Out of the blue, into the black. Hugs, condolences to family, friends, colleagues and fans.

Danny Wolf‘s Skin: A History of Nudity in Movies will stream via Quiver Distribution on 8.18. It seems intelligent enough.

Almost exactly a year ago I suggested that Elvis Presley‘s grandson, Benjamin Keough, could “theoretically” play his late grandfather in Baz Luhrman‘s in-preparation biopic about the relationship between Presley and Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). “I’ve no idea if Keough can act or sing or anything,” I wrote, but he’s “nearly a dead ringer” for Elvis, and would seem like the right choice “in terms of genetic follow-through.”

A half-hour ago TMZ reported that Keough, the 27 year-old son of Lisa Marie Presley and musician Danny Keough as well as the brother of Riley Keough, “has died of an apparent suicide.”

TMZ: “Law enforcement sources tell us Ben appears to have died Sunday in Calabasas from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. [The deceased’s] grandparents are Elvis and Priscilla Presley.”

TMZ follow-up (3:57 PM Pacific): Lisa’s “is completely heartbroken, inconsolable and beyond devastated,” said her manager Roger Widynowski, “but is trying to stay strong for her 11 year old twins and her oldest daughter Riley. She adored that boy. He was the love of her life.”

The truth is that David Poland‘s Libya or Iraq string-em-up fantasy sounds…well, I shouldn’t say. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a slight ping of emotional pleasure from imagining this scenario. Let’s lay it on the table. These people are despicable villains, and Trump’s COVID negligence and ignorance has — be honest — hastened the needless deaths of tens of thousands. And he’s clearly inflamed the racial divide climate in this country.

HE: I hate how the Khmer Rouge has kicked me out out of what used to be lefty conversation circles. Or, you know, pushed me into sensible left-centrism by way of twitter mob action. I’ve regarded myself as a flaming lefty all my life, but no longer. Not with cancel-culture wing nuts calling the shots.

Friendo: So many people tell me they’re feeling the same way. A friend turned me on to Ben Shapiro, who’s been written off as a crazed rightie but his latest podcast episode is so good – he compiles interviews he’s had over time with Rogan, Peterson, Harris — they call it the “dark web” of independent thinkers. I don’t agree with him 100% but it’s so refreshing to hear people talk about real stuff. It’s no wonder he’s so popular.

HE: I can’t go there. Shapiro speaks frankly but is also a flat-out conservative who’s given elbow-bumps to Trump. That’s a bridge too far. Not this horse.

David Mamet‘s State and Main, a critically approved culture-clash satire, opened nearly 20 years ago. It’s about character issues (morality, honesty, “purity”) that arise in a small Vermont town during the location filming of a Hollywood movie called The Old Mill. It’s actually more about the townspeople being co-opted by Hollywood opportunism and amorality than a “clash” of values, although a divide between some of the characters is eventually exposed.

All Mamet plays and films are written in Mamet-speak (short staccato sentences, a tone of flat irony, not much in the way of natural-feeling interplay), and the more strictly this is adhered to the better they work. That said, Mamet material has always played better on stage. I still maintain that the 1984 Broadway production of Glengarry Glen Ross (which I attended on opening night — 3.25.84 at the John Golden Theatre) was the most perfect Mamet experience anyone has ever savored.

In any event I recall being half-amused and half-annoyed by the Mamet-speak in State and Main, but mostly tolerating it. And yet for years I’ve told myself that the only truly luscious line was Alec Baldwin‘s “heh…so that happened!” after he crawls out of an overturned station wagon. I actually adopted it as one of my fall-backs whenever some calamity or misfortune occurs. I use it to this day.

So last night I re-watched State and Main on Amazon to see if there were other great lines that I’d forgotten. And there aren’t — the Baldwin is still the only keeper.

And while Mamet is castigating Hollywood boy’s club sexism, particularly in the matters of Baldwin’s Polanski-like yen for teenage girls and the ruthless pressure that Sarah Jessica Parker‘s actress character endures when she decides not to perform a nude scene unless her fee is upped by $800K, the film feels callous in this post-#MeToo realm. “It hasn’t aged well” is putting it mildly.

And Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s screenwriter character behaves like a submental Boy Scout dingbat dweeb. He’s a published playwright who’s attracted to fetching, intelligent women (he falls for small-town book seller Rebecca Pidgeon) and, being a writer of some perception, is presumably aware that Hollywood is a culture defined by big money and moral relativism. And yet he goes simple when asked to testify about whether Julia Stiles (who was 18 when State and Main was filmed and looks no younger than that) was in the car with Baldwin when it crashed. She was but so what? And yet if he tells the truth he’ll be blackballed by the industry, and if he doesn’t his soul will be forever soiled.

Then again Hoffman isn’t an eight year old — he’s a 30something adult in bed with reptiles. With the film company having been forced to leave a previous New England location because of another young girl episode, Hoffman is fully aware that Baldwin’s “hobby” (i.e., seducing teens) is a fixed feature. And it’s not as if Stiles is a wrecked victim accusing Baldwin of sexual assault — she clearly schemed to bed him and got what she wanted without much effort.

So a morally unsavory episode happened, but no actual crime was committed. (The age of consent in Vermont is 16.) So if Hoffman is any kind of realistic Hollywood careerist, he has to somehow wiggle out of testifying. Or he has to develop amnesia. It’s how this industry has dealt with embarassing episodes (including incorrect sexual dalliances and car accidents) for many decades, and unless Hoffman is ready to commit career suicide (not an attractive trait) he has to somehow slither out of this.

The way to avoid embarassment all around, obviously, would be for Hoffman to go to William H. Macy‘s director or David Paymer‘s studio chief and urge them to keep Stiles quiet by paying her off. A $50K college fund, let’s say. But they don’t pay Stiles off, and before you know it a local attorney (Clark Gregg) is threatening the movie company with some kind of sexual assault lawsuit and so they have to pay him off with a $300K bribe, which he will use for a forthcoming Congressional campaign. Brilliant!

So with Hoffman playing a starry-eyed idiot there’s no one to identity with or root for, and so I didn’t care about anyone in State and Main…not really. And so it isn’t a comforting or satisfying moral fable. It just feels precious.

Imagine being a USC staffer, and that your job title is assistant dean of diversity and inclusion. That’s an excellent thing to focus on, but imagine having to be the assistant diversity and inclusion guy for months or years or decades on end.

Or is it the chubby shirt? Brenda Vaccaro, James Farentino and Elizabeth Ashley are definitely rail-thin. I’d love to see an all-new Celebrity Bowling match between Brad Pitt and Alia Shawkat on the home team, and LexG and Zach Galifianakis opposing.

It’s not the CG….well, it is but it’s mainly the voiced animals and the paychecks for the actors who play them. Sam Rockwell as Ivan, the well-paid grown gorilla. Brooklynn Prince as Ruby, a baby elephant, and Angelina Jolie as Ruby’s elephant mom…two paychecks. Danny DeVito as Bob, a dog who deposits a nice fat paycheck at the end of the day. Helen Mirren as Snickers, the paycheck-cashing poodle. Chaka Khan as Henrietta, a chicken who won’t cluck unless you pay through the nose, and Ron Funches as Murphy, a paycheck-earning rabbit. And so on.

Boilerplate: “In 1973, a gorilla named Ivan lives in a cage at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade with an aging elephant named Stella and a dog named Bob with no recollection of how they got there. They are owned by Mack, the owner of the Big Top Mall. When an abused baby elephant named Ruby shows up and is taken under Stella’s trunk, Ivan starts to care for her as well and along with the janitor’s daughter Julia, they help to turn things around at the mall.”

A few days ago I reported that Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion, a brilliant Kentucky redneck true-crime drama that I saw and wrote about three years ago, is “still unreleased”, although a late summer opening in Australia via Madman is planned. U.S. distributor Roadside Attractions wanted to open it last March, but then COVID-19 intervened. The current plan is to open it sometime in the fall (maybe) or, failing that, in early ’21, depending on the pandemic.

