A friend has slipped me a May 2019 draft of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, his theatrical follow-up to First Man. (Chazelle is currently working on The Eddy, an eight-episode Netflix series set in Paris.) Babylon is a late 1920s Hollywood tale about a huge sea-change in the nascent film industry (i.e., the advent of sound and the up-and-down fortunes that resulted) and about who got hurt and who didn’t.

A la Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Babylon (which may or may not be distributed by Paramount or Lionsgate) offers a blend of made-up characters and a few real-life Hollywood names of the time — Clara Bow, Anna May Wong. Paul Bern and an “obese” industry fellow who represents Fatty Arbuckle. (I’m presuming there are others.) I’ve only read about 40% of it, and I’m certainly not going to describe except in the most general of terms. It runs 184 pages, and that ain’t hay.

Most of Chazelle’s story (or the portion that I’ve read) is amusingly cynical and snappy, at other times mellow and humanist, and other times not so much. It takes place in the golden, gilded realms of Los Angeles during this convulsive, four or five-year period (roughly 1926 to 1931, maybe ’32) when movie dialogue tipped the scales and re-ordered the power structure. Everyone above the level of food catering had to re-assess, re-think, change their game.

It starts out with a long, bravura sequence that will probably impress critics and audiences in the same way La-La Land‘s opening freeway dance number did. Except Babylon is darker, raunchier. The first 26 or 27 pages acquaint us with the main characters (one of whom may be played by Emma Stone) while diving into the most bacchanalian Hollywood party you’ve ever attended or read about. Cocaine, booze, exhibitionist sex, an elephant, the singing of a lesbian torch song, heroin, blowjobs, and a certain inanimate…forget it.

Unless Chazelle embarks on a serious rewrite, the 27-minute opening of Babylon is going to seem like quite the envelope pusher. It’s basically Fellini Satyricon meets Day of the Locust meets the secret orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shot meets the Copacabana entrance scene in Goodfellas. Plus Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby meets The Bad and the Beautiful meets Singin’ in the Rain meets The Big Knife…that’ll do for openers.

It seems to me that Chazelle wrote Babylon with a jaded, somewhat angry attitude. When a couple of scenes tip into near-porn you say to yourself, “Yeah, I get it — he’s showing this stuff in quotes…as commentary.” Laugh if you want but the audience will be attending this party in the company of a lot of self-obsessed, deluded or ruthless types. Anyway, that’s all.

From “Don’t Fuck It Up,” posted on 12.30.15:

In any creative enterprise the worst mantra you can repeat to yourself is “don’t fuck it up.” Those words are, of course, rooted in fear and a corresponding lack of confidence on the part of the artist. I know. In the late ’70s I tried like a motherfucker be a diligent, exacting movie journalist while repeating these words over and over, fearful as I was of exposing myself as the marginally talented, somewhat under-educated guy I feared that I was deep down.

Anxiety, insecurity and fear are jail cells. “Don’t fuck it up” did nothing but freeze my instincts and make me afraid of my own voice, and of what the world might think.

What are helpful words to go by when you’re creating? “Let’s see what happens if I fuck with this or fiddle with it in some fuck-all way” has always worked for me. Once you stop giving a shit, everything starts to flow. You can’t uncork artistic discovery if you’re too worried about disappointing your bosses or fans or whomever. If you overdo the fuck-all you can always formalize and clean it up, but you can never fix work that’s been created with a sword over your head.

From the “Crosby vs. Feinberg” comment thread, penned by yours truly a few hours ago:

(1) David Crosby being asked by Scott Feinberg to recall certain deeper feelings and recollections about Joni Mitchell clearly irritated him.

Perhaps because Crosby feels very badly about the greatest singer-poet troubador of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s being in a somewhat diminished state today. (Memory lapses, or so I’ve been told.). Due to her stroke of 2015. Which Crosby has observed the aftermath of first-hand.

