Jeffrey Wells

Sam Mendes’ decision to cast four 30-ish (or nudging 30) actors as the 20something Beatles in their mid-to-late-‘60s prime is, for me, a leap too far…28-year-old Harris Dickinson as John Lennon-if-he-was-a-basketball-player, towering over the hawk-nosed, pointy-chin-chinned Paul Mescal, 29, as Paul McCartney…the wicked, warlock-eyed Barry Keoghan, 32, as Ringo Starr, and the fair-skinned, ginger-haired Joseph Quinn**, 31, as the dark-eyed, non-gingered George Harrison…casting calls that seem not just reachy but three-quarters doomed (Dickinson might pan out)…and the four films (one about each Beatle) won’t be released until April ‘28…three years of gestation.

** You know who Quinn closely resembles? Prince Harry of Montecito.

Quinn is going to be as much of a bad-acid-trip George Harrison as the absurdly miscast Mescal is sure to be a weak-tea McCartney, a would-be inhabiting that can’t hope to persuade, much less transcend. (“Hey, Hawk-nose…why don’t we do it in the road?…everyone will be watching us.”). If Quinn had been around in the early ‘70s, he might have been regarded as a poor man’s Ryan O’Neal. Would Stanley Kubrick have even met with him during the Barry Lyndon casting process? Okay, he might have been cast as the younger roadside thief (i.e., the son of Captain Feeney).

It doesn’t make basic sense that Joseph Kosinski ‘s F1 (Warner Bros./Apple), opening worldwide on 6.25, isn’t debuting in Cannes in mid-May.**

Because it apparently won’t be.

Even with Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (Paramount, 5.25) allegedly locked down for a Côte d’Azur premiere, F1 is the hotter, louder ticket. We’re all familiar with the M:I brand…same old bing-bang-boom. Not to mention the eternally stationary Ving Rhames again.

Is there some kind of ironclad rule that within a given Cannes Film Festival there can only be one U.S.-produced blockbuster? Did Paramount and Tom Cruise insist on a no-competition clause or something?

Jordan Ruimy was told a while back that F1 producers “opted instead for a world premiere in Monaco.” Because of the annual Grand Prix, of course. The only problem is that Monaco is a really shitty place for a world premiere. It’s an architecturally ugly, super-corporate city (I was repelled during my last visit) and it attracts the worst (i.e., shallowest) people in the world.

** Patrick Brzeski and Scott Roxborough’s THR prediction piece is two weeks old, granted.

Orange Mussolini has curiously acquiesced to Kid Rock’s idea of a White House dinner with Bill Maher this week, but he’s clearly uncomfortable with the fact that Maher isn’t a devotional boot–licker.

The meeting wouldn’t have been scheduled in the first place, of course, if Maher hadn’t earned a certain respect from righties for having routinely trashed woke lunatics over the last few years, and yet the authoritarian-in-chief still feels antsy…what a fragile child.

On top of which this may go to Cannes. If so, some are rooting for a Director’s Fortnight slot, which can be comfortably ignored.

Whimsical is pretty much synonymous with capricious, and post-Days of Heaven Malick has shown himself to be nothing, creatively speaking, if not “given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood and behavior.”

Again — ask Adrien Brody about this. Ask the late Chris Plummer. Ask Geza Rohring, who plays Jesus in Malick’s STILL unfinished The Way of the Wind, which shot principal photography in 2019 and has been subject to Malick’s tossed–salad, elusive–butterfly editing aesthetic (you can’t call it a process) ever since — five and a half years as we speak.

“Sudden and unaccountable changes of mood and behavior” = the man does not know his mind, or is so engrossed in the mystical that there can be no destination. “The farther one travels, the less one knows” — George Harrison, “The Inner Light.”

One could adopt a brusque attitude and conclude that Malick has no sense of decency or fundamental follow-through when it comes to post-production.   How about them apples?

I HATE guys who make a big egoistic show of this…who brazenly perform for the crowd by dropping to their knees in order to propose marriage to their beloved. “Look at what a loving, open-hearted fellow I am! Actually look at the two of us!”

You’re appalling, Monsieur Douchebag, and you don’t even know it.

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.