Jeffrey Wells

There’s a 4.29 Wrap story about how former hotshot Hollywood journalist Anita Busch is still pushing her civil lawsuit against Michael Ovitz and AT&T for damages stemming from the Anthony Pellicano wire-tapping scandal, which will always be linked, of course, to that June 10, 2002 episode with the dead fish on Busch’s windshield and the note that said “stop!,” etc. Almost nine years ago and counting.

I understand why it’s taken so long, and I definitely understand and respect tenacity and staying the course and snagging the dough if you can get it, but man…nine years of this? And how many yet to go? You gotta get what you can get — I get that — but you’ve also gotta let things go when you reach a certain degree of “fucking Christ enough already.”

Pellicano wire-tapped my ass in ’93 (or was it early ’94?) and bragged about it to me in a phone conversation, and instead of getting even by hurting him in some way I asked him for a favor seven or eight years later and he obliged because he knew he owed me one. And it was a pretty good favor. So it all worked out fine. I let it go and it came back to me like the tide.

I never liked Anita Busch, and I don’t like not liking people. Seven years ago I wrote that Busch was “like Old Faithful” in that “every time I saw her at a screening or a party, she always gave me a vaguely dirty look…Every. Damn. Time.” So I wish her well as long as I don’t have to see her again.

One of the reasons that hustlers like Elie Samaha and Don Kushner believe they can get away with what they’re apparently planning to do with the legendary cathedral that is Grauman’s Chinese is that they know that most Movie Catholics are caught up in their own stuff and will pay closer attention to Transformers 3 trailers than to Samaha and Kushner’s maneuverings.

HE is supposedly read and followed by a vocal and highly aware readership, and so far there are four lousy comments on the story about the Chinese-Studio 54 conversion (which was posted at 9 this morning)? if you’re not going to say something about a true temple of cinema being turned into a part-time temple of Charlie Sheen-style pleasuring, who and what are you?

What a drag that it all ended with Eyes Wide Shut — obviously engrossing and very carefully assembled but altogether the most lifeless and embalmed Stanley Kubrick film ever made. (Yet another hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)

Why go with this kind of photograph and particularly one with this angle if you’re going to apply subtle Photoshopping to a part of the anatomy that would be otherwise visible? I don’t really care and it’s obviously not a huge deal, but the absence makes it noteworthy. (Hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)

To get into this you need to think about the cadence and phraseology of Eric Burdon‘s “San Franciscan Nights.”

The first 25 minutes of Baz Luhrman‘s Moulin Rouge were so forced and frenetic that my head nearly exploded. (Just like that bald-headed guy with the glasses in David Cronenberg‘s Scanners.) On Monday, 5.2 at 3 pm, MTV.com is staging a livestream celebration of the film’s 10th anniversary with Josh Horowitz interviewing Baz, Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman and John Leguizamo.

The TCM Classic Film Festival began last night with a screening of An American in Paris, but they wouldn’t let me attend because…I don’t know why and don’t really care. There was a Vanity Fair-sponsored after-party following the Paris screening and VF reps are always giving off chilly-vibe, go-away, more-exclusive-than-thou attitudes. Or maybe Hollywood Elsewhere just isn’t cool enough in a general sense.

I’ve already missed the 9 am screening of Becket due to writing about Elie Samaha and Don Kushner, but here are some of the classic films I’d like to see projected on big (or at least moderately large) screens between now and Sunday night, not because I haven’t seen them all ad infinitum but because it’ll be cool to see them in presumably tip-top condition with an enthusiastic crowd:

All About Eve (1950), Bigger Than Life (1956), British Agent (1933), Carousel (1956), Citizen Kane (1941), The Devil is a Woman (1935), Girl Crazy (1943), The Godfather (1972), La Dolce Vita (1960), Manhattan (1979), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), The Mummy (1932), Niagara (1953), A Night at the Opera (1935), One, Two, Three (1961), Pennies from Heaven (1981), A Place in the Sun (1935), Reds (1981), Spartacus (1960), Taxi Driver (1976), The Tingler (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), West Side Story (1961), Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

Manhattan-based film curator Miriam Bale has called to complain about my having described a recent press release statement that the delayed Ishtar Bluray is “impending” as “apparent conjecture” on her part. I was told by 92Y’s Sarah Morton that the term “impending release” came from Bale, but Bale says it was Elaine May‘s “people” who submitted that term.

