Why would actor-director-producer Timothy Busfield, a 68 year-old, well-established, name-brand player, behave in a way that might blow up his career and possibly envelop him in ruin?
Busfield hasn’t been accused by a couple of young actors (twins) of blatant sexual molestation — they’ve basically said he just touched them or, in Busfield’s version, possibly “tickled”** them inappropriately — but we can all sense recklessness and some kind of absurd urge to self-destruct.
The alleged behavior happened between 2022 and ’24, during the filming of The Cleaning Lady, a TV series on which Busfield was an exec producer (i.e., one of many).
Is the prospect of gently touching a young guy’s schlong with the tips of your fingers that transporting?…so theoretically transporting that it’s worth risking your stability, employability and industry-wide reputation…hell, everything that means anything?
3:45 pm update: “Actor and director Timothy Busfield surrendered to New Mexico authorities Tuesday after a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with child sex abuse charges. He insisted he was innocent before being taken into custody.”
** Tickling young guys sounds suspiciously similar to Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky having claimed he was just “horsing around” with young football players.
The ICE agent who slipped and fell on his ass the other day? Big deal. It happens to intemperate guys in a big hurry. But the bros who laughed and whooped like hyenas and called the ICE agent a pussy for falling and so on? Those guys were behaving like cheap little weenies. Sadistic bullies. I’m not in any way empathizing with Minnesota ICE thugs, but I hate those giggling streetside twats.
During his eight-year administration Obama ejected 3,066,457, averaging 383,307 per year, which is significantly higher than Trump’s tally so far. Obama’s nickname in this regard — “deporter in chief” — speaks for itself.
It follows that illegal immigration is not an imagined blight, and that giving the heave-ho to offenders is not an inherently evil thing.
But the Immigration Customs Enforcement storm troopers have persuaded millions otherwise, at least as far as their reported (i.e., video-captured) activities are concerned. Widely loathed and deeply despised isn’t the half of it.
This recent gas-station confrontation (i.e., the usual aggressive chaos) in St. Paul was posted this morning by the N.Y. Post. What an effusion of misery on both sides.
According to recent stats, starting pay for ICE agents is around $48K to $50K. “Experienced” agents pull down between $71,674 and $93,175. Annual pay for “senior” agents ranges between $99,628 and $129,517. Jonathan Ross, the killer of Renee Good, is reportedly a senior-level agent. He lives in a Minneapolis suburb, and is reportedly married with kids.
Videos show that Ross, positioned in front of Good’s car, shot her without urgent cause…intemperately, angrily (“fucking bitch”). But Good and her wife were reportedly agitating, and we all understand Good would be alive today if she’d just chilled and submitted when told to “get out of the fucking car.” Instead she panicked and peeled out.
Two days ago (1.10.26), Iran International reported that at least 2,000 protesters — a conservative estimate — had been killed nationwide over the previous 48 hours. Amidst an internet and power blackout, Iranian security forces have been blowing away demonstrators en masse with no-holds-barred brutality.
Yesterday afternoon (1.11) the Guardian ran a story that was headlined “the streets are full of blood“…”Iranian protests gather momentum as regime cracks down.”
Trump has said U.S. forces might strategically hit Iran if the government continues to murder protestors. Obviously that’s what they’re doing. So…?
PBS.org: “‘We’re looking at some very strong options,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday night. Asked about Iran’s threats of retaliation, he said: “If they do that, we will hit them at levels that they’ve never been hit before.”
‘Trump said that his administration was in talks to set up a meeting with Tehran, but cautioned that he may have to act first as reports of the death toll in Iran mount and the government continues to arrest protesters.
“‘I think they’re tired of being beat up by the United States,’ Trump said. ‘Iran wants to negotiate.'”
@cbsnews International journalists such as CBS News’ Holly Williams and others can’t get into Iran amid protests throughout the country against the regime. Williams reports from Erbil, Iraq, close to the Iraq-Iran border, where despite a media and internet blackout, Iranians are telling their story of resistance. #Iran#protests♬ original sound – cbsnews
I’m a person who walks around with a generally dispassionate view of the cosmic scheme of things (intelligent design over moralistic whatever), and yet my GoldenGlobereactions last night were punctuated with several emotional “thank God!” exclamations.
