In their just-published Esquire chit-chat (8.13), which is about promoting One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 9.25), Leonardo DiCaprio says this to director Paul Thomas Anderson: “You’re considered a very art-house director. Would you call it that? What do you call it?”
Anderson: “Well, there’s no need to be insulting.”
DiCaprio: “No, what’s the term? You don’t do incredibly commercial movies, let’s put it that way. You are a writer, director. You have your own vision. What’s the term?”
Anderson: “Box-office challenged?”
HE translation: “Let’s face it — since Inherent Vice I’ve been red ink. Especially now in the case of One Battle After Another, which has dodged Venice and Telluride and is expected to more or less flop when it opens in late September. It cost a big pile of dough and, die-hard PTA mavens aside, nobody’s especially interested. Jordan Ruimy has declared it all but D.O.A. You can smell the lethargy in the social media chat threads.”
Anderson also delivers the best quote, which addresses the film’s theme as well as a general observation about getting older:
All I’m asking or hoping for is that the audience will be spared the default #MeToo trope, to wit: “The white middle-aged guy is odious, venal and reprehensible.”
Please don’t sink us into that fetid swamp yet again. Anything but that. Puhleeze.
If the 32 year-old Martin Scorsese, livid about the MPAA’s demand to cut much or most of the Taxi Driver shoot-out finale, had somehow stolen the original work print and thereby preserved the original look of this climactic sequence…if Scorsese had manned up and done this, he would’ve found himself in a heap of legal trouble but would nonetheless have behaved like a dude of resolve and consequence.
In Rebecca Miller‘s forthcoming Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV+, 10.17) the now 82-year-old director tells the story of this traumatic episode. He definitely intended to steal the work print, he says. He also bought a gun and was thinking of waving it around or something.
Scorsese should have somehow gotten hold of that Taxi Driver work print and sent it to a lab and copied it. At least that. His failure to preserve the original color scheme of that shoot-out scene was nothing short of an artistic tragedy. It remains a stain upon his legacy to this day.
On 3.11.11 I ran a piece called “Taxi Driver‘s Brown Blood“. It was about (a) Grover Crisp and Martin Scorsese‘s Bluray restoration of Taxi Driver (4.5.11). and more particularly (b) a technical question asked of Crisp by The Digital Bits‘ Bill Hunt.
Hunt asked about the brownish, sepia-tone tinting of the climactic shoot-out scene, which had been imposed upon Scorsese by the MPAA ratings board. Scorsese had always intended this scene to be presented with a more-or-less natural color scheme, in harmony with the rest of the film. Hunt to Crisp: “Why didn’t you and Scorsese restore the originally shot, more colorful shoot-out scene?”
“There are a couple of answers to this,” Crisp replied. “One, which we discussed, was the goal of presenting the film as it was released, which is the version everyone basically knows. This comes up every now and then, but the director feels it best to leave the film as it is. That decision is fine with me.”
HE response: “There can be no legitimate claim of Taxi Driver having been restored without the original natural color (or at least a simulation of same) put back in. The film was shot with more or less natural colors, was intended to be shown this way, and — with the exception of the shoot-out scene — has been shown this way since it first opened in ’75.
“There’s nothing noble or sacred about the look of that final sequence. The fact that it was sepia-toned to get a more acceptable MPAA rating is, I feel, a stain upon the film’s legacy.”
Crisp explained that even if Scorsese wanted to present the natural color version, the original Taxi Driver negative is gone and there’s no way to “pump” the color back in.
Steven Gaydos 2011 comment: “Jeff’s right that it’s a shame a filmmaker had to alter his film in order for it to be seen in wide release, but according to my in-house expert (Monte Hellman, who oversaw the digital restoration/release of his 1971 film Two Lane Blacktop), if the negative is gone, as Crisp clearly says it is, then ‘you can put the color in but it will never look right, and certainly won’t look anything like the original footage.'”
And that was that.
But two or three years later I came upon this image of the wounded Travis Bickle, and damned if it doesn’t look like the original probably did before the MPAA stepped in.
I wondered right away where it came from, and I asked myself “if someone could satisfactorily manipulate a single frame from that shoot-out sequence to make it look right and natural, why couldn’t someone manage the same trick for the whole sequence?”
But the trailer is certainly telling us that Marty Supremeisn’t a ping-pong competition movie, but a film about the power of positive thinking…confidence, swagger, self-promotion. There’s one little snippet of a ping-pong game — the rest is about Timothee Chalamet‘s Marty Reisman seducing or otherwise selling himself to women, businessmen, everyone.
The only “uh-oh” element is in the final clip…a massively obese guy (a Josh Gad lookaike) saying that the tangerine-colored ball is “an original [ping-pong] ball for an original guy. It’s the Marty Supreme ball, not the Marty normal ball.”
The problem is that by the standards of the late ’40s to mid ’50s, which is when table tennis maestro Marty Reisman was peaking, fat guys weren’t the size of circus tents. They looked like Jackie Gleason or Andy Devine or Oliver Hardy for the most part, and not like Jabba the frickin’ Hut…350-pound sumo wrestler types were pretty much confined to travelling circus side shows.
I’m a semi-fan of The Studio, but missed the “Cinemacon” episode, primarily because I was in Cannes when it aired on 5.14.25. And then I forgot about it or something.
I finally watched it a half-hour ago…excellent! The tonal atmosphere of hyper-aggressive farce is energized by the flickings of shroom psychedelia.
