Excerpts from Jane Mayer‘s New Yorker profile of Tony Schwartz, who in the process of ghost-writing “The Art of the Deal” (1987) extensively hung out with Donald Trump and got to know him quite well. Schwartz is guilt-ridden over having sold the Trump myth to the public (“I put lipstick on a pig“) and is obviously looking to atone.

Mayer began chatting with Schwartz last month. The piece is fascinating, seemingly thorough, well-written. Definitely worth a full read.

New Yorker illustration by Javier Jaen.

Excerpt #1: “When Schwartz began writing ‘The Art of the Deal,’ he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, ‘I play to people’s fantasies…people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”

“Schwartz now disavows the passage. ‘Deceit,’ he told me, ‘is never innocent.’ He added, ‘Truthful hyperbole is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, it’s a lie but who cares?’ Trump, he said, loved the phrase.

It is written in the Hollywood playbook that the personalities and speaking styles of action-film heroes have to be wry, cocky, self-amused. So completely confident about their badassery that nothing rattles them. No edge, no anxiety. Pretty much every threat is an opportunity for casual dispatch, gun-twirling and deadpan one-liners. We got this. If it gets any easier we could almost be bored.

Yes, this was the initial attitude of Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and the others in John Sturges‘ The Magnificent Seven. But as that 1960 film wore on Sturges and the cast added darker layers: despair, guilt, bitterness, regret, fatalism.

Do the seven hotshots in Antoine Fuqua’s remake (Columbia/MGM, 9.23) develop in a similar way? Possibly, but you’d never know it from this trailer, which looks to me like more of the usual bullshit. Do you know why portions of this trailer suggest a videogame K-Mart version of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 original? I’ll tell you why. Like every other action director, Fuqua is looking to appeal to the megaplex dumbshits but more importantly to the Chinese.

A 106-minute cut of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ The Unknown Girl (as opposed to the 113-minute version that played in Cannes last May) will open in France on 10.12.16. Sundance Selects has the U.S. distrib rights, but will apparently delay the domestic opening until next year. If they felt any passion about this thing they would attach English subtitles to this Belgian-made trailer. Alas, non.

From my 5.18.16 Cannes review (“Doctor Detective”): “Whatever the story or thematic import, it was nearly a foregone conclusion that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ The Unknown Girl would be a moral tale that would (a) underwhelm, (b) radiate integrity and (c) be almost entirely composed of medium shots of people talking. Plain-spoken, unforced, refined, unpretentious. The Dardennes are nothing if not consistent.

“And if you’re smart, you’ll just sit there and take it. You have to slurp the soup and at least respect the ingredients. During this festival, I mean. As I wrote two years ago, the only negative thing Cannes critics are allowed to say about a Dardennes film is that it’s ‘minor.’

From Sasha Stone’s letter to Viggo Mortensen over his continuing, never-say-die support for Bernie Sanders: “It’s 2016 and we know the election could be close once again. We know that if Jill Stein earns 7% of the vote that could easily tip the election in Trump’s favor. We know that when that happens, Paul Ryan will essentially be President as Trump will become an hysterical puppet. We know, beyond any doubt, that they will put an extreme conservative back on the Supreme Court to replace Scalia. We know that they will try to overturn Obamacare, the rights of gay couples to get married in every state, a woman’s right to do with her body what she chooses. We know Trump’s first order of business will be to ‘declare war’ with ISIS and that will mean terrible terrible things for our country — and it will not stop ISIS anyway because no war can stop every madman in every truck. We know all of these things.

“How can you, in good conscience, believe that being true to your own whim is more important than protecting so many others will be put in such grave danger? How can the Viggo I thought I knew and admired be that selfish?”

When I saw this photo on Facebook this morning, my second thought was “good…a cartoon character about to be shot through the head by Jason Bourne.” Then I thought of all the wonderful, starry-eyed kids out there who love the Ice Age characters and would be upset by this image, and certainly by this notion. I’m sorry for sharing this thought just now. I want only to think gentle, positive things about everyone and everything. Thank God for family-friendly animated features and all the money they make for the corporations who fund them.

Taken last night at the corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Highland Ave.

Wives are always giving their husbands shit about something. You’re insensitive, you always wait too long to take out the garbage, you’re too randy, you’re too work-obsessed, you’re not randy enough, you could be a better provider, you don’t spend enough time with the kids, you lack sensitivity, you’re flabby. But wait until you hear the complaints in The Infiltrator, an ’80s cocaine-trade thriller about a real-life customs agent Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) who infiltrated the ranks of Pablo Escobar associates by pretending to be a flashy money launderer. They’re lulus.

They can be summed up as (a) “You put too much gusto into your impersonations when drug dealers are around” and (b) “The agent who’s pretending to be your wife in the field is too hot, and that’s entirely your fault.”

The already famous waiter-brutalizing scene in The Infiltrator — (l. to r.) Pablo Escobar associate, waiter getting head pushed into birthday cake, Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston), Mazur’s rock-stupid wife Evelyn (Juliet Aubrey).