Largely, I admit, in response to this or that Golden Globe nominee losing or being ignored. Otherwise I nodded, grunted, chortled and groaned.
Congrats to Team Hamnet for taking the Best Motion Picture — Drama trophy. This happened, of course, because of the emotional power punch of the final 15 minutes. I accept this cause-and-effect.
I would have voted for the far-more-elegant, way-more-penetrating SentimentalValue, but that’s me.
My final client of the night, a very bright and emotionally upbeat Stratford resident, said he didn’t actually know what Hamnet is. (Until I gave him the rundown.) I’m sorry but award-season hoopla just doesn’t matter much to even well-educated Average Joes. Now more than ever, I mean.
Congrats to Timothee Chalamet and Jessie Buckley for winning in their respective categories.
The GG loonies actually placed IfIHadLegsI’dKickYou, arguably themostexasperatingandemotionallysuffocatingmisery–virusfilmof2025, in the Musical + Comedy realm. Rose Byrne brought the mute nostril agony like no other actress last year, and she took the M + C Best Actress award…gaaahh!
I was able to accept Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Director win for OneBattleAfterAnother (which won the top prize in the musical + comedy category) as a kind of career achievement, gold-watch thing, He’s 55, has been on the phenomenal auteur path since the mid ‘90s, has a snow-white beard, etc.
There’snopointinmy mentioningthat OBAA is a financial failure and a lefty-bubble phenomenon. It’s basically Crash, and I don’t mean Cronenberg.
But PTA snatching the Best Screenplay trophy away from both SentimentalValue’s Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier and Marty Supreme’s Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie struck me as nutso, given the ludicrous construction and arc of Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw character.
Yesterday afternoon I was openly praying for the absurdly over-praised Sinners to be blanked in the merit realm, and it was! No Best Screenplay award!
Ludwig Goransson’s Best Original Score trophy aside, Sinners’ only other win was basically a Joe and Jane Popcorn attaboy back-pat thing — i.e., a GG Cinematic and Box-Office Achievement award.
Thank God SentimentalValue’s Stellan Skarsgard won for Best Supporting Actor. I was afraid that Value might be shut out entirely due to the dull-witted slow boaters…the none-too-brights who lack the sensitivity to comprehend and appreciate what Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix winner gently probes and reveals.
GG voters declared last night that OBAA’s Teyana Taylor (whose “Perfidia Beverly Hills” performance is okay but no great shakes) is more deserving of their Best Supporting Actress trophy than Weapons’ Amy Madigan or Sentimental Value’s Inga IbsdotterLilleaas? Yeah, but for bullshit reasons.
They went for Taylor because (a) they needed a significant non-white winner and (b) because they couldn’t pronounce, much less spell, Inga’s middle and last names.
Remember that overly emphatic, fleurescent-pink suit you wore to the Oscars in ‘21? Tonight’s Golden Globes get-up looks better.
I just want Timothee Chalamet to win for Marty Supreme; ditto Josh Safdie for Best Director. (Marty has a problem with younger women, according to TikTok.) And I want Sinners to be brushed aside, or at the very least to win small.
Yesterday Paul Schrader dealt a resounding blow to Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons (’42), and the tragic reputation of this alleged masterpiece (originally 131 or 133 minutes, although only an 88-minute version has been generally seen) will probably never be the same.
I’m not saying that Ambersons acolytes have fled into the forest, but they’ve definitely been told “whoa, come up for a little air” by a guy who knows a thing or two about directing and casting.
In a 1.10 Facebook post, Schrader, having recently seen the the 133-minute (or is it 131 minute?) “reconstructed” version of Ambersons, essentially agreed with a six-and-a-half year old HE column that Tim Holt‘s grating, agonizing lead performance is an insurmountable problem.
Edited Schrader: “MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS REDUX. I’ve always withheld judgment on Welles’ 1942 classic. Lost masterpeice, taken away from him and recut, he was in Brazil, blah, blah, blah. I’ve now seen the 133-minute ‘reconstructed’ version and changed my mind.
“Welles didn’t step away from the re-edit because he was cut out, and he didn’t go to Brazil simply at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller. I believe he stepped away from the film because he knew it was fatally flawed and that no amount of recuting could rescue it. And the fatal flaw was in the casting of Tim Holt.
