I knew Sterling Hayden personally. Not well but somewhat. I ran into him here and there in the late ‘70s, interviewed him once or twice. I was a fan and a friend as far as it went. His manner was a bit odd and curious but only because there was so much going on inside. I actually loved that about him. At times peaceful and reflective, at other times anxious or even turbulent, I could always feel — sense — where Sterling was at. He was like a surly uncle with a kind heart and a beautiful half-smile that he only revealed in rare moments.

I watched him act in two locations during filming of Frank Pierson’s “King of the Gypsies” in ‘77. He was happiest as a roamer, a wanderer. He once lived on a river barge in Paris — a life for me if I could’ve managed it! Sterling was magnificent in “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Dr. Strangelove.” and “The Long Goodbye” and Bertolucci’s “1900.”

Quote: “Fasting is the precise opposite of debauch. I’m always torn between the two. The hard thing is to hold that middle ground, hold that middle ground.”

Hayden reminded me of my big, tall, eccentric paternal grandfather, although he wasn’t that far from my father, age-wise. A nearby resident of Wilton, CT. He used to take long morning walks. He was a great writerly fellow, like a character out of Melville. A writer, a dreamer, the soul of a poet, Wonderful Zeus-like gray beard, walking stick, Irish tweed cap. Deep purring voice, and occasionally a bellower when irate. Enjoyed an occasional hash pipe. Loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

Hayden was one of the most spiritual actors I’d ever had the pleasure to know or speak with.

There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time.

Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents. He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.

Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, Proud but insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved getting high. And (I’ve already said this) he loved his Johnnie Walker Red.

We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, but I said it before he did — “I’ve always loved the wind”. Sterling loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said “God love ya.”

I thought this morning that my Omicron condition might be improving somewhat. No such luck as it turns out. Today it just stayed in the same draggy place. I feel so vaguely weak and fatigued right now that the idea of going outside and visiting my local CVS seems like too much of a challenge. I don’t feel miserable — I feel “okay” but drained.

All day long I’ve been trying to write some thoughts on the passing of the great Joan Didion, whom i began worshipping as a young buck (particularly due to “Play It As It Lays” and “The White Album”) but whom I never quite befriended or even met, despite a good phone-interview rapport with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, whom I regarded as an excellent fellow. And despite running into her at a “21” press luncheon seven or eight years ago.

But I don’t seem to have the energy or something. I don’t like this at all.

Three writer-producers are quoted in Richard Rushfield’s latest Ankler column. They’re basically asked “how bad are things now?”, “did anyone in Hollywood accomplish anything good this year?”, “how negatively has streaming affected bare-bones creativity?” and other questions in this vein.

Writer-producers #1 and #3 sound like smart, attuned, reasonably cool people, but writer-producer #2 is an absolute woke Torquemada. He says Netflix should have thrown Dave Chappelle under the bus, for heaven’s sake. Talk about a geyser of woke vampire saliva and an absolute absence of X-factor, clear-light consciousness…seriously, this guy is scary.

Here’s an observation about award shows from writer-producer #3:

In other words, if the Academy wants to bury itself even deeper in the hole of irrelevancy and over-ness, do four things: (a) Double down on the Steven Soderbergh mindset (woke Tony Awards) behind last April’s Union Station debacle; (b) Make certain to only award films with shitty Rotten Tomatoes & IMDB audience scores and which did next to no business theatrically; (c) choose winners based on woke-driven political narratives; and (c) completely ignore the phenomenal audience reactions to Spider-Man: No Way Home

Bruce Feldman, the seasoned publicist who founded Clein + Feldman (with late partner Harry Clein) and who later battled it out as Universal’s vp publicity during the Waterworld era of the mid ‘90s…it was Bruce who suggested that Maggie and I might want to name our first-born son Jett, drawing upon the lore of James Dean’s Giant character, Jett Rink.

Here’s Bruce holding Jett sometime in the late summer or fall of ‘88. Just below is the latest shot of Jett and Sutton, who’s now four and a half weeks old.

This environmentally friendly email from director-writer Adam McKay [below] is part of an overt virtue signaling tendency that sinks “Don’t Look Up”.

Imagine “War Games” if only Matthew Broderick’s character were the only smart one and everyone else was labeled as a shallow, one-dimensional idiot. “Don’t Look Up” would have worked if the deck weren’t stacked, if Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence weren’t so earnest and portrayed as unable to get their message out in a very real world as opposed to an SNL sketch where vacuous talk show hosts are oblivious, libidinous and banter with showbiz patter.

