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Stallone-Schrader Connection

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I ran into Paul Schrader during Monday night’s Artificial after-party. I mentioned that I’d been moved by I Play Rocky, and Schrader immediately barked his general disapproval and lack of interest in even seeing it, partly because he never liked the original Rocky and doesn’t want to even flirt with going there again.

I then suggested on a whim that he might want to write (and perhaps even direct) his own version of I Play Rocky by way of Taxi Driver — how the 29 year-old Schrader, then living in Manhattan, battling chronic insomnia and visiting porn theaters because they were open 24/7…how Schrader came to write the landmark 1976 film, and then how it was financed by Michael and Julia Phillips and made by Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, Michael Chapman, Bernard Herrmann, et. al.

Just as I Play Rocky is a fascinating time-trip film about desperate struggle and fortuitous fate in the mid ’70s, Schrader’s Taxi Driver saga could work on similar terms, only in a darker, moodier vein.

Wiki excerpt: “Following a divorce and a breakup with a live-in girlfriend, Schrader spent a few weeks living in his car. After visiting a hospital for a stomach ulcer, he wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver in less than two weeks. “In the hospital this image came to me of a taxi cab,” Schrader later recalled, “and I said, ‘That’s me…I’m this kid locked up in this yellow box floating in the sewer, who looks like he’s surrounded by people when he’s absolutely alone.”

“Social Reckoning” Guillotine Drops at 9 am Eastern, 6 am Pacific

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Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning will begin showing commercially on Thursday afternoon (10.8) around 4 pm. With reviews surfacing early tomorrow, they will have been out and about for roughly 30 hours by the time the first show begins.

Jordan Ruimy sez: “Reviews will most likely be middling. Not hearing good things. Apparently it’s not a terrible movie — just very vanilla, milquetoast, flat-looking, no pizazz. Jeremy Strong‘s Mark Zuckerberg is apparently a minor player. Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison are the leads.”

Saint Peaked In The Mid to Late ’50s

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Eva Marie Saint‘s impactful acting career peaked in the 1950s, primarily due to her performance as the intrepid Edie Doyle opposite Marlon Brando‘s Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront (’54). Edie is a steely, kind-hearted 20something who gently prods Malloy to do the right thing when it comes to the brutal Hoboken corruptions of Lee J. Cobb‘s Johnny Friendly.

Secondly due to Saint’s sleek inhabiting of Eve Kendall, not just a double intelligence agent in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (’59) but also a woman who “goes stereo”, so to speak, as a provider of sexual pleasure for James Mason‘s Phillip Van Damm, a bisexual spy for the Russians, and then as a 20th Century Limited lover of Gary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill.

Saint’s first big score happened at age 29 with a significant Broadway stage role in Horton Foote‘s The Trip to Bountiful (’53). Two years later at age 31, she played the lover of the 40ish E. G. Marshall in Paddy Chayefsky‘s Middle of the Night. The same year she costarred in a televised version of Thornton Wilder‘s Our Town opposite Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra.

In ’56 she appeared in two dismissable paycheck roles — That Certain Feeling, a bullshit Bob Hope film, and in the nearly unwatchable Raintree County with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. But Saint rebounded with a powerful performance in Michael V. Gazzo‘s A Hatful of Rain (’57), a Manhattan drug-addiction drama opposite Don Murray, Anthony Franciosa and Lloyd Nolan.

Then came an uninspiring lover-of-Paul-Newman role in Otto Preminger‘s Exodus (’60). Next came a tragic role as Warren Beatty‘s lover in John Frankenheimer‘s All Fall Down (’62), followed by blah roles in The Sandpiper, The Russians Are Coming and 36 Hours. The 41 year-old Saint was reasonably sufficient as Yves Montand‘s lover in Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (’66). Her best role since her ’50s hot streak was a co-lead in Irvin Kershner‘s Loving (’70), in which she played George Segal‘s unsettled suburban wife.

Saint’s passing at age 102 was announced this afternoon. An actress of serious consequence.

Confessions of an Awestruck, Not-Smart-Enough “Artificial” Admirer

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I’m an ardent, true-fucking-blue admirer of Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial, which I saw last night with the aggressive A-crowd inside Alice Tully Hall. It rushes in and sweeps you up and carries you aloft, you bet.

It’s a “you are there” experience and then some…a sweeping, decades-spanning (2003 to ’23), multi-chapter, whizz-bang saga about how the AI monster was initially imagined and then created and refined on a step-by-step basis, and how it gradually became a self-educating, self-adapting, thoroughly sociopathic T-Rex that no one knew how to control, much less foresee what would come next.

Friendo: “I think it’s a major movie and, in a better world, would be an Odyssey killer. But we no longer live in that world.”

