Jeffrey Wells

The title of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (11.7.63) was allegedly finalized early on, but a few working titles were considered before that. One was One Damn Thing After Another.

Kramer’s over-emphatic comedy enjoyed two full weeks of play before JFK’s murder. It nonetheless ended up with $46 million domestic, $60 million worldwide.

This appears to be a possibly fake re-issue one-sheet. Notice the “73” in the lower right-hand corner — that’s a re-issue date.

Santa Rosita was the location of “the big W”.

Mickey Rooney got the short end of the stick here; Buddy Hackett was also made to seem minor. Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle and (fat) Sid Caesar ruled.

I remember a review that questioned the suitability of using super-sized Cinerama as it provided several unwelcome close-ups of its aging cast…pink eyes, sagging cheeks and wrinkled brows.

The scalpers, I mean.

Following Thursday evening’s 7:15 pm screening of Jessica Palud’s Being Maria at the Quad, HE was 100% prepared to get into the whole Being Maria vs. Last Tango in Paris vs. Bernardo Bertolucci accuracy dispute.

I was cranked and ready to go into my shpiel about the content of the original Last Tango shooting script and how a sizable portion of the sexual assault scene was on the page, etc.

But the ginger-haired moderator of the Being Maria discussion restricted participation to herself, costar Matt Dillon (who plays Marlon Brando) and producer Marielle Digou. No questions from the schmoes!

After it ended I caught up with the moderator (didn’t catch her name) and asked why questions weren’t permitted. “I don’t know,” she replied, adding “Are you going to blog about this?” I wasn’t sure what she meant but I said, “I already have.”

I later told her about the original shooting draft, etc. She said she’s also read the original Tango script but she was mistaken — she’s actually read a published dialogue transcript of the 1972 film.

I also buttonholed Dillon, who was loose and cool, and asked if he had read the original script and he said nope. I explained about the sexual assault scene, etc. I also told him I thought his Brando performance was first-rate, which it is.

I recorded almost everything. I’ll upload the mp3 when I get around to it. Probably late Friday.

Earlier this month Jeff Sneider passed along loose talk about Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride (Warner Bros., 9.26.25), a woke-feminist re-imagining of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (‘35). And with musical interludes!

Sneider had heard the film is “pretty weird.” He might have added “too weird for the room” — a judgment indicated by WB distribution having given The Bride a new release date — 3.6.26.

Last night “This Is Heavy, Doc” tried to whitewash the Being Maria / Maria Schneider saga by calling me a whitewasher and a “poisoned soul.”

HE response; “A poisoned soul”? Who’s “white-washing”? I’ve gotten into this because the legend and narrative of Maria Schneider, who passed in 2011, and the tempest that’s been generated by her #MeToo allies has been used, I feel, to unfairly trash Bernardo Bertolucci’s professional reputation.

Was Schneider not a budding actress who was hired to bring to life before cameras a young, free-spirited Parisian character named Jeanne? When Brando pretended to anally assault Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris, Schneider-the-actress naturally responded with rage and anguish. That’s what Bertolucci wanted. It’s what the Tango dynamic required.

Bertolucci stated in 2016 that the sexual assault scene wasn’t a surprise as it was scripted. This is what I may or may not be able to verify by thoroughly reading and correctly translating the 1972 French-language Tango shooting script that yesterday arrived in my inbox.

The only surprise on the day of shooting, Bertolucci said nine years ago, was a decision to use butter as a lubricant.

Was it professionally unkind and disrespectful of Bertolucci and Brando to not invite Schneider into their small creative circle as the scene was being planned? Yes, it was. They hurt her feelings; she felt bruised. It was nonetheless a staged, allegedly written-out scene that required persuasive acting on the part of Brando and Schneider.

Schneider bore the emotional brunt of the scene, obviously. Pretending to endure a sexual assault had to feel traumatic to some extent, even within the realm of trying to sell a made-up, make-believe situation.

Keep in mind that Brando also felt emotionally manipulated and over-exposed in terms of his emotional past, which was used by Bertolucci to give dramatic definition to Paul.

Was it fair for Brando’s soft white underbelly to have been exploited for artistic motives? I think it was. Dramatic acting is not tiddly-winks, and yet Brando resented Bertolucci for having mined his personal childhood saga to produce dramatic dividends. They didn’t speak for quite a few years after Tango was released.

So did Bertolucci do something wrong or dishonorable by extracting strong, distinctive performances from Brando and Schneider, in some ways by manipulation and pushing their personal buttons and whatnot? I don’t think so. Art isn’t easy, and the creation process sometimes involves occasional bruisings and discomfort, especially given the fact that pulling emotional truth out of a person is essential.

What matters at the end of the day is what’s finally on the canvas. What Bertolucci did here and there may have been a bit cruel and hurtful, yes**, but it was done for the right reasons and was hardly a crime against humanity.

** Bertolucci’s manipulations on this film weren’t hugely different from that moment during the Chinatown shoot when Roman Polanski abruptly yanked a couple of strands of stray hair out of Faye Dunaway’s scalp. She was infuriated.

Not every first-rate director is an obsessive, but many are under the surface. The good ones are certainly exacting when it comes to the various details that have to be finessed and arranged just so.

During his 3.14 “New Rules” rant, Real Time’s Bill Maher discussed how various historic terms for those who traffic in performative sexual satisfaction-for-hire have more or less been retired (the terms, I mean) in favor of “sex worker.”