The portrayal of the president by the world’s greatest actress [Meryl Streep] sank the movie. Peter Sellers’ president in “Dr. Strangelove” is STILL a president — analytical, seeking answers, striving for calm in the midst of chaos, and that’s part of what makes the escalating madness distressing and funny. Imagine Sellers’ president taking the McKay approach and talking about approval ratings and contending with an idiot son. “Don’t Look Up” negates verisimilitude in every scene, offering a polemic and not a satire.

Sketch characters, as a rule, have a single trait, not dimensions. If DiCaprio and Lawrence were forced to seek out a vacuous media personality to front them, yet another music star or media influencer, in order to get on a talk show, or engineer some stunts to get their message out to a fatuous populace, then you’re dealing with Sellers’ impassioned RAF officer who’s begging for spare change and sanctioning the shooting of a Coca Cola machine.

Without verisimilitude, the exaggerated personas from “Don’t Look Up” turn wearying and cutting from idiots to the sanctified liberals feels forced and preachy, which it is. Leonardo’s portrayal and rants are pitch perfect, but he’s playing the intention of the piece… not what’s on the page.

Faye Dunaway‘s “Network” executive is a very real person, as are all the characters in that 1976 film, but McKay only shows legitimacy towards the characters he personally sides with and that’s his biggest mistake… along with not having good jokes.

This is a bigger budgeted “An American Carol” and saddens me as I love McKay and satire.

The Omicron variant is still in my system, of course. But I can feel it fading — weakening — in slow, incremental ways. Tuesday and to some extent Wednesday were the bad days.

Today (12.23) will be spotty (still a tiny bit achey) but I won’t sleep as much. I should be mostly out of the woods by Saturday. I might even be 70% back to normal by Christmas Eve (Friday, 12.24).

With a regular, old-fashioned flu I always start sweating when it’s about to give up the ghost. This hasn’t happened yet with the big “O”. Perhaps it never will.

“I ain’t so tough” — James Cagney’s Tom Powers in William Wellman‘s Public Enemy (‘31).

12.23, 1:20 pm update: Still feeling vaguely shitty, but my temperature has dropped to 98.8.

Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, a brilliantly effective thriller, opened stateside exactly 50 years ago today (12.22.71). Out of respect for the work alone, there should be, I feel, some way of praising this ultra-violent Dustin Hoffman-Susan George drama without necessarily trashing Peckinpah the man.

Peckinpah certainly earned his awful reputation, yes, and today’s #MeToo culture has nothing but contempt for him, but he also made three great films — Dogs, The Wild Bunch and Ride The High Country. You have to give him that.

I always argue that John Coquillon’s lensing of Straw Dogs is fast and centered and perfectly lighted, and that the editing (by Paul Davies, Tony Lawson and Roger Spotttiswoode) is master-class level.

I posted “Post–Straw Dogs Peckinpah Mess” on 4.22.21. In recognition of the film’s half-century anniversary, here it is again:

I was going to title this article “Cancel Sam Peckinpah,” but that might sound too extreme. Then again why not? The idea (one that I’m sure wokesters would agree with) is that by posthumously cancelling the late, impassioned, gifted-in-the-’60s, booze-addled, cocaine-snorting, notoriously abusive director and keeping him jailed in perpetuity, it would send a message to current industry abusers that they’d better clean up their act or else.

You can’t just cancel the residue of this horrible man — you have to erode and possibly even destroy the lives of those who’ve sought to keep his memory alive. Have you ever gotten down on your knees and tried to remove crab grass from your front lawn? You can’t fuck around. You have to be merciless.

And let’s not stop at Peckinpah‘s memory alone — let’s also cast suspicious eyes upon his film critic admirers, his biographers, his fans, the Criterion Collection execs who approved the Bluray of Straw Dogs, director Rod Lurie for his Straw Dogs remake, anyone who owns Blurays of Ride The High Country, Major Dundee, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Wild Bunch…you get the idea. Round ’em all up.

It goes without saying that if Peckinpah was somehow time-throttled out of the ’60s and ’70s and into the present environment that he wouldn’t last five minutes. So why not pretend that he’s still here and act accordingly? Why not send a clear and thundering message that Peckinpah-like behavior will never, ever be tolerated in this industry again? What does the fact that Peckinpah died 36 and 1/2 years ago have to do with anything? In a way he’s still “here”, still among us.