The press release about May’s 5.17 appearance at the 92nd Street Y in concert with the Ishtar Bluray release will be amended next week, she says.

I reported the other day that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment “will eventually, no doubt, release their Ishtar Bluray (i.e., the one that almost came out last January but then was pulled at the last minute) but to go by SPHE publicist Fritz Friedman nobody at that company has any specific idea when this long-delayed disc will finally appear. Sometime this summer, next fall, next year…we’ll get back to you.”

Here’s a screen capture of the offending sentence fragment in the original 4.25 press release:

LA movie fanatics need to savor the Old Hollywood aura of Grauman’s Chinese theatre as much as they can between now and May 20th because after that date the notoriously oily Elie Samaha and his partner Don Kushner, the film and video-game producer (Tron: Legacy), will be transforming the legendary Chinese into a kind of mixed-venue Studio 54.

This is what I’ve been told by a source I spoke to this morning who’s closely affiliated with the Chinese and has been observing walk-throughs by Samaha and Kushner and their associates and overhearing conversations, etc.

The currently-unfolding TCM Classic Film Festival may turn out to be the last serious film-buff event ever held at the Chinese, he suspects, in view of what Samaha and Kushner have in mind.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Daniel Miller reported last night that Samaha and Kushner are buying the theater and taking over the long-term lease of the adjacent Mann Chinese 6 megaplex from a joint venture of Warner Bros. and Viacom Inc. “for an undisclosed sum.”

Miller quoted real-estate broker John Tronson as saying that the “new owners are exploring ways to maximize ‘the real estate opportunity…they could do a lot of other things there that would drive people who come and visit and see it.”

The HE source is a regular reader and serious Movie Catholic who regards the coming Samaha-Kushner transformation of the Chinese as a vulgarization of a beloved venue that, despite its diminished business and faded glory, is still more or less considered to be the Notre Dame of LA movie theatres. The Chinese is a landmark that is deeply woven into Hollywood’s history and lore, and is a kind of spiritual institution that should be protected by the city and/or the state or some kind of high-minded, non-slimy consortium and managed by priests and choirboys, or certainly not by the likes of Samaha and Kushner, who are basically satanic figures in this context.

(l.) Elie Samaha; (r.) Don Kushner.

The Chinese has been a sagging or failing enterprise for a few years now, largely due to the competition from the Arclight, and the law of the jungle says that all weak animals will be eaten sooner or later by predators. But there’s something profoundly icky about Samaha and Kushner transforming the Chinese into a mixed-venue attraction — occasional screenings, special-event rentals, attracting sports fans, glitzy night-life empties and nocturnal pussy-hounds (i.e., the Charlie Sheen and Kim Kardashian crowd).

The HE source believes, but couldn’t provide proof, that Samaha was instrumental in arranging for basketball star Kobe Bryant to be honored with a hand-and-footprint ceremony at the Chinese.

The Chinese staff is off salary as of 5.20, the source informs, and that’s when the heartache begins.

Samaha, the former dry-cleaning entrepeneur who became a kind of funny-money movie producer starting in the late ’90s, has been running (via a sub-lease deal) the Vogue nightclub at Hollywood and Cahuenga as well as the Playhouse, a club that used to be the Fox Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, co-operated by Samaha (who also reportedly ran Roxbury, Sunset Room and White Lotus) and Rob Vinokur.

“Samaha has been doing walk-throughs at the Chinese for some time,” the source says, “and it is clear from conversations with his people that he wants to turn the Chinese into a mixed venue that can show films, hold concerts, be rented out with removable seats to accomodate dance floor or standing-room-only crowds, etc, along with adding a bar and kitchen.

“Samaha can sugarcoat this ‘mixed venue’ concept all he wants, but clearly his intentions are not for the preservation of a grand movie palace, but rather for a grand club,” the source contends.

Samaha “also intends to convert the Chinese 6 plex upstairs into a tri-level night club that would serve as after-party location for premieres and events that might be held at the Graumans, so the studios would be more or less forced to book a package with him if they want a film to premiere at Grauman’s Chinese.”

