Sigourney Weaver visiting the NBHS cast and crew at their encore performance of Alien after national media recognition was unbelievable!! #alien#Alien40thpic.twitter.com/2UXL0v1H3X
I’ve been living in the same West Hollywood pad since ’91. The influence of Tatyana has led to all kinds of cleaning and re-painting and throwing stuff out. A month ago we tossed a large glasstop desk and an adjustable up-and-down chair that I’d been using as my default workspace furniture for a good quarter-century. You wouldn’t recognize the place now. Everything, it seems, is fresh, scrubbed and clutter-free.
Ex-wife Maggie and I outside the Picasso Museum in October ’87, either just before or just after getting married at St.-Julien-le-Pauvre.
Near Omaha Beach, Normandy, France — a day or two later.
I can’t recall if my pitch was emailed or typed-out and sent via snail-mail, but Esquire bit right away…assignment! Those were the days when it could take as long as two or three months between suggesting an article and seeing it in print. The other freelance piece [after the jump] was about private Hollywood poker games. It was either for GQ or Outside magazine; I honestly don’t remember.
Best idea I pitched that nobody wanted to run: A Playboy parody article called “The Girls of Bumblefuck.” The premise was that (a) the myth of the devastatingly attractive farmer’s daughter bailing hay in Podunk, Arkansas, was bullshit and (b) that beauty always follows wealth and power, hence the dishiest women are almost always found in big cities while women from one-horse, out-of the way trailer-park towns tend to be…well, not in the Ava Gardner or Angelina Jolie realm.
Here’s an L.A. TimesLewis Beale article about the making of Bolden (Abamorama, (5.3), a biopic about the cornetist and seminal jazz musicianBuddy Bolden. Commonly regarded as the father of New Orleans jazz, Bolten’s band and more particularly his sound (“a fusion of ragtime, black sacred music, marching-band music, rural blues”) was heard in New Orleans clubs between 1900 and 1907. Bolden’s inspired run ended tragically — at age 30 he suffered an episode of acute alcoholic psychosis (i.e., drunkenness + schizophrenia) and wound up spending the rest of his life in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum in Jackson, a mental institution, where he spent the rest of his life. He died at age 54, in 1931.
George Clooney‘s Catch 22 miniseries (Hulu, 5.17, six episodes) looks visually similar to Mike Nichols‘ Catch 22 (’70), and they sound alike also. The thinking, I’m sure, was that Clooney’s six-hour version could accommodate more of Joseph Heller’s sprawling World War II saga (Clooney is playing Colonel Scheisskopf, a character ignored by the Nichols version) and that it might feel more satisfying than Nichols’ film, which after all was a critical and commercial bust.
Nichols’ film famously missed the mood and tone of its era. Audiences preferred Robert Altman‘s loose and fraternal M.A.S.H. to Nichols’ somber, handsomely shot arthouse creation.
The six-part limited series from Paramount Television and Anonymous Content is directed by Clooney, Grant Heslov and Ellen Kuras, who also serves as producer. Each directed two episodes.
Clooney’s cast includes Christopher Abbott as John Yossarian, Kyle Chandler as Colonel Cathcart, Hugh Laurie as Major — de Coverley, Daniel David Stewart as Milo Minderbinder, Austin Stowell as Nately, Rafi Gavron as Aarfy Aardvark, Graham Patrick Martin as Orr, Pico Alexander as Clevinger (who?), Jon Rudnitsky as McWatt, Gerran Howell as Kid Sampson, Lewis Pullman as Major Major Major Major and Heslov as Doc Daneeka.
“Biden is in…finally, a fresh face! Joe made the announcement on his social-media platform — Western Union. This doesn’t mean I don’t think [Biden] shouldn’t be President just because he’s 76. That’s ageism, which is a form of bigotry just like the others. Having said that, he does have hair plugs that are older than Pete Buttigieg. And I strongly disagree with those people who say Joe Biden doesn’t have a vision — he doesn’t have night vision.”
“If Fyodor Dostoevsky had written the Mueller Report, it would be called Crime and No Punishment. It was like All The President’s Men meets Al Capone‘s vault…what the fuck? No prosecuting from the prosecutor. Preet Bharara was on Real Time the week the Barr summary came out, and I had one burning question: ‘Could a different prosecutor had reached a completely different conclusion?’ And he said yeah. That’s all I need to know. I get it — Mueller’s a boy scout, a straight arrow, he plays it by the book. But you may have noticed for the past three years that we’ve kind of been ‘off book.’ And greatness sometimes means not doing everything by the book.”
