Out magazine is reporting that Scarlett Johansson has exited Rub and Tug a little more than a week after her casting as transgender massage parlor owner Dante “Tex” Gill sparked backlash among transgender activists. Johansson was accused of “ciswashing.” Her initial response (about 10 or 11 days ago) to the protestors: “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment.” But today she changed her tune.

“In light of recent ethical questions raised surrounding my casting as [the late] Dante Tex Gill, I have decided to respectfully withdraw my participation in the project,” Johansson told Out. “Our cultural understanding of transgender people continues to advance, and I’ve learned a lot from the community since making my first statement about my casting and realize it was insensitive. I have great admiration and love for the trans community and am grateful that the conversation regarding inclusivity in Hollywood continues.”

“While I would have loved the opportunity to bring Dante’s story and transition to life, I understand why many feel he should be portrayed by a transgender person, and I am thankful that this casting debate, albeit controversial, has sparked a larger conversation about diversity and representation in film. I believe that all artists should be considered equally and fairly. My production company, These Pictures, actively pursues projects that both entertain and push boundaries. We look forward to working with every community to bring these most poignant and important stories to audiences worldwide.”

Later this month Warner Archives is releasing a modestly-priced Bluray of Peter Ustinov‘s near-great Billy Budd (’62). 11 years ago I posted the following about a Warner Home Video DVD version:

“Black-and-white CinemaScope is one of my favorite visual formats, and what an exquisite and luscious silver-toned transfer this is — spotless, velvety smooth, ultra-crisp perfection with each carefully-lighted value and tiny detail on view, and assembled exactly right. The cinematography is by Robert Krasker (The Third Man, Odd Man Out, El Cid, Fall of the Roman Empire).

“The film itself is taut and intelligent and finely sculpted. If you have the patience to get into a film that delivers in an exacting, step-by-step way and which uses the technique of just-so dialogue and characters that build and build upon themselves, it will hold you every step of the way.

“The dialogue is plain and straight in the way that seamen and gentlemen officers presumably once spoke (‘I’m sorry for the manner but not the matter’), but heavy with the irony and immense sadness of Herman Melville‘s classic tale, which is basically about a meeting of child-like innocence and craggy evil aboard a British warship in the 1790s.

“And the performances! Much better than I remembered them, especially Robert Ryan‘s Claggart , Melvyn Douglas‘s wise old Danish sailor (‘I look around this room and sense…finality’) and Terence Stamp‘s Billy — one of the more striking debut performances ever.”

Claggart: “The sea is calm, you said. Peaceful. Calm above…but below a world of gliding monsters, preying on their fellows, murderers all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who’s to tell me it’s any different here on board or yonder, on dry land?”

The Film Stage‘s Jordan Raup reports that Jim Jarmusch is currently shooting a “’70s zombie movie” in the small Delaware County town of Fleischmanns. Pic costars Adam Driver, Bill Murray and Chloe Sevigny as cops; Selena Gomez and Austin Butler are also featured. Collider’s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Steve Buscemi and Tilda Swinton have also been cast. The tentative title is either Kill The Head or The Dead Don’t Die. In an Philadelpha Inquirer article Murray calls Jarmusch’s zombie script “hilarious.” Hilarious but deadpan, he surely means.

“It’s mind-boggling that one freakish American election, resulting in a presidency that a majority of Americans never wanted, could do so much damage not just to the United States but also to the global order that the United States created in the wake of World War II. But Germans know as well as anyone the havoc a single demagogue can wreak when the forces of decency are exhausted and unsure of themselves, and they can’t help seeing Trump through the lens of their own hideous history.”

Klaus Scharioth, who served as Germany’s ambassador to the United States during the Dubya and Obama administrations: “When I talked to my American friends in 2016, I always reminded them of what happened in Europe. Nobody thought in the early 1920s that Italy would become a dictatorship. Nobody thought that Germany, supposed a quite cultured nation, would get rid of democracy in a very short time. Maybe when you have this European experience, you might be more pessimistic than others.” — from 7.13 N.Y. Times opinion column, “Evil Has Won — Pro-American Germans feel betrayed,” by Michelle Goldberg.

Work Without Author, the latest from Oscar-winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others), is opening in Germany and the Netherlands on 10.3. It screened for German press last week. A friend says it will “apparently” screen a few weeks hence at the Venice Film Festival “but nothing’s official.” Said to be somewhere in the vicinity of 170 or 180 minutes, give or take.

