After his debut in 1939’s Golden Boy, William Holden became a mid-range Paramount contract player who appeared in generic fare throughout the ’40s. The legend is that Holden broke through at age 32 in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard (and he did to some extent), but his career didn’t really take off until Stalag 17 (’53), for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. After that Billy Wilder film Holden was regarded worldwide as a major heavyweight movie star.
Over the next six years he made ten films that definitely mattered — The Moon Is Blue, Executive Suite, Sabrina, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Country Girl, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Picnic, The Proud and Profane, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Horse Soldiers. He kept working until his death in ’81, but from The Horse Soldiers on (or over the next 22 years) Holden only made six genuinely good films — The Wild Bunch, Wild Rovers, Breezy, Network, Fedora and S.O.B. Okay, seven if you want to count The Towering Inferno.
The idea of a guy nudging 80 becoming President…I’m sorry but it just doesn’t feel right. It’s not who Bernie is or what he stands for. Bernie started something big and persuasive three or four years ago, and now he’s not the only Democratic contender who believes in socialist-style approaches and remedies for the usual social ills. Full respect and stiff salute, but the Bernie brand can’t work again in ’20.
Together we can defeat Donald Trump and repair the damage he has done to our country. We need leadership that brings us together – not divides us up. pic.twitter.com/iCSNhM2FXD
After reading those brusque comments supplied by Scott Feinberg‘s “Brutally Honest Oscar Voter,” I found an even lazier, more intemperate, more short-fusey Academy member (his identity is so secret I can’t even mention the branch he belongs to) and got his reactions to Feinberg’s guy.
Rocketman (Paramount, 5.31) might approach the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, but I doubt it. It certainly won’t match or exceed it. Because while Rami Malek sounded almost exactly like Queen’s Freddie Mercury (his “voice” was a mixture of his own, Freddie himself and a gifted imitator), Taron Egerton sounds like a mediocre Elton John wannabe singing on a cruise ship. The effect doesn’t work, and the movie is going to suffer because of it.
On top of which I hate Egerton’s face — one look and I knew it needed punching — and I really hated those two fucking Kingsman movies and that godawful Robin Hood movie, which earned a 15% Rotten Tomatoes score and lost møney besides.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted an oral-history piece about how Harvey Weinstein‘s hard-charging and in some ways ethically shady Best Picture campaign for Shakespeare in Love overwhelmed the campaign for DreamWorks’ Saving Private Ryan.
It’s called “‘Harvey Always Wanted More’: Weinstein, Spielberg and the Oral History of the Nastiest Oscar Campaign Ever.”
Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t dispute that Weinstein’s Oscar-season blitzkreig was a key factor in Shakespeare in Love winning the Best Picture Oscar, but I’ve always suspected that the main reason was the fact that Saving Private Ryan caused its own defeat.
One, Ryan actually did peak during the 24-minute D-Day Omaha Beach sequence, and two, director Steven SpielbergCHEATED HIS ASS OFF with that early time-jump cut that suggests the old coot having an emotional breakdown in the Omaha Beach cemetery is either Tom Hanks or Edward Burns.
“Hanks is dead, the awful pretentious voice of the actor playing General Marshall is treacling away, we hear ole Honest Abe’s letter again and I am now waiting for the shot of Ed Burns with the big-boobed girls back at the cemetery.
“Why do I know that is coming? Well, only two members of the squad are left [at the end of the film], Burns and the cowardly translator, and I know it can’t be him because he was not with Hanks and the squad during the twenty-four minutes of glory at the start of the film. So ithastobeBurns standing there among the graves.
“Now the morphing shot comes, and I am looking at the old face of Matt Damon at the cemetery.
“Well, you can’t do that. Don’t you see, hewasn’tfuckingthere. He knew nothing of the attack on the beach, knew nothing of the odyssey that followed, and he never had a chance to hear about it. The only spare moment he had was when he was telling us all about his brothers and the ugly girl and setting the barn on fire.