At one point Scott was asking about (or certainly alluding to) the hanky-panky history between Le Croz and Joni and Graham Nash, and on some gut level Crosby reacted with some kind of angry primal revolt. Something to do with (a) the aroma of inane questions about who was diddling who at what juncture and (b) rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(2) Scott is very exacting, highly focused, hard working, ultra disciplined, knows his stuff, cares a great deal, etc.

All that said, I think his first misstep may have been when he asked Crosby to explain what the term “harmony” means. Which, for any kind of seasoned musician, isn’t too far from an interviewer asking an average human being to define what “breathing”, “eating”, “talking” and “walking upright” mean.

And then Scott doubles down by asking Croz to explain how standard “harmony” differs from sophisticated harmonies a la CSNY, Beach Boys, Beatles, etc. Which, at first brush, isn’t too far from that scene in George Pal’s The Time Machine (‘60) in which a blonde-haired Eloi asks Rod Taylor what “laws” are. Or what a “book” is.

Scott didn’t ask these forehead-slappers to be perverse. He asked them because he sincerely believes that a significant percentage of 20something and even 30something listeners might not have a clear idea what these terms mean. Which may in fact be the case, but C’MON, MAN!!! Club me to death with a croquet mallet or, you know, a putting iron.

On 7.18 the N.Y. Times posted an interactive investigation piece about the possible causes of the 4.15.19 Notre Dame fire, and how Parisian firefighters managed to put it out before the whole cathedral collapsed, which, the article reports, was something that damn near happened save for the efforts of certain valiant fireman.

The co-authors of the article are Elian Peltier, James Glanz, Mika Gröndahl, Weiyi Cai, Adam Nossiter and Liz Alderman.

For me the most interesting portion is the following two paragraphs:

I know nothing about the odds that a short circuit (either “in the electrified bells of the spire or in the elevators that had been set up on the scaffolding to help workers carry out renovations”) might have been the cause of the blaze. For all I know an electric spark was the cause. But a hunch tells me this is a red herring. The fact that the second paragraph ends with what is presented as a remote third possibility — “cigarette butts found on the scaffolding, apparently left by workers” — tells me this is almost certainly the most likely cause.

But investigators and the government of French president Emmanuel Macron don’t want to blame cigarette smokers, because that would be the same as blaming the entire proletariat work force, which Macron wants the support of in the next election.

But try to imagine the foreman of the workers who were puffing away on the cathedral scaffolding. You’re dealing with ancient timbers in the attic and the possibility that only a few accidental embers could ignite a catastrophic blaze. What kind of a moron foreman would say to his workers, “It’s okay, guys…unfiltered Gauloises are a French adult male birthright… smoke ’em if you got’ em.”

So far only one certifiable villain has been discovered — a security employee who didn’t call the fire department when a smoke alarm sounded, and who sent a guard to the wrong building, a side chapel called the “sacristy”. The guard found nothing. Excerpt: :Instead of calling the fire department, the security employee called his boss but didn’t reach him. The manager called back and eventually deciphered the mistake. He called the guard: Leave the sacristy and run to the main attic.”

STRIKE! A man hoping to capture a killer swing at softball practice caught more than he bargained for when the ball sails right into his phone, knocking it into the dirt. Fortunately, he seemed like a good sport about it. https://t.co/RB4vm9l8Cs pic.twitter.com/sZGXTtxDJy

— ABC News (@ABC) July 19, 2019

Posted on 9.27.07: Easily the most soulful and influential female poet-composer-performer of the late 20th Century (as well as the most emotionally arresting, elegantly phrased, bravest and saddest), Joni Mitchell spat out the blunt truth when Vulture‘s Tim Murphy asked why she’d recorded no new tunes since the days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“I was angry at the politics. Especially [at Bush]. Angry at the American people. At Christians. At theology — the ignorance of it. And I didn’t want to write about it. I removed myself from society and painted. It was a method of avoiding the anger, not addressing it.

