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Jeffrey Wells to Eric Kohn, the New York City-residing artistic director of the Southampton Playhouse:

Eric,

Happy New Year and all the best, etc.

I’ve just read Hope Hamilton’s puzzling 27east softball piece about the Southampton Playhouse and particularly about you and Maria A. Ruiz Botsacos and the honor of being named “people of the year” by some vague Southampton press org.

ANYWAY, I’m a tiny bit perplexed by a few details (or a lack of them) in the Hamilton article.

We all understand that the Southampton Playhouse is a grade-A aspirational nonprofit experience, one that incidentally houses “the smallest IMAX theatre in the nation”, according to Hamilton. (What could be the possible point of showing a big Chris Nolan event film on a teeny-weeny IMAX screen?)

We also understand that exhibition is a sadly dying industry (breaks my heart) and that most of the super-wealthy boomers and GenXers who can afford to live in the Hamptons (but whose ranks are almost certainly thinned out during the cold months) prefer to stream HD films at home on their 75-inch 4K screens.

So how does the eight-month-old Southampton Playhouse, even with the unacknowledged, unmentioned grants and secret donations and tax breaks and you-name-it that fund the overall operation…how can the SP cover the basic operating expenses (which have to be sizable) plus your salary plus Maria’s…how does it all add up?

Not to mention yours and Maria’s Southampton lodging and commutation expenses (rents are ridiculous out there, even in the winter). I mean, who’s the secret arms-dealing billionaire who’s paying for all this?

And why doesn’t Hamilton even mention the Harmony Korine EDGLRD thing, even in passing?  You left your lofty position with IndieWire for the Harmony thing, right?  Is that job still happening?

At the very least Hamilton’s article reads and sounds like a carefully phrased, very carefully edited, ignore the elephant in the room, blah-blah profile.  

Seriously, what’s really going on?  Without blowing smoke, I mean.

At the end of the day, the Southampton Playhouse is just a movie theatre (technically a quad, right?)  and movie theaters in general are struggling to survive.  At best this or that indie showcase in Key West or Savannah or Austin or hipster Brooklyn MIGHT be breaking even, but only with salaries and expenses pared to the bone…right? Are flush Saudi billionaires cutting checks on the side for the SP? 

I’m obviously not familiar with the ins and outs of financing blue-chip operations like the SP, but way back when I was a fully licensed Connecticut projectionist plus I also worked as a manager of Sid Geffen ‘s Carnegie Hall Cinema so there’s that. 

Best to you and the family. How old is your son now?  My granddaughter Sutton just turned four.

Jeff

P.S.: We all understand that the spelling of Southampton includes only one “h”, which breaks down to “South” and “ampton.” (Or, if you will, “Sout” and “Hampton.) And yet the neighboring community of East Hampton is spelled like it looks and sounds.

Also: I understand the motive behind Alejandro G. Inarritu’s decision to substitute a G. for Gonzalez so his name would sound less pretentious or more concise…9 syllables vs. the original 11…but on top of her three-pronged, 8-syllable name why does Maria insert an A. for a grand total of 9 syllables?…as long as she’s piling up the syllables why not really go for it and insert the name that the A. stands for, in which case she might possibly out-syllable George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter?

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival (5.12 through 5.23) is only four and a half months away, which means I’ll need to lock down an affordable crash pad by January or February, early March at the latest.

I’ve been looking around, and rental-wise Cannes is once again a miserable proposition. Within last year’s price range (2200 or 2300 euros for ten days) the available places are either the size of broom closets or located too far away from the Palais, or both. One humiliating shit-level rental after another. There’s a notion of possibly bunking at that horrible little studio Jordan and I shared last May…ugghh!

If you want to stay at some half-decent Cannes apartment during the festival, you need to be able to shell out 3500 or 4000 Euros for 10 days. The greed factor makes me sick. Venice rentals are so much more humane.

Chumbawamba’s biggest single was released on 8.11.97. I find this numerical fact hugely depressing.

I still disagree with the spelling of the group’s name. For the last 28 and 1/2 years I’ve been calling them ChumbaWUMba. Obviously the last two syllables being spelled “wamba” doesn’t work in this context.

I’m not in league with the nyah-hyah blamers and fault-finders who love to point their tanned, well-manicured fingers and accuse dicky, flinty, less-than-gracious people of being “dicks” or “ayeholes”.

Were they wrong about Chevy Chase during his late-20th-Century heyday? Apparently not, but they also used to point fingers at Jerry Lewis and he was always fine in my book. I always accepted who and what Lewis was. He was a “prick” but fine…shrug it off. Show business breeds performers with over-sized egos and cavalier attitudes. It goes with the territory.

Now 82, Chase seems a bit diminished. His diction seems a bit off. Maybe I’m wrong.

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HE to candy-ass woke brainiacs and male-hating TikTok feminists who are calling Marty Supreme socially dangerous because it clearly admires and in fact glorifies a hungry, selfish, ruthlessly ambitious pogo stick and out-for-number-one ping-pong athlete…

I’m talking to those who are basically calling Josh Safdie out for inspiring toxic, anti-social behavior amongst your impressionable basement-dwelling bros…bitch-slapping Safdie for having made a new version of The Wolf of Wall Street, which people like LexG admired “for the wrong reasons”…

Those who are lamenting that Safdie and Timothee Chalamet have created a new version of What Makes Sammy Run?….

Sadie and Chalamet have valorized, they fear, a lower-Manhattan beanpole who isn’t much different, morally or ethically, from Robert DeNiro‘s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets…

The Marty haters need to get a clue.

