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It’s hard to set aside time to read a book when you’re already putting in several hours a day on a column plus the usual chores, reveries and occasional screenings. Last night I nonetheless read five or six chapters of Seymour Hersh‘s “Reporter“, which hit stores less than two weeks ago. I read the ones about Hersh serving as an Associated Press Pentagon reporter and as press secretary for the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy in late ’67 and ’68, and two chapters about his breaking the My Lai massacre story — “Finding Calley” and “A National Disgrace.”

Of course and indisputably, “Reporter” is a page-turner. First-rate writing and reporting — pruned to the bone, no wasted words. I was completely hooked and immersed, and then appalled all over again when I got to the Calley chapter. After I finished I found “Finding Calley” in a recent Harper’s post.

Remember that scene in Full Metal Jacket in which a blustery helicopter gunner regales Private Joker (Matthew Modine) and Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) with stories about how he “sometimes” mows down women and children, etc.? That was, of course, the My Lai sensibility, albeit diluted for mass consumption.

Hersh: “One GI who shot himself in the foot to get the hell out of My Lai told me of the special savagery some of his colleagues — or was it himself? — had shown toward young children. One GI used his bayonet repeatedly on a little boy, at one point tossing the child, perhaps still alive, in the air and spearing him as if he were a paper-mache pinata. I had a two-year-old son at home, and there were times, after talking to my wife and then my child on the telephone, when I would suddenly burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably. For them? For the victims of American slaughter? For me, because of what I was learning?”

Hersh’s initial My Lai report broke on 11.12.69. He wrote about the atrocity in “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath” (’70), but a long excerpt in Harper’s appeared a few weeks before that. Hersh had interviewed nearly 50 Charlie Company perpetrators. The initial indictment said that 109 My Lai (or Son My) villagers had been murdered — the figure was actually 504. Two years later a second Hersh book, “Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4“, was published.

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Ocean’s 8 costar Mindy Kaling has repeated a lament about crotchety male critics that Brie Larson, Sandra Bullock and others have voiced, which is basically that Rotten Tomato dudes don’t get women’s films and that their dominance is a problem in and of itself.

Kaling is quoted in a two-day-old Guardian piece. She told a junket journo that the white male critic heirarchy is “unfair”, and explained that “if I had to base my career on what white men wanted I would be very unsuccessful, so there is obviously an audience out there who want to watch things like [Ocean’s 8], what I work on, what Sarah [Paulson] works on.

“And the thing about so much of what this movie is, I think white men, critics would enjoy it, would enjoy my work, but often I think there is a critic who will damn it in a way because they don’t understand it, because they come at it at a different point of view, and they’re so powerful, Rotten Tomatoes.”

Ocean’s 8 costar Cate Blanchett: “The conversation has to change, and the media has a huge responsibility.”

Hollywood Elsewhere exception #1: If more women elbow their way into the film-critic conversation, great. But any critic worth his or her salt will tell you the same thing, which is that it’s not about gender as much as quality. A caper flick has to have the right attitude and the right kind of chops, which is to say the kind that appeal to both genders. A heist movie that chooses to deal frivolous wank-off cards can be fine, but it has to do so with charm and finesse and a certain air of confidence.

I still say that the high-water mark for this kind of thing is Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock (’71). It was totally throwaway, but it was reasonably well-plotted in an absurdist way, and it had a clear-cut comedic tone.

Hollywood Elsewhere exception #2: For what it’s worth I didn’t find Ocean’s 8 all that problematic. In my 6.7 review, I said “it doesn’t deliver much but it’s not that bad. To my profound surprise it doesn’t get into emotional stuff at all. It’s like ’emotion who?’ It deals almost nothing but dry, droll, mid-tempo cards. And I kind of liked that. Was I knocked out? No, but I felt oddly placated.”

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Producer Martin Bregman, the elegant New York smoothie who basically built a career out of producing five Al Pacino movies and five starring Alan Alda, has passed at age 92. The Pacinos were Serpico (’73), Dog Day Afternoon (’75), Scarface (’83), Sea of Love (’86) and Carlito’s Way (’93). The Aldas were The Seduction of Joe Tynan (’79), The Four Seasons (’81), Sweet Liberty (’86), A New Life (’88) and Betsy’s Wedding (’90).

To me Bregman was always the consummate, well-connected gentleman producer with a deep voice who gave great on-camera interviews, especially about the making of Scarface. Brooklyn-born and Bronx-reared, he was a classic New York “industry” personality — as much of a staple of a New York filmmaking attitude (make things happen, finesse the unions, grease the right palms) as Sidney Lumet. He seemed cut from the same (or at least a similar) cloth as producer and talent agent Jerry Weintraub, who also hailed from Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Bregman started in insurance and real estate, and then sashayed into the entertainment biz as a nightclub agent and a personal manager, eventually representing Pacino, Alda, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, et. al. He also produced Phillip Noyce‘s The Bone Collector (’99) and The Adventures of Pluto Nash (’02), an Eddie Murphy vehicle. In ’05 Bregman also produced a Carlito’s Way prequel that his son Michael wrote and directed.

A sharp producer who hails from the east and has been around: “Bregman played it pretty close to the vest. He was a tough guy who could deal with the goombahs who for many years controlled the city streets that were needed for outdoor locations in New York. He had the connections. Nobody fucked with him. And he was widely respected by left coasters for being the insider who got the job done.”

“Trump Is Making Us All Live in His Delusional Reality Show,” by New York‘s Andrew Sullivan, posted on 6.15: “The president believes what he wants to believe, creates a reality that fits his delusions, and then insists, with extraordinary energy and stamina, that his delusions are the truth.