“When he was great, and he was great, Spielberg was a phenomenal storyteller. All gone. That or he doesn’t care.”
“The greatest offense comes from Harrison Young‘s awful over-acting as the 75-year-old Ryan. His face is stricken with guilt as he shuffles through the Omaha Beach cemetery, and he walks like a 90-year-old afflicted with rheumatism.
To go by this trailer, the marketing strategy behind Leaving Neverland (HBO, 3.6 and 3.7) is to tred as lightly as possible. The allusions are vague but discernible if you listen carefully to what Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck are saying, and if you study their facial expressions, etc. I saw the four-hour doc in Park City last month so I’m past the allusion stage. There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that Michael Jackson began having man-child sex with these guys at very young ages — when Robson was 7 and Safechuck was 10. Diehard Jackson believers have been denying this all along, but I want to read their tweets after the doc airs.
A statement of temporary support for embattled Empire star Jussie Smollett was issued today by 20th Century Fox Television and Fox Entertainment. It said that Smollett “continues to be a consummate professional on set and, as we have previously stated, he is not being written out of the show.”
In other words, they intend to wait for a final, official and definitive confirmation about Smollett’s alleged complicity in staging a racially-motivated hate attack in Chicago on 1.29.19. Until then, everything’s cool.
There’s no question that the crime spree of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the bank-robbing desperadoes who killed nine police officers and several civilians, had to be stopped. On 5.23.34 they were ambushed and killed in a Louisiana backwater by a special posse consisting of four Texas-based lawmen (Frank Hamer, B.M. “Manny” Gault, Bob Alcorn, Ted Hinton) and two Louisiana officers (Henderson Jordan, Prentiss Morel Oakley).
A grim but necessary task, okay, but can someone please explain what was so cool and bad-ass about this? Firing 300-plus rounds into two people from a cover of bushes and whatnot, and generally cutting them into ribbons?
John Lee Hancock‘s The Highwaymen (Netfix, 3.29) seems to be selling da coolness. Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Gaulty (Woody Harrerlson) were grizzled and cussy old boys, but they had the balls and the moxie to do the dirty deed. Or something like that.
A whole different mythology was sold by Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie and Clyde (’67). Back then there was more of an oppressive socio-economic context — common rural people had been fucked over by the Depression and the predatory banks, and Bonnie and Clyde were wild and reckless enough to just steal whatever the hell they wanted.
Everyone remembers Denver Pyle‘s Frank Hamer — a joyless, moustachioed guy with a pot belly.
“Hollywood is now irrelevant. It was these six movie companies essentially were able to extend their hegemony into everything else. It didn’t matter that they started it. When it got big enough, they got to buy it.
“[But now and] for the first time, they ain’t buying anything. Meaning they’re not buying Netflix. They are not buying Amazon.”
“In other words, it used to be if you could get your hands on a movie studio, you were sitting at a table with only five other people. And so that table dominated media worldwide. That’s over.” — from a 2.18 interview with Recode‘s Kara Swisher.
Posted on 8.17.12: I was riding along last night with the radio on, and “Do You Know The Way To San Jose?” — the 1968 Burt Bachararch-Hal David pop tune that was sung most famously by Dionne Warwick — came on, and for some reason I started thinking about what the lyrics really say.
Here’s what they say: “I fucking quit…this town is too tough for me…this place is full of souless, grasping hustlers, and I’m too spiritual and self-respecting to make it with these hounds.”
This spirited bouncy little tune is basically an anthem for losers. It’s the opposite, spiritually speaking, of the Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind” or the hopeful go-getter optimism of “New York, New York” as sung by Liza Minelli and Frank Sinatra.
“Do You Know The Way To San Jose?” is akin to that line in the Atlanta Rhythm Section‘s “I’m Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight” that says “the rats keep winning the rat race.” Which is another way of saying “eff this noise and eff this scene…I’m going back to Bedford Falls where I have friends and loved ones.”
