Hold your horses, keep your activities in check, maintain Covid protocols, get your vaccine ID cards and extend the misery until at least May or thereabouts. Better safe than sorry. True herd immunity won’t activate until September.

The 2021 Telluride Film Festival will be a five-day event (Thursday, 9.2 through Monday, 9.6) or one day longer than usual. For four years straight (’16 through ’19) Hollywood Elsewhere stayed at the Mountainside Inn, or the poor man’s Telluride lodging option. (I was also booked there last year until Covid stepped in.)

In ’16, ’17 and ’18 a four-day Mountainside rental was $1100. It went up a hundred or so in ’19, and then last year it jumped to $1400 and change. The Mountainside’s five-day fee for next September’s festival including taxes is $1700, I’ve just learned. And all you get is a modest-sized motel room with a king-sized bed, a bathroom, no closets, a little freezer and a crummy little writing table and a chair.

So I’ve put a deposit on a bigger, roomier place in the woods. It’s a mile or two beyond the Telluride airport (about a 12-minute drive) — two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, outdoor deck, nice kitchen, etc. $1600 and change but I’ll probably be splitting the expense so I’m only looking at $800-something. A short drive in and out of town every day in not a problem.

Each and every person attending the 2021 Telluride Film Festival (Thursday, 9.2 through Monday, 9.6) needs to carry a coronavirus vaccine certification card (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson). Some kind of laminated driver’s license-sized card with a bar code — one that you can attach to your festival pass. No, such cards haven’t been issued but they clearly need to be to allow certain dormant businesses to reactivate in the summer and fall. Not just film festivals but any business or civic gathering that involves close proximity — indoor restaurants, cinemas, town halls, airlines, convention centers. A 1.18.21 CNBC story reported that “Microsoft, Apple and Google have shown interest in developing vaccine passports or certificates to usher in safer travel.”

…is the most urgent, the most relevant, the most newsworthy?

The official 2021 Oscar poster has been unveiled, and it mostly conveys a feeling of vague fear — a hodgepodge of different design concepts intended to “say” as little as possible about anything.

It certainly says nothing at all about what’s happening in Hollywood culture right now, and particularly about the woke psychology among the vanguard of Academy voters — a collective owning up to past and current sins (toxic white masculinity, systemic racism, predatory old-boy behaviors that suppress women) by advocating a certain corrective favoritism.

I prefer a concept that was created by Edmon de Haro [below] for a 1.27.21 N.Y, Times piece called “How Can the Oscars Be More Entertaining?”

I’m not much of a designer but I’d also love to see an Oscar poster (unlike the below Francis Bacon nightmare) that visually conveys the power that women and POCs are currently, justifiably wielding along with (here’s the tricky part) some nebulous conveyance of cancellation terror a la ’50s blacklisting. Something in that realm.

N.Y. Times poster concept by Edmon de Haro.

Speaking about the “teenaged Spielberg in early ’60s Arizona” film (aka Young Beardo) that Spielberg has been co-writing with Tony Kushner and intends to direct this summer, HE commenter Manwe Sulimo posted the following this morning: “I’d rather watch a James Cameron biopic focusing on his legendary behind-the-scenes antics. This Mother Courage shit [i.e., Michelle Williams as Spielberg’s mom Leah] sounds boring.”

HE reply: I would DEARLY LOVE to see a behind-the-scenes James Cameron film. Perhaps a making-of-Titanic movie. Or perhaps one about making the original 1984 Terminator. A film about Cameron’s creative methodology, force of personality and blitzkrieg approach. Because Cameron is (or could at least be portrayed as) a real-life version of Jonathan Shields.

A hard-driving and manipulative Hollywood producer played by Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful, Shields was demanding and overbearing but at the same time devoted to filmmaking excellence — 85% David O. Selznick, 15% Val Lewton. Cameron has long exuded this same powerhouse approach, and I love the idea that a backstage Cameron film might deliver the same theme or psychology conveyed in the very end of Vincente Minnelli‘s 1952 classic — i.e., while some might complain that Shields/Cameron is no day at the beach, at the end of the day they still want to work with him because he’s “got it.”

I’m sorry but I would much rather see a “look out, here comes the steam-rolling Cameron!” film than Young Beardo.

Barry Sullivan, Lana Turner and Dick Powell at the very end of The Bad and the Beautiful.

Here’s a re-posting of a classic HE essay titled “Friends of Varinia.” It originally appeared on 2012, and was reposted on 3.14.14 — almost exactly seven years ago. HE will probably re-post again in 2028.

“Nobody and I mean nobody in the history of film criticism has mentioned what I’m about to bring up. It’s about a hidden aspect of Spartacus, although it’s really a question for Howard Fast, who wrote the original 1951 “Spartacus” novel. But Mr. Fast is long gone so let’s just kick it around. It’s about sex and territoriality and rage that would have been unstoppable.

“The issue would have been about the animal anger and resentment that Kirk Douglas‘s Spartacus would have felt over the fact that Jean Simmons‘ Varinia, the love of his life, had been forced to have relations with several of his fellow gladiators, as was the custom during captivity in Lentulus Batiatus‘s gladiator school in Capua. The result would have been heavily strained friendships between Spartacus and his slave-revolt comrades after they’d broken out and become free men.

Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, Kirk Douglas during filming of Spartacus.

“If Spartacus was anything like Detective James McLeod, whom Douglas portrayed in William Wyler‘s Detective Story (’51), he would have been an intensely jealous guy and no day at the beach. No matter how he intellectually rationalized what had happened — all slave women at Capua were ordered to have weekly sex with gladiators at the direction of Peter Ustinov‘s Batiatus and Charles McGraw‘s Marcellus, the sadistic gladiator boss — he still wouldn’t be able to handle it in his gut.

