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A lot of people will be trashing Netflix if they fail to cut some kind of arrangement with the Cannes Film Festival and wind up yanking five films from the festival slate, including Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma and Paul Greengrass‘s Norway.

The near-final answer will come on Thursday, 4.12, when the festival announces the 2018 slate. Yes, there are always add-ons but who knows?

One guy who is speaking well of Netflix is author, screenwriter, former Variety critic and Other Side of the Wind costar Joseph McBride. The SF State University film professor plays a film critic, Charles Pister, in the Welles film, and not for some walk-on cameo. McBride went before the cameras for a six-year period during production on The Other Side of the Wind, from the early to mid ’70s, and had actual lines. Anyway, he recently posted the following on Facebook:

“There’s been a big flap over how villainous Netflix supposedly is threatening to withdraw its films from Cannes, including Orson Welles’s nearly completed The Other Side of the Wind and Morgan Neville’s companion documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (both of which I am in).

“Netflix stepped up to the plate after Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Roger Corman and everyone else in Hollywood passed up the opportunity to finish The Other Side of the Wind. For that alone Netflix [deserves] the eternal gratitude of film history. They are heroes in this saga. As I wrote, it was my idea to bypass theatrical after two decades of futility, so people can blame me for that, but if not for Netfix the film would still be in cans in the Paris lab. Kudos to the producers for making this finally happen and to Netflix for supporting it so generously.

HE response to McBride: Netflix definitely stepped up and saved this film, but at the end of the day we all know that a Netflix streaming berth, though welcome, has a certain arid component. I’m sure you agree that a big whoop-dee-doo Cannes Film Festival debut of The Other Side of the Wind will provide a much-needed moment of emotional satisfaction — completion, closure — for all the players (including Peter Bogdanovich) who’ve been involved for so many decades.

You know that the ghost of Orson Welles will definitely be watching and perhaps even raising a glass a la Celeste Holm at the end of A Letter To Three Wives.

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Okay, I’ll admit that this new trailer for Ron Howard‘s Solo: A Star Wars Story (Disney, 5.25) sells you on the possibility that the film itself might be half-tolerable, and I’ll admit that the naturally glum, Prius-driving Aldenreich exudes a certain devil-may-care je ne sais quoi. I’ll give you all that. But he’s still four inches shorter than Harrison Ford, and his eyes are a lot smaller than the Real McCoy’s. Donald Glover‘s Lando Calrissian feels fine, but he sure as hell isn’t related to the “old smoothy” played by Billy Dee Williams.

The same thing is happening in Hollywood. To me, I mean. As a columnist friend put it a couple of months ago, “The voracious corps — Penske Media, Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Vulture, N.Y. Times and a few others — is trying to vacuum up every advertising penny in the sector and drive all competitors out.”

From “Introducing HE:(plus),” posted on 2.27.18: “Award-season ad revenue is finite, and over the last two or three years the big gobble guys have muscled their way into the banquet room like the Al Capone mob. They’ve been throwing their weight around and sucking up the oxygen and indirectly eating me (and others I could mention) alive, no lie.

“Plus the new whiz-kid agency buyers are, like their forebears of a decade ago, interested only in numbers and page-views, and not in HE’s sui generis cosmology as well as its longtime award-season selling point — not just numbers but the quality of industry eyeballs — the coolest directors, producers, screenwriters, Academy members, agency guys, ubers, early adopters, grumpy know-it-alls, etc.

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With $665,355,740 in domestic earnings thus far, Black Panther is obviously a huge, historic, worldwide phenomenon. But it’s not a Titanic beater, and it probably never will be. And currently it’s not the all-time third highest grosser either. Not by inflationary standards, it’s not.

By the close of ’98 Titanic ended up with $600,788,188. If you add the nearly $58 million haul for Titanic 3D, which was released in 2012, the lifetime domestic gross is $659,353,944. But let’s stick to the ’97 and ’98 earnings.

The 2018 dollar is 52.8% higher than the 1998 dollar. $100 in 1998 is equivalent to $152.76 in 2018, and so Titanic‘s initial haul of $600,788,188 translates into $917,735,286 by current monetary standards.

After saluting Black Panther this morning as “the number 3 movie of all time in the U.S.,” Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman speculated that it might hit $700 million before it’s done. If that milestone is achieved, Black Panther will be $217,735,286 behind Titanic‘s domestic ’98 tally. By inflationary criteria.

Titanic‘s worldwide earnings (including the 2012 3D re-release) are at $2,187,463,944 — i.e., roughly $2.2 billion, and at least 90% of that was earned in ’98. Right now Black Panther‘s worldwide tally is at $1.3 billion, or $1,2999,855,740.

I’m sorry but I like the poster more than the trailer for Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The poster kills; the trailer is a “hmmm, yeah.” I’m doubly sorry that Gilliam won’t be able to screen his long-gestating film in Cannes next month, due to a lawsuit with Portugese producer Paulo Branco. Costarring Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver, Stellan Skarsgård, Olga Kurylenko, Joana Ribeiro. Who remembers Lost in La Mancha? It doesn’t feel like it popped 16 years ago, but it did.

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Eric Kohn‘s 4.7 Indiewire piece about the Netflix-vs-Cannes brouhaha mentions a significant point, which is that a law overseen by France’s culture minister requires 36 months between a film’s French theatrical release and its streaming debut. So if Netflix were to theoretically commit to theatrical openings this year for its five films slated for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the company wouldn’t be able to stream them in France until 2021. That is beyond absurd. A six-month window would be more like it.

Kohn and Anne Thompson‘s latest Screen Talk:

…into submission by this thing, sitting there in my seat and getting pounded, elbowed, waffle-ironed and slam-banged for 156 minutes. And it’s all about perks, pomp and paychecks…an army of filmmakers hauling it in, and not so much as a taste for Hollywood Elsewhere. This movie will do nothing but sap and impurify my precious bodily fluids.

I’ve been wondering all my life why Orville Nix was so far from the Presidential motorcade when he captured his crappy footage on 11.22.63. The motorcade route was widely known, having been published in the local papers. Why was Nix so far away from Elm Street, a half-block to the north? Nix just before the big moment: “I can hear the motorcade coming. It’ll be coming down Elm any second now, but I don’t want to get too close. It’ll make for a better shot if I can capture the whole panorama. True, I won’t get a closeup or even a medium shot of the President and Mrs. Kennedy, but the grass and the asphalt road and the trees and the blue sky are just as important, if not more so.”

And what about that gifted cinematographer Abraham Zapruder? He wasn’t aiming his 8mm camera properly, and so most of what he captured was above the JFK limousine. In fact Zapruder almost managed to miss the grisly Kennedy head shot. 85% to 90% of the image is about Dealey Plaza grass — 10% or 15% of the Zapruder image, at most, shows the limousine and its occupants. Zapruder just barely captured what happened. He nearly missed it entirely.

Zapruder and Nix were typical suburbanites with typical photographing skills. Both clearly believed in the importance of touristy wide shots, and had no apparent use for MCUs or close-ups. If only someone with a knack for decent framings had been on the scene. If young Steven Spielberg, 16 or 17 years old at the time and visiting Dallas with his mother for some reason, had been at the base of the grassy knoll and shooting with an 8mm Kodak wind-up, history would have been in his debt.