“His psychological illness, moreover, is capable of outlasting anyone else’s mental health. Objective reality that contradicts his delusions is discounted as ‘fake news’ propagated by ‘our country’s greatest enemy,’ i.e., reporters. If someone behaved like this in my actual life, if someone kept insisting that the sea was red and the sky green, I’d assume they were a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Almost no one else in public life is so openly living in his own disturbed world.

“This past week was a kind of masterpiece in delusion. It was a long version of that surreal video his National Security Council created for Kim Jong-un. It was crude, crass, and absurd. I can’t begin to unpack the madness, but it’s worth counting the bizarre things Trump said and did in such a short space of time.

“Trump clearly believes that Canada’s milk exports are a verifiable national security threat to the United States. He thinks Justin Trudeau’s banal press conference, reiterating Canada’s position on trade, was a ‘stab in the back.’ And he insists that the nuclear threat from North Korea is now over — ‘Sleep well!’ — because he gave Kim the kind of legitimacy the North Korean national gulag has always craved, and received in turn around 400 words from Pyongyang, indistinguishable from previous statements made to several presidents before him.

“For good measure, he took what was, according to The Wall Street Journal, Vladimir Putin’s advice –I kid you not — to cancel the forthcoming joint military exercises with the South Koreans. More than that, he has offered to withdraw all U.S. troops from the peninsula at some point, before Pyongyang has agreed to anything. He regards all of this as worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize, his Reagan moment. And he is constructing a reality-television show in which he is a World Historical Figure.

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Go on, tell me how much fun you had with Incredibles 2. How you just loved sitting with kids and their families. How you found it just as good if not better than the 2004 original. How impressed you were by the nonstop wit and action. How the post-Iron Man superhero onslaught had no influence upon the machine-gun, ADD-styled pacing. Go on, lay it on me.

Jacob Bernstein‘s “The Great Interview Magazine Caper“, a N.Y. Times “Style” piece (6.16.18), is a thoroughly reported, concisely written history of a high-fashion, celebrity-focused monthly that really seemed to matter from the early ’70s to early ’80s. To me anyway and others in my Manhattan journalist circle. Particularly, I would say, during the mid to late ’70s, and especially the Studio 54 heyday (’77 to ’80).

Launched by Andy Warhol in ’69, Interview folded last month after nearly 50 years in business.

I forget exactly when I realized that Interview had lost that special aura of downtown coolness, but it was probably sometime in the mid to late ’80s. It was clear to one and all that the edge factor was gone by the early ’90s. I’m amazed that a past-its-prime version of Interview limped along for a quarter-century, but it did.

My one and only visit to Interview‘s editorial offices was in early ’78. I had written up an interview with Sterling Hayden for Fairfield County magazine, and was trying to sell it to a Manhattan publication. (Zero overlap.) It was just a so-so profile, and yet executive editor Robert Hayes didn’t blow me off. As I sat by his desk he unfolded a copy of my article and read it line by line. He didn’t skim — he actually read each sentence. He said it was “good” but let it go at that. I didn’t expect that much would happen, but Hayes made me feel welcome and conveyed a certain peer respect.

We chatted about various critics who were around at the time. He described one as an “easy lay” — the first time that a big-league New York editor had confided that kind of opinion to me. I was flattered. A few years later Hayes died of complications from AIDS. I never forgot his graciousness and good manners.

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I still say that anyone who acts in a belligerent, aggressive manner when the cops come is an idiot. Because pushing back against the bulls can only end badly. Beatings, handcuffs, jail cells, sometimes emergency rooms. And sometimes even death. Are the wrong cops on the job? Obviously. Are there a lot more bad ones than authorities realize? Almost certainly. But this isn’t likely to be fixed next week. When the cops arrive, the drama stops. The only way. Head down, calm tone of voice, mild submission…duhhh.

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The last two paragraphs of Glenn Kenny‘s N.Y. Times review of Kevin Connolly‘s Gotti are hilarious.

“For many scenes, it seems that Mr. Connolly asked himself, ‘What would Martin Scorsese do?’ All his answers are wrong. His staging of shots is not even rudimentary. And when he tries for a slightly sophisticated effect, he whiffs. There’s a shallow-focus view of Gotti and his crew walking down the street near their social club. The background is impressionistically out of focus as intended, while the characters walking toward the camera are…well, they’re out of focus, too. Just less out of focus than the background.

“The use of period pop music on the soundtrack here is probably influenced by Mr. Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Except the choices are on-the-nose dull or out-and-out hilarious. The killing of ‘Big Paul’ Castellano, which occurred in December ’85, is accompanied by Elvis Presley’s ‘Silent Night.’ Mr. Connolly even throws in Isaac Hayes’s ‘Theme From Shaft.’ You don’t put the ‘Theme From Shaft’ in a movie that is not Shaft. Come on.”

Side comment: I really don’t like that comma in the sixth sentence of the first paragraph, the one between “focus” and “too.” It may be technically correct but it looks wrong, and that’s the bottom line. HE version: “The background is impressionistically out of focus as intended, while the characters walking toward the camera are…well, they’re out of focus too.”

A Criterion Bluray of the ’61 version of A Raisin in the Sun will pop on 9.25.18. Based on Lorraine Hansberry‘s 1959 play, directed by Daniel Petrie, produced by David Susskind. Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Stephen Perry, John Fiedler and — in his film debut at age 25 — Louis Gossett Jr. Early ’60s social realism — straightforward, modestly framed, well-honed, cards on the table. I’m very sorry, as usual, that Criterion had decided to present this much-honored film in a cleavered 1.85 aspect ratio when they easily could have gone with 1.78 or 1.66. (The cinematography is by Charles Lawton, Jr.) A Columbia Classics DVD presented Raisin in both full-screen and 1.85.

Full-frame.

Cleavered.

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