Okay, I’m partly kidding. Peckinpah was definitely a drunken, sexist, coked-up beast (particularly in the ’70s and early ’80s), but he did make a few brilliant films. If you know anything about the movie-making craft you know it’s damn hard to make even a decently mediocre one. Plus the annoying fact that life has never been especially tidy in the corresponding or delineation of great art vs. gentle people and vice versa.

I was inspired to write this by an HE commenter named “Huisache“, who posted the following in the “Duelling Thompson Sagas” thread:

Huisache: “With the exception of Straw Dogs all of Sam Peckinpah’s films are messes of one magnitude or another, with Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia the biggest mess of all.

“The Getaway is enjoyable but the Slim Pickens ending is emblematic of Peckinpah’s resort to just saying ‘screw it, how do I get out of this mess? It was just nailed on. Sam had a mess and he called Pickens for help and the old feller bailed him out with a glorious good-ole-boy bit.

“I saw the film when it came out and was living in the area where it was filmed in central Texas. I thought it a very enjoyable mess and the Pickens ending a hoot. But that’s all the film is — an enjoyable hoot. Acting like it’s some kind of worthy project is a bridge too far. 

“I suppose Sam’s problem was his alcoholism and his anti-social personality disorder. Either way the guy had a hard time making the pieces fit into the holes.”

HE reply: “Thank you — 100% correct about the nagging ‘mess’ factor. Totally dead-on. That said, Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and, as you noted, Straw Dogs are not messes. And there are many reasons to respect Junior Bonner. And I’ve never even seen Noon Wine.”

By the way: At the end of The Getaway Slim Pickens’ character tells Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy that he makes around $5K annually, or roughly $31,683 in 2021 dollars. That works out to roughly $2640 a month — an impoverished lifestyle. McQueen offers Pickens $10K or over $60K in 2021 dollars for his beat-up, piece-of-shit pickup truck. Pickens figures they’ll pay more so he says “how about $20K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $120K…for a shitty pickup truck! And then Ali McGraw counters with “how about $30K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $180K…for a piece-of-shit pickup truck! That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known as a messy ending.

“Marisa Tomei’s Guide to Natural Skin Care & Everyday Makeup” surfaced around seven days ago. It contains a fair amount of sensible and creative suggestions. But the only visual take-away anyone will talk about…

Hairy pits were in vogue in the early ‘70s, at least among counter-culture women. Hairy pits and a thick bush in the genital region. Shaved pits returned, and then the”airstrip.” I’m hardly an authority, but my general impression is that “shaved clean” has been the reigning aesthetic for some time.

Wednesday, 12.22, 3:50 pm: Last night I “slept” fitfully (not really sleeping, in and out, waking up about 16 times)) for nine hours. Then I got up, thinking I might be feeling “better”, but that notion quickly faded. An hour or so later I went right back to sleep. Just woke up an hour ago (3 pm). Sniffles, sneezing, a little bleary. But I’ve been sicker.

Anthony Quinn during the second-act interrogation scene in The Guns of Navarone: “I’m sick…I’m sick!”

Yesterday evening: My Covid test came back late this afternoon, and I’m infected all right. Omicron, I’m guessing, but who knows? All I know is that after.defying Covid since March of ‘20, my German genes have let me down. Omicron is more infectious than Delta or generic Covid — I know that much.

Jordan Ruimy found out earlier today that he’s been infected also. Ditto a producer friend.

I actually feel a lot better now than I did early this afternoon. My temperature was at 100 around 2 pm — then it went down to 98.9. Then it went up to 99.1. I feel a little weak and achey right now, but it’s like I have a mild flu. I had a Christmas flu last December, and it didn’t last for more than a couple of days.

6:40 am update: Same. A bit weak and a bit achey but not awful. I can feel an alien presence in my system. Cough persists but I have cherry-flavored cough spray that helps. You can’t sleep all that deeply with this damn thing so I’ve been lying here (fitful sleeping, in and out, floating on the surface of the pond) for nine hours. And of course I’ve got Tatiana furious at me — how dare you potentially spoil my trip to Russia? My Malibu producer friend and Jordan Ruimy and me and a certain Brooklyn-based journalist getting it at the same time means a LOT of people are suddenly infected. Omicron!

I’m triple vaxxed as we speak.