“Any ex-gladiator who had ‘known’ her would be on Spartacus’ shit list, and he would have given them dirty looks and subliminal attitude and maybe even put them into forward skirmishes with Romans in the hope that they’d get killed.

“Matrimonial relations between Spartacus and Varinia wouldn’t have been very pleasant either. Every time Spartacus looked at her he would see Heironymous Bosch fantasies that would torture him to no end. He would see John Ireland‘s Crixus or Nick Dennis‘s Dionysus or Harold J. Stone‘s David thrusting and groaning like lions.

“Remember when Warren Beatty‘s Ben Siegel said to Annette Bening‘s Virginia Hill, ‘I was just wondering if there was somebody you haven’t fucked?’ That’s how it would be almost all the time between Spartacus and Varinia.

Yesterday morning Deadline‘s Justin Kroll reported that a few months hence Steven Spielberg will direct a feature, cowritten by himself and Tony Kushner, “loosely” based on his childhood growing up in Arizona.

One presumes that “loosely” alludes to an intention to partially fictionalize.

Kroll added that Michelle Williams will portray a character inspired by his mom, Leah, “but with a separate and original voice.” Which means what? No depicted difficulties between herself and Spielberg’s dad, Arnold? No mention of infidelity?

The film will shoot this summer with a plan to open in ’22. It will presumably focus on the making of Firelight, a 140-minute sci-fi adventure that led to the making of Close Encounters of The Third Kind. Pic was funded by his dad to the tune of $500 or $600. It was given a single showing in a Phoenix-area theatre in March ’64.

From Joseph McBride, author of “Steven Spielberg: A Biography“(2011):

“A good portion of my book focused on ‘Steve’ Spielberg’s extraordinary boyhood years making films in Arizona (1957-64, including Firelight). I have 111 pages on his youth in Cincinnati, New Jersey, and Arizona before he went to California, and a chapter about his final year of high school in Saratoga.

“He also made films in 16mm at California State College at Long Beach (now Cal State Long Beach). All his Arizona work (including Firelight) was shot in 8mm. (Firelight had sound added.) His first 35mm film was Amblin’ (’68), which Universal bought. It earned him his seven-year TV directing contract.”

A photo from McBride’s Spielberg biography, credited to the Arizona Republic/Phoenix Newspapers, Inc.

Soielberg shooting Escape to Nowhere in ’62 — photo credited to childhood friend Barry Sollenberger.

I distinctly recall an Interview q & a with Superman star Chris Reeve. The issue was dated December ’78, and Andy Warhol himself was one of Reeve’s interviewers. (It was a group chat thing.) It was memorable because of a question that Warhol asked Reeve. He asked, “Why didn’t the producers let us see your sex?” — i.e., why did you have to wear a codpiece when you wore your Superman outfit?

Warhol was always a little playful and put-on-ish in conversation. What he meant deep down is that he found the 26 year-old Reeve attractive, etc. He was probably also thinking, “Wow, it would have been great if Reeve had been around when we shot Lonesome Cowboys ten years ago…”

One of Warhol’s “lost” ’60s films, Lonesome Cowboys was a 100% improvised gay spoof of classic western machismo. (Hitching posts used as ballet barres, etc.) Paul Morrissey directed, wrote, shot most of it, edited. Warhol was indisposed in post-production, having been shot by Valerie Solanas on 6.3.68.

Lonesome Cowboys is a whimsical cluster of splotchy bits and ends. No story, digressive, sophomoric, non-rhythmic cutting, cruddy sound. Warhol factory players Viva, Taylor Mead, Louis Waldon, Tom Hompertz, Eric Emerson and Joe Dallesandro costarred. Shot in January 1968 in Old Tucson and the Rancho Linda Vista Dude Ranch in Oracle, Arizona on a budget of $3,000.

The film opened at the Andy Warhol Garrick on Bleecker and the 55th Street Playhouse on 5.5.69.

There was an Italian-language DVD kicking around in the ’90s or early aughts but no longer. You can’t stream it or anything now. Not that you’d want to — it’s a mess.

According to Guardian correspondent Julian Morruzi, the Guinness Book of Film Facts and Feats (Second Edition) states that the earliest pre-credit sequence can be found in Destry Rides Again (1939). Maybe so but Henry Hathaway‘s The Desert Fox (’51) contains the first lengthy (around six minutes) pre-credit sequence with a fair amount of dialogue — roughly similar to the length of a typical pre-credit sequence in the Bond films.

Incidentally: The brisk military drums heard over the opening credit sequence in The Desert Fox (6:20 mark) almost certainly inspired a similar drum track heard at the beginning of The Longest Day (’62), around the :12 mark.

Life on planet pandemic has been miserable and totally depressing for 12, 13 months now. Vaccines are slowly turning things around but what happened to maintaining miserable safety protocols (masks, distancing, hand cleaners, no indoor dining) for 100 days after Biden’s 1.20.21 swearing-in, or roughly until May 1st? Or better yet June 1st. Life has been at a standstill since early March 2020 — what’s another couple of months? I for one have gotten used to living in a suffocating hell space…let’s keep it going! Related: The pandemic reportedly cost AMC $4.6 billion last year.

Skullbangers: Mandalorian vs. Mauritanian — on her deathbed after being shot by a storm trooper, an ex-girlfriend of bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) tells him he’s the biological father of Mona Mosholu, a risk-junkie smuggler operating a fast cargo ship with a couple of rascally partners in a nearby galaxy. Enter Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a Mauritarian gentleman and book author who spent 15 years in Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Upon release in 2016, Salahi, hungry to breathe free and see the galaxy, accepts a position as a time-travelling…I can’t do this. This is a stupid, shitty idea for a new Disney + miniseries. I was merely struck by the five-syllable, sound-alike names. Not every idea pans out.