This morning I wrote a friend about Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed and the intensely Bressonian lead performance by Ethan Hawke, and how only a few short months ago they both looked like potential Oscar contenders. All the critics called First Reformed a major comeback for Schrader, remember, and all those smooth journos who interviewed Hawke spoke of his performance in hushed tones.

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Summit is releasing a Bluray box set containing all five Twilight films, assembled in one grand, 10-disc package for the first time. You’d think that by now even the most ardent Twi-hards would be saying “whoa, enough already…leave us alone.” But Summit wants to milk the tenth anniversary of Twilight-mania for all it’s worth.

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Author, critic, film professor and Orson Welles scholar Joseph McBride knows who Orson Welles was as well as anyone, and probably better than most. He recently wrote a Sight & Sound piece about Welles and his final film, The Other Side of the Wind. McBride was personally friendly with Welles, has written three books about him, and played a film critic in Wind.

Last night on Facebook a guy named Michael Karoly asked McBride if Welles liked the films of Jean-Luc Godard. McBride’s posted reply: “I’m not aware of anything he said about Godard. He didn’t see a lot of contemporary movies.”

HE reply to McBride: Wait…WHAT? What serious filmmaker ducked Godard back in the ’60s and ’70s, or for that matter missed “contemporary movies”? Welles was a big fan of the Shaft TV series (according to Todd McCarthy) but as of the late 60s or early 70s, or when you began your friendship with him, he didn’t see many films that were being made back then? During Hollywood’s experimental golden age? To me this indicates that Welles was partly living in a state of vague spiritual nostalgia and withdrawal and in some sense coasting on the fumes of the past.

To paraphrase a Cameron Crowe observation, Orson really was Brian Wilson — on fire and cooking with genius gas from his early to late 20s (mid 1930s to mid 1940s, Wells having been born in 1915) and then…well, then he lived the rest of his life. And there was nothing wrong with that.

From the mid 40s to his death in ‘85, Orson lived large. Ups, downs and all-arounds. Tirelessly creative, always industrious, always writing & pushing, a great gabber. But the creative incandescence happened early in his life (NY theatre, “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons), and everything he did from the mid 40s on was noteworthy, commendable, European, aspirational, admirable, Shakespearean, etc. But it was basically an aftermath to his brilliant “touched by God, years of lightning” streak.

Just as Brian Wilson’s monumental hot streak lasted four years, or from ‘64 to late ‘67 — from age 22 to 25 or 26. Obviously Orson’s streak lasted longer but the analogy holds.

Beto O’Rourke is going to lose to Ted Cruz in Texas next month, but that might work out because it’ll leave him in a position to run for president in 2020. I really think he should do it. The hour is getting late and the Democrats need somebody strong and flinty to run against President Trump, and the more I kick it around the more I realize it has to be Beto. The Texas Senate race has nationalized him in a positive light. He’s been a U.S. Congressman for five years. He has the moxie and the aura, and there’s no time like right now.

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And it’s funny. “Too Many People,” weaponizing songs, “get the hell off my property,” etc.

I always want the whole story when I read about someone switching jobs or getting promoted. Example: this morning’s announcement (first reported last night by Brian Stelter) about Vanity Fair Hollywood columnist Rebecca Keegan joining The Hollywood Reporter as senior film editor.

Keegan had written VF’s “Letter From L.A.” and “HWD” newsletters, so who’s taking her place? And her senior film editor title means that Gregg Kilday, a dug-in THR veteran, is…what, suffering a downgrade of some kind? No, I’m told. Keegan simply merited an impressive title. Kilday is ultimately still the film editor and isn’t going anywhere.

Hirings are always described in trade stories as occasions for praise and celebration, but the undercurrent is occasionally about cruel Darwinian process (survival of fittest, dog eat dog, dog won’t return other dog’s phone calls).

Prior to last night’s London premiere of Suspiria Dakota Johnson flashed her partially unshaven armpits for photographers. Different grooming disciplines for different folks, I suppose, but we all know that the general tendency over the last 15 or 20 has been to trim, snip and shave. Among both genders, I mean. Dakota is an outlier. There’s no way wage-earning women are going to start walking around with bushy armpits…no way. Any more than they’re going to abandon the genital airstrip or chean-shaven aesthetic. When was the last time any woman or man went bushy in any respect? I forget how many years ago it was that Howard Stern spoke about using a razor all over, but he’s not alone.