This teaser-trailer posted on 2.5.17 — I’m told that a new, much longer trailer (allegedly four minutes) has been assembled but isn’t out yet. Another source says pic is “a lightly fictionalized bio-pic of Gerhard Richter and, like The Lives of Others, focuses on the tension between an artist and the changing political landscape around him.”

An insider calls Work Without Author “impressive and highly personal, and warrants its long running time. One of the best German screenplays I’ve ever read, super ambitious and a more than worthy follow up to The Lives of Others, covering 30 years of German history beginning in World War II and finishing in the mid to late 60s, a period rarely covered in German cinema. It’s basically about a painter finding his voice.”

I kept my word last night by revisiting Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 at an opening-night gala for 2018 Outfest. It’s a fascinating, well-told tale — sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad — that invites you to really sink in to that mad Manhattan era (’77 to ’80) that was a real bacchanalian sweet spot — post-pill, pre-AIDS, sexual liberation and an abundance of quaaludes and cocaine.

As I was driving home it hit me why I’m so affected by Studio 54, above and beyond the nostalgia vibes. It’s because Tyrnauer’s strategy for the first hour or so is to give you a great contact high with the saga of Studio 54’s amazing success — the cinematic equivalent of dropping a Lemmon 714 on an empty stomach — and then abruptly shift into wistful melancholy as he relates how partners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager struck it rich only to see the whole thing collapse less than two years later.

Schrager recovered and went on to great success as a boutique hotelier; Rubell died of AIDS in 1989 at age 45.

On 4.26.77 Rubell and Schrager opened the legendary late-hours club — an immersive alternate-reality trip on West 54th near 8th Avenue. Studio 54 quickly became known for enforcing a brutal door-admission policy while at the same time passing through top-tier celebrities and allowing all kinds of hedonistic, wild-ass behavior once you got in (especially in that big dark balcony). They hit the cultural jackpot, revelling in bass-thromp music, mountains of cash and all kinds of druggy good times for a year and and two-thirds until New York State prosecutors and the IRS raided their offices in December ’78, and then filed tax-evasion and skimming charges the following summer.

The last third of Tyrnauer’s 98-minute film brings it all home. The mood of the film suddenly quiets down and shifts into “yeah, the success went to our heads and then we went to prison and then a few years later poor Steve died.” Almost anything having to do with loss tends to get me emotionally. Studio 54 is about striking it rich but lacking the wisdom or being too arrogant or wrecked to avoid dumb mistakes, and how recklessness and the overplaying of one’s hand leads where you might expect. The finale includes an admission from the now-72 year-old Schrager (who’d never consented to being interviewed about the Studio 54 saga until Tyrnaeur came along) that he and Rubell acted foolishly and that life is short but the pages turn regardless.

Why did Studio 54 get to me? Because I made a mistake or two when I was young and somewhat brash, and it took some time to correct or counter-balance them. Life is choices, whether rashly decided upon or not.

Hollywood Elsewhere will be picking up an Outfest press pass in a couple of hours, and then early this evening I’ll be attending the opening-night gala screening of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54, which I fell for during last January’s Sundance Film Festival. Two motives: I want to see how it plays with an enthusiastic gay crowd and whether or not a second viewing will still give me the tingles. Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber have picked up U.S. rights and will presumably open it sometime in the fall. Outfest runs from tonight through Sunday, July 22nd.

“Many of the viewpoints Maher ridicules seem outrageous only because mainstream society is not yet accustomed to hearing them and having to ponder their validity. In this regard and many others, Maher’s material is reactionary in the dictionary sense of the word: opposing political or social liberalization or reform, or at least dramatically signaling his annoyance with the idea that there might be another way to live and think beyond whatever he’s comfortable with.

“That’s unfortunate, considering that a big part of his routine is based on self-identifying as a liberal. It’s as if he just wants things to go back to the way they were in the ’90s, when he could plausibly sit on the left-hand side of the set on his old ABC talk show Politically Incorrect. The Overton window shifted while he was ensconced at Real Time on HBO, and he’s mad that he can’t move it back.” — from Matt Zoller Seitz’s 7.12 Vulture piece, “Bill Maher Is Stand-up Comedy’s Past — Hannah Gadsby Represents Its Future.”

The thing that bothered me about Alden Ehrenreich playing Han Solo in Solo (i.e., zero resemblance between himself and Harrison Ford) is the same thing bothering me about 81-year-old Billy Dee Williams returning to plan Lando Calrissian in J.J. Abrams‘ Star Wars Episode IX flick — i.e., zero resemblance to Solo‘s Donald Glover.

