Originally posted on 4.2.08: 25 years ago Oliver Stone did me a great favor, and I’ve thanked him at least two if not three times since. In ’95 he and publicist Stephen Rivers arranged for me to pay a brief visit to the Nixon West Wing — Oval Office, cabinet room, hallways, various offices, etc.

Production designer Victor Kempster had built the amazingly detailed set (including an outdoor portion with grass and bushes) on a massive Sony sound stage.

I was allowed in just after Stone and his cast (including Anthony Hopkins) and crew had finished filming. It was sometime around February or March of ’95. I wrote up my impressions for an L.A. Times Syndicate piece. Nixon opened on 12.20.95.

The Nixon unit publicist (or somebody who worked for Rivers) escorted me onto the stage and left. Nobody was around; I had the place all to myself. I had a video camera with me and shot all the rooms, and took my time about it. I was seriously excited and grateful as hell for the opportunity because it was, in a sense, better than visiting the real Oval Office in the real White House, which I would have never been allowed to do even if I’d been best friends with someone in the Clinton administration.

Nixon’s oval office.

JFK’s subdued variation.

Every detail was Eric von Stroheim genuine. Wooden floors, real plaster, ceilings, rugs, moldings, early 1970s phones, bright gold French aristocracy drapes, china on the shelves and mantlepiece, etc.

Five years later I was granted a visit to a replica of Jack Kennedy‘s West Wing that had been used for the shooting of Roger Donaldson‘s Thirteen Days. It was around the same time of year — February or March of 2000, roughly nine or ten months before the movie’s release in December. The set had been built by production designer Dennis Washington inside a warehouse-type sound stage somewhere in southern Glendale or Eagle Rock.

The difference between the Nixon Oval Office decor — creamy beiges and bright golds, a bright blue rug, gilded bric a bracs on the shelves (which contributed to a kind of effete, faux-aristocratic atmosphere) — and the subdued greens, browns and navy blues of JFK’s office (which even had a replica of the coconut shell that Lt. Kennedy used to carve out a message during his PT 109 adventure) will always stay in my mind.

You can tell a lot about people from the decor in their homes and workplaces. Only an arrogant know-nothing would have chosen the nouveau-riche wooden floor that Bush had installed in ’05. The White House is a place of great history, echoes and ghosts, and it should look and feel like it’s been hanging in there for at least a century or so — stressed floors, old timber and dark varnish, like the early 20th Century and 19th Century homes that are found in the northeast.

These visits were as close as I’m ever going to get to the real Oval Office — they gave me a real organic window into recent history. Even if I’d been invited to the real White House I wouldn’t have had the chance to poke around and study everything at my leisure.

In Scott Feinberg’s intro to his THR podcast chat with “Chasing The Light” author Oliver Stone, he mentions an excerpt from a Guardian piece that churlishly described Stone as “a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway…an action man with a reputation for women and drugs.” That’s bullshit — Stone is actually one of the most nakedly honest and at the same time deeply vulnerable fellows out there. A spirited adventurer slash poet slash politician slash outsider eccentric. Fascinating to listen to. His chat with Feinberg is perhaps the most illuminating he’s done during the whole book tour so far. I wasn’t expecting much at first, but the interview just takes off.

Director-writer Oren Moverman to Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, posted a few days ago:

(Beat, beat, beat) Nobody gives Liam “Paycheck” Neeson a raw deal!

Except for the wokesters who tried to cancel him over that anger episode he admitted to a year and a half ago. So yes, okay, the wokesters gave Neeson a raw deal, but nobody else.

In Honest Thief (Open Road, 10.9), Neeson is a veteran bank robber who cuts some kind of deal with the FBI. (Nobody but nobody cares what kind of deal.) He’s soon after double-crossed by two corrupt agents, and goes on the run in order to settle the score, blah blah.

The director is Mark Williams, Emmy-nominated producer of Ozark and producer of Ben Affleck‘s The Accountant./ Williams also directed A Family Man, a 2016 Gerard Butler film..

Funniest, best-written, best-acted Lincoln Project ad yet?

But not in New York or Los Angeles. So if citizens of those burghs want to catch Chris Nolan’s latest, they’ll have to leave town — it’s that simple. Me? I’ll be catching it in Palm Springs.

Indiewire‘s Tom Brueggemann is reporting (or reminding) that Nolan’s film “is scheduled to open in 50 territories between August 26 and 28, including Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Korea, and Australia; other major countries like Russia and Japan follow soon thereafter. China’s also approved the film for release, albeit without a date.

Key passage: “In the U.S. today, 45 states permit indoor theaters to operate (with safety precautions) in all or most locations. Because of lack of new product, most have yet to do so. To preclude the September 3 opening, governments would have to shut them down — and that’s much more difficult to do than delaying permission to open.

Brueggemann “spoke to exhibition sources in some of the riskier regions who question whether they will make the date, but it’s clear that most of the nation’s cinemas will open as allowed. They are not irresponsible people, but their companies’ survival depends on this. And they will play Tenet.”

Respect and admiration for British director Alan Parker, who’s left us at age 76.

A graduate of the British TV commercial industry, Parker was a first-rate shooter and cutter — he knew how to make films look sharp and polished and feel just right. And he definitely understood the power of great music wedded to handsome, well-cut visuals (Evita, The Commitments, Fame, Pink Floyd — The Wall, Bugsy Malone) And he knew how to create atmospheres of dread and doom (Angel Heart, Mississippi Burning, Midnight Express).

The rap against Parker for many years was that he was a slick salesman who didn’t have much to say. That consensus began to change in the late ’80s when he got his act into gear and crafted four fairly mesmerizing knockouts over the span of eight years. Those films were, in order of excellence, (a) Evita (’96), (b) Angel Heart (’87), (c) Mississippi Burning (’88) and (d) The Commitments (’91).

Parker also made some films that I couldn’t stand — Shoot The Moon, Birdy, Come See The Paradise, Angela’s Ashes. The Life of David Gale. But let’s focus on the good stuff.

Posted on 2.28.18: Is Ava DuVernay‘s Selma a more accurate history lesson than the one provided by Mississippi Burning? Is it more organically truthful? Did it deliver an identity current that translated into a better-than-decent domestic haul of $52,076,908?

Yes to all, but Mississippi Burning is a better film despite all the bullshit it sold. (And let’s not forget that Selma sold some bullshit of its own.)

The key thing is that Mississippi Burning delivered an emotionally satisfying payoff that audiences bought into, and which resulted in earnings of $86 million if you adjust for inflation.

Here’s how I put it on 11.29.14: “Alan Parker‘s Mississippi Burning gets an awful lot wrong about the way things really were in Mississippi in 1964. African Americans did a lot more than sing hymns and watch their churches burn, and we all know that Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo mangled the history of the FBI’s hunt for the killers of three Civil Rights workers (Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman).

“Their coup de grace was having a pair of FBI agents, played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, turn into Dirty Harry-style vigilantes in Act Three, bringing the guilty yokels to justice by playing rough games and faking them out. Pauline Kael called it ‘a Charles Bronson movie.’

“And I’ve never cared that much. Very few have, I suspect. I’ve always had a soft spot for Mississippi Burning for various reasons — the polish of it, Hackman’s performance (particularly his scenes with Frances McDormand), Peter Biziou‘s cinematography, Gerry Hambling‘s editing, the percussive rumble of Trevor Jones‘ music, da coolness. But especially Parker and Gerolmo’s bullshit plot. Because the lies they came up with are emotionally comfortable, and that’s always the bottom line.