This led to an acknowledgment of roughly 20 such female film performances (prostitute, whore, lady of the evening) that have won Oscars and another 20 that were nominated but didn’t win.

Out of this came a side mention of the Madonna-whore complex, and then a diss about Madonna (Mary Louise Ciccone) having never made “a good one”. Dead wrong — Alan Parker’s Evita (‘96) is completely respectable (80% or 85% of it is actually damn good). Madonna’s all-singing Evita Peron was / is the best she’s ever been. I’ve watched the film several times over the last 29 years. It more than holds up.

“Fate, Luck, Serendipity,” posted on 5.11.17:

The other day Patti Lupone dismissed Madonna‘s performance as Evita Peron in Alan Parker’s 1996 film adaptation (which I’ve always enjoyed and admired). “Madonna is a movie killer,” Lupone said. “She’s dead behind the eyes. She couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. She should not be on film or on stage. She’s a wonderful, you know, performer for what she does, but she is not an actress.”

(Lupone’s performance as Evita in the original 1979 Broadway production is commonly regarded as the summit.)

Except Madonna was never better than she was in Parker’s film. She wasn’t brilliant or staggering, but she gave it everything she had and this, coupled with the fact that Evita itself was a way-above-average musical, makes her performance a fully honorable, good-enough thing. Madonna was more than reasonably decent in the role, at least to the extent that she didn’t get in the way.

Sidenote: I don’t agree about Hayden Christensen‘s performance in Shattered Glass being a high-water mark. I found his manner in that film oppressively phony and cloying, making it impossible to believe that Stephen Glass‘s coworkers at the New Republic would buy into his bullshit.

From a Lee Bollinger interview, posted four days ago (3.11.25) by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education:

…to admit that it took me this long to finally sit down with Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. I’d planned to catch it theatrically in Manhattan seven or eight weeks ago…can’t explain, don’t ask. Earlier today I streamed it on Amazon for nearly six dollars. Just me, Leigh, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and the others.

I was riveted by it. Brutally honest writing, acting, sculpture. No “story” to speak of but pared to the bone. With the exception of one dialogue-free scene near the end involving Jean-Baptiste’s son (played by Tuwaine Barrett) that I didn’t believe, there’s not even a faint sprinkling of bullshit in any of it.

Jean-Baptiste is guns-blazing brilliant in a way that really slaps you down — her character’s anger…her misery, I mean…seeps right into your bloodstream. No “acting”, no charm, zero excuses. I’m sorry but I found MJB’s unprovoked acidic rantings kind of funny. (Keep in mind that the Wiki page describes Truths as a “comedy–drama”).

How in the world did Jean-Baptiste not land a Best Actress Oscar nomination? How or why was Hard Truths blown off by Cannes, Venice and Telluride?

Every single costar (Michele Austin and David Webber especially) delivers the same cut-the-crap realism as MJB. Leigh, 82, is such a master.

The all-but-forgotten Norman Foster, who has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performance as a San Fernando Valley abortionist in Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays (‘72), was indisputably the principal on-set auteur behind Walt Disney’s hugely popular Fess Parker / Davy Crockett shows of the mid ‘50s.

Literally a kind of Steven Spielberg-like maestro behind the biggest Disney franchise of all time, Foster directed all five Parker / Crockett episodes. .

Some may have also forgotten there were in fact five “Crockett” episodes that originally ran on the “Walt Disney Presents” Sunday night anthology show in 1955 and ‘56 — the original THREE in ‘55, followed by TWO episodes in ‘56 (i.e., the river boat prequels).

There were also TWO Crockett theatrical features that were composed of (a) the first three episodes and (b) the final two which costarred Jeff York’s “Mike Fink.”

Born in ‘03, Foster was covertly married to Claudette Colbert between ‘28 and ‘35. He had a decent career as a 1930s screen actor (romantic leads) before moving into directing in the late ‘30s (six “Mr. Moto” films and three “Charlie Chan” features **), ‘40s (including the Orson Welles-produced Journey Into Fear as well as the bizarrely titled Kiss The Blood Off My Hands).

A late-60ish Foster gives a supporting performance in Welles’ The Other Side of The Wind.

To repeat, Foster’s first three Parker / Crocketts were initially broadcast in 1955 on the Disney TV show (Sunday evening):  “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter”, “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress”, and “Dave Crockett at the Alamo”.  (The final episode killed Crockett off without depicting his actual demise.)

These were quickly fused together and theatrically released as Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, also in 1955.

Foster also directed the two Crockett prequel episodes, “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race” and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.” The prequel episodes were also cut together and released as a 1956 theatrical feature.  

Foster also directed Disney’s The Sign of Zorro (‘58).

** Given the revoltingly racist nature of the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto film series, will Justin Chang and Bowen Yang pool forces in order to get Foster posthumously cancelled?

The wokester campaign to urge the freeing of Lyle and Erik Menendez has pretty much collapsed. L.A. District Attorney Nathan Hochman isn’t buying into the “boo-hoo, I blew my parents away because my dad repeatedly fucked me in the ass.” To which I say, “Eat shit, shotgun murderers!”

A movie about a sexual chow–down affair during the late World War I era between a pair of British dudes, to be played by Josh “stinky feet” O’Connor and Paul “God help us all” Mescal?

O’Connor is on his way up (the talk is that he might even be cast as the new 007) but post-Gladiator II Mescal is unmistakably on his way down. Is there anyone in the civilized world who wants to see this hawk-nosed Irish actor, the quintessence of dead-fall charisma, play ‘60s-era Paul McCartney?