Jeff Wells

Hollywood Elsewhere regrets that the life and career of French director and Cannes favorite Laurent Cantet has ended too soon. The poor guy was only 63. Cantet was a social realist with a frequent focus on workplace and labor issues. The standouts were Human Resources (’99), Time Out (’01), Heading South (’05) and the Palme d’Or-winning The Class. I can’t remember which film or year, but for me Cantet’s most memorable scene involved a pair of late middle-agers, a man and woman who may or may not have been married, who were suddenly laid off from their jobs, and held each other intensely as they openly wept.

If anyone knows what I’m thinking of, please advise.

It is HE’s contention that the two most depressing paragraphs ever written for a trade piece about the general state of the movie industry…said paragraphs can be found, trust me, in “Why It’s Never Been Easier to Land in Director’s Jail,” a 4.24 Hollywood Reporter article by Mia Galuppo. It’s basically about certain harsh, sudden-death judgments currently prevailing in the big studio realm.

Here’s the one-two punch…paragraphs #8 and #9…strap yourselves in:

“[Nowadays] new talent must deliver multiple successful projects in a row, sans slip-ups, before being afforded the grace (albeit only so much) to fail at the studio level. Says a top manager with a stable of studio directors of the gauntlet for filmmakers, ‘You basically get one shot [at proving yourself], three times in a row.'”

“For their part, executives offer that there is a dwindling number of working directors, even those with a bomb or two, [who] can be trusted with bigger budgets to deliver on time, on budget and on brand. Stuntperson-turned-director David Leitch is at the top of studio wish lists as someone who is able to direct entertaining films while having a great relationship with talent.”

David Leitch directs entertaining films? Since when? If you’re a brainless dork perhaps, but if you’re saddled with that terrible, bordering-on-lethal virus called ‘taste’. Leitch’s movies are a nightmare. And yet he couldn’t be doing better.

That’s really it, man….good God…game over. An entertainment or diversion industry that worships a soulless, mechanized, empty-coke-bottle hack like Leitch has become so submerged in shallow cynicism that there’s really no recovery scenario…the old idea of movies being an occasional delivery system for spiritual oxygen…if there’s one thing that David Leitch-ism stands for, it’s a conviction that movies are best de-oxygenated…that studios need to commit to eliminating those emotional potions that Joe and Jane Popcorn used to treasure and pay for back in the day.

From HE’s 8.2.22 review of Leitch’s Bullet Train:

“Bullet Train is looking to excite those tens of millions of action fans who despise the idea of realistic action (you know, the kind with roots in that tedious realm that exists right outside the theatre doors or when you take off your headphones and turn off your Playstation games), and if it winds up making money, great.

“Because that’s who and what Leitch is — a man of impudence and conviction and hunger who’s out to make money. And Sony loves him for that. And Brad Pitt, who was allegedly paid $30 million to star in this thing, is almost certainly swooning with affection

“I’m not saying Bullet Train is a bad, empty, cynical, unfunny, idiotic, overwrought, soul-polluting film (although it is). I’m saying I’m not in this. Bullet Train wasn’t made for people like me. It was made in order to sell tickets to people with a jaded (corrupted?) sense of taste in this stuff, but the secondary motive (and Leitch will be the last one to deny this) is to make people like me feel poisoned and bored and drained while watching it.

“That’s how I felt last night, all right. But it doesn’t matter because action movie fans with standards don’t matter. The entire corporate movie-making, escapist-driven culture of 2022 is brushing away the lint of my opinions as we speak. Go away, you grumpy-ass fuck.

“Pay no attention to sourpusses like myself. I am like a crust of bread left over from a half-eaten chicken salad sandwich that’s sitting on a crumb-filled plate in a truck-stop diner somewhere in Indiana. Nobody cares about that crust, but they do care about the cinematic visions of David Leitch!”

Observation #2: What’s up with illustration for this article? My first reaction was that a director’s chair being consumed by flames seems like an admission by Galuppo and THR editors that many if not most directors today are writhing in a kind of hell. My second reaction was that it represents that age-old saying “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Observation #3: Galuppo doesn’t name any directors who may be residing in director’s jail, but I’m truly sick over the idea of David Leitch ruling the roost while certain directors who really have or certainly had something going on…directors like Cary Fukunaga, John McTiernan, Terry Gilliam, Shane Carruth, Tony Kaye, Alex Proyas, Brad Bird, Tom Hooper, Martin Brest, Tomas Alfredson and Terry Zwigoff (to name a few listed this morning by Jordan Ruimy)…the idea of directors of this calibre cooling their heels in movie jail is, at the very least, moderately revolting.

