This morning Variety‘s Marc Malkin reminded the industry that “recorded stage productions are not eligible for consideration.” That’s straight out of the AMPAS rulebook, and so you can forget Hamilton as a Best Picture contender.

The fact that the Disney Plus filmed version was watched by nearly everyone over the Independence Day holiday weekend will have to do. That and the fact that it’s won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer and a Grammy.

Hollywood Elsewhere watched the Disney Plus Hamilton a couple of nights ago, and my basic reaction was to agree that 18th Century hip-hop is indeed a thing to submit to, revel in and cheer as far as it goes.

Hamilton is five years old now, but it was the first high-impact show to afford POCs strength and dominance in a reimagined historical narrative. Many films, plays and streamers followed in its conceptual wake. A brilliant gimmick slash concept, and certainly vigorously staged, inventive, dynamically conceived, excitingly choreographed. So yes, it’s quite the capturing of the late Obama zeitgeist.

But thank God for the subtitle option. I caught a phrase here and there, but I’m glad I saw it with subtitles because at least I understood every line and phrase. If I’d paid $400 or $500 to see it on stage at Manhattan’s Richard Rodgers theatre, I would have followed the general drift but missed 60% or 70% of the particulars.

From Benjamin Wallace‘s 7.6 Vulture piece, “Is Anyone Watching Quibi?”

“Quibi, which rhymes with Libby, is short for ‘quick bites.'” Wait…all this time I’ve been mispronouncing? I thought it was Kwee-bee.

“People have wondered why Quibi honcho Jeff Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman, in their late and early 60s, respectively, and not very active on social media, would believe they have uniquely penetrating insight into the unacknowledged desires of young people.

“When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, ‘I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.’ But any particular shows she likes? “Grant,” she offered. “On the History Channel. It’s about President Grant.”

“Katzenberg is on his phone all the time, but he is also among the moguls of his generation who have their emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by an assistant.

“In enthusing about what a show could mean for Quibi, Katzenberg would repeatedly invoke the same handful of musty touchstones — America’s Funniest Home Videos, Siskel and Ebert, and Jane Fonda’s exercise tapes. When Gal Gadot came to the offices and delivered an impassioned speech about wanting to elevate the voices of girls and women, Katzenberg wondered aloud whether she might become the new Jane Fonda and do a workout series for Quibi. (“’Apparently, her face fell,’ says a person briefed on the meeting.)

“Most subscribers have signed on with a 90-day free trial. This month, as that period expires, Quibi will learn how many of those people will stick around once they’re asked to pay. If they don’t, Quibi will be left to reckon with how it miscalculated so badly, and for Katzenberg and Whitman, it could be a deflating capstone to two storied careers.”

We all know how a “death of someone famous” story is expected to read. Family, friends and colleagues describe the deceased as God’s gift to humanity who left a glorious legacy, and was a vessel of pure love, industriousness and boundless energy. And at the moment of departure the entire family was at bedside. No family members were in the bathroom or in the downstairs cafeteria or taking a shower back at the homestead…the family is always there en masse and without exception, standing or praying in a perfect half-circle.

And we all know what we’re expected to say when we read about the death of a noteworthy person. Second verse, same as the first.

I’ve taken some heat three or four times for posting overly candid obituaries. The truth is that I posted only one that could be fairly accused of being a tad insensitive. I’m referring, of course, to the Bob Clark piece that appeared on 4.4.07. The consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t so much what I said (“Very few directors have offended me as much as he did over the years”) as not waiting a week or two before posting. Clark had only died 12 hours earlier.

This morning I came upon a highly unusual post-mortem assessment of Peter Sellers, who died of a heart attack in 1980 at age 54. The speaker was his old friend and Goon Show colleague Spike Milligan, quoted in Ed Sikov‘s “Mr. Strangelove“: “It’s hard to say this, but [Peter] died at the right time.”

That’s the kind of searing observation that only a fellow artist could share or even think. A variation of this sentiment could be that the deceased didn’t die soon enough.

Nine years ago Scott Feinberg‘s posted a 7.25.11 piece about the death of Amy Winehouse (“The Art of Dying Young“). The idea was that it’s not such a terrible thing to check out early if your legend is going downhill anyway. Biological shutdowns will always be traumatic to friends, fans and loved ones, but it may be worse, Feinberg said, to hang on past your peak point.

But how do you know when you’ve peaked? Answer: Nobody ever does. Everyone goes through life saying, “I’ll find a way to turn things around…after all, tomorrow is another day.”