“I couldn’t listen to music for ten years, I hated it all. It all pissed me off. Music just became grotesquely egocentric and made for money. It wasn’t music — there was no muse. Music requires a muse. The producer is not a muse. He’s a manufacturer. Contemporary music made me want to punch people. I couldn’t stand any of it. The whoring, the drive-by shooting of it all. I don’t care how well crafted it is. America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It’s grotesquely mentally ill.”

Mitchell’s reputation as a world-class phraser, searcher and sufferer will last for the next several centuries. She’s a heavy cat among kittens. Nobody has recorded a more touching and transcendent version of “Unchained Melody” than Mitchell. Her early ’70s to early ’80s stuff was perfection, completion. Especially The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Those “six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain” and “the hexagram of the heavens.” That “poppy poison-poppy tourniquet [that] slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit.” I’ll take these lyrics with me into the next life.

Posted on 3.31.15: Joni Mitchell, 71, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after reportedly being found unconscious, She was said to be alert in the ride down to a hospital (presumably UCLA or Cedars), but is reportedly in intensive care. I’ve spoken to a friend who was with her last week, and he said he sensed that all was perhaps not entirely well. Mitchell, he said, had called for “a healer” to drop by and lay on hands or help out in some kind of shamanistic way.

Mitchell has been an unrepentant smoker all her life, beginning at age nine. My friend mentioned that there’s been some discussion (and perhaps an intention) of switching to electronic cigarettes but after six decades of reportedly heavy smoking…God help her.

Obviously everyone wants her to recover and push on, but at a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.

Sidelight: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 200 or 250, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center.

No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell **, and I was quite excited about being this close to her. I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”

Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.

4.20.12: Variety‘s Jeff Sneider reported about that ludicrous notion of casting Taylor Swift as Mitchell in a film version of Sheila Weller’s 2008 book, “Ladies Like Us.” Swift was said to be “circling” the Mitchell role.

The Katie Jacobs-directed film was going to be shot under the aegis of Sony and Di Bonaventura Pictures. But last fall it was reported that Mitchell had killed the Swift casting. (She told a Sunday Times interviewer that “I squelched that…I said to the producer, ‘All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.’” She added that the screenplay “is just a lot of gossip… you don’t have the great scenes.”) It was “an appalling idea,” I wrote, “because Mitchell’s manner and speaking style always conveyed the churning soul of a poet and artist, and Swift looks and talks like a none-too-introspective, looking-to-please pop personality. Mitchell is a world-class lady with oceans, rivers and tributaries within; Swift is a pond.”

** My beloved Patti Smith ranks a close second.

During the first two-thirds of a 39-minute “Awards Chatter” interview, Hollywood Reporter columnist and podcaster Scott Feinberg and legendary rock star David Crosby seem to hit it off. But then Crosby starts to lose patience with Feinberg’s questions, which he regards as overly generic, simplistic and boilerplate.

Crosby seems particularly irked by Feinberg’s questions about Joni Mitchell, whom Crosby has known for over 50 years, first as a musical admirer, then a lover, then a creative partner, and then as an off-and-on friend. Crosby visited Mitchell after her 2015 stroke and was the first person to say anything substantive about her condition, or so I recall.

Things begin to go wrong around the 26 and 1/2 minute mark. And then during the last three or four minutes Crosby shifts into outright hostility, calling Feinberg “a dumb guy,” “an asshole”, a “dipshit”, an “idiot” and so on. Feinberg understandably wasn’t at all charmed by this. He also understands, I’m sure, that you can’t win ’em all. All interviewers try to get along with charm and intelligence, dealing the usual cards (upfront, polite, deferential), but some people are like oil and vinegar. You just have to shrug it off when this happens.

I think this was was actually a fascinating interview. Hundreds upon hundreds of podcast chats are posted on a regular basis these days, and for the first 25 or so minutes Feinberg vs. Crosby was just another amiable discussion that was ostensibly about promoting a film (i.e., David Crosby: Remember My Name). And then came the thorns and abrasions.