“Welles again made a decade-spanning epic about a flawed macher, but instead of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles like a charismatic blunderbuss, it was an immature CFK, George Amberson Minafer, a snotty guttersnipe of a young man portrayed by the untalented Holt.
“Watching the film at the length that Welles originally intended, I realized that Holt’s George was hopelessly inadequate. Most of the 40 excised mintues came from Holt’s performance. Welles couldn’t have saved the film. No one could have. The studio notes, in essence, must have been this: lose one half hour, trim Tim Holt and try to make Joseph Cotten the lead.
“I suspect Welles welcomed the opportunity to distance himself from the film’s inevitable failure and, as the decades wore on and his memory dimmed, embrace the fantasy that The Magnificent Ambersons was a masterpiece which had been ripped from his hands and mutilated.”
The hive-mind mantra behind The Magnificent Ambersons (’42) has been so deeply drilled into film-maven culture that even today, no one will admit the plain truth about it.
I’m referring to the fact that Tim Holt‘s George Amberson Minafer character is such an obnoxious and insufferable asshole that he all but poisons the film.
I’ve watched Welles’ Citizen Kane 25 or 30 times, but because of Holt I’ve seen The Magnificent Ambersons exactly twice. And the second viewing was arduous.
Welles admitted decades later that he knew “there would be an uproar about a picture which, by any ordinary American standards, was much darker than anybody was making pictures…there was just a built-in dread of the downbeat movie, and I knew I’d have that to face.”
He’d calculated that audiences would forget their discomfort when Minafer “gets his comeuppance” at the very end. But even in the truncated 88-minute version of the film that exists today, audiences still have to suffer Minafer’s ghastly arrogance, snippiness and smallness of spirit for roughly 80 minutes, and most people simply can’t tolerate this much abuse.
One of those who saw the 133-minute cut was costar Anne Baxter (1923-1985), who was 19 during filming. Yesterday I came upon a Baxter q & a in “Conversations with Classic Film Stars“, a 2016 book by James Bawden and Ron Miller, and came upon the following quote:
I love Manny Farber’s Ambersons review, and particularly this excerpt: “Theater-like is the inability to get the actors or story moving, which gives you a desire to push with your hands. There is really no living, moving or seeing to the movie; it is a series of static episodes connected by narration, as though someone sat you down and said ‘here!’ and gave you some postcards of the 1890s.”
Last night I excerpted portions of a 1.10.26N.Y.TimesEzra KleinShowpodcast — an exacting discussion by Klein and M.Gessen that identifies and describes in depth the ongoing Donald Trump spectacle barrage.
Here’s what I wrote this morning in the commentthread:
Klein and Gessen have seriously nailed and bull’s-eyed it with their assessment of Trump being deeply, instinctuallyinvestedinbrash, totalitarianspectacle. Swayed and swooned by it.
Spectacle as a theatrical tool or grand dramatic strategy. Spectacle as a demonstration of force and grand power. Spectacle doesn’t seek to persuade or acquire broad consensus — it trumpets, parades, dramatizes, symbolically bludgeons.
When Klein and Gessen said that word something clicked in my head. Tom Wolfe called it “the ‘aha’ phenomenon”, and I swear to God it just clicked into place.
The killing of Renee Good obviously wasn’t planned in advance, but it was a cruel, media-flooding spectacle all the same.
MAGA stalwarts believe that Trump is doing God’s work by pushing back against the multi-cultural immigrant hordes (“They’re eating the dogs!”) and warring with the deeply deranged, white-guy-hating, gender-fluid wokeys, but they also know that he has only the remainder of ‘26 and possibly early ‘27 before it all starts to topple and crash into a heap.
Trump surely knows this. He’s fortified by strong German-family genes, yes, but he’s old and clearly withering (turns80on6.14.26 — five months from now) and declining after a fashion, and knows he’ll be impeached after the Democrats re-take the House and possibly even the Senate in November.
So he’s in a hurry to throw more logs onto the fire and swamp the country with more and more Trumpian spectacle (including the likelihood of a forthcoming attack upon Iran’s theocratic dictators as the street furor grows — a prospective move that I personally agree with) while he still has the moxie.