Observation #4: On 7.11.14 I posted the following about director-screenwriter-comedian Mike Binder…

Variety‘s Steven Gaydos responded as follows:

“Coincidentally, while researching a piece on comedy directors I recently discovered that Binder’s real sin is not the Sandler gig, but to not have had that Wedding Crashers breakout hit that everyone’s studio exec jobs are depending on. But making lean and mean, smart, touching, human-centered films doesn’t get you that spot at the head table like it should. As Johnny Cash said, ‘I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way.'”

The New York turnaround aside, Harvey Weinstein will remain in the slam in Los Angeles, where he’s serving a 16-year sentence following a 2022 conviction for sex crimes (forcible rape, forced oral copulation, sexual penetration by a foreign object). Weinstein was sentenced in Los Angeles on 2.23.23.

I don’t believe that pro-Gaza, pro-Palestinian protestors nationwide (NYU, Columbia, USC) are primarily driven by anti-Semitism, although anti-Semitism is almost certainly lurking. I think that occupying or otherwise encamped students are angered by the slaughter of Gaza non-combatants (including thousands of kids) by Israeli forces. That’s a humanitarian thing, not a tribal thing. The cops aren’t the bad guys, of course.

This is what college students do…what they did in the ’60s and early ’70s, what they’re doing now, what they’ll be doing 20 or 50 years hence.

NYPD Assistant Chief James Mccarthy and a few officers are chased by protestors after making an arrest at NYU last night.

Mccarthy is seen attempting to get inside the NYU Catholic Center, but couldn't open the door. He eventually finds an unlocked door around the corner.… pic.twitter.com/WVVriOBbMP

— Peter H (@peterhvideo) April 24, 2024

USC COPS VIOLENTLY ARRESTING@palyouthmvmt organizer. Protest turned violent at the University of Southern California (USC) campus. pic.twitter.com/JBGmflYV95

— Channel3 Now (@channel3nownews) April 24, 2024

This is NOT what vile antisemitism looks like. The media is not being fair and even handed about the Columbia campus protests. https://t.co/hyFeyy2LDd

— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) April 24, 2024

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This morning I accidentally sliced into the tip of my left index finger. An Exacto knife…don’t ask. You think Tony Perkins coped with a bloody bathroom situation in the wake of Janet Leigh‘s stabbing death in Psycho? Nothing compared to what I was dealing with an hour ago. It’s all bandaged up now and will be more of less healed in four or five days.

I immediately flashed on the Yubitsume scene at the end of Sydney Pollack and Paul Schrader‘s The Yakuza (’74), in which Robert Mitchum‘s “Kilmer” slices off half of his pinkie finger as a gesture of regret.

Yubitsume or “finger shortening” is a Japanese ritual to atone for offenses to another, a way to be punished or to show sincere apology and remorse to another, etc. In The Yakuza Kilmer is offering a gesture of apology to Ken Takakura‘s “Ken Tanaka” fof having brought pain into his life.

Pollack depicts this amputation as akin to a skin prick from a rose thorn. In actual life Mitchum would be covered with spurting cherry-red vino…splattered all over his suit plus the table, tablecloth and floor. I just went through a relatively minor sliced-finger episode and it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

All to say that if I’m ever in Tokyo again (unlikely) and I somehow wind up bringing great pain into the life of a close Japanese friend, I’m not cutting my finger off as a way of saying “sorry, bruh”. The offended guy will have to take my word of it.

I’m sorry to have missed last weekend’s Los Angeles showing of a freshly restored 4K version of North by Northwest, which will be the basis of a forthcoming 4K UHD Bluray that will street late this year. Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1959 classic screened Saturday afternoon (4.20) under the auspices of the TCM Classic Film Festival.

I presumed the TCM NXNW screening was a premiere. (Distributors routinely debut new restorations at TCM Classic Film Festival.) Which is why I was thrown when I discovered yesterday that a “4K restoration” of North by Northwest played at the Film Forum roughly five months ago (late October-early November).

