A fond but not entirely reverent remembrance of Peter O’Toole by Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy is worth a read. O’Toole wrote two books about his life before he made it big-time — Loitering With Intent: The Child and Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice. McCarthy laments that O’Toole never wrote about his career from Lawrence of Arabia onward.

Everyone wrote yesterday that O’Toole was unfairly robbed of a Best Actor Oscar for his T.E. Lawrence portrayal. But the real robbery happened in April ’65 when his career-peak performance as Henry II in Becket lost to Rex Harrison‘s Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. That’s the Academy for you.

McCarthy saw O’Toole play Professor Higgins, badly, in a 1987 London stage presentation of Pygmalion. I saw O’Toole in that reviled Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980. It was slow and turgid and altogether horrid, and the audience all but booed at the curtain call. The look on O’Toole’s face at that moment was ghastly in itself. I felt sorry for him. I wanted to comfort him on some level. All such thoughts went out the window when I interviewed O’Toole in his Hampstead Heath home two or three days later.

A few slow-on-the-pickup types expressed shock or surprise at yesterday’s Joan Fontaine riff, particularly about how I could never imagine her in a heterosexual context. I was merely saying that I never felt much in the way of animal passion, that’s all. If anything, I said, Fontaine always struck me as vaguely dykey in a kind of old-time closeted sense. I know she was straight — I was talking about what she radiated on-screen. A critic friend wrote a half-hour ago and called this impression “interesting.” He added that “aside from pointing out that [Fontaine] was married four times, I would just add that a witty gay gentleman friend of mine used to squire her around a lot — to the Oscars, etc. — and always said she had the foulest mouth in town and the dirtiest stories about everyone. Caustic, often very funny, sometimes catty to the point of unpleasantness. A female curmudgeon. And hated her sister to her dying day.”

The only two 2013 BlackList scripts that I can at least guess about content-wise are (a) Richard Corinder‘s The Shark is Not Working and Nick Creature and Michael Sweeney‘s The Mayor of Shark City, both about the making of Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws, and (b) Stephany Folsom‘s 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon, which expands on the urban legend (mentioned in Room 237) that Stanley Kubrick was hired by NASA to stage and shoot a fake moon landing in the wake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If anyone has PDFs of these or any other noteworthy Black List screenplays, please send. Here’s an analysis of the whole list.

Produced by, partially written by and co-starring Jonah Hill, 22 Jump Street opens on 6.13.14. I was down with the tone and shape of 21 Jump Street (except for the generic action ending) so this’ll probably be okay. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are directing again. Hill co-penned the story that Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel’s script is based on.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) has announced the nominees for the 19th Annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, and the leaders are 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle with 13 nominations each. To more than a casual extent the BFCA has tended to reflect or predict Academy sentiments (they were the first to signal last year’s Argo rebound) so this is a huge shot in the arm for both films, not to mention the absolute ignominious end for Saving Mr. Banks as a credible Best Picture contender. Pay up, Scott Feinberg!

Gravity did pretty well also with ten nominations, but it’s been downgraded to runner-up status. At this stage of the game it can be fairly said without prejudice or rancor that while Gravity has a clear following, it’s no longer the Big Kahuna of Best Picture contenders. The picture has changed. Right now it’s the masterful Slave vs. the widely admired and enjoyed Hustle. No softies! This is a good thing.

The Wolf of Wall Street, Her, Captain Phillips and Nebraska received six nominations. Inside Llewyn Davis, August: Osage County, Enough Said, Saving Mr. Banks, Iron Man 3 and Rush received four nominations.

The BFCA dropped the ball big-time by failing to nominate The Wolf Of Wall Street‘s Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor or Jonah Hill for Best Supporting Actor. This isn’t just an oversight — it’s an unconscionable “what?”

The BFCA also showed their clubby, mainstream, celebrity-kowtowing colors by failing to nominate Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos for Best Actress. (They chose instead to nominate her as one of year’s Best Young Actor/Actresses — a humiliating consolation prize.) The BFCA did, to be fair, nominate Brie Larson for Short Term 12, but they mostly went for a roster of established, name-brand actresses whose campaigns have been well-funded and vigorously publicized — Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson.

This is a stab at an iPhone obituary for Joan Fontaine, whose death at age 96 was reported today. (I’m sitting at a Pete’s Coffee across the street from the Aero, where Michael Mann‘s digitally reconstituted Thief will screen at 7:30 pm.). I heard of her departure a couple of hours ago, and like everyone else I flashed back to Fontaine’s vulnerable, haunted performance as Laurence Olivier‘s young second wife in David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rebecca, the 1940 melodrama that launched her as a big-name actress.