Make no mistake — Artificial is, from a certain perspective, an impressively brainy knockout. Authoritative and then some. And amusing here and there. And yes, a slow-building horror film.

On top of which Andrew Garfield‘s seductive, lightly swishy performance as OpenAI’s Sam Altman is magnificent. Altman is Artificial’s gay Darth Vader, and I loved every second in the pleasure of his company.

Garfield is being campaigned as a Best Supporting Actor contender, I’ve read, and I one am 110% behind this suggestion.

As I noted last July, Artificial is basically an innocent genius vs. corrupt tech bro origin story — about the journey of OpenAI brainiac Ilya Sutskever (Anora‘s Yura Borisov) and how OpenAI became a formidable industry player under CEO Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) when original funder Elon Musk pulled out, and also how the potential culture-killing malevolence of AI was foreseen…uhm, gradually.

Altman’s indifference to AI’s latent evil eventually resulted in a November 2023 boardroom coup in which Altman was abruptly whacked, but then reinstated days later.

The genius-nerd, savant-like Sutskever is a polyannic, socially fumbling dweeb; Altman, of course, is an agreeably smooth and manipulative bastard…an excellent villain.

The only problem is that Artificial, smirky and whipsmart and knee-deep-in-the-hoopla as it is, made me feel like a bit of a dumb-ass. It reminded me that I’m not smart enough, or perhaps that my eardrums aren’t attuned enough, to keep up with movies that are as dazzling, assured and powerhoused as this.

So don’t listen to me. I’m not a donkey but…well, maybe I’ll be a 95% or even a 100% fan when I see Artificial for the second time. Right now I’m an 80% to 85% fan.

I’d done my basic homework by reading Simon Rich’s 2025 screenplay a few weeks ago and by watching The AI Doc last March so I knew what was basically going on, but I’m not (and never will be) an A-plus student who sails through a final exam with absolute confidence. I’m a B student who has to go to an old, odd-smelling tutor’s home in the late afternoons in order to keep up.

So no, I’m not quite Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a movie-appreciation sense. I’m not Antonio Salieri either but I’m a little bit slower than the vaguely arrogant brainiacs few been that kid all my life, in a sense.

I really wanted to hear a certain Ilya line, allegedly spoken in the late teens, which states that AI is learning “the complete corpus opf all human knowledge.” When I read that line in Rich’s script I felt a slight thud…an uh-oh feeling. Alas, the film doesn’t have it.

For what it’s worth, a critic friend who really loved Artificial has confided that he didn’t quite follow every line of pinpoint, ahead-of-the-curve dialogue.

And a filmmaker friend whom I spoke to at the after-party said that for him “too much was unclear.” So maybe I’m not so dumb.

The thing about The AI Doc that I responded to was that co-directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell aimed their narration at the none-too-brights. I would have appreciated Artificial a tiny bit more, perhaps, if there had been a dumb-assed character who needed stuff to be explained to him/her. And then re-explained.

David Ehrlich: “The Social Network was a movie about an asshole. Artificial is a movie about the Antichrist.”

Excerpt from 17-year-old HE review of Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity:

“For most viewers, I suspect, Duplicity will be talked about as a corporate mindgame confection — not a ‘thriller’ per se (there’s only one sequence in which the tension is seriously cranked up) but a movie that is truly expert at delivering a series of dry little fake-outs and doing quick little leap-frogs over your expectations.

“I had a seriously pleasurable time watching it — don’t get me wrong. It’s an amazingly sharp and sophisticated and well-honed thing. As far this sort of adult international chess-game tends to play, it’s quite delicious.

“The issue, for me and for potential viewers who have similar tastes and attention spans, is that the serious pleasure happened the second time I saw it. The first time? Not as much.

“The problem, I confess, was more mine than Gilroy’s. I’m just not smart enough, you see, to get or enjoy all the twists and curve balls and keep the whole equation proportionately focused and sussed. Slow guy that I am, it was just too much work. Not all the time or even for much of the running time. I’m not a complete moron. But every so often I felt a bit burdened and blurry of mind. I felt overly fucked with, to put a point on it.

“Wait a minute, is this…wait, is that what’s going on? I guess so, okay. But then why….?”

“Unlike, I should add, my brilliant ex-wife Maggie, who had no trouble keeping up, and unlike the Einstein-level N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, who had the audacity to write in his review this morning that Duplicity “ends more or less as you always suspected it would.” (What?).

“A good mystery flick (or more precisely a good what-the-fuck-is-going-on? movie) is supposed to work on a dog-race principle. The audience is the dog pack and the stuff you’re trying to figure out is the artificial rabbit. The rabbit is always supposed to be just ahead of the dogs, but never so far ahead so that they lose hope and start to give up.