A song that is right between “Do You Know The Way to San Jose?” and “New York New York” is Peter Gabriel‘s “Don’t Give Up,” which was co-sung by Kate Bush.
“Fame and fortune is a magnet / It can pull you far away from home / With a dream in your heart you’re never alone / Dreams turn into dust and blow away / And there you are without a friend / You pack your car and ride away.”
I’ve heard these words spoken by many, many people in real life, and they were all saying the same thing, which is that they came to the big city with initial hopes and dreams, but they lacked the talent and the moxie (which is understood in some circles as “claw-your-way-to-the-top ambition”) and so they were packing it in and moving back to a smaller, less difficult pond. I was on the brink of this myself in the early days, but I grimmed up and doubled down and finally broke through.
The world is for the few.
A friend comments: “Interestingly Warwick was on CBS Sunday Morning this week and mentioned this song as the only one she truly hates.”
The great Tony Curtis died eight and a half years ago — on 9.29.10. A decade earlier I had a great little lunch-hour interview with the guy. It happened in a Starbucks at the Beverly Glen shopping plaza. Curtis wasn’t a dodger or side-stepper — all name-brand actors are bullshitters to some extent, but I didn’t sense much from him. Well, a little.
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Halfway through our session I handed Curtis a list of the 120 films he’d starred or costarred in and asked him to check the ones he’s genuinely proud of. He checked 18 — a fairly standard batting average. Screen actors who’ve made it big or starred in zeitgeist button-pushers (like Sweet Smell of Success or Some Like It Hot) are always sent the best scripts. For a few years at least.
Curtis didn’t check The Vikings. He didn’t check The Outsider. He checked Houdini. Every film he made after Spartacus in 1960 up until 1968’s The Boston Strangler, he didn’t check. He checked his role as a pair of mafiosos — Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter in 1975’s Lepke and Sam Giancana in the 1986 TV movie Mafia Princess.
I wrote in a March 2000 piece that Curtis enjoyed his hot streak from the early ’50s to roughly ’68 — a 16-year run. The truth is that Curtis’s streak had that special incandescence (critical huzzahs + big paydays) for only four or five years.
Curtis wouldn’t have becomes “Tony Curtis” if he hadn’t starred or costarred in Sweet Smell of Success (’57), The Vikings (’58), The Defiant Ones (’58), Some Like It Hot (’59), Spartacus (’60) and The Outsider (’61) — six films in all plus The Boston Strangler (’68) for a total of seven. Plus that great little voice cameo as Donald Baumgarten in Rosemary’s Baby.
Which leads to a question: Which present-day heavyweight actors are in the same position that Curtis was in the late ’60s? Actors or actresses who’ve done a lot of great work over the years, but who no longer have the heat and are most likely never going to enjoy a reoccurence. That probably covers the vast majority of above-the-title actors, but nobody ever said this town was a bowl of cherries.
“Few modern films are as riveting as Jonathan Demme‘s TheSilenceoftheLambs, which swept the 1992 Oscars and whose central villain (besides HannibalLecter) is the wannabe transsexual Jame Gumb (played by TedLevine) who happens to be a serial killer — a character, according to Demme, who simply hated himself and wished he was a woman.
“This brilliant and terrifying movie contained a handful of memorable movie characters (from Hannibal to ClariceStarling to Dr. FrederickChilton to U.S. Sen. RuthMartin to, yes, Jame Gumb) who are all in a swirling pitch-black thriller for adults and not starring in a public service announcement. It wasn’t concerned with ideology or representation (though in many ways it is a feminist movie), and its main focus was to simply tell a gripping story with everyone working at the peak of their craft.
“One gets the terrible feeling that this classic would never be made today, let alone win the Oscar, in our current culture where everyone is screeching about victimhood and inclusivity and representation and identity politics — all of which distort reality and have absolutely nothing to do with creating art.