The first stirring of trouble happens at the 26:55 mark when Feinberg begins asking particulars of Crosby’s relationship with Joni Mitchell, which began in late ’67 or early ’68 (or something like that). Here are some roughly transcribed portions of the discussion — words and phrases are omitted but the gist of the interview is, I feel, fairly represented.

Crosby: I have to ask…are we going to go through my entire history, week by week?
Feinberg: No, no, no…
Crosby: Tell me what we’re doing here.
Feinberg: Well, what would you like to do?
Crosby: I’d like to talk about the last four records in a row that I just made.
Feinberg: Well, we have an hour so…
Crosby: Okay, we’re creeping along here. Uhm, I had already been living in Laurel Canyon.
Feinberg: Everybody knows retroactively what Laurel Canyon scene was about, but at the time was it known as a kind of artists’ community?
Crosby: No, hell no. We just trying to get above the smog. I had lived in L.A. and knew how bad the smog was. I had already been living in Laurel Canyon when I came back from Florida with Joni. We were just trying to get above the smog. You go up into the hills and there’s a smog line. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, could’t afford Beverly Hills, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to live downtown so…
Feinberg: It’s just that there are such differing recollections about you three guys initially got together.
Crosby (under his breath): Oh, God.
Feinberg: What [unintelligible]?

Last Monday I did a phoner with Cameron Crowe, the director-screenwriter who did double duty as producer and off-camera interviewer for A.J. Eaton‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name (Sony Pictures Classic, 7.19).

An interviewer usually knows if a q & a is going well while it’s happening. This was one of those occasions, but I realized later on it was a bit more. A nice conversation with a nice give-and-take flow.

HE: “This movie has an extraordinary candor factor. I’ve seen it three times, and you get the same contact high from listening to Crosby spill his guts, just spilling it all. It’s almost like a religious current. You say to yourself, ‘If Crosby can be this calmly candid about his failings, about his past…whom he used to be and who he is now…you say to yourself, ‘Gee, I’d like to go out and talk to my friends this way’…you know? I’d like to be this really candid, deeply honest person…it feels cleansing, you know?”

Crowe: “Totally, totally agree. Crosby just said something like that [during the junket], and I’d never heard him say it. Exactly what you said. It was just ‘get the load off me…just say it and get it out there’…and I’d never heard him say this but he said he felt lighter. That’s what I love about him. That kind of exposure. He said about the movie that it’s really hard to watch that guy. But on another level he’s getting off on the dump truck unloading his head.”

Crowe on the still-festering resentments between Crosby and ex-CSNY bandmates Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Graham Nash: “They’ve hurt each other a lot. Sometimes it’s been about women…about David shooting his mouth off about Neil’s [wife Daryl Hannah]. Sometimes it’s been about credit. Sometimes it’s been about money. They’re used to doing this. I think they just got really tired of each other.”

I’ve posted the above video two or three times, but look at it again. It happened in Park City after the film’s very first screening on 1.26.19. Crowe told me that when the film ended he wasn’t sure if Crosby would be angry or sullen or what. But the crowd melted him down.

At the 31-second mark the obviously shaken and humbled Crosby looks up, feels the applause and emotion, and leans back against the curtain as if to say, “I don’t know if I can even stand up after what I’ve just seen and been through, and what I’m feeling now.”

Crosby: “It’s about being fragile. And you know that a catharsis will take place. You’re watching your life, and you learn stuff, and I’ve been there.” At 1:18 he looks at Eaton with moisture in his eyes and says, “And it really caught me.” In response to which Eaton pats Crosby on the shoulder.

“At least twice I was gonna cry, and one time I did cry,” Crosby goes on. “And you guys did a good goddam job. And Eaton says, ‘No, you did a good job.” Crosby: “Very emotional. A lot of pain.”

