From Brooks Barnes’ N.Y. Times profile of producer Amy Pascal, posted on 7.8: “Pascal’s producing projects are varied: superhero movies (Silver & Black), prestige-minded dramas (The Papers), bouncy comedies (Barbie). But almost every film on her docket involves female empowerment.

“’I’m not trying to correct or counterbalance,’ Pascal said, referring to male-dominated Hollywood. ‘I’m interested in women because I am a woman, and that’s what I understand.’

Producer Amy Pascal (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Papers

“To illustrate her point, she turned to The Papers, which stars Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham, who hesitantly took over The Washington Post after her husband’s suicide in 1963. The screenplay finds Graham trying to catch up to The New York Times, which published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, enraging President Richard M. Nixon and leading to a landmark First Amendment court case, which prohibited the government from ordering that leaked information not be published.

“’It’s first and foremost a movie about Katharine Graham, a woman who went from being a little bit of a mouse to a lion,’ Ms. Pascal said. ‘And that, to me, was obviously really interesting. She had to struggle to decide to speak up.’

“She added: ‘I know that woman. I’ve been that woman.'”

HE interjection: The problem with The Papers, as I indicated last March after reading Liz Hannah‘s The Post (since retitled and rewritten by Josh Singer), is that Mrs. Graham spends too much time as a mouse (over 70 pages) and not enough as a lion.

I’m a sucker for clackety-clack typewriter sounds, sure. I love fiddling with typewriters. I love that there’s a brick building on Olympic called National Typewiter Company. But I haven’t owned a typewriter since ’88 or thereabouts. Typewriters aren’t vinyl (i.e., a cooler way to go) but Victrolas. They’re basically a sentimental indulgence for affluent types who don’t have to submit or post anything. Or who don’t mind scanning their pages and transferring to digital. Not to mention buying inky ribbons, white-out, paper. There’s an OSX software called Noisy Typer that I just tried to install — didn’t work. Doug Nichol‘s California Typewriter will open in New York and Los Angeles on 8.11. No screening invites or offer of video links. Who’s handling publicity?

There was some back-and-forth yesterday about Kier Simmons‘ timid approach to covering a G20 demonstration for NBC (“What Kind Of Pussy Reporter Wears A Crash Helmet?“). One of the comments mentioned that notorious scene at the beginning of Thunderball when Sean Connery wore a jetpack helmet. Connery had that Scottish machismo thing down just fine in Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. But it all collapsed when he put that pussy helmet on. From that point on there was something vaguely deballed about the guy. The advertising team obviously agreed — the Thunderball posters showed Connery flying the jet pack without the helmet.

No argument about having to wear a helmet to ride a motorcycle around town (although I’d be happier if the helmet law was optional) and I understand the need to wear yellow hard hats on a construction site, but otherwise helmets are for eunuchs. I’ve never worn one of those pinko-pansy bicycle helmets in my life, and I never will.

But you can’t make him drink. Or, in Shia LaBeouf’s case, not drink.

The poor guy was arrested in Savannah around 4 am this morning “after he was caught causing a drunken commotion in City Market downtown,” according to Variety. Hey, I know the City Market area pretty well! Festive, touristy. If I was still a drinking man I would probably adore Savannah on a whole ‘nother level.

Whatever Labeouf’s enjoyment levels were last night, they plummeted when he was put in a cell around 4 or 5 am this morning. He made bail around 11 am.

“The Transformers star first began making a scene when he asked a bystander and an officer if they had any cigarettes to spare,” the report reads. “Upon their refusal, Lebeouf ‘became disorderly, using profanities and vulgar language in front of the women and children present,’ says the SCMPD. ‘He was told to leave the area and refused, becoming aggressive toward the officer. LaBeouf then ran to a nearby hotel, where he was eventually apprehended inside the lobby.’

It was apparent to me nine years ago that Lebeouf had a problem that needed addressing. I had a brief discussion with him about “the program” during an Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crustal Skull party at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Excerpt: “I told LeBeouf he looked great also, adding — this was a minor mistake — that the program obviously agreed with him. ‘The program?,’ he asked. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘AA, no? I read you’d gone into the program after the Chicago Walmart bust.’ ‘Nope…no program…just livin’ my life,’ he replied.”

A24 has funded a Chinatown storefront that’s about promoting David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, which opens today. The idea is to immerse yourself in the mythology of the film by wearing an actual ghost sheet (which can also be ordered online) while meditating about eternity and whatnot. I think about the void all the time. Well, actually I don’t. I know I’m going to die and become a ghost some day, but I’m happier being in the present and sniffing aromas and thinking about movies.

I like Kate Erbland’s 6.27 Indiewire story about the pop-up, but Steven Zeitchik’s L.A. Times story (posted this morning at 11:45 am) declines to post a link to the store’s website, and both stories refuse to simply state that it’s located at 51A Chrystie Street, between Canal and Hester. Zeitchick will only divulge that the pop-up is “in a revived post-industrial stretch of the city in lower Manhattan.”