Marty Supreme is about a selfish young dude’s journey across the heaving seas…a journey that begins with an epic hustle and ends with tears in a maternity ward,….but it’s mainly about the same primal hunger that drives salmon to swim upstream.

Consider the opening-credit footage of sperm cells furiously swimming toward the egg in order to fertilize. This is what Safdie is telling us in so many words…young men are sperm cells, and they have to furiously swim and scramble their way into a place of warmth, growth and nurture because nobody will do their swimming for them…life is struggle, bruh…move it or fucking lose it.

All exciting or dynamic art strikes the gatekeepers and bluenoses as dangerous…Igor Stavinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps had people howling.

@josephholmesstudios #martysupreme #filmtok #masculinity #femisim #men ♬ original sound – Joseph Holmes

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HE is proud of the alleged fact that Wilton, which was largely Republican and booze-free when I was a teenager, is the gayest town in Connecticut. According to GeoUSA Discovery, 2.34% of the homes in Wilton, or “about” 68 homes, are gay-owned. (Does that include lesbians and maybe a trans person or two? For what it’s worth, a trans biomale was working last summer at the Wilton Library.)

@geousadiscovery Do you know? #unitedstates#usa#connecticut#gayest#live ♬ original sound – GeoUSA Discovery

Back in the bad old 20th Century porn-flick titles were mainly known for taking mainstream movie titles and changing them into cheap puns. But HE has to hand it to the producers of Rear Admiral…a diamond in the rough.

Gavin Newsom will be obliged and in fact required to destroy the White House’s elephantine, obscenely disproportionate Trump ballroom and recreate the original East Wing as it existed since the original 1902 construction or the 1942 expansion…take your pick. I’m serious. As a symbolic rejection and erasure of arrogant, malignant, Mussolini–like Trumpism.

Oh, and The Wolf of Wall Street shouldn’t have been made either, according to sapphic_swiftie13.

@sapphic_swiftie13 I understand the art AND I understand the way it effects society. You need both to be a responsible artist, and it’s very clear the director of this movie did not!! #martysupreme #martysuprememovie #timotheechalamet #timotheechalametedit #timotheechalametedits ♬ original sound – Cheyenne Rae

Posted on 6.24.25: William Friedkin would turn in his grave if news of Criterion’s defacement of their Sorcerer 4K Bluray could somehow be communicated to his afterlife realm.

Freidkin to Criterion: “How dare you….how fucking dare you saturate my 1977 masterpiece with grotesque teal-green tones…you don’t flood your Carnal Knowledge 4K with teal so why did you do it to Sorcerer?…do you understand that what you’ve done represents a form of evil? Do you even get that, fuckers, or are you oblivious?”

Friedkin-to-Criterion followup: “Do you guys know that Birds scene in the Bodega Bay diner when that hysterical mother says to Tippi Hedren, ‘Who are you?…what are you? I think you’re evil….EVIL!!’ You know that scene? Well, that mother is the Bluray-buying public, and you’re Tippi Hedren!”

Late last night I finally saw Craig Brewer‘s Song Sung Blue, ånd like everyone else I felt generally pleased and often turned on during the musical performance segments. Who wouldn’t be? Catchy Neil Diamond tunes, re-energized by spirited, sufficiently talented middle-class tribute folk…alive, they cried!

I’ve never been the biggest Neil Diamond fan but on a certain level I felt a genuine kinship with the real-life, Milwaukee-based tribute performers Mike and Claire Sardina, who are fetchingly played by Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson.

Mike and Claire’s heyday was in the ’80s and early ’90s, and it was quite a ride. Serious Milwaukee favorites.

Plus I loved Michael Imperioli‘s supporting turn as Mark Shurilla, a Buddy Holly impersonator who joins Mike and Claire’s band. Ditto Ella Anderson, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi, Mustafa Shakir…everyone generates full conviction and good vibes.

There’s a fountain of musical joy that flows from the voices and hearts of Hackman and Hudson, and it’s a serious pleasure during the film’s first half…maybe the first 60% or so. Heart-lifting stuff that really floods the system.

But then they both get walloped with out-of-the-blue waffle irons that struck me, frankly, as too much. These tragedies really happened, yes, but it stills feels like bad plotting.

OBVIOUSLY NOT A SPOILER IF YOU’VE SEEN THE MIKE-AND-CLAIRE DOCUMENTARY, BUT I CAN IMAGINE WHINERS COMPLAINING IF I DON’T WARN: Claire getting hit by an out-of-control car while gardening in her front yard…the fuck? What kind of ridiculously demented asshole-behind-the-wheel would do such a thing? (Another crazy driver slams into the same home 20 to 25 minutes later, and it’s like….again? It’s just too nuts.) And then Mike dying from putting super-glue on a gash in his forehead after suffering a heart attack? It doesn’t feel real. Hell, it feels surreal.

Hudson delivers the spunkiest performance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she winds up getting Best Actress–nommed. Plus she seems to have gained a little bit of weight for the part, which is kinda commendable in a Robert DeNiro-in-Raging Bull sort of way. (Okay, maybe Hudson didn’t gain weight for the film, but she sure as hell didn’t lose any. She looks filled out in a 40ish sort of way.)

This is going to sound shallow, but I had problems with Jackman’s Neil Diamond wig, which has a kind of three-pointed shape and looks seriously dorky or bulldogish or whatever. It’s too Prince Valiant bouncy on the sides. The real Mike’s hair was far more becoming.

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