“Most [performing survivors] overstay their welcome,” says Feinberg, “and simply begin to evaporate from the public’s consciousness, either because they find themselves (a) unable to maintain the performance-level that first garnered them fame, (b) are creatively limited by the public’s limited perception of them, (c) are distracted and/or deterred by fame and its trappings, (d) no longer able or willing to compete with ‘fresher’ faces.”

Joe Rogan and James Lindsay combined: “That’s one of the things going on now. People getting retroactively cancelled for things they did [in the relatively distant past]. We can talk about the psychological side of it…the moral purity thing that’s going bonkers. You’ve gotta think of woke as kinda like a church. ‘Everybody’s a racist‘ is the vibe of the new thing. So you’ve got the woke academics…the woke people who are teaching it to kids, as critical race theory. They’re making the nonsense, and you get this feeling they’re wrestling with their inner demons?

“There’s this book, Robin DiAngelo‘s ‘White Fragility‘…the one Matt Taibbi destroyed…and if you read the book there are all these weird vignettes, [and you can sense that basically the woke nutters] are wrestling with the racism within themselves. Rigid ideologies, can’t be challenged, you cannot in any way veer from the course…this is cult shit, straight-up cult indoctrination stuff.”

HE conclusion: When the woke insanity thing finally subsides and goes away, sensible people everywhere will come for the Khmer Rouge fanatics, and it will be beautiful. Wokesters will have to hide in the shadows like Jean-Louis Trintignant did at the end of The Conformist. Today’s retroactive cancellers will themselves be retroactively cancelled, and then they’ll be forced to eat their own poison. I for one cannot wait for that to happen. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

I feel a little funny about re-posting a piece from the satirical Babylon Bee, a kind of rightwing Onion. I hate the idea of chuckling at any kind of conservative humor, but the Khmer Rouge has become so toxic, so deranged, so over-the-waterfall that, in the words of Richard Gere’s “Mayonnaise” in An Officer and a Gentleman, “I got nowhere else to go.”

I’ve been a Los Angeleno for 37 years, and I’ve never seen or heard a July 4th spectacle like the one that happened last night. It just kept going and going.

@HighSierraMan Thnx @VictorRocha1 for alerting me to this Ghislaine Maxwell update, which drastically changes the over/under bet on how many days before "something" happens. pic.twitter.com/ZfyW2rB4ov

— Steven Gaydos (@HighSierraMan) July 5, 2020

Peter Medak‘s The Ghost of Peter Sellers (currently streaming) is a fascinating documentary about the disastrous making of his own Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a 1973 Peter Sellers pirate comedy that turned out so badly it was never released theatrically.

It was, however, issued on VHS in ’85, and on a Region 2 DVD in 2016 — $7.98 to buy, $3.99 to ship.

The 36 year-old Medak, coming off the success d’estime of The Ruling Class (’72), agreed to direct Noonday Sun in order to work with Sellers, regarded worldwide as a comic genius who was worth his weight in gold. If, that is, the script was first-rate and everything else was in its proper place.

Alas, the Noonday script was allegedly shoddy and shooting at sea (off the coast of Cyprus) was sure to be technically difficult. But the torpedo that destroyed the movie (and which damaged Medak’s career) was the erratic, instinctual madness of his lead actor, who could be extremely skittish and difficult to work with.

Sellers often said that he couldn’t abide mediocrity. Apparently he inhaled a good whiff of the stuff (or so he believed) almost immediately upon arriving in Cyprus. And so he tried to escape by bringing hell.

The best disaster docs of this kind are George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coppola‘s Hearts of Darkness (’91), Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe‘s Lost in La Mancha (’02), about the calamitous undoing of Terry Gilliam’s first attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and Les Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (’82), about the arduous making of Werner Herzog‘s Fitzcarraldo (also ’82).

The Ghost of Peter Sellers is just as good and as necessary as these three. You really do have to watch it.

I was going to write about Medak’s film earlier this week, but I was depressed about being late to the party. I could have seen it at the 2018 Telluride Film Festival but I didn’t. I could have obtained a press screener earlier than I did. Bummed, man. Couldn’t get it up. I finally got going today.

A week-old discussion with a colleague:

HE: “Sellers was obviously the lunatic villain in this bizarre saga. Yes, they shouldn’t have made the damn film. Yes, it was a bad idea with a script that allegedly blew chunks. The only thing that was ready was the money. But Sellers was a crazy man.”

Colleague: “Sellers was crazy at times, but I honestly don’t think it was his behavior that ruined the film. And if that’s the case, why is he the villain?”

HE: “A producer says in the doc, ‘We all knew Peter was crazy, but we didn’t know how crazy.’