And why, may I ask, isn’t there a Los Angeles Ghost Store? The A24 guys are based in Manhattan, of course, but they seem indifferent to the feelings of their Left Coast friends. I for one think this situation sucks.

Last night I caught a 7:15 pm showing of A Ghost Story at the Arclight, and man oh man it’s so great to sit in the front row and stare at the big screen and that 1.37 aspect ratio image with the rounded corners. And I love how Casey Affleck‘s ghost garb is somewhat grayish and frayed, and looks more like a soiled paint tarp than a bedsheet. You can tell that the ghostface eye holes have been cut with drugstore scissors, and that they’re frayed. And I love how Lowery is very, very careful not to let the viewer see Affleck’s feet or footwear. God forbid should we notice tennis slip-ons or flip-flops. Affleck’s ghost doesn’t exactly float around but Lowery definitely tries to discourage viewers from mulling the possibility that the ghost gets around by putting one foot in front of the other.

Wells to Zeitchik and Erbland: Chrystie Street! 51A Chrystie Street! Take the B or D to Grand Street.

As he prepared to cover G20 Summit protests in Hamburg, NBC correspondent Kier Simmons decided to wear a bright blue crash helmet, obviously for protection if the cops clubbed him or something. Real men take their chances. Can you imagine Matt Damon, Ryan Reynolds or Channing Tatum wearing one of these things if they played a TV reporter in a film? Their reputations would never recover.

MCN’s David Poland let his guard down a couple of days ago: “I am, like my father, a softie. This always feels odd coming out of my mouth (or fingers) as there seem to be so many people who want to tell me what a mean person I am. And I certainly have been mean at times. But I tend to believe that by ‘mean’ what is really being expressed is that I hit a tender spot with my words and left a mark.”

Wells comment: You can be mean with your keyboard but not with your fingers. All writers are softies of one kind or another. I’ve never found David to be especially “mean.” Judgmental, yes — he’s the only guy who’s ever dropped me as a friend. But judgment and condemnation go with the territory. I remember listening to a couple of Poland tirades about my shortcomings that were so severe that the only commensurate response, it seemed, was suicide. I decided to push on.

Back to Poland: “There was a time when I was more reckless with this skill. In those early years of The Hot Button, I just hit ‘publish’ and kept working. I was amused by my ability to cause an emotional response (good or bad) from people more powerful than I. As time passed, I came to understand — finally — that we are (mostly) all vulnerable in similar ways. [So I gradually] got out of the business of reporting on misery — jobs lost, companies failing, etc. The failures of others are not a form of amusement.

“Of course, this didn’t preclude some people and/or studios from having insanely thin skin. If you are playing in the big stadium, you have to be able to take the shots you have coming. The same is true of journalists. Much of the anger held towards me comes from headlines in the early days of Movie City News. I could be brutally direct. And 17 years later, it still comes up. But the age of Finke-ian entertainment journalism and the support of it by non-journalists like Jay Penske has led to an era of all-suck-up or all-rage coverage. [In this regard] I am a tweener. I believe in people. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in the inherent kindness of which we are all capable.”

With almost everyone having seen Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, early peeks at the other two high-prestige flicks of the ’17 summer — Kathryn Bigelow‘s Detroit (Annaurna, 8.4) and Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk (Warner Bros., 7.21) — are happening this week.

Detroit screened yesterday in New York (and also here, I presume) for those attending a Los Angeles actors’ junket tomorrow. There’s another junket happening concurrently in Detroit with the filmmakers attending (Bigelow, presumably screenwriter Mark Boal, etc.)

Dunkirk is being screened tomorrow for junketeers with a press conference of some kind happening on Sunday. The blogaroos have been begging to be let into Saturday’s showing but Warner Bros. is saying not now, hang in there, etc.

A guy who attended last night’s Manhattan screening of Detroit had positive reactions. He says it’s basically aimed at black audiences (the early August opening is about The Help and Straight Outta Compton having opened on 8.10.11 and 8.14.15 and earned $216 and $201 million, respectively) as well as action connoisseurs, review-reading elites, X-factor types.

He called it a tense and sobering history lesson, teeming with obvious echoes of present-day police brutality and unwarranted violence toward black guys. A strong, complex, grim and riveting visit to urban America of 50 years ago. The cops are mostly one-note villains, he says, but how could they not be given the history of the ’67 Detroit riots? Not much room for anything but condemnation.

The stand-out among Detroit‘s mostly-black cast, he says, is Algee Smith. I’ve heard from another source that Will Poulter gives the best white-cop performance. As expected, Barry Ackroyd‘s cinematography and William Goldenberg‘s editing are ace-level. Certain elite critics have apparently been given a looksee, but the blogaroos have all been told they can see Detroit sometime “soon.”