This morning I called the Film Forum and was told by a seemingly knowledgable employee that the restored 4K version of NXNW that played at the West Houston Street theatre last fall was the same version that played last Saturday at the Chinese on Hollywood Blvd.

The employee mentioned that FF senior programmer Bruce Goldstein, who’s also involved with the TCM Classic Film Festival, had finessed the booking, etc.

And yet this didn’t seem right. Why would Warner Bros. Discovery, which oversaw the NXNW restoration and will release the 4K UHD disc…why would they present a freshly minted NXNW 4K restoration at the Film Forum five months before the big TCM Classic Film Festival debut?

Then again, the FF page plainly states “4K restoration.”

Just before last weekend’s TCM showing I reached out to George Feltenstein, WBD’s in-house archivist and restoration hotshot (his technical job title is WBD Library Historian). I wanted to learn about the technical details of the restoration and when the disc might be released, etc.

I didn’t hear back until this afternoon. I was informed as follows by email:

Sentence #1: “The version of North by Northwest that was shown at the TCM Film Festival last weekend is a brand-new scan from the original camera negative, using a new scanner adapted for VistaVision.”

Sentence #2: “To confirm, this is not the same version of the film that played at Film Forum last year.”

Yet another team — New Regency, director John Hillcoat, screenwriter John Logan — is trying make Cormac McCarthy‘s “Blood Meridian” (’85) into a movie.

Don’t they understand this is an all-but-unfilmable property?…that the history of failed adaptations stretches back at least 25 years?…that Joe and Jane Popcorn lack the constitution to cope with frank depictions of such a blistering and ultra-violent book?

“The black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowie knife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the ex-priest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast.”

Producer Scott Rudin has been riding herd on a Blood Meridian adaptation for many, many years.

In the late ’90s, Tommy Lee Jones acquired the adaptation rights to the story and subsequently rewrote Steve Tesich‘s 1995 screenplay. Never happened, deemed too violent.

Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan entered discussions with Rudin for adapting “Blood Meridian” with Paramount Pictures financing. Abandonedm, too violent, etc.

James Franco took a crack at McCarthy’s novel in 2011. He shot 25 minutes of test footage starring Scott Glenn, Mark Pellegrino, Luke Perry and Dave Franco. Never went anywhere.

On 5.5.16 Variety reported that Franco was negotiating with Rudin to write and direct an adaptation to be brought to the Marché du Film, starring Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D’Onofrio. Nope.

I’m presuming that the partly-diseased, woke-stricken HE commentariat is going to respond to this frank and seemingly fair-minded video essay by attacking me.

Let me say two things before this discussion begins. One, to the best of my knowledge Angelina Jolie‘s daughter Shiloh is not trans. And two, the preemptive HE attackers probably need to go fuck themselves. Because like it or not, there really are an awful lot of trans kids being raised by celebrities, and it’s certainly fair to ask why.

Bill Maher in ’23: “Yes, part of the reason for the rise in LGBTQ numbers is from people feeling free enough to tell it to a pollster, and that’s all to the good. But some of it is ‘it’s trendy.’

“If you attend a small dinner party with [some] typically liberal, upper-income Angelenos, it’s not uncommon to hear parents who each have a trans kid, having a conversation about that. What are the odds of that happening in Youngstown, Ohio? If this spike in trans children is all natural, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.”

There are reports that Megan Fox has three bio-boys who identify as trans girls. The odds of this happening naturally are astronomical.

Talk about priceless remnants of ancient civiizations and the various complications (ethical and otherwise) that ensue when a very special remnant is discovered…

Jean Negulesco‘s Boy on a Dolphin (’57) is about as far away from Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera as you can get. The first Hollywood film shot in Greece, this 20th Century Fox release is square, schmaltzy, simplistic, sentimental and very strongly opposed to any sense of native authenticity.

Set in Hydra, Sophia Loren is a poor local girl with great boobs, Alan Ladd is a good-guy archeologist with shimmering blonde hair, and Clifton Webb is a nefarious sophisticate with links to the black market.

The only anecdote I can recall is the one about a two-inch height disparity between Ladd and Loren (who was making her English-language debut).

Wiki excerpt: “The dissimilarity in heights between the 5 foot, 8 inch Loren and 5 foot, 6 inch Ladd led to complications. Some of their scenes together required him to stand on a box; another forced a trench to be dug for Loren when the pair walked along the beach.”