Posted on 2.17.25: “The second Boston Tea Party (the one on 15 Lansdowne Street, just off Kenmore Square and across from Fenway Park) was in business only a year and a half — July 1969 to December 1970. But man, what a hallowed place, what a holy temple of purification.
I attended several ear-pounding, spirit-lifting sets inside that fabled venue, but my most vivid memory isn’t musical — it’s my LSD freakout episode…a psychedelic meltdown that led to my forsaking hallucinogens forever and eventually renouncing marijuana. Yes, even that.
I was living with a crew of upper-middle-class drug dealers…friends from Wilton who were moving huge amounts of weed, heavy amounts of LSD inside clear plastic bags, and Vietnamese heroin. We lived in a large basement apartment at 467 Commonwealth Ave., and we all felt happy and churning and generally delighted with everything. Plus we were fastidious and flush and wore Brooks Brothers shirts….we had it all down.
On New Years’ Eve (’69 into ’70) we all attended a Boston Tea Party featuring the Grateful Dead and The Proposition, a Cambridge-based improv comedy group that featured Jane Curtin.
Except before walking over we all passed around a kind of rubber-lined goatskin container of Kool-Aid, which had been liberally spiked with LSD. Too liberally. It was soon apparent that the Kool-Aid was way more potent than anticipated, and roughly an hour into the Proposition set I began to feel increasingly anxious and creeped out, and then full-on paranoid.
I remember several details about the Curtin/Proposition performance as my psyche devolved into pudding. Curtin and and some schlumpy-looking guy played young married tourists from the Midwest who were experiencing Boston’s counter-culture scene for the first time, and feeling disoriented and a bit frightened.
Later in the set a comedy bit struck some kind of cosmic wowser chord, prompting a none-too-bright audience member to exclaim out loud, “Whoa, that’s heavy!” In response to which a Proposition performer looked at the guy and said “yeah, wow, man…too many tabs!”
That was me — too many ground-up tabs in the Kool-Aid had led me me into a place of, like, quaking disorientation. As in “uh-oh….uh-oh.” I began to feel as if I was standing next to a manhole-sized opening, and I knew that if I somehow fell into that hole I would lose my mind and never know sanity again.
Hunter S. Thompson knew this all too well. He called it “the fear.”
A month ago I learned I was afflicted with atherosclerosis….hardening of the arteries. So I arranged to submit to a stress test, the results of which might have warranted a balloon agioplasty and maybe a stent for good measure.
So I finally had the stress test done five days ago, and two days later I got the verdict. And it wasn’t alarming or even that concerning. My situation is “normal“, according to my primary care physician.
I don’t believe that altogether. I still think I need to do something about the plaque, which is what stents are supposed to be good for. But my diet has improved, and my bad habits have been amended. Well, some of them.
Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard opened exactly 75 years ago — August 10, 1950. Everyone involved is dead, of course, except for the intrepid Nancy Olson, who turned 97 a month ago.
The Paramount marketers who created the below newspaper ad on behalf of the Radio City Music Hall took the art of lying to new absurdist heights, of course. Sunset Boulevard remains one of the darkest and most acidic portraits of Hollywood psychology ever crafted, and they were selling a happy, smiling, lovey-dovey glamour ride.
The thing about Sunset Boulevard that doesn’t quite play in today’s terms is Joe Gillis‘s refusal to confide to Betty Schaefer what he’s up to — that he’s become a kind of screenwriting gigolo, living high on the hog with a 50 year-old silent movie star.
Gillis cares for Schaefer and vice versa — audiences can tell they’d be a good match — but he’s too consumed with self-loathing to let her know what’s up. That doesn’t figure. He was broke and ready to skip town when he met Norma Desmond. Now he’s hustling a rich meal-ticket while he plots his next move. What’s so shameful about that?
The first 30 minutes of Sunset Boulevard are sharp and catchy, and the last 15 are grand-slammy. But the middle 65 of this 110-minute film are a little slow and frustrating.
And why hasn’t Gillis insisted to Desmond that he has to be paid an actual weekly salary? If he got one he could save up enough to buy a new car and move back into his apartment and get his career going again, especially with Schaefer as his new writing partner.
Cameron Crowe: “There is a famous story from the first Hollywood screening of Sunset Boulevard [in 1950]. Louis B. Mayer [head of MGM] was standing on a stairway, railing about ‘How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?’ What did you say to him when you overheard all this?”
Billy Wilder: “I am Mr. Wilder, and go fuck yourself.”
Crowe: “What did he say to that?
Wilder: “He was astonished. He was standing with the great MGM bosses who were below him, there at the studio, Mr. [Eddie] Mannix and Mr. [Joe] Cohen. And that so astonished them, that somebody had the guts to say, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” [And that’s when] I knew that I had a good picture there. — from October 1999 Vanity Fair piece, “Conversations With Billy.”
Posted on 11.16.20: The famous animal bone sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey lasts one minute and 54 seconds. It shows the moment in which Moonwatcher (Dan Richter) discovers a certain killer instinct that will save his tribe from extinction.
My favorite part is the final six seconds, starting at 1:48. This is when Moonwatcher says “okay, that was cool, I now understand how to kill prey for food…and now that I’ve figured this out I’m going to throw the fucking bone in the air and forget about it.”
Which he does. And then he runs his fingers through the sand and starts…whatever, daydreaming. I love this part…”fuck it, fuck the bone, I’m not doing this all day, I’m taking a break.”