From “Pete Buttigieg Is Still Figuring This Out,” a N.Y. Times Sunday magazine piece by Mark Leibovich:

“Some of Buttigieg’s giddier supporters and profilers have likened him to Barack Obama, not just in his appeal to a new generation of political consumers but also in his intent to create a new way of thinking and discussing politics. He is the next level of anti-politician politician, quintessentially political but running against what he sees as the counterproductive outrage that seems to have taken hold in American politics, particularly in the Trump era. ‘Our response is going to be to model something completely different,’ Buttigieg told me.

“And indeed, he possesses an Obama-like ability to wield cool detachment — impassioned and remote at the same time, calmly in a rush. Even his execution of the necessary and grubby candidate activities, like fund-raising, has an earnestly above-it-all air. ‘Hey,’ he began a blast email appeal to his supporters on the eve of the last Federal Election Commission fund-raising deadline. ‘You know that we don’t subscribe to inauthentic urgency here at Pete for America. That’s not why we’re here. We are here to build trusted relationships.’ He then hit up his ‘trusted relationships’ for donations.

“’You can seek to do the right thing,’ Buttigieg said in the wake of the South Bend Eric Logan shooting, ‘and be reasonably confident you made the less bad choice and get your ass handed to you all the same.’

“’I see Pete Buttigieg as more of a healer-warrior, and there’s an absence of vitriol with him,’ Dave Dvorak, a Minneapolis physician, told me. ‘And maybe that’s what we need.'”

If you want a short, flavorful, totally on-the-money taste of what watching certain portions of David Crosby: Remember My Name may (or may not) feel like, please watch the below video. Produced by Rolling Stone and titled “Ask Croz,” it’s just four minutes and 24 seconds of Crosby answering fan questions. What makes it whoa-level is the naked, quietly scalding, take-it-or-leave-it honesty, which is almost always abundant from Crosby but in this instance is also present in the questions.

Like a 16 year-old girl asking about her fear of death and existential gloom. Or a person worrying about a family member, incarcerated on a “bullshit” drug charge, being able to handle prison life. Or a guy who’s angry about the fact that when he and a musician friend are competing for the same girl “she always goes home with him.” Or a general question about fundamental values and what it all feels like to have death patiently waiting on your doorstep.

This warts-and-all candor is also what makes A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe’s documentary (Sony Pictures Classics, opening today) such a profoundly rich and transcendent film.

I’ve said this over and over but it really is the shit, this film. A lion-in-winter reflection piece…hugely emotional, meditative…about the tough stuff and the hard rain, about hurt and addiction and rage and all but destroying your life, and then coming back semi-clean and semi-restored, but without any sentimentality or gooey bullshit. An old guy admitting to each and every failing of his life without the slightest attempt to rationalize or minimize. Straight, no chaser. And hugely cleansing for that.

This movie, I swear, delivers one of the best contact highs I’ve ever experienced. By the end it makes you feel lighter, less weighed down, even if you’re 18 or 37 or whatever. We all have stuff churning inside, and we all need catharsis. It’s very rare when a film offers you this for the mere price of admission.

So the catty-watties in Tom Hooper‘s Cats (Universal, 12.20) are their own species — cat-human hybrids that don’t much resemble their cousins who cavorted in the popular stage show. Small and lithe with cat ears and whiskers and tails, but darting around on their hind legs and dressed in leotards. And no claws. More of a mocap than a costume-and-makeup thang.

Flatline reaction to Francesca Hayward‘s Victoria, I’m afraid, and a mild shrug for Taylor Swift‘s Bombalurina and Idris Elba‘s Macavity. If anyone owns it, it’s Jennifer Hudson, I suppose. I immediately recognized Judi Dench (Old Deuteronomy) and Ian McKellen (Gus the Theatre Cat). I wish I was allowed to say that James Corden and Rebel Wilson play fat cats, but that era has passed, I’m afraid. Their characters are named Bustopher Jones and Jennyanydots.

The title of this post was stolen from a 7.18 trailer review riff by N.Y. Times contributor Bruce Fretts.