I realize that prequels like Solo can’t hope to fully blend with the sequel trio — they’re parallel universes with their own biological compositions– but all these films have been produced by Disney and Kathy Kennedy, and after watching Solo I feel as if I’ve made an investment in Glover-as-Calrissian. But when Episode IX comes out I’ll be back with the old Lando again. And I don’t like it. Glover is 21st Century cool but Williams is the original cool so who’s da man?

From Ben Childs’ 7.11 Guardian piece: “The fear is that Disney-owned Lucasfilm is only wheeling out the 81-year-old [Williams] because it desperately needs original-trilogy cachet, and has exhausted the potential to cast Ford, Hamill or Fisher in yet another episode.

“Cynics will also complain that Williams ought to have been front and center in Abrams’ earlier effort, The Force Awakens, when he might have been paired successfully with his old buddy Han. But Lucasfilm has made a habit of keeping its classic cast apart in the new era, as if too much of a good thing might overwhelm us. Perhaps the idea is to retain the focus on fresher faces such as Daisy Ridley’s Rey and John Boyega’s Finn, so it is probably fair to say that the ploy has proved successful.
more or less.”

By the way: I’m not entirely sure if Luke Skywalker really and truly died at the end of The Last Jedi. He did, I know, but did he? I so hated the fact that Luke never left Ahch-To throughout the whole film, and that he died on Ach-To after the final confrontation with Kylo Ren even though he wasn’t actually fighting anyone — his “force projection” was. God, I hated that ending.

It was announced earlier today that Steve McQueen’s Widows (20th Century Fox, 11.16) will open the BFI London Film Festival on Wednesday, 10.10. The fact that the screening is being called an “international premiere” suggests that the caper thriller will start things off in Telluride or Toronto.

Pic is based on Lydia LaPlante’s Widows mini-series that ran on British television in ’83 and ’85. Wikipage logline for McQueen’s film: “Four armed robbers (Liam Neeson, Garret Dillahunt, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) are killed in a failed heist attempt, only to have their respective widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez) step up to finish the job.”

Viola Davis, Liam Neeson in Steve McQueen’s Widows.

Widows also stars Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas and Brian Tyree Henry.

In what particular way[s] could Widows fit into the ’18/’19 awards season? From what I’ve been told, Viola Davis is more or less a slamdunk for a Best Actress nomination. A guy who allegedly saw an early cut has said that “Viola is the standout, a force of nature in a showcase lead role…and she’s so respected as an actress.”

I’ve assumed all along that McQueen, an esteemed art-film director (12 Years A Slave, Shame, Hunger), wouldn’t go slumming by directing a boilerplate robbery caper flick. I’ve been told that he hasn’t done that. I’ve been told that he blends the Chicago-based robbery plot with political commentary involving police brutality, political corruption (Colin Farrell‘s character racking up odious points in this regard) and Black Lives Matter. So you should most likely put out of your mind any thoughts of Widows being an Ocean’s 8 companion piece.

Spittin’ cousins, queens at cross purposes. The willful, emotional, ultimately unlucky Mary Queen of Scots (Saoirse Ronan) vs. the coolly reasoned Queen Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) in the mid to late 1500s. Things don’t quite work out for Mary, but then you knew that. The Focus Features release opens on 12.4.

Yesterday I passed along praise for Ronan’s performance (“incredible, really gets to shine, a full range of emotions”). The flame-haired Robbie looks like a fright. (Cue junket-whore questions about how upsetting it was for the beautiful Robbie to ugly up for the sake of art.) The clips are handsome in a carefully-balanced, steady-as-she-goes, class-A fashion. The exquisite lighting is the work of dp John Mathiesen, a longtime Ridley Scott collaborator.

Directed by Josie Rourke, the trailer seeks to persuade that the film is primarily focused on character and conviction rather than blood and spectacle. The fact that Beau Willimon (House of Cards) wrote the screenplay suggests this. And yet the word around the campfire is that the Game of Thrones aesthetic was also an influence.

“Less stuffy literary biopic than ever-relevant female-empowerment saga, Wash Westmoreland‘s Colette ranks as one of the great roles for which Keira Knightley will be remembered. While hardly the first English-language feature to go behind the famous French byline (Danny Huston directed the much-derided Becoming Colette a quarter-century earlier), it succeeds in tying her story to the zeitgeist, while delving deeper into the love affairs she pursued with other women.” — from Peter Debruge‘s Sundance review, posted on 1.21.18.