The gripes are on the idiotic side, but that’s…I was about to say irrational complaints are to be expected in any marriage but let’s be fair and balanced. And yet the fact is that Cranston absorbs some highly negative criticism from Juliet Aubrey (as Mazur’s wife Evelyn) — late in the second act, early in the third — that is forehead-slapping dumb.

93% of the film is about Cranston’s Mazur pretending to be slippery financier Bob Musella. If Mazur’s performance isn’t note-perfect the drug barons will smell a rat and kill him. Surely he’s told his wife this basic fact, and surely she understands that if he runs into one of these guys unexpectedly, he has to instantly and convincingly become “Bob Musella.” Obviously.

And yet when Mazur and his wife are out celebrating their anniversary at a nice restaurant, one of the Escobar guys strolls over and says “hey!”, and so Mazur, naturally, goes right into his act. And soon after he angrily chews out a waiter for serving a wedding anniversary cake (which in fact he had ordered) and not a birthday cake. Then he grabs the waiter and shoves his head into the cake. If the Escobar guy had suspected Mazur/Musella had, in fact, ordered an anniversary cake, the jig would be totally up.

“As [Donald] Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card — his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. And without question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV shows and best-selling books.

“But a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of ‘truthful hyperbole.’ Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.” — paragraphs #3 and #4 from David Barstow’s 7.16 N.Y. Times piece, “Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative With the Truth.”

Today’s Baton Rouge cop killings (three policemen dead, one shooter killed) looks to everyone like a Dallas copycat thing. It feels to me like yet another indication that we’re back in the spring and summer of 1968. Obviously awful in human/social/political terms, but now we’re faced with the possibility (God forbid) of still more sniper cop-killings in the future, subsequent mayhem inspired by the Dallas shootings and now today’s.

In short, is this an indication of a malevolent hate-trend (if that’s not too insipid or shallow of a usage) or flash-fire, a version of an arguably similar self-destructive martyrdom that we’ve seen in the Middle East time and again. Or is it just bad luck for everyone that two guys (one in Dallas, another in Baton Rouge) had the same idea? God help us all if this keeps happening.

1:38 pm Pacific: CBS News is reporting that the shooter has been identified as a black male named Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri. He was born on July 17, 1987.

I have a peripheral thought (and I’m mentioning this with the usual presumption that the Twitter dogs are going to bark and howl): how might these cop killings affect the reception to Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation (Fox Searchlight, 10.7)?

Neon Demon without the Refn or the cannibalism? Right away I suspected that Mads Matthiesen‘s The Model (Brainstorm Media, 8.12 theatrically — 9.6 iTiunes/VOD) would be more palatable, more grounded, my kind of thing. Set within the Paris fashion realm, and apparently some kind of bad-boyfriend tale. Maria Palm is the new Elle Fanning; Deadpool‘s Ed Skrein plays the shithead. Incidentally: Looking-to-make-it actors used to adopt screen names if their given name was tongue-twisty or creepy sounding. If your last name was Skrein, wouldn’t you do something about it?

I know that disconnecting is a path to a better, more spiritual life, but I can’t do that. More to the point, I honestly don’t want to. What am I gonna do with “time off”? This is the happiest period of my life, and all due to my daily 14-hour enslavement to Hollywood Elsewhere. HE is the fountain that brings joy and security and washes all wounds. You can call that a no-life life, but it doesn’t feel that way. Really. And it’s not like I never disengage. I have hiking time, hanging-with-friends time, cat love at odd hours, weekend biking, Pavillions time, West Hollywood Wonton-slurping time, evening screening time, Bluray time, motorcycling-along-Mulholland time plus the travel, the festivals, New York, Europe, Vietnam, etc. Plus I get lucky once in a while. Sorry.

I was kidding, of course, about Ben Mendelsohn breaking out the Marlboros and working up a good, greasy sweat for his Rogue One performance as the cruel but brilliant Orson Krennic, an Imperial Military Director obsessed with the completion of the Death Star project. I know the scheme — Imperial villains are always cool, crisp fellows, and only members of the rebellion are allowed to perspire. But Mendelsohn needs to sweat and chain smoke. It’s who he is, what keeps him going. If fortune smiles Mendelsohn will one day be cast in an HBO miniseries as Ben Sweat, a pervy Southern plantation owner and the grand-nephew of Ben Quick, the Long Hot Summer barn-burner played by Paul Newman.

Criterion’s Bluray of Terrence Malick‘s The New World pops on 7.26. My copy arrived yesterday. Three versions — a 172-minute extended cut, the 150-minute “first cut” (which I saw in a New Line screening room and which was given a brief theatrical run) and the 135-minute theatrical version that New Line insisted upon because the 150 struck some as overly ponderous. I’ll be doing the 172, of course. A serious commitment.

Posted on 8.26.09: “I never felt that the story told by Terrence Malick‘s The New World really worked, particularly the last third, but I’ve always been in love with the primeval splendor of the thing. During those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora.

“Despite the disappointing last-third The New World is one of the greatest dive-in-and-live-in-the-realm movies of all time. A movie clearly uninterested for the most part in telling a gripping story but one that atmospherically mesmerizes in such a way that it feels like someone put mescaline in your tea.