An HE reader attended a research screening last night at Manhattan’s AMC Lincoln Square for Simon Curtis‘s My Week With Marilyn. The British-made drama, highlighted by a knockout performance by Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier, is based on two books by the late Colin Clark about Clark’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956.

Kenneth Branagh in some period film and not as Laurence Oliver in Simon Curtis’s My Week With Marilyn…although he’ll probably look vaguely similar to this in Curtis’s film, minus the moustache.

It sounds at first glance like an opportunity for a tour de force performance by Williams, but in the view of our correspondent it’s Branagh who stops the show .

“Branagh is the surprise of the film. He’s wonderful as Laurence Olivier — just brilliant. Like Williams, he doesn’t look much like his real-life character but unlike her, he’s aided by superior writing. He also perfectly mimics Olivier’s facial mannerisms and voice and hamminess to the extent that you forget you’re looking at Branagh. He steals every scene he’s in and is the reason to see this movie.”

Otherwise, she says that My Week With Marilyn “reminded me a little of Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles — same type of yesteryear feeling except that film was semi-fictionalized while My Week with Marilyn is more or less true. The problem, for me, is that last night’s film seemed to be missing the punchline. For me there was no ‘dramatic’ thread.

“Colin (Eddie Redmayne) gets his first job working on a movie, courtesy of family friend Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), otherwise known as Lady Olivier, costarring her husband and Marilyn Monroe. Aside from briefly romancing the wardrobe girl, Colin is soon befriended by Monroe. There are a few scenes of him showing Monroe various tourist attractions and then watching her skinny dip in some river somewhere but other than that, the story falls flat.

Laurence Oliver, Marilyn Monroe during filming of The Prince and the Showgirl.

“Colin doesn’t sleep with her. He really doesn’t form any type of real friendship with her other than a superficial camaraderie that takes place over the course of a few days. This is the plot of a movie?

“Williams is an excellent actress but she’s miscast as Marilyn. Although lovely and luminous, she doesn’t have the right bombshell charisma, the traffic-stopping star wattage that made Monroe a celluloid icon. Not only that, the writing for Marilyn is trite and weak — she never comes across as anything but a cipher.”

My Week With Marilyn shot from 10.4.10 to late November at Pinewood Studios and in various London locales. It will probably be released later this year.

I thought and thought and thought about it, and decided it was better, no disrespect, to get the sleep rather than wake up at 2:30 or 3 am Pacific to catch Prince William and Kate Middleton’s marriage ceremony. Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple.

On their own terms and in the minds and hearts of the principals, all weddings are joyous and hopeful events that everyone feels very good about, myself included. I was married in Paris at a small Catholic church called St. Julien le Pauvre in October 1987, and it was quite perfect all around. But this one, from a public standpoint, is of course a matter of some tabloid conjecture and fantasy.

From my 4.19 assessment: “The wedding will be a celebration of an exceptionally lame fantasy that tens of millions of under-educated, Sex and the City-worshipping, Star magazine-reading women the world over hold extremely dear, which is that they might one day luck into marrying an exceptionally rich guy from a rich and powerful family and live a life of fabulous, mostly thoughtless leisure for the rest of their lives. And have kids who will enjoy the same luxuries and get to to do the same thing as adults-with-their-own-kids when they come of age.”

“At one point during the preordained throwdown between the two colossi who stride through Fast Five, Dwayne Johnson rips off his bulletproof vest with the practiced economy of a 17th-century courtesan flinging off her corset,” writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. “His character, a professional tough guy bluntly named Hobbs, has just found his fugitive bad twin, Dom, the gnomic guru of the Fast and Furious franchise, played by Vin Diesel.

“They are the fast and, yes, the furious. Yet as these giants grasp each other’s bulging muscles, their bald heads rearing in the frame with tumescent vigor, it’s easy to imagine that they’d like some alone time. They don’t get it, largely because the earth might spin off its axis if they did, though also because the director Justin Lin, having come of cinematic age in the maximalist era of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, cleaves to the principle of more.

“About the only silence you hear in this movie, amid the crunch of metal and the hard rain of shattering glass, is the one between Dom’s ears.”