“Sellers was miserable during the shoot, but he was the powerhouse. He knew the difference between a good script and a bad or weak one. He wanted to have fun and do The Goon Show with Spike Milligan. But he had to know that the whole thing had a basic dubiousness and fragility.

“Yes, Medak saw that also, but he trusted in Sellers’ genius. Which was absurd, of course — if it’s not on the page it isn’t worth doing. Sellers played the innocent when he met Medak later on. ‘It was you and me vs. them,’ he recalled. Medak replied, ‘No, Peter. It was you.’

Fans aside, who would be dumb enough to vote for Kanye West for president? Conservative-minded African Americans who might otherwise vote for Trump? Not that anyone will regard his candidacy as anything more than a dopey ego-trip. He didn’t even have the resolve to announce during primary season.

In addition to the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins seriously contemplating a name change due to cultural concerns, a third topic of Native American identity and conversation is currently under review. Welch Foods Inc., the Concord-based company known for its grape juices, jams and jellies made from dark Concord grapes (as well as white Niagara grape juice), needs to gently, retroactively apologize for a racist advertising campaign from the 1950s than demeaned Native Americans. I’m speaking, of course, of the TV ads that featured the cartoon characters “Pow” and “Wow” and which utilized the slogan “woo-woo-woo-woo Welch’s!”**

** There are no YouTube capturing os the old Welch’s TV ads, but they were definitely made and broadcast. I’m not sure how many “woo”s were used in the ads — it could have been just two or three.

Hollywood Elsewhere is hoping and praying that Telluride ’20 will happen, and that a facsimile of an actual, real-deal award season will begin to take shape sometime around late October or certainly by early November, and that all will eventually end well.

2020’s Best Picture nominees will be judged and supported according to five determining factors: (a) how woke or welcome they are, or to what extent they focus on non-white or female characters, (b) how un-woke and potentially unwelcome they might be due to focusing on white-male characters, which are a generic no-no among Khmer Rouge cadres, (c) how good they are in terms of basic craft (directing, acting, editing, cinematography…I know, old-fashioned concept!), (d) how “desperate” Academy voters might feel in a COVID-damaged, take-what-you-can-get realm, and (e) whether or not they seem to defy the categories by way of occupying their own realm and passing alone some aspect of fundamental human truth.

I know nothing, of course. I’m just spitballing (yes, again), and I’m probably going to have to correct this post 15 or 16 times before 9 pm this evening.

I’m presuming that the top 12 contenders right now are (1) David Fincher‘s Mank (Netflix), (2) Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World (Sony), (3) Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater, (4) Thomas Kail and Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Hamilton (Disney), (5) Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix), (6) Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, (7) Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, (8) Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland (Searchlight), (9) Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods (Netflix), (10) George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix), (11) Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost (Screen Media) and (12) Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari (A24).

Jeremy Strong (Jerry Rubin) and Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman) between takes during filming of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Five of the 12 (Fincher, Sorkin, Howard, Lee, Wolfe) are Netflix releases, and three of these are paleface movies.

Contenders that focus on characters of color or women are Hamilton (non-European-descended actors portraying the Founding Fathers), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Da Five Bloods, Minari (Korean-American family struggling to hang on and stay afloat in ’80s Arkansas) and Nomadland (Frances McDormand as a roaming 60something woman of the highway).

Three of the Netflix movies — Mank, Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy — are about white characters and set decades in the past.

Is West Side Story going to be processed as a partly Puerto Rican tale, or will viewers and voters default to a shorthand notion that it’s a 63 year-old adaptation of a classic white-guy creation (Steven Spielberg, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, William Shakespeare)?

I don’t think Hamilton has a chance as it’s not really a film and was shot four years ago to boot. So in terms of the African American experience Lee and Wolfe are the only players, and the presumption is that the only stand-out Bloods contender is Delroy Lindo for Best Supporting Actor. Am I wrong?

A gut feeling is telling me that the five finalists are likely to be Mank, Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy, Nomadland and Stillwater. What do I know, right? Obviously the old school never-Netflix crowd isn’t going to be comfortable with this but what can they do about it?

Year in and year out my thinking is that high-calibre craft and emotional involvement are the most important factors, and that the old Tom Stoppard/Real Thing riff about “cricket bats” still applies.

Stoppard: “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

“This [cricket bat] here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly

“What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock it might…travel.”

In short, my hunch is that the cricket-bat factor is likely to be strongest with Stillwater, Hillbilly Elegy, Nomadland, Mank and The Trial of the Chicago 7. Just spitballing.