There’s an east-coast critic whose name I won’t mention, but she tweets with some regularity, like many of us, and every so often she’ll mention how she adores this or that somewhat older film. And if I’m startled by her opinion due to having always loathed the film in question, I’ll reply along the lines of “uhm, but that movie stinks! It stunk when it first opened and it still stinks now, plus it bombed at the box-office.”
Once or twice this critic has replied by saying “no offense but who asked you?” or “if you don’t agree with me about something I love please keep your rancid, negative, bordering-on-Satanic opinions to yourself because my love for certain films is sacred and shouldn’t be challenged if I express it on Twitter, so please don’t bring me down and don’t put my friends down…please just agree with me and radiate alpha vibes or keep to your own corner.”
My reply is usually something along the lines of “wait…on Twitter you want people to be well-behaved? On Twitter this or that person sharing views in a blunt fashion gets you upset? Where do you think we are, in Lytton Strachey‘s apartment in Bloomsbury?”
If you can’t stand the heat, you shouldn’t be in the kitchen in the first place.
“Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) taps environmental lawyer Bill McKay (Robert Redford) to run as the Democratic opposition to U.S. Senator Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter). It’s a Faustian bargain with a twist: McKay is guaranteed to lose, but can still run to further promote his environmental work.
“[But] it doesn’t take too long until McKay is inducted into the entire spectacle of campaigning. His message is slowly tweaked, he gets a makeover, and his demeanor becomes less off-the-cuff and more camera-ready.
“What you slowly start to notice, however, is the whirr of machinery as he gains popularity. It takes a lot of equipment to make a man and spread his message: the invasive cameras, superimposed TV screens, falling boom mics, and the short bursts of flashing bulb lights. We see him less in person, so to speak, and more through the lens of a camera or on a TV screen. We’re increasingly bombarded with his public image.
“If Lucas is spinning an unyielding gossamer system, then McKay is trapped in it. And it’s one preoccupied with form rather than content. It’s a lesson that McKay will eventually learn the hard way at the end of the film, when he actually wins. We see a dumbstruck McKay look to Lucas and ask ‘What now?’ — only to be drowned out by a mob of friends, family, and supporters.
“But even before that moment, McKay’s public mask had begun to crack; in moments when he can’t keep up with the other version of himself, he’ll goof off or rebel in private.
“In one scene, he breaks character while rehearsing a speech: ‘Vote once, vote twice for Bill McKay…you middle-class honkies,’ he jests as he double-peace signs like Nixon.
“The most telling breakdown of all is during the well-known ‘laughing scene,’ wherein a falling boom mic leads to an uncontrollable fit of laughter from McKay. After that, he corpses through the taping of his speech as a frustrated producer yells ‘I fail to see the humor!’
I honestly believe that Avengers: Endgame is one of the most engaging time-travel movies ever made. I’ve never bought into such a wildly absurd, head-spinning fantasy as this, but I submitted with pleasure because it’s so planted and propulsive and convincing — because it believes in itself without blinking an eye.
I’m not sure if it’s the best time-travel flick ever, but it’s certainly among the top three or four. I haven’t decided yet. I’ll figure it out as I go along. Right now I have 20 goodies and 2 baddies.
Best: 1. Back To The Future; 2. Edge of Tomorrow / Live Die, Repeat; 3. Avengers: Endgame; 4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day; 5. Somewhere In Time; 6. Contact; 7. The Terminator; 8. The Time Machine; 9. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; 10. Time After Time; 11. “Walking Distance,” 1959 Twilight Zone episode; 12. “A Stop at Willoughby,” 1960 Twilight Zone episode; 13. X-Men: Days of Future Past; 14. Planet of the Apes; 15. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; 16. 12 Monkeys; 17. Sleeper; 18. Looper; 19. The Final Countdown / The Philadelphia Experiment; 20. Captain Marvel.
Obviously Sean Connery was still hanging in there, hair-wise, when he appeared on What’s My Line? in October ’65. (Sidney Lumet‘s The Hill has about to open stateside while Connery was shooting A Fine Madness.) His thatch was thinning or receding a bit, but not to the extent that anyone outside of Harry Saltzman or Cubby Broccoli would call “a problem.” It shows you how rigid the machismo standards were back then. Anything less than a full head of thick hair would reflect badly on 007’s manliness, or something like that. To the best of my knowledge Connery appeared with his own hair in Dr. No and From Russia With Love, but became a rug-man with the shooting of Goldfinger.
