, much more costly version that was shot in Italy (directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, costarring Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton). It wound up costing $44 million, which roughly translates into $400 million in 2022 dollars.

Taylor ended up getting paid around $7 million, which works out to $63 million in our present-day economy.

I would recreate the old, full-size neon Camel sign that sat for decades on the southeast corner of 7th Ave. and 43rd Street and hang it somewhere in Manhattan…some location that gets a fair amount of foot traffic. Not to sell cigarettes, mind, but as a tribute to classic billboard art of the early to mid 20th Century. Billowing smoke rings and all.

Pronouncing “camels” isn’t tricky by the way — the first syllable has the same vowel-ocity as “ham”, and the second syllable sounds like a mix of “mull” (rhymes with boat hull) and an abbreviated “Mel” as in Mel Gibson. But many of the guys I knew back in my New Jersey suburb used to say “gimme a pack of cahmuhls.”

The biggest chapter in Louie Anderson’s career as a big-time comedian, actor and branded personality happened over the last 22 or 23 years, but I still identity or associate with his mid-‘80s breakout period as a fresh, nervy standup. Anderson passed today in Las Vegas at age 68…cancer. Regrets and condolences.

Julian Higgins’ God’s Country, Chloe Okuno’s Watcher and Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines are the three best Sundance ‘22 films. Or so it would appear to this viewer. I’ve seen ‘em all, and was seriously gripped and jarred. I was throttled by two, and fairly horrified by the most reality-rooted (i.e., not the genre-ish Watcher or God’s Country).

I haven’t felt this energized by a crew of Sundance breakout indies in a long time. These three will definitely be on my year-end “best of ‘22” list, come hell or high water.

Set in present-day Bucharest and costarring Maika Monroe (It Follows), Karl Glusman and Burn Gorman, Watcher is unquestionably scary and unnerving but stops short of elevated horror — it’s more of a low-key, Roman Polanski-level thriller in the vein of Repulsion and The Tenant. First-rate chills and creeps. The Scream-level morons may respond in their usual way, but Watcher is as good as it gets with this kind of palette and approach.

A violent socio-political allegory, God’s Country is a slow-build American gothic melodrama — patiently paced, melancholy, sparely crafted, thoughtful, Ex-New Orleans cop Thandiwe Newton, woke and angry, vs. Montana bumblefucks. Straw Dogs minus the sexual factor and the Peckinpah slow-mo. A touch of The Limey, a hint of High Plains Drifter.

I’ve been all but threatened with bodily harm if I reveal anything semi-significant about Palm Trees and Power Lines, but it’s a riveting, step-by-step, coming-of-age dramatic creeper (based on Dack’s 2018 short) about a 17 year-old fatherless girl (Lily McInerney) who gets involved with a 34 year-old (Jonathan Tucker). Gretchen Mol is McInerney’s stressed, somewhat self-absorbed single mom. The review embargo lifts early next week.

Update: TMZ is reporting that Meat Loaf, an anti-vaxer, died from Covid. Quote: “If I die, I die.” It would appear, in short, that ML died for his idiotic beliefs. Life is choices, right?

One of my favorite jokes about the N.Y. Times, which concerned the late Meat Loaf (aka Marvin Lee Aday), was told many years ago by comedian Robert Klein. In a profile piece about the Dallas-born singer and world-famous “Bat Out of Hell” guy, the Times referred to him, said Klein, as “Mr. Loaf.”

What is this strange urgent compulsion that some people have to keep Kristen Stewart in contention for the Best Actress Oscar, at least in their own minds? Whatever the root of it, Variety Oscar handicapper Clayton Davis seems to be singing from the same hymn book as Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman (i.e., “she might pull through because now she’s an underdog…go, Kristen…we’re rooting for you!”).

Two days ago I mentioned that my very first viewing of The Godfather, Part II happened on 12.20.74 (opening day outside of NYC). It was a matinee showing inside an unheated theatre “somewhere north of downtown Stamford,” I wrote. A few hours later director Rod Lurie explained that the venue was probably the Ridgeway Theatre (52 6th Street, Stamford, CT 06905). It was part of the Ridgeway Mall. It turns out that the Greenwich-residing Lurie went to see Francis Coppola‘s Oscar-winning sequel to The Godfather later that very same day. He was 12 at the time**. The Ridgeway had opened in 1951, and closed its doors in 2001. An LA Fitness spa now occupies the same turf.

It came out wrong, but what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell meant to say was “African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Kentucky white-ass rural yokel bumblefucks.”

In case you missed it, Mitch McConnell said the quiet part out loud last night: “African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

Make sure everyone sees this.pic.twitter.com/ReOvHGJcnI

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) January 20, 2022

What kind of driver hits a well-lighted news reporter who’s standing on the street in full view of everyone? Who does that? I’ll tell you who does that. An idiot does that. A bad driver does that. A ditzy driver who’s checking her device does that.

Wow, this reporter gets hit by a car, and rebounds to finish the live shot! 😂 pic.twitter.com/dbwKt5N1xc

— Lee K. Howard (@HowardWKYT) January 20, 2022