“Put simply, my first Duplicity experience made me feel like the dumb dog sitting in the back row in math class in seventh grade. I haven’t felt that way in a long time. Because I was, in fact, that dumb kid, and it took me years to get past that image of myself as a guy who would never get good grades or go to a good college, who would never be very good at sports, who would never drive a slick car or get to disrobe those wonderfully busty blonde girls who always hung out with the jocks.”

“Great Movie” — Seasoned, Seen-It-All, Done-It-All Filmmaker After Last Night’s L.A. Screening

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Morning-after assessment: “The audience of Hollywood insiders were frequently cheering as if seeing the original Rocky movie.

“The speculation at the post-screening reception was all about the film winning the Best Picture and Best Screenplay Oscars.

“Peter Farrelly commented that while the original Rocky film was a superb work of pure fiction, the script for I Play Rocky immediately attracted him because it’s a larger-than-life but completely true story.”

The screening was at the Crescent Theatre (100 No. Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210).

Led Zeppelin’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”

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How could Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Inarritu have even fantasized that Digger might connect on some primal level with Joe and Jane Popcorn? They had to know it would sink like a stone. I know these guys — they’re too sharp not to have foreseen this.

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When Casting Got In The Way Of Excellent Writing

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Choice dialogue from Paddy Chayefsky‘s Middle of the Night (1959 — an all but forgotten film that STILL hasn’t been HD-upgraded and which you STILL can’t stream — it’s only available on a DVD:

Fredric March‘s Jerry, a miserable, widowed Manhattan business owner in his mid 50s: “Listen, sonny boy. Love, no matter how shabby it may seem, is still a beautiful thing. Everything else is nothing.”

Albert Dekker‘s Walter Lockman: “I haven’t had ten cents worth of life! Not a dime…believe me! When they bury me, they can put on the gravestone, ‘This was a big waste of time.'”

Originally posted on 8.8.10: I’ve been a Paddy Chayefsky fanatic for as long as I can remember, but I waited until ’08 to see Middle of the Night (’59), a melancholy May-December romantic drama.

Directed by Delbert Mann, it costarred Fredric March and Kim Novak with Albert Dekker, Martin Balsam and Lee Grant supporting.

Chayefsky adapted it from his 1954 Philco-Goodyear live-TV drama, which costarred E.G. Marshall and Eva Marie Saint in the March-Novak roles. It was also presented in ’56 on the Broadway stage with Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands in the lead roles.

Middle of the Night is a dirge — the kind of movie that you can easily respect but otherwise requires a certain effort to get through.

Right away I was telling myself “this is good but I’m not enjoying it, but I’m determined to stay with it to the end because it’s a Chayefsky thing and is obviously well acted, especially by March and Novak and Albert Dekker, and because it has some fascinating 1959 footage of midtown Manhattan and yaddah-yaddah.”

It’s about Jerry (March) having an affair with Betty (Novak), an insecure 24 year-old divorcee. It’s a grim, grim film — even the off-screen sex feels like a vague downer of some kind. But it also feels honest and even courageous in the sense that relatively few 1950s films painted frank portraits of big-city despair and depression.

When I say “well-acted” I mean according to the mode and style of 1950s acting, which tended to be on the formalized, speechifying, strait-laced side. (Which is why the internalized styles of Brando, Clift and Dean were seen as huge breakthoughs.) I found myself wishing that Mann had asked everyone to tone it down a bit. Nobody mutters or stammers or speaks softly, or struggles with a thought.

Middle of the Night is about loneliness and guilt and fear of social judgment…a fear that you’re not behaving as you should or as your family wants you to behave.

There’s also the opposing notion that you may as well lunge at whatever shot at temporary happiness that comes along because life basically sucks and no one gets out alive.

It feels cleansing to come upon an Eisenhower-era drama that admits that a fair percentage of people are miserable (even or perhaps especially those who are married) and which explores this situation in some detail, and with the usual blunt eloquence that you get from any Chayefsky work.

Everyone in the cast (including Grant and Balsam as March’s daughter and son-in-law) walks around with a certain melancholy under their collar, unhappy or at least frustrated but committed to keeping up “appearances.” God, what a self-torturing way to live!

Here’s the problem: A drama about a love affair has to have some kind of basic chemistry going on. There are some couples you can accept as lovers in a film or a play, and others you just can’t. And I’m sorry but I was having real trouble with March and Novak doing the nasty. Just writing that sentence creeps me out even now.

There are some people you’d rather not think about in a sexual context and the older March, beginning with his performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (’46), is one of them — no disrespect intended.

His Middle of the Night character is supposed to be in his mid ’50s but March was around 61 or 62 when the film was shot, and he was evidently never much of a 24 Hour Fitness guy to begin with. By today’s standards he looks at least 70 if not older.

So it feels very weird and strange that Novak would even half-entertain the idea of doing this guy. Then again March always seemed genuine and grounded as an actor — you always believed he really felt what he was saying.