But now that’s all up in the air due to pirated copies of the film circulating all over, which obviously compromises the streaming rental value. The bootleg availability is due to a premature, scattershot, ad-hoc distribution that has basically put the cart before the horse.

The usual plan for an American-made film, especially one set in the rural heartland, would be to open in the U.S. with at least a modest p&a budget ($8 million in p&a spending had been sought for Above Suspicion) to support the initial release. International bookings follow from that. But not this time. Not with a distribution strategy that any veteran would call penny-wise and dollar-foolish.

According to this Time Out link, Above Suspicion‘s first commercial booking was in Dubai on 3.18.19. Another theatrical engagement happened in Lebanon on 7.4.19, according to the IMDB. This was followed by an Israel release on 1.23.20. On 8.12.18 original Above Suspicion author Joe Sharkey reported that a Turkish-dubbed version called Suphe Otesi (a rough translation of the English-language title) was streaming online. Several months later, per the IMDB, came a “DVD premiere” in Greece on 3.12.20. This was apparently followed by a 6.19.20 release in Japan (theatrical or digital only?).

Perhaps the most egregious opening of all is the imminent streaming debut of Above Suspicion in England on Monday, 7.13. “Egregious” because star Emilia Clarke (Games of Thrones, Solo: A Star Wars Story), who is rightly proud of her performance as the murdered FBI informant Susan Smith and would have granted interviews to generate interest, was never even told about the British streaming release until a couple of days ago.

Last Wednesday (7.8) The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw gave Noyce’s film a three-star review (trust me, it’s at least a four-star effort). Presumably Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will review concurrent with the 7.13 release.

Other territories have been sold, including Germany, Eastern Europe, Italy, Iceland, Scandinavia, Spain, India, South Africa, Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America and South America. The pandemic has turned everything upside down, of course, but opening territories on a random patchwork basis, especially before the domestic U.S. debut, is not the usual way to go.

Roadside had wanted to distribute Above Suspicion since it was finished in mid ’17, but a long holdup resulted over a party that wanted to invest $8 million for p&a. Negotiations dragged on forever. As one observer puts it, “If you’re in real estate, the usual thing is that if you say no, the property goes up in value. That doesn’t work in film, however.”

Word around the campfire is that the “comparatively rich” $8 million p&a offer was made in March 2018. The p&a guy wanted America and all English-speaking territories (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) while two senior investors could have all of the foreign, non-English-speaking territories. The offer concluded with the following prophetic line: “This show is like a melting ice cube, and with every day that goes by the value diminishes. Therefore this offer is open until the end of business (PST) on Friday, March 23, 2018.” The offer was rejected.

Over the last three years, in fact, a total of five such offers were rejected.

I’m told that this investor is nonetheless still ready to make a deal. He/she is “not put off by piracy” and “has agreed today to keep the investment and is happy for the film to play in the U.S. as late as February 2021.”

Noyce has been unwilling to speak about this long-running situation since ’17, but here’s what he says now, speaking for himself and Above Suspicion producer Colleen Camp:

“Colleen and I were devastated to discover that our film is about to be released in the UK. The news came on top of discovering by chance that the Australian release was also imminent. I myself feel like a parent who has lost a child in the chaos of war. The thought that the movie I’ve loved is not even being respected with the dignity of us all being informed in advance of its release just sickens me.

The Orange Plague hasn’t pardoned longtime pally Roger J. Stone Jr., but he’s commuted his 40-month sentence, a result of being found guilty on seven felony charges, including obstructing a congressional inquiry into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

N.Y. Times: “In a lengthy statement released late on a Friday evening, the White House denounced the prosecution against Mr. Stone on what it called ‘process based charges’ stemming from ‘the Russia Hoax’ investigation. ‘Roger Stone has already suffered greatly,’ the statement said. ‘He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!’

“These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice. his is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.”