…and turned up loud, Keith Richards and Ron Wood‘s guitar work in this 1980 Rolling Stones song is pure raunchy pleasure.

“A simple power-chord rocker telling a clueless lover to get lost. But what ‘Let Me Go’ lacks in depth, it makes up for in punk-rock attitude. Richards slashes away and Wood provides Creedence-y licks, while Jagger contemplates hanging out at gay bars and tells his soon-to-be ex-lover, ‘Can’t you get it through your thick head this affair is dead as a doornail?'” — from Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Rolling Stones Songs.”

Last evening around 6:30 pm Tatiana and I embarked on another steep uphill hike. Yes, despite the heat. It was primarily for exercise, but our goal was the gates of Bella Vista, John Barrymore‘s sprawling, perfectly landscaped, Spanish colonial hilltop home at 1500 Seabright Place.

We began at the corner of Lexington Ave. and North Crescent. Due west, right on Hartford, up Benedict Canyon, right on Tower Road and then up, up, up to Tower Grove Drive and beyond. Panting, perspiring, wheezing, groaning.

The visit was more or less inspired by Drew Barrymore having confirmed a couple of days ago that following her grandfather’s alcohol-related death in 1942, his body was indeed stolen from a morgue by W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and Sadakichi Hartmann “so that they could prop him up against a poker table and throw one last party with the guy”, according to an interview transcript.

Nothing makes my blood boil more than some irksome junket journalist asking a director or actor “how much pressure did you feel?” before attempting this or shooting that. Is there any real difference between accepting that a certain activity is necessary or at the very least a good idea (like brushing your teeth, taking out the garbage, finishing your homework or showering daily) and feeling “pressure” to do same? There’s almost always an element of pressure attached to almost any vital or worthwhile activity. Junket journalist to HE: “How much pressure did you feel about brushing your teeth this morning?” HE to junket journalist: “Probably the same amount of pressure that babies feel just before taking their first breath after being born.”

Eternal HE law: Any journalist who uses the word “pressure” in the presence of an interview subject is a very bad person.

If there’s a Bluray or an HD-streaming version of Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergey Urusevsky‘s Soy Cuba (’64), I can’t find it. A Russian-funded documentary intended to be pro-Cuban propaganda, Soy Cuba emerged as a sensual celebration of cinema (the long shots are brilliant) in the vein of Sergei Eisenstein‘s Que Viva Mexico!. An ambivalent exploration of Cuban culture, Soy Cuba half-revelled in hotel luxury, swimming pools and bikini-clad hotties — not what the Soviets were looking for.

An HD restoration happened in 2019, but it’s not currently streamable via Criterion or Amazon or any of the others. (Or so it appears.) It used to be accessible via Prime Video but has been withdrawn. Oscilloscope used to have a DVD version (who wants 480p?) but this has also been withdrawn.

Friendo: “Isn’t it weird looking at Maya Hawke and Levon Hawke? It’s like you see shades of Uma and Ethan but neither really look like one or the other completely.”

HE: “Isn’t that par for the course? I was standing around at the Hotel du Cap in ‘02 or ‘03, and I saw Ethan Hawke taking Maya for a walk. She would’ve been four or five. Maya is now 22 and Levon is 18. Having famous parents mean they both have it easy, and at the same time kinda hard.”

Mid ‘70s baseball superstar Willie Hammer vs. Manhattan mad men Foley and Lane. Lunch at The Palm. Fast talk, undercurrents of agitation, lotsa racket. From a perfectly written Tom Wolfe short story, “The Commercial”:

From a Washington Post story by Michael Kranish, posted at 5:06 pm Pacific:

Covid shut-in fever — stasis, boredom and dreaming about those bygone days when we could do pretty much anything — has been with us for five and a half months. Thanks to the mask refusers, party animals and bumblefucks we’ll be stuck in this godforsaken tomb for another two or three months, perhaps until early ’21. Thank God for occasional diversions.

On 3.11.11 I ran a piece called “Taxi Driver‘s Brown Blood“. It was about (a) Grover Crisp and Martin Scorsese‘s Bluray restoration of Taxi Driver (4.5.11). and more particularly (b) a technical question asked of Crisp by The Digital Bits‘ Bill Hunt.

Hunt asked about the brownish, sepia-tone tinting of the climactic shoot-out scene, which had been imposed upon Scorsese by the MPAA ratings board. Scorsese had always intended this scene to be presented with a more-or-less natural color scheme, in harmony with the rest of the film. Hunt to Crisp: “Why didn’t you and Scorsese restore the originally shot, more colorful shoot-out scene?”

“There are a couple of answers to this,” Crisp replied. “One, which we discussed, was the goal of presenting the film as it was released, which is the version everyone basically knows. This comes up every now and then, but the director feels it best to leave the film as it is. That decision is fine with me.”

HE response: “There can be no legitimate claim of Taxi Driver having been restored without the original natural color (or at least a simulation of same) put back in. The film was shot with more or less natural colors, was intended to be shown this way, and — with the exception of the shoot-out scene — has been shown this way since it first opened in ’75.

“There’s nothing noble or sacred about the look of that final sequence. The fact that it was sepia-toned to get a more acceptable MPAA rating is, I feel, a stain upon the film’s legacy.”

Crisp explained that even if Scorsese wanted to present the natural color version, the original Taxi Driver negative is gone and there’s no way to “pump” the color back in.

Steven Gaydos 2011 comment: “Jeff’s right that it’s a shame a filmmaker had to alter his film in order for it to be seen in wide release, but according to my in-house expert (Monte Hellman, who oversaw the digital restoration/release of his 1971 film Two Lane Blacktop), if the negative is gone, as Crisp clearly says it is, then ‘you can put the color in but it will never look right, and certainly won’t look anything like the original footage.'”

And that was that.

But two or three years later I came upon this image of the wounded Travis Bickle, and damned if it doesn’t look like the original probably did before the MPAA stepped in.

I wondered right away where it came from, and I asked myself “if someone could satisfactorily manipulate a single frame from that shoot-out sequence to make it look right and natural, why couldn’t someone manage the same trick for the whole sequence?”

The Wikipedia page says that Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League (aka The Snyder Cut) will run 240 minutes. Plus it won’t include any scenes shot by Joss Whedon for the theatrical cut. The plan is for a May 2021 world premiere on HBO Max.