I missed Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and then again in Telluride eight months ago, but I finally saw it at the Jacob Burns on Sunday night and man, it has a real unwashed, hand-to-mouth, transportational spirit thing going on.

It’s about the ancient past (Etruscan artifacts) being dug up in Tuscany and sold and exploited by lowlife scruffs, and how this all shakes down in a moralistic or fable-like sense. It doesn’t pay off emotionally, or at least not in a way that I recognize, but it almost does. And it definitely feels whole by the end — I can say that for sure.

Rohrwacher, her dp Hélene Louvart (who mostly shoots within 1.37 and 1.66 aspect ratios), editor Nelly Quettier and the mostly tramp-like, generally unattractive cast (except for the radiant Carol Duarte, a Brazilian actress playing a kind of Gelsomina- or Guilietta Masina-like innocent, and the white-haired, eternally beautiful Isabella Rosellini)…Rohrwacher and friends are definitely up to something here.

Tall, pale-faced, unshaven Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a kind of artifact whisperer — a filthy British-born bilingual fellow who smokes all the time, wears dirty clothing and ugly footwear and shuffles around with one of the worst haircuts in movie history.

But Arthur is about more than just stinky socks and rancid cigarette breath — he can sense or smell where Etruscan artifacts (sculpture, goblets, statues, frescoes) are buried, and so most of the film is about Josh guiding a band of tomb robbers on illegal digs. Their findings are sold to a sinister art dealer (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s older sister), and that’s how they make ends meet.

La Chimera is about hundreds upon hundreds of spirit elements coexisiting in a hungry, dirt-poor realm without showers or deodorants or laundromats…the soiling and pirating of ancient remnants by low-life scuzzies…buried Etruscan pottery and tiled floors and erotic figurines…soil whispers, dusty ghosts.

Ethical conflicts abound, of course, but what matters is treating the past with care and reverence and allowing others to bask in its beauty. I don’t see what’s so bad about selling found history. As long as the artifacts are respected and not hoarded, what’s the problem?

It took me a good half hour before I got past O’Connor’s smelly feet and disgusting cigarette smoking and began to realize where the film is headed — before it hit me that it’s a casting a kind of underclass spell that really takes hold…that it’s a La Strada-like adventure or dirt poem, a half-fantasy or fairy tale about wretched refuse types looking to survive as best they can and not fretting about ethical issues…about digging up Etruscan pots and cups and marble statues and you-name-it…poor folks sifting through soil in Tuscany’s hidden regions (i.e., the kind that tourists rarely gaze upon).

Talk about a curious turn-on mechanism but this is Rohrwacher’s signature…she takes all kind of disparate, haunting, non-hygenic elements and throws them together like a salad maker…nothing is the least bit glammy or posed or polished or conventionally alluring…everything is half-assed, raggedy-assed…the sublime merged with the ugly.

La Chimera features one of the ugliest coastline super-sized factories I’ve ever seen in my life — it reminded me of a coastline factory in Piombino, a working-class town where tourists catch the ferry to Elba.

La Chimera has a real sense of spirit. Rohrwacher (her first name is pronounced Ahh-LEE-chuh) really goes for the off-handed, the weird, the gunky, the untidy, the muddy. It’s not exactly pleasant, but is kind of wonderful all the same.

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…but dear God, it feels so good when Alec Baldwin slaps Crackhead Barney and Friends‘ phone…I would have held myself in check, but my God, what a wonderful thing it can be to swat a mosquito.

White devil Alec Baldwin attacked me
While I was trying to get coffeee pic.twitter.com/qebME0V4Wl

— Crackhead Barney & Friends (@CHBAF) April 22, 2024

This 1976 Benefit Blowout poster was posted on Facebook this mornhing by musician and old friend Eric Pearson. It was composed by the late Chris Browne (Hagar the Horrible). His older brother, fellow cartoonist and extraordinary musician Chance Browne, passed away a few weeks ago. Notice the “Black Wells Fiasco” logo at the bottom left.

The below photo ran in the Wilton Bulletin in early August ’76. It accompanied a story about a then-upcoming Save The Whales concert, which then-girlfriend Sophie Black (on my left) and I co-produced, and which was held on a hilly 52-acre farm owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The focus of the story was that a portion of the proceeds would be donated to Camp PIP, a non-profit that offered recreational facilities help to lower-income kids.

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