Yesterday was “a day that will live in infamy,” according to sagwatch.net, since it marked a huge split in the contract bargaining posturings of SAG and AFTRA over attempts to decertify memberships among TV show performers. An instant doze-off for most HE readers, I realize, but the allusion to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (12.7.41) caught my attention. Especialy since the statement uses the word “war.”
“The possibility of SAG and AFTRA engaging in joint bargaining with the industry collapsed today,” the statement reads, “after SAG’s Doug Allen refused to renounce raiding activity by which he and other representatives of Membership First are seeking to promote decertifications among AFTRA shows, including the long running soap The Bold and the Beautiful.
“Allen’s refusal to renounce raiding led to the cancellation of today’s scheduled joint SAG-AFTRA board meeting, which had been set to approve the package of bargaining proposals for the Primetime/Theatrical agreement.
“While the effort at fomenting decertification at the CBS soap opera is seen as doomed before it gets started, the refusal to agree to a no-raiding pact is seen as an admission that Allen plans other such attempts, in a move his critics say is reminiscent of his behavior helping to divide the NFL Players Association more than 30 years ago, when he crossed his own union’s picket lines during the 1974 NFL strike. That action created a divide between the well organized established players and Allen’s group of free agents and rookies who were trying to get a toe hold in the league.
“The effects of this war will likely be even far reaching and severe. Membership First will now have to fight not just externally with AFTRA, and, atop that, the festering internal battles with high profile members and the New York/RBD members are expected to explode.”

The Kids Choice Awards aired last night in Nickleodeon. I agreed with Ratatouille being named the Favorite Animated Movie. Otherwise I was fantasizing about being Jay Silverheels (a.k.a. Tonto) and rounding up all my renegade Indian pallies and getting on our horses and riding down to the place where the show was taped and kicking up dust and causing trouble. Which is merely a variation on my standard reaction to treacly pop plasticity, which is that the Taliban has a point.

Borys Kit-Carl DiOrio wrote a story for last Thursday’s Hollywood Reporter about Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio being signed to write a Lone Ranger movie for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The news about the project itself, however, was revealed almost a year ago by Collider‘s Steve Weintraub.

I wrote in response that the idea is “an obvious non-starter for the simple fact that westerns haven’t mattered for decades.” Open Range showed that one could make a good solid western that stood on its own two feet, but the genre lost its cultural vitality back in the ’60s. Boomers in their late 50s and 60s have a sentimental thing for the classic TV series with Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels (“What you mean, we?”), but GenXers and GenYers, I would think, are completely uninvested. It just boils down to being a title that has a certain marketability because it’s vaguely “familiar” in the dead-head sense of that term.
The other thing I wrote is that If Bruckheimer is really and truly married to the idea of reviving a 1950s-era western, he should remake Shane.

In a short q & a that ran two days ago, Wall Street Journal softballer John Jurgensen put the following pregnant question to My Blueberry Nights star Nora Jones: “Have you read any of your reviews?” To which Jones replied, “No. Never have, never will. This acting thing has been fun and if I never do it again, I had a great experience. If I do do it again, I hope I get better at it. But I don’t have ambitions to conquer Hollywood or anything.”

I saw Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights (Weinstein Co., 4.4) eleven and a half months ago at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s finally opening this Friday at limited venues. The best thing about it, honestly, is the title — the allusions to eroticism and delectability within. I was going to say I can imagine hip urban thirtysomething couples being okay with some of it, but I honestly can’t do that. Here’s are portions of what I wrote from the Orange Cafe so many months ago:

(a) “I could sense trouble fairly early on in Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights, a horribly written, woefully banal self- discovery mood piece (the word ‘drama’ really can’t be applied) about a young girl (Nora Jones) who leaves her home town of Manhattan and starts job-hopping across the country — waitress gigs in Memphis and I-couldn’t-tell- what-town in Nevada, with an apparently uneventful stopover in Los Angeles — in order to get over a bad case of breakup grief.”
(b) “That early ‘uh-oh’ comes when Jones, playing a lady named Elizabeth with a certain doleful sincerity, is on the phone with her soon-to-be-ex. She asks him, ‘Are you seeing somebody else?’ and then two seconds later she inquires, ‘Who is she?’ In other words, the boyfriend (whose voice we don’t hear) has quickly admitted to infidelity. Of course, guys never admit there’s another woman without being hammered and prosecuted by their betrayed significant other for hours, if not days or weeks, on end. The male genetic code prohibits it. We all know this. So right away it’s obvious that the human behavior and particularly the human dialogue will not have the cast of reality.”
(c) “The Blueberry strategy, in any event, is roughly this: the folks whom Elizabeth gets to know and feel for during her episodic journey — a Manhattan pasty-shop owner from Manchester (Jude Law), an alcoholic, deeply depressed beat cop (David Strathairn), the cop’s hysterically alienated wife (Rachel Weisz), a hard- luck Nevada gambler (Natalie Portman) — are all nursing broken hearts, and their combined pathos somehow will prod Elizabeth into relinquishing the mope-a-dope and deciding to look forward and live in the now.”
(d) “The ‘aha!’ she finally absorbs seems to have something to do with realizing how much worse off everyone else is than she, along with the futility of letting hurt be the dominant chord. The problem is that there’s no giving a damn about any of it, particularly since Elizabeth’s new attitude leads her back to a possible relationship with the flirtatious Law, with whom she spends the first third of the film with, trading sad memories and little bon mots of bittersweet regret about bruised feelings and whatnot.
(e) “There’s just no investing in Law these days — every character he plays feels like a sly, gently calculating hound — and it’s impossible not to feel cynical about any female character in any movie hooking up with this smoothie because you know where it’ll all eventually end up.”

