Given the widespread loathing and the massive flop rejection of Madame Web, Dakota Johnson naturally has to distance herself from it (“who, me?) and more or less throw the carcass under the bus. Hence her chat with Bustle‘s Charlotte Owen (3.5.24):

“[Making Madame Web] was definitely an experience for me. I had never done anything like it before. I probably will never do anything like it again, because I don’t make sense in that world.” [Translation: ‘Nobody believed I was supergirl material….I look too passive or spacey or something.”]

“And I know that now. But sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’ But it was a real learning experience, and of course it’s not nice to be a part of something that’s ripped to shreds, but I can’t say that I don’t understand.

“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made — and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out — decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee. Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms.

“My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.”

A Gone With The Wind quartet (Olivia De Havilland, David O. Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier) during the 12th Academy Awards ceremony, held on the evening of Thursday, 2.29.40 (why a Thursday?) at the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove.

This can’t be the only decent color photo, but right now all I can find are unexceptional, run-of-the-mill black-and-white shots.

Passed along seven years ago by HE commenter “Stewart Klein“:

Posted on 11.27.14: Producer and former Paramount Pictures president Frank Yablans, who presided over that studio during its early-to-middle”70s golden period (The Godfather, Serpico, Paper Moon, Chinatown, The Godfather, Part II, Murder on the Orient Express) and then served as vice-chairman and COO of MGM/United Artists under Kirk Kerkorian, died earlier today at age 79.

Unlike his slightly older, still-living brother Irwin, a producer of second-tier “product” who was Billy Carter to Frank’s Jimmy Carter, the younger Yablans believed in class and quality. Alas, like almost every other producer, his record was hit-and-miss.

Frank produced Silver Streak (good comedy), The Other Side of Midnight (glitzy garbage), The Fury (second-tier DePalma), The Star Chamber (Peter Hyams crap) and Congo (crap).

Yablans also produced and co-penned screenplays for North Dallas Forty (a very good football film) and Mommie Dearest (classic, hilarious, over-the-top kitsch).

“My Neighbor Frank Yablans,” posted by Medium‘s Loren Kantor on 12.26.23.

Posted on 1.16.17 — slightly more than seven years ago:

HE commenter Bobby Peru has attempted a takedown of Frank Perry‘s Mommie Dearest, calling it a “florid embrassment” that uses “cheap, tacky artifice to generate cartoonish shocks” and “unintentional comedy.”

That’s been the prevailing rant against this film for decades, and it’s just as wrong today as it was 35 years ago. I explained what it actually is as concisely as I knew how.

“Mommie Dearest is maudlin soap-opera realism,” I replied, “overbaked but winkingly so, everyone in on the joke and yet taking it ‘seriously,’ and at the same time a melodrama that’s occasionally intensified and heightened to the level of Kabuki theatre.

“The comedy is not ‘unintentional,’ but at the same time it’s not really a ‘comedy’ — it’s a kind of hyper-realism with a campy edge.”

“If director Frank Perry had modulated Dunaway’s performance, some of the great lines — ‘No wire hangers EVER!,’ ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas!’ — wouldn’t have worked so well. Those lines are the stuff of Hollywood legend, right up there with Bette Davis saying “what a dump!” and Vivien Leigh saying “I’ll never by hungry again.”

Peru: “This post is quite amusing for a number of reasons, but I concur Dunaway is a legend for her finite run of the above mentioned films, which will go down in film history. However, to call Mommie Dearest ‘that great Frank Perry film’ is, at the least, oxymoronic, and at most a wild, almost unbelievable overstatement, especially coming from a ‘film Catholic’ like you, Jeff; the Movie Godz do not approve. Even Dunaway knows what a POS that florid embarrassment is; after years of rudely dismissing any journalist who would dare to even breathe the title, she finally discussed recently and blamed Perry for ruining her career by not working to ‘direct’ her performance, thereby leaving it unmodulated and Dunaway herself twisting in the wind (as if great, Oscar-winning actors can’t self-direct at least to a modicum).

“The movie is camp junk for a reason — because it is cheap, tacky artifice with one agenda, which is to generate cartoonish shocks. This has not stopped me and millions from enjoying it as such, but ‘great’ it most certainly is not unless you are referring to unintentional comedy.

“As for Dunaway herself, the Crawford turn bolstered by decades of diva behavior (my friend is her neighbor and has told many a story) well past her glory years has also contributed to why her career went to the toilet; too many grandiose notions about herself and a history of making lives difficult onset. I’ve heard first-hand stories of her dismissing acting students while auditing classes (‘They’re staring at me’) to parading up and down the aisle of a coach flight — get this — reading a script aloud. She is a major nut, great as she was.”

One of the most horrifying Orwellian wokethink images mine eyes have ever beheld…I’m serious, I was there and I fucking snapped this photo…a N.Y. Times video ad inside the Washington, D.C metro, which first appeared in February ’22. Only two years ago, and one reason why Biden has reason to fear the wrath of the electorate.

