“Believe in the possibilities and not the obstacles. Do not believe the lies they tell about us. Believe in the stories you have inside and believe that we all can make a difference.“ — the great Guillermo del Toro upon receiving a Hollywood Walk of Fame sidewalk star.

I’ve mentioned two or three times that HE’s gold-toe sock problem stretches back 25 years to Pulp Fiction. I had come to despise gold-toe socks based on my own experience and certain aesthetic standards that I began to develop and refine during the late ’70s and ’80s, but when I saw that John Travolta was wearing a pair during the famous “twist dance contest” sequence with Uma Thurman, that’s when I said to myself, “Jesus H. Christ, something has to be done…I mean, somebody has to stand up.”

Did I say something right away? No, I waited until 2012, but at least I made it a thing, and I kept at it.

Everyone out there who believes mega-billionaire Larry Ellison is going to allow Annapurna Pictures, the production and distribution company headed by Megan Ellison, to fall into bankruptcy and general disrepute, please raise their hands.

“Multiple sources” have told Deadline‘s Mike Fleming and Dominic Patten that Annapurna “has burned through much of the $350 million credit facility the company secured in fall 2017,” and that “those sources said Annapurna has either defaulted or is about to default on that debt” and that “a deadline has been set by lenders for this week to come to a solution.”

The solution is that Larry, the fourth-richest human in America and seventh-richest in the world with a fortune estimated at $65 billion, will step in and reinvest in Megan’s company. He’s not going to just sit there and watch the ship sink. Then again something fundamental about the company’s progressive-vision-in-the-sky investment aesthetic will presumably have to change.

Fleming/Patten: “Bankruptcy would be a major embarrassment for Megan Ellison, and several sources familiar with the issues felt her father wouldn’t allow that.”

Megan Ellison memo to staff, circulated earlier today: “Restructuring deals with financial institutions is not uncommon, yet the process is usually handled without a spotlight on it. Fortunately/ unfortunately, people like to write about me and my family. That said, it is of tremendous importance to me that you all know we are as committed as ever to this company and are in full support of our future.”

Things have been downswirling for Annapurna since the crash and burn of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit two summers ago ($34 million cost, $24 million worldwide earnings). Adam McKay‘s Vice (which I loved) didn’t pan out financially ($60 million cost, $78 million worldwide haul). Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk brought in $20 million worldwide on an investment of $15 million. I thought the popular-with-cool-critics Booksmart, which cost $6 million, might become some kind of Superbad-level hit but nope. Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer cost $9 million but only brought in $5.5. million worldwide. Everyone seems to share concern that Annapurna’s next release, Richard Linklater‘s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, will probably underperform if not tank.

“Plant your feet, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth” solution: Larry and Megan agree to bring in Hollywood Elsewhere as a senior consultant with veto power over all projects. If I don’t like a script or where the development is going, it’s history. I guarantee you things would change under this arrangement, and that super-toney, progressive-minded, representation-driven prestige projects would have a much harder time of it, you bet. For I can smell trouble a mile away. I’ve always had this knack. Plus I know everyone and everything, and I’m a “man of the people” — the culture flows and churns within my system on a daily basis. Plus I occasionally eat hot dogs.

“Make no mistake, my friend — we’re in the midst of a full-scale invasion here.”

So says rightwing radio host Lionel Macomb (Steve Coogan) at some point in Hot Air (Lionsgate, 8.23). The basic premise feels like a Trumpian pancake-flip of Oliver Stone‘s Talk Radio with Macomb dealing with family issues, particularly his 16-year-old niece, Tess (Taylor Russell). Frank Coraci is a longtime Adam Sandler collaborator who’s directed The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy, Around the World in 80 Days, Click, Zookeeper and The Ridiculous 6. The screenplay is by Will Reichel.

Just when I was wondering why I hadn’t heard about Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life appearing at any of the early-fall festivals, I was told it will in fact screen at Telluride. Which makes sense as a fair number of critics praised it in Cannes, not to mention Fox Searchlight having paid at least $12 million to acquire it.