Can you imagine being dead for 48 years, just floating around in some airy-fairy, non-material way, when a bulletin from earth suddenly punctuates your cosmic head-space? The news being that a guy named David Bret has nailed you in a book for having had halitosis, hepatitis, rotting teeth and “shovel-like” hands? I don’t know that these and similar revelations concerning Clark Gable‘s life are things that I need to know. I can deal with his halitosis (read about it years ago) but that’s as far as I’d like to go, thanks.

Nourishing, semi-leisurely Sunday activity is a good thing. Tomorrow, if you live in Los Angeles, satisfaction on that level could and perhaps should include (a) Word Theatre’s 11 a.m. event at the Venice Canal Club (brunch plus readings about sex and death) with Tess Harper, Rae Dawn Chong, Gary Dourdan, Sarah Maclay, etc., and (b) a 5:30 pm screening of Sydney Pollack‘s The Yakuza (1974, w/ Robert Mitchum, Ken Takakura, Brian Keith, Richard Jordan) at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre.

Honoring the recently-departed Richard Widmark‘s performances, N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr shows a little more passion and vigor that he usually does within the boundaries of his tweedly-deedly prose style. Here‘s a graph about Widmark’s work in Jules Dassin‘s Night in the City (1950):

“It’s hard to imagine another tough-guy actor of the period allowing himself to come as close to tearful impotence as Widmark does, at the moment his character realizes that there is no escape from the vengeful associates he has betrayed. Running toward the camera, as well as toward his death, Mr. Widmark allows his face to go slack and his limbs to loosen; he seems to become a panicked child before our eyes, shrinking into infantile helplessness.
“A jump cut might take us to the opening scene of Rebel Without a Cause, when James Dean‘s drunken teenager collapses on the sidewalk, playing with a toy monkey.”

I’ll post a thought or two about Stanley Weiser‘s W, formerly known as Bush, on Monday. I couldn’t get my hands on a recently revised draft, but if the film that Oliver Stone will begin shooting next month is at all similar to what’s on the page, W won’t be any kind of breathtaking, guns-blazing, political-zing movie. It’s primarily a modest, brick-by-brick character study about who George W. Bush really is deep down. We tend to bring a certain level of expectation to Stone’s films. We’ve been conditioned a certain audacious, holy-shit element, but sometimes a movie simply is what it is. W, which might be shot, cut and released in near-record time (i.e., before the end of the year), may be seen as more performance-driven than anything else.

John Edwards is the essence of petty equivocation. He’s a phony. Obama didn’t provide the right kind of oral pleasuring so he didn’t endorse him, this 3.28 John Heilemann New York article reports. He’s a slinky performance artist who likes power and money, y’all. The mere sound of that awful buttery drawl gives me the willies. He’s selling vacuum cleaners.

“I realize this will sound geeky, but for me a good character match for Hillary Clinton is the old Star Trek character of Dr. Janice Lester, played in the original late ’60s series by Sandra Smith. All it takes is her breakdown scene at the finale when she sobs, ‘I’ll never be the Captain!’ If you haven’t seen it or don’t recall, I’m sure plot capsules abound on the net.” — HE reader ChuckW, writing this morning.

A reliable-seeming online synopsis of episode #79 (original airdate: 6.3.69) states that Dr. Lester, “once involved with Captain Kirk, harbors a deep hatred of the captain, because she, herself, has never been able to captain a starship.”
The best Hillary/Obama analogy so far has come from HE reader Nate West, to wit: “Hillary is Orson Welles‘ Hank Quinlan character in Touch of Evil. Obama is [Charlton Heston‘s] Vargas.”

I’ve been told that producer Jean Doumanian is partnering with the Weinstein Co. to produce a film version of Tracy Letts‘ masterful August: Osage County, which N.Y. Times critic Charles Isherwood called “the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years” in his 12.5.07 review.

Deanna Dunagan (r.) as Violet Weston, the family matriarch; Amy Morton (l.) as her daughter, and Rondi Reed (center) as Violet’s sister.

As always, a Broadway hit (Osage County is certain to triumph at the ’08 Tony Awards in June) is one equation and a satisfying hit movie is another. The stage-to-cinema process is always about rethinking, reshuffling, compressing, diluting and, in one way or another, downgrading to some extent. A broader audience = the need to make a play more accessible to Average Joes = problems from the viewpoint of Broadway purists.
The big questions are (a) will the movie version hold to the play’s three-hour length (there will certainly be pressure to trim it down at least somewhat, perhaps as much as a third), (b) will they try to movie-ize it (visually “open it up, etc.) or stick to the pure theatrical scheme of everything happening in the Weston family’s two-story home, (c) who will Doumanian-Weinstein get to direct…Mike Nichols?, and (d) which middle-aged screen actress will play the key role of Violet Weston (i.e., “an evil mom to end them all”), presuming that Deanna Dunagan, whose on-stage performance is said to be legendary, will be shunted aside in favor of a Meryl Streep-level actress with a bit more in the way of marquee power.