Hugs and condolences for the family, friends, colleagues and fans of director Richard Donner, who was born on 4.24.30 and passed earlier today at age 91. Donner was no visionary auteur but an amiable, well-liked, good-guy journeyman — he behaved like a human being, always got the job done, kept his cool, smoked cigarettes, etc.

Hollywood Elsewhere is an unqualified fan of two things Donner directed — “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the 1963 Twilight Zone episode in which an airborne William Shatner grappled with the sight of a gremlin on the wing, and the original Lethal Weapon (’87), an anarchic, crazy-violent, occasionally funny cop thriller that helped launch a new idea in action films– i.e., the cop who was crazier than the criminals. (Angel Heart, which opened concurrent with Lethal Weapon, advanced the same notion.)

Be honest — the first Lethal Weapon was the only decent one, and it represented the only time in Donner’s career when he was truly the king of the hill and totally on top of the zeitgiest curve.

I was mezzo mezzo on Superman — didn’t care for the scenes with fat, white-haired Marlon Brando, hated the Jeff East casting as young Chris Reeve, loathed the North Pole ice palace, etc. But I loved Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty‘s interplay (“Otisburg?”).

I’m sorry but I had problems with every other Donner-directed film — The Omen (silly, stupid, annoying), Superman II, The Toy, The Goonies, Ladyhawke, Scrooged, Lethal Weapon 2, Radio Flyer, Lethal Weapon 3, Maverick (a friend called it “a $75 million dollar Elvis Presley film“), Assassins, Conspiracy Theory, Lethal Weapon 4, Tales from the Crypt: Ritual, Timeline, 16 Blocks.

Nobody cares about In The Heights any more, but if they did there’d be one more thing for wokesters to gripe about.

The last grenade thrown at Jon Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s musical (a mostly faithful adaptation of LMM’s 2005 stage musical) was the colorism thing — the film had ignored the presence of Afro-Latinos in Washington Heights and therefore was, after a fashion, guilty of a form of discrimination — i.e., colorism.

I never saw the stage play but a friend of Jordan Ruimy‘s did, and he reports that the film version “cut the plot line about Kevin Rosario, the Puerto Rican dad” — Jimmy Smits in the film — “not wanting his daughter Nina to date Benny” over an ethnic disparity issue. (In the film Nina and Benny are played by Leslie Grace and Corey Hawkins.)

A blunt way of explaining Kevin’s “ethnic disparity” problem is that he doesn’t want his daughter dating a guy who isn’t from their tribe and who doesn’t speak Spanish. A blunter way of putting it is that Kevin may have a problem with his daughter dating a black dude,.

Here’s a portion of the Act 2 play synopsis from Wikipedia’s In The Heights page:

“Nina and Benny spend the night together in Benny’s apartment as Kevin frantically searches for her all night; Benny worries about what Kevin will say about their relationship but is happy to finally be with her (‘Sunrise’). Nina eventually returns home to find her parents worried sick about her, and Kevin grows furious when he learns she was with Benny, disapproving of their relationship due to Benny not being Latino.”

A 6.10.21 Elle piece by Madison Feller discussed several differences between the stage and film versions. Feller didn’t mention Kevin’s problem with Benny in the stage version.

Quentin Tarantino‘s negative opinions about mainstream exhibition, posted earlier today by the Armchair Expert podcast, are, I feel, slightly misplaced.

“Some of these exhibitors who are going, they fucking deserve to go,” Tarantino said. “They have taken all the specialness out of movies anyway. Some of these chains [are] showing commercials all through it, [plus] they don’t turn the lights down [and] everything is stadium seating…plastic shit.”

Whoa, wait…what’s wrong with stadium seating? I hated those old-fashioned, slight-grade theatres in which you’d routinely have to cope with some guy’s big fat head blocking your view.