HE’s new Telluride rundown is as follows:

Marriage Story, d: Noah Baumbach
Ford v Ferrari, d: James Mangold
Judy, d: Rupert Goold
Uncut Gems, d: The Safdies
Motherless Brooklyn, d: Edward Norton
A Hidden Life, d: Terrence Malick
The Truth, d: Kore-eda
The Aeronauts, d: Tom Harper
Wasp Network, d: Olivier Assayas
The Two Popes, d: Fernando Mereilles
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, d: Celine Sciamma
Pain and Glory, d: Pedro Almodovar
Parasite, d: Bong Joon-ho
Beanpole, d: Kantemir Balagov
The Whistlers, d: Corneliu Porumboiu
First Cow, d: Kelly Reichart
Varda by Agnes, d: Agnes Varda

Possibly Scott Burns‘ The Report. Possibly Werner Herzog‘s Family Romance LLC. And possibly the new Todd Haynes. And possibly Michael Covino‘s The Climb.

In a tweet deploring the Venice Film Festival’s decision to screen Nate Parker‘s American Skin under the fest’s “Sconfini” banner, Memphis Film Festival senior programmer Miriam Bale added that the Venice honcho Alberto Barbera “is a strident version of a quiet backlash that I see everywhere now, especially in liberal film circles.”

A backlash against what again? Wokester militancy? For help I turned to a Los Angeles-based friendo.

“The moment is fraught with peril on all sides,” he replied. “Social media means never having to confront anything you didn’t endorse. So everything now is people swatting away difficult thoughts [that might] pierce their cocoons. Provocation is now seen as an indictable death penalty offense. Conflicting ideas are drive by assaults. Remember all those lessons of youth? Turn into the curve. Don’t fight the riptide. Stay still or the quicksand will pull you down.”

HE to friendo: “Heed these, you’re saying. Stay still or the wokesters will pull me down…got it. But specifically and clearly, are you sensing some kind of anti-woke backlash? Talk to me like I’m a dumbshit who doesn’t get veiled references.”

Friendo: “35% of Americans believe Trump is their salvation. 35% of Americans believe Trump is Satan. 30% of Americans are on fentanyl. Calcification is the new woke.

“My bitch this week [is that the] MSM doesn’t want to talk about what it could mean if the Dayton shooter is an Antifa nutcase. Too complex for simple CNN/MSNBC headlines and the whole gun nut thing runs counter to the Fox doctrine, so we get more simplistic, well-meaning as well as unbelievably cynical soundbites and nothing changes.

“Try to ask someone what it means that El Paso was a rightwing nut and Dayton is a leftwing nut. No one can process complex thoughts anymore. So everyone hunkers down in their own calcium pits.”

HE to friendo: “At the end of the day do you think history will be kind to woke McCarthyites?”

Friendo: “History is kind to those who draw attention to oppression and abuse. You’re reacting to the current mood of social-media-induced cocooning. It’s not about woke. It’s about ‘I’ve got my beliefs so don’t confuse me with more facts!’ It’s the 21st century version of Paddy Chayefsky‘s Network speech — “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”

As far as I can tell from the trailer, Craig Zobel‘s The Hunt (Universal, 9.27) is a social satire about deplorables being hunted for sport by enraged liberals. Despite my admiration for Zobel’s seven-year-old Compliance, my immediate reaction was “no thanks.” Now Universal is “re-evaluating its strategy for the certain-to-be-controversial satire,” according to a 8.6 Hollywood Reporter story by Kim Masters. A Hunt ad that was slated to appear on ESPN was yanked, Masters reports. Also: “An ESPN source says no spots for the film will appear on the network in the coming weeks.”

A friend sent me the news about casting director David Rubin having been elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences earlier this evening.

“He looks so bland, so vanilla,” I replied. “Like a real-estate agent or a tax attorney. A very safe face. Why can’t they elect someone who looks like a novelist…someone who knows what art and risk are about…a person with gusto and passion and character in his or her veins? Look at him — he looks like the manager of WeHo Pavilions.”

“It’s political,” the friend replied. “And you need to have nothing better to do.”

A backfiring motorcycle caused a brief panic in Times Square early Tuesday evening. People have been conditioned to expect mass shootings at any time, in any place. We’re all living in 1880s Hadleyville before Will Kane came along. A NYPD spokesperson said they received multiple 911 calls and urged people not to panic. Officials assured that the “Times Square area is very safe.”

It was announced earlier today that the third installment in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise will be an adaptation of Jeffrey Toobin’s “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President.”