Welcome to episode #2 of “The Misfits” as HE’s Jeffrey Wells welcomes this weekend’s hotshot guests — Wilson Morales, editor and founder of Blackfiklmandtv, and comedy writer, former Fox News movie guy and “Talking Movies” cohost Bill McCuddy.

Topics include (a) the last and final Oscar predictions (we’re all very glad the season will be over after next Sunday night, 3.10), (b) reactions to Dune: Part Two, and (c) speculations about five or six March releases. Again, the link.

Click through to HE’s Substack page to watch, and please be good people by becoming paid subscribers next week and down the road.

I had a few chats with Dennis Wilson back in the mid ’70s, and one of those times we briefly discussed Monte Hellman‘s Two Lane Blacktop (’71). And I can tell you that Wilson wasn’t a fan. I can’t recite an exact Wilson quote as it happened too long ago, but his basic opinion was that Hellman had missed the potential…that he didn’t really understand what the film was about or didn’t appreciate the glory of high-octane engines….something like that. Wilson felt he understood the fast-car aesthetic better than Hellman, and that he understood more fully what it should have been about.

As mentioned two or three times I got to know Charles Bukowski a little bit in ‘ 87. This was during the post-production period on Barbet Schroeder‘s Barfly, which I wrote the press kit for.

I visited, drank with and “interviewed” Bukowski (sans notes, Truman Capote-style) in his Long Beach home sometime around…I don’t know, maybe March or April or even May. Barfly opened on 10.16.87.

Barbet made me rewrite the press kit over and over and over, so much so that I couldn’t read it after the tenth or twelfth revision. I came to hate hat press kit, but you know what? It’s one of the most tightly composed pieces of writing I’ve ever authored.

All to say that somewhere during this period I experienced by very first reading of Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart,” which I loved. Not as much as “The Genius of the Crowd” but still.

Originally posted on 7.28.08: Here’s a decent story about a celebrity-drinking incident, passed along second-hand by a friend. It involves Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart, as well as the non-drinking Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher**. It’s important to understand that no one had GPS on their phones, and that verbal driving directions were the law of the realm.

“It happened a week or two after the opening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” I was told. “Or sometime in late May or early June of ’08. Harrison, Calista, Demi and Ashton all went out to dinner. The latter two weren’t drinking but over the course of dinner Harrison and Calista had…I don’t know, two or three bottles of wine between them and got fairly loaded. Too drunk to drive, in any case. It was therefore decided — responsibly, intelligently — that Ashton would drive Harrison home in his car, and Demi would follow with Calista in her car.

“But somehow Demi lost Ashton at a traffic light, and Ashton and Harrison are now heading towards Ford’s home in the Pacific Palisades on their own, presuming that Demi will catch up. Except Calista has succumbed to the alcohol and passed out. Okay, ‘gone to sleep.’ Dead to the world, in any event. Demi tries to rouse her so she can get the directions and the address, but with no luck.” Wells note: STrange as it sounds, Demi hadn’t typed in the address on the GPS software on her Blackberry or iPhone before leaving the restaurant,

“So as she’s driving along, Demi starts prodding and shaking Calista with her right hand to wake her up to get the address, and as a result of the shoving the car slows down and weaves a bit, and as luck would have it a couple of patrolmen notice this and pull them over.

“Have you been drinking? the cops ask. No, Demi answers. I was trying wake up my passenger to get directions to her home. Has she been drinking? Demi doesn’t want to say, says she doesn’t know. The cops suspect inebriation despite Moore’s denials — “I haven’t been drinking! I don’t drink!” — and make her do the walk and touch her nose and all that.

“Meanwhile, Harrison and Ashton have arrived at Ford’s home. It’s been a little while and they’re wondering what’s happened to the ladies. Ashton calls Demi on her cell and by this time she’s being questioned by the cops and they’re saying ‘no answering the phone while you’re being tested for intoxication.’ Harrison says to Ashton, “You want an omelette? It’ll calm you down.” Uhh, not really, Kutcher replies, having just eaten an hour or so ago. Ford leads him into the kitchen anyway and starts on the omelette. ‘You want herbs? You want cheese? You want onions?’

“Back on the road, the combined efforts of Moore and the two cops finally wake Flockhart up. It’s like she’s coming out of a coma. One of the lawmen ask, ‘Do you know where you live?’ She gives them the address and they all get into their cars with the understanding that the bulls will escort Demi and Calista to the house.

“A few minutes later Harrison and Ashton see the flashing lights outside and respond as you might expect — “Oh my God, are you guys okay?,’ ‘What happened?,’ ‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’ The cops say goodnight and leave, all’s well that ends well, and everyone’s safe and sound. And Harrison says, ‘So…who wants an omelette?'”

** Moore and Kutcher met in 2003, married in ’05. After six years of marriage they separated in 2011. In 2015 Kutcher married former costar Mila Kunis. Moore is allegedly currently dating celebrity chef Daniel Humm.