Tarantino presumably believes, as do I, that movie theatres, at their highest iteration, are churches and cathedrals — places of spiritual communion and emotional uplift. But of course, mainstream movies are no longer in the “touch your soul and persuade viewers to contemplate the deeper, finer or sometimes crazier things in life” business. That idea began to wither and die 10 or 15 years ago. (The death process really began in the ’90s and the rise of guys like Jan De Bont, but we’ll let that go for now.)

Over the last 10 or 15 years theatres have been catering more and more to your low-rent, T-shirt and flip-flop animals who’re mostly into gamer-type action fare — not to your cultivated, somewhat educated cineastes (an all but entombed culture) but to the lowest-common-denominator LexG crowd. Bottom-of-the-barrel types who love F9…bottom feeders, toads, pigs at the trough.

Paul Schrader in November 2018: “There are people who talk about the American cinema of the ‘70s as some halcyon period. It was to a degree but not because there were any more talented filmmakers. There’s probably, in fact, more talented filmmakers today than there was in the ‘70s. What there was in the ‘70s was better audiences.”

Exhibitors have simply tried to adapt to the downscale ball–scratch mongrelization of movie culture.

Tarantino: “They have been writing their own epitaph for a long time, but they assumed the business would take you along. It’s been crazy throughout my career to see how the film experience is lessened for the viewer like every five years. However, I do think boutique cinemas actually will thrive in this time. And I am not talking about the La-Z-Boy, order nachos and margaritas…I actually like the Alamo Drafthouse a lot. But I have a living room, [and sometimes] I want to go to the theater.”

Tarantino is right, however, about exhibitors who never turn the lights down all the way. I really hate that. Movies need to be absorbed in complete darkness.

While chatting earlier today on the Armchair Expert podcast, Quentin Tarantino announced that he’s bought the beloved Vista Theatre — an historic 98-year-old venue between the Los Feliz and Silverlake regions of Los Angeles. The single-screen, 400-seat Vista is easily the most attractively designed and aesthetically pleasing commercial theatre in Los Angeles. It’s a work of art.

I’ve just realized I haven’t been to the Vista since catching a special midnight screening of Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook on 12.7.14, which included a special introduction by William Friedkin.

With the Vista still shuttered by the pandemic, Tarantino said “we’ll probably open it up around Christmas time.”

HE to QT: Why six months from now? Why not Labor Day, which is eight weeks hence? Theatrical is bouncing back — why wait for six months? Failing that, why not October 1st? What do you need to do to the place improvement-wise? It’s been in reasonably good shape for several years now, no?

Tarantino stressed that like The New Beverly, the Vista will show “only film…it won’t be a revival house…we’ll show new movies that come out where they give us a film print. It’s not going to be like the New Beverly [Cinema]. The New Beverly has its own vibe. The Vista is like a crown jewel kind of thing. We’ll show older films, but it will be like you can hold a four-night engagement.”

What he seems to be saying is that The Vista will present films that will combine the aesthetic of (a) the current Westside Pavillion Landmark, but only if the distributor supplies a 35mm print, and (b) the Nuart, which sometimes will show older films along with European or Xtreme indie fare. Yes, 35mm prints of new films are still being made (or so I hear) but Tarantino knows that distributors are more or less out of the 35mm celluloid business, and that it’s

HE to QT: The New Beverly’s film-only policy is cool on one level, but a dying sentimental fetish on another. It’s fine to insist on a pure-celluloid experience, and being able to show (and savor) a mint-condition print can be wonderful thing. But it can just as easily be a drag. Digital is the way of things now, and there’s something needlessly stubborn about insisting that film is the only way to go.

Every time I contemplate going to the New Beverly, I think back to a seven-year-old showing of the ’62 Mutiny on the Bounty. I wrote about this in a 7.16.14 post titled “New Beverly Pits“:

“I imagined that Marlon Brando’s Bounty might look better than I expected, and so, like a moron, I went there tonight and took a seat in the second row. It looked like dogshit. Dupey, brownish tones, substandard projection lighting (I’d say around 8 foot lamberts, or 6 lower than the ASCAP standard) and nowhere near wide enough. The New Beverly doesn’t even present a true Scope aspect ratio (i.e., 2.35:1). It looked to me like 2.25:1.