Pic will focus on Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, and the impeachment trial that most Americans were either bored or appalled by. (“Impeach Clinton for lying about getting a blowjob in the Oval Office?…please!”) Beanie Feldstein as Lewinsky, Sarah Paulson as the duplicitous Linda Tripp and Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones. No word on who will play Bill and Hillary.

Feldstein doesn’t strike me as the right actress to play Lewinsky. ML was 24 or 25 at the time and maybe a tiny bit zaftig, but she wasn’t exactly a Beanie. By which I mean she wasn’t…am I allowed to say chubby without getting jumped on?

Presumably it’s going to be about a selfish, super-powerful, silver-haired dude preying on a semi-innocent victim, but my understanding has always been that Lewinsky flirted ardently with Bill and that he flirted right back. ML wasn’t some baahing little lamb in the woods — she made an ambitious and calculated play for him, and then scored, and then was dumb enough to blab it all to Tripp, whom she had to know was in with the righties.

It would make a fascinating story if Murphy brings in all the contradictions and complexities. But as a straight-from-the-shoulder #MeToo saga? Life isn’t that simple.

I recently read somewhere that most U.S. citizens have never visited more than eight states. It goes without saying that most of us who drive or fly around tend to avoid the poor land-locked states or those known for bumblefuck, hee-haw, shotgun-rack mindsets. We also tend to favor the coastal states or those with extra-beautiful scenery (Colorado, Utah, Montana, northern California).

The states I’ve visited (36) are boldfaced below with certain designations. My faves are California, New York, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Florida, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Georgia.

U = have visited, driven through, meh
V = have lived there for years
W = have never visited, and probably never will
X = visited, liked the architecture and/or atmosphere, liked the people and the vibe, would like to return.
Y = briefly visited because I wanted to leave as quickly as possible, and did.
Z = have flown over.

Alabama / Y; Alaska / W; Arizona / X; Arkansas / W; California / V; Colorado / X; Connecticut / V; Delaware / Y; Florida / X (Miami, Key West); Georgia / X; (Savannah, I mean); Hawaii / X; Idaho / U; Illinois / U; Indiana / U; Iowa / Z

Posted on 12.21.15: Back in the 20th Century people used to ask actors for autographs instead of cell-phone selfies. Eccentric as it may sound, fans would actually carry around autograph books for this purpose. It’s been suggested that now and then hardcore fans would ask for more than just a signature — they would ask the celebrity to write a quote he/she is famous for uttering in a film.

If you ran into Gloria Swanson, let’s say, you would ask her to write “I am big…it’s the pictures that got small.” If you bumped into William Holden you’d ask him to write “if they move, kill ’em.” And so on. I would never do this, of course, but some allegedly have.

Today Daily Beast contributor Tom Teodorczuk posted an interview with 45 Years costar Tom Courtenay, and about halfway through Courtenay mentions that he was recently approached by an autograph hunter asking him to sign a piece of paper underneath the words “the personal life is dead” — one of the utterances of Strelnikov, his character in Dr. Zhivago. Courtenay tells Teodorczuk that the quote is “a load of bollocks,” but did he oblige?

Four years ago I recalled a moment in ’81 when I ran into In Cold Blood costar Scott Wilson in a West Hollywood bar, and that I stifled an instinct to ask for an autograph along with the words “hair on the walls” — a Dick Hickock line from Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel.

If I could persuade Brad Pitt to give me an autograph, I’d ask him to write “don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” If I’d run into Marlon Brando in the ’70s, I would have asked him to write either “whatta ya got?” (a line from The Wild One) or “Don’t be doin’ her like that” (from One-Eyed Jacks). If I’d enountered Montgomery Clift I’d ask him to write “nobody ever lies about being lonely” — a Robert E. Lee Prewitt/From Here To Eternity line. If I saw director-actor Alfonso Arau I would ask him to write “damn gringos!” Further suggestions along these lines?

Robert De Niro: “Are you talkin’ to me?” Samuel L. Jackson: “I don’t remember askin’ you a goddam thing!” Seth Rogen: “Heh heh heh heh yuk yuk yuk!” Bruce Willis: “Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!” or “Welcome to the party, pal!” Al Pacino: “Hoo-hah!” Jonah Hill: “Are those my only two options?”