“Mohammad Movahedi Azad, Iran’s attorney general, said on Saturday that legal proceedings against rioters should be undertaken “without leniency, mercy or appeasement,” according to Iranian media, and he warned that ‘all criminals involved’ would be considered an ‘enemy of God,’ a charge that could carry the death penalty.
“President Trump, who had previously said that the United States would intervene militarily if Iran killed protesters, said in a post on social media on Saturday that ‘Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help.’
“He has been briefed in recent days on new options for military strikes in Iran, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.”
Iranian woman lights her cigarette with a burning photo of the ayatollah. This is braver than anything an American feminist has done in the 21st century. Actual badass: pic.twitter.com/1nzV4lmwOh
Ezra Klein: “The Trump administration often operates through propaganda of the deed. They’re not an anarchist collective — they’re a state, a regime. But they operate not so often through the dull work of rules, laws, legislation and deliberation but rather through spectacle.
“Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath. They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left it otherwise completely in place. Nobody — not even Trump or his administration — seems to know what it means for America to be running Venezuela. But it was an example, an act that showed something.
“Even before the capture of Maduro, they had chosen not to fight the drug war, America’s fentanyl scourge, through laws and legislation on addiction and drugs. Instead, they chose to do very high-profile bombings of alleged drug boats, which, even if they were drug boats, were probably carrying cocaine.
“It was spectacular. It was a message. It was showing what they could do. It was a deed that everybody could see and would talk about.
Masha Gessen: “The Trump administration is an administration of spectacle. I’ve heard it sometimes described as a reality-TV administration, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Because what reality TV wants is ratings. And these spectacles, this propaganda — they’re meant to carry messages. They’re meant to make clear how the world now works.
“Venezuela was structured as spectacle. There did not seem to be a long planning process for what the post-decapitation of the regime would look like, but just: Go in. And then you have this picture of Maduro on the plane, blindfolded. You have this very triumphant news conference from Donald Trump.
“There’s the level of this love of a particular aesthetic of strength, a particular aesthetic of dominance and organization that Trump seems to be instinctively drawn to.
“We’ve known that since his first term. He has an obsession with military parades and, obviously, the spectacle of the transformation of the White House — both the creation of all the gold leaf and the destruction of the East Wing as a demonstration of dominance and power.
“But I also think that Trump is always in a movie. He is always watching himself onscreen. That’s something that makes him different from anyone I’ve ever read or written about. There just seems to be this constant external observation of this character that he’s playing, which is in some ways his superpower. It’s what gives him the ability to shake his fist after literally dodging a bullet and shouting, ‘Fight, fight, fight’ — and having that incredible photo op. Because even at a moment when he really did come face-to-face with death, what he’s thinking of is what it looks like from the outside.
“There’s a whole other level of spectacle that we’re seeing here that we still need to understand.”
Klein: “When I listen to MAGA and Trump and then its theorists and its followers, I hear something being said about this idea that we have restrained the animal, masculine, dominance-oriented, conquest-oriented instincts that made humanity great — that, in the Elon Musk version, will get us to Mars in the future — and tied them up in hollow, liberal values and self-restraints and debate, discussion, deliberation, rules and procedures.
“There’s something being said that is operating at all levels, that the way America is acting under Trump is the way America should act, the way a superpower should act. That is what it means to be a superpower: To be unrestrained. But that the way Trump acts is also the way a man should act.
“I’m almost having trouble having this conversation because the thing I am thinking about is the public execution of Renee Good in Minnesota. It’s a little unclear what happened. Her car was in the middle of the street, and then you watch the federal agents rush the car, and she begins executing a multipoint turn to try to leave. And then an agent shoots her dead in the middle of the street.
“The Trump administration is saying she was trying to run them over. But you can very easily see that she was not trying to run everybody over. She was parked first. They run at her, and she tries to leave. Not even speed out, just leave.
“And it is a spectacle of its own. It is the kind of thing they’ve always been creating the conditions to see happen. I’m not saying they intended for this to happen, but everybody has predicted things like this happening, myself included. And it feels like a message to every protester.
“I’m curious how you have understood her killing and this moment — what its meaning is.”