Fontaine won a Best Actress Oscar for playing another vulnerable, haunted wife (this time betrothed to Cary Grant‘s disreputable Johnny Aysgarth) in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, which opened the following year. But Fontaine seems a bit trapped in this possible-murder tale in more ways than one. Suspicion is a somewhat flawed film because of a notorious cop-out ending. She seems a fool for forgiving and supporting Grant at the end. Rebecca is the better crafted effort, I feel, not to mention spookier (it’s a kind of ghost story) and more atmospheric. Fontaine is much more anguished and aching in it. She carries a greater load on her back.

This is a portion of a DVD Beaver frame capture from the new Arrow Bluray of Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye (’73). So $5000 bills (last printed in 1934) were actually kicking around in the early ’70s? Printed money doesn’t gain in value as the years roll on, of course, but the U.S. Labor Department inflation counter says the purchasing power of $5 grand in ’73 was/is equal to around $26 grand today. So finding a $5000 bill “in a box of Crackerjacks,” as Elliot Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe explained to Mark Rydell‘s Marty Augustine, was quite a discovery.

At age 81, the great Peter O’Toole has shuffled off this mortal coil. A legendary lover of drink, a magnificent royalist, a classical actor for the ages with one of the most beautiful speaking voices ever heard. Fire in the blood and diction to die for. O’Toole was a legendary personality (he could be great on talk shows), the half-mad blonde beauty of Lawrence of Arabia, an inhabitor of King Henry II (twice), the wonderfully spirited fellow who rebounded with The Stunt Man, the voice of the gourmand in Ratatouille…a brilliant man in so many respects. In private he could be a bit of snob (or at least with the occasional journalist) but when he chose to be “on” O’Toole snapped and crackled like lightning.

He had five peak periods in his career — the first three years (’61 to ’64) starting with his being hired to play T.E. Lawrence and then making the film and exploding onto the scene when Lawrence of Arabia opened in late ’62, and then following up with his best performance ever as King Henry II in Peter Glenville‘s Becket. He lost “it” for a period in the mid ’60s but then got it back as Henry redux in Anthony Harvey‘s The Lion in Winter (’68). Then he returned again with that hilarious performance as a hippie-ish paranoid schizophrenic in The Ruling Class (’72). The fourth rebound happened between ’80 and ’82 with his performances in The Stunt Man, the TV epic Masada and My Favorite Year. The fifth and final rebound happened in the mid aughts with Troy, Venus and his voicing role in Ratatouille.

A friend invited me to an event party last night on Willoughby, about a block south of the Formosa Cafe. I was immediately concerned when she said it was open to the public and that all I had to do was rsvp on Facebook. I’ll walk into any dive bar in any down-at-the-heels scumbag neighborhood in the world but I haven’t attended a Facebook-rsvp event in my life — it sounded horrible. When the door guy (heavy-set, African-American…what else?) said “show me your ID” I scowled and turned and walked back to the car. Okay, I’m spoiled. I’ve been getting invited to elite media events for 30-plus years. I’m easily unimpressed.

I honestly feel that West Hollywood’s Astro Burger is one of the most attractively designed commercial establishments in all of Los Angeles. This is what Vegan/health food restaurants lack — that sparkly, 1950s-era American Graffiti drive-in vibe.

I asked the guy in the Santa suit what he and his girlfriends were doing in the Santa suits and he said, “Uhhm…celebrating the holiday?” And I said, “Really…on your own volition?” And I asked to take their photo. This happened last night around 8:45 pm in a Ralph’s on La Brea.

If there was a God, The Wolf of Wall Street and 12 Years A Slave would be the big neck-and-neck competitors for the Best Picture Oscar with everyone except for the harumphs going “yes, of course…are you kidding me?” But we live in a Godless and narcotized realm with the Slave resistance and the over-65 default crowd still running the conversation. But if Gravity continues to slowly deflate (Sandra Bullock‘s quote about how it was “supposed to be an amusement ride” let some air out of the balloon), there’s a growing chance that American Hustle, which everyone really admires and which has opened very strongly this weekend, could slide in for a win. It’s possible. I would be content with this. Saving Mr. Banks may not be finished as a nominee but it certainly can’t win. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, Jean Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyer’s Club, Spike Jonze‘s Her — these are the films that deserve the highest consideration alongside Wolf and Slave, but those damn softies (i.e., the crowd that voted for Argo, The Artist and The King’s Speech) won’t get with the program.

Posted on 8.21

Cecil B. DeMille was a pious hypocrite. The theme of his Biblical-era films was spiritual salvation through the Bible, but no other studio-era filmmaker shovelled sex, female flesh, big muscles, debauchery and blood with more relish. On top of which he was a Republican who believed in the blacklisting practices of the late ’40s and early ’50s. But he had a fairly decent eye for balance and composition — almost as good as John Ford‘s. He knew how to fill the frame, and his films were handsomely dressed and designed. Samson and Delilah (’49) is swill, of course. The dialogue by Jesse L. Lasky, Jr. and Fredric M. Frank is agony. But George Barnes’ Technicolor cinematography is ripe and richly toned. The Bluray streets in early March.