Just exited a Zola screening (8:50 pm start) at the Landmark. Stripper saga + road + relationship movie + oddball humor here and there and finessed with absolute assurance…FIRST RATE..all hail director Janicza Bravo.

Pic is an immediate top-tenner. So much more gripping and fascinating than I expected. The focus was constantly “on” and I was fully in the grip — knew it was aces almost immediately. Taylour Paige and Riley Kehoe own this fucking movie. And that tall skinny 20something guy (Nicholas Braun) plus the 50ish pimp (Colman Domingo) + costars Ari’el Stachel, Jason Mitchell, Nasir Rahim, Sophie Hal…all great.

Taut and well honed and short even…86 minutes! No moralizing, no crude impact slams, almost none of the usual cliches, never touches (much less explores) the wallowing realm. An almost perfect film for what is, what it aims at. I’m delighted that it turned out this well. (posted from iPhone)

Friendo: “It sounds like a very 2021 movie…one that no one would ever dare criticize. But yet it does. It has some dissenters on RT:m. Not many, but some.”

Earlier today I spent a few hours reading this and that portion of Quentin Tarantino‘s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” paperback. I have to say that I relished almost all of it.

QT’s prose isn’t quite on the level of the great Elmore Leonard, but it reads straight and clean and without a hint of hesitance or snazziness for its own sake. Page by page it doesn’t fuck around, and delivers all kinds of ripe flavor and embroidery in terms of the various characters and their backstories, and overall you just fly through the chapters.

The book, which I bought last night at the New Beverly for $11 and change, is somewhat “better” than the film, to be honest, and the more I read the more I wished that OUATIH had become a ten-part Netflix series, using each and every line in this 400-page novel. Just go for it…just sprawl it all the fuck out.

I was especially taken with a two-page scene between a red-kimono-wearing, half-bombed Rick Dalton and the real Steve McQueen, the latter sitting behind the wheel of his car outside the gate to the Polanski-Tate home and kind of half-dismissing Dalton but at the same time half-listening to him. Then they reminisce how they once played three pool games (okay, two and a half) at Barney’s Beanery back in ’62.

Not in the movie, of course…

I also love a chapter called “The Twinkie Truck” (pgs. 156 to 175). It’s mostly about the adventures, ambitions and psychology of one Charles Manson, who really wanted to be a rich and famous rock star and knew deep down that all of his spiritual guru sermons and posturings were more or less a bullshit side activity.

This is real-deal history according to QT and common knowledge, and it’s fascinating to consider some of the particulars about Manson’s interactions with Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher, Candice Bergen and Mark Lindsay, and how one night Manson even jammed with Neil Young.

There’s another chapter called “Misadventure”, and it basically focuses on Cliff Booth‘s half-accidental murder of his needling, boozy wife, Billie, with a “shark” gun (whatever the hell that is) and the ins and outs of that episode. Again, you’re asking yourself “why wasn’t some of this material used in the film, and if it couldn’t fit why didn’t Tarantino shoot it anyway and create a 10-hour version down the road?”

Excerpt: “No one really knew for sure if Cliff shot her on purpose. It could have been just a tragic mishandling of diving equipment, which is what Cliff always claimed. But anyone who had ever seen a drunken Billie Booth berate Cliff in public in front of his colleagues didn’t buy that.

“How did Cliff get away with it? Easy — his story was plausible and it couldn’t be disproven. Cliff felt real bad about what he did to Billie. But it never occured to him not to try and get away with murder.”

Excerpt #2, pg. 167, focusing on Sharon Tate: “She liked the bubble-gum hits she heard on KHJ. She liked that song ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’ and the follow-up song by the same group, ‘Chewy Chewy.’ She liked Bobby Sherman and that ‘Julie’ song. She loved that ‘Snoopy vs. The Red Baron’ song.