A friend writes, “What I’m curious about is when or if the Turks are going to leak the recording of Jamal Khashoggi being tortured and murdered. Horrifying. And what is the behind-the-scenes war between the Turks and the Saudis that the Turks were not only bugging the embassy, but told the world that the Saudis lured, tortured, murdered and dismembered Khashoggi. The latest is that one of the photographed hit men is a close confidante of Mohammed bin Salman and a member of the Royal Guard responsible for protecting him.

“And the picture widens: President Trump is in deep financially to the Saudis, perhaps as much if not more than the Russians. It is already clear that he doesn’t give that much of a shit if somebody hacked up a Washington Post reporter. The question is how much of this is a coverup for Trump’s untaxed unreported dark money income. And why are the Turks suddenly in bed with us? A takedown of Saudi Prince as well as Trump?”

If you’re late to the party, read this 10.16 Dexter Filkins New Yorker story.

I’m probably not the only leftie who felt surprised if not shocked when I read that hinterland bumblefucks are allegedly feeling energized by the Brett Kavanaugh psychodrama. Revved and cranked about the midterm elections, I mean. The apparent conservative rationale was that everyone does crazy drunken shit when they’re 17 or 18, and that it’s not fair to destroy a person’s life over this or that uncorraborated episode, and so even an obvious liar with a temper problem like Kavanaugh…even scumbags of his ilk deserve the benefit of the doubt. Or so the thinking goes.

That’s part of it, but not all of it.

What really happened, I fear, is that Middle American convservatives (males but also some women) are sick to death of the string-em-up, off-with-their-heads attitude of the #MeToo movement, and are thinking that the #MeToo-ers have gone too far in trying to automatically terminate the career of anyone accused or suspected of sexual misconduct. Middle American pudgebods seem to feel that it’s time for the brakes (i.e., counter-measures of some kind) to be applied.

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More than a few 21st Century films have driven me crazy in the sense that I knew they were absolutely brilliant and breathtaking — bull’s eye, honed to a fine edge, diamond drill — and yet the ticket-buying public and a sizable portion of the critics were either oblivious, ho-hum, dismissive or haters.

I’m not talking about films I merely believed in or which meant something special to me personally (although I did and they did) — I’m talking about films that I knew were gold standard — films that the Movie Godz and generations to come would eventually wake up to and almost stand by for decades to come. Except in some cases they didn’t.

I didn’t feel as if I was standing alone on an island but I certainly didn’t feel as if enough people agreed with me. I was basking in the molten glow of these films and couldn’t figure (and still can’t figure) why others couldn’t feel the same heat. If my tortured saga had been made into a Twilight Zone episode, the title would have been “What’s Wrong With Everyone?” and it would have starred Earl Holliman.

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A new Atlantic piece by James Fallows passes along a first-hand conspiracy story from Democratic strategist James Strother. The gist is that the late Republican torpedo specialist Lee Atwater (the guy behind the Willie Horton ad) confessed to Strother on his death bed in ’91 that he “set up” 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart. The cancer-stricken Atwater, 39 years old, allegedly told Strother that “I did it!…I fixed Hart.” The whole Monkey Business episode with Donna Rice, Atwater meant, and that damning photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap. All of it a political trap.

Atwater somehow took advantage of and/or worked with Billy Broadhurst, the “political groupie and aspiring insider” who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. Rice and another woman were invited to join the cruise, and the photo of Rice on Hart’s lap was planned and of course used after Hart suspended in his 1988 campaign. Fallows writes that there’s no proof of this other than Strother’s account.

As much as I admire Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, which is all about how Hart’s campaign was destroyed by allegations about a possible Rice affair, it would have been that much stronger a film if the Strother-Atwater story had been woven into the plot. Right now the movie has two hand-of-doom elements — Hart’s cavalier self-destructiveness in not hiding his indiscretions more covertly or skillfully, and the Miami Herald reporters who were tipped off about Hart’s affair with Rice. If the Strother-Atwater story has been used, it would have trumped both of these elements.

Did Hart have certain extra-marital tendencies before the Rice scandal? According to legend, yes. Would he have gotten into trouble with some other lust object if the Rice thing hadn’t happened? Possibly. But the Atwater confession certainly adds spice to the brew.

From the Fallows piece:

Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals. “Lee and I were friends,” Strother told me when I spoke with him by phone recently. “We’d meet after campaigns and have coffee, talk about why I did what I did and why he did what he did.” One of the campaigns they met to discuss afterward was that 1988 presidential race, which Atwater (with Bush) had of course ended up winning, and from which Hart had dropped out. But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign.

Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”