Posted from Park City on 1.26.17: Hollywood Elsewhere loves Icarus, the Russian doping doc that Netflix picked up two or three days ago. I’ve no striking observations or insights to add to the general chorus, but I can at least say that after a slow start Icarus turns into a highly gripping account of real-life skullduggery and paranoia in the sense of the classic William S. Burroughs definition of the term — i.e., “knowing all the facts.”

As noted, Bryan Fogel‘s two-hour film starts off as a doping variation of Morgan Spurlock‘s Super Size Me, and then suddenly veers into the realm of Laura Poitras‘ Citizenfour.

It doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know or suspect. The prime takeaways are (a) the use of performance-enhancing drugs is very common in sports (everyone does it, Lance Armstrong was the tip of the iceberg) and (b) there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Vladmir Putin and his top henchmen and the Al Capone mob of 1920s Chicago.

I was a little worried during the Super Size Me portion, in which bicyclist Fogel and Russian scientist Grigory Rodchenkov embark on a project with the goal of outsmarting athletic doping tests. It’s interesting at first, but it goes on too long. After a while I was muttering “so when does the Russian doping stuff kick in?”

Suddenly it does. Rodchenkov gradually admits to Fogel that he orchestrated a Putin-sanctioned doping program that gave the Russian athletes an advantage at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, which led to the winning of 13 gold medals. But in November ’15 Rodchenkov’s laboratory was suspended by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) following a report alleging state-sponsored doping in Russia, and soon after Putin and the bad guys were looking to lay the blame on Rodchenkov. (Or possibly kill him.)

Sasha Stone‘s Awards Daily is conducting a Best of 2017 poll. Critics, columnists, industry people, etc. I was asked to submit my top five or ten within a fenced-off area — i.e., a cutoff release date of July 1st, and no festival favorites that haven’t been released yet. The results will be posted sometime on Monday.

So I ignored the rules about no festival films and the 7.1 cutoff and submitted the same films I posted a couple of weeks ago — (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, (6) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (7) David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, (8) Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (even though I fundamentally regard this Paris-based ghost story as last year’s news as it premiered nearly 14 months ago at the ’16 Cannes Film Festival) and (9) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

Explanation/retort: The Guadagnino has been praised extensively. Everyone who knows or reads anything is aware that it’s a major film, so why exclude it because the megaplex knuckle-draggers haven’t seen it yet? What in blazes have they got to do with anything? Why confine your eligible films to those seen by the lowly, popcorn-munching ticket buyer?

“Hah…can I quote part of your response in the article?” the poller guy said. “By the way, I agree with you. 47 of the 48 lists thus far have had Get Out. It doesn’t look like that movie is going away come awards season.”

“It’s a good but overpraised John Carpenter film in the vein of They Live,” I answered, repeating myself ad infinitum. “Thumbs up, yes, but calm down. The Get Out praise is largely about 45-and-over white critics (and, down the road, white Academy members) wanting to seem socially attuned and benevolent. If a white guy had directed it, I doubt it would even be in the awards conversation, much less the finals.”

It was announced today that Ava DuVernay will write and direct a five-episode Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case of ’89. I don’t know, man. Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary, was one thing (i.e., not without problems but compelling). But a dramatic miniseries will be a whole ‘nother challenge.

The case was about the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female stockbroker, in Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89. Five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — were wrongly prosecuted and falsely imprisoned, only to be exonerated and freed several years later. A flat-out expression of racist hysteria and institutional corruption.

Duvernay is facing two significant problems in terms of her main characters — the five alleged assailants and Meili. If DuVernay fudges, sidesteps or fabricates (as she did with her depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma), she’s going to run into trouble.

Problem #1: The teenagers who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home.

How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Problem #2: The victim’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was almost as stupid. I lived in New York City in the early ’80s so don’t tell me — what Meili did was flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street and much less above friggin’ 100th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

How do you dramatize Meili’s late-night jogging without the audience thinking “wait…is she an idiot?

Either you’re intrigued and excited by the idea of a spooky but essentially non-scary ghost movie, or you’re not. Or you’re able to embrace the idea of a silent and passive ghost under a bedsheet, or not. 90% if not 95% of ticket-buyers prefer the dead-obvious kind of ghost flick (i.e. anything in the vein of the Conjuring series) and maybe 5% or 10% (if that) have a place in their heads for smarter, subtler variations. Which is one way of acknowledging that David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, which opens tonight, probably won’t be setting any box-office records. But man, it sure rang my bell at Sundance last January.

Please…if you’re smarter than a fencepost and can think outside the box, give it a looksee this weekend.

I’m not the first one to say this, but it could be argued that the scariest thing about A Ghost Story is Lowery himself.

From Madison + Vine’s Jake Coyle: “A Ghost Story is what it says it is, and it may well haunt you. It won’t scare you; it doesn’t even say ‘boo.’ But glowing light and ghostly soulfulness linger on like a quiet, scratching presence that won’t leave you.”

Posted last month: Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.

The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.