The candidates who helped themselves the most during last night’s Republican debate were Nikki Haley (the most sensible and presidential sounding) and Vivek Ramaswamy. Tbe best of them, Chris Christie, didn’t do as well as he should have, but he said some good things. Haley came off the best.

There’s a new Rebecca Keegan THR article about Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24), and the support she got from Priscilla Presley, whose life with Elvis Presley from age 14 to 24 (barely pubescent girlfriend to wife-mother) is the subject of the film.

Repeating for emphasis, the article says that the Tinkerbell-sized (4’11”) Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla “from age 14 to age 24.”

In other words Coppola’s film omits the last three years of Elvis and Priscilla’s strained and occasionally tempestuous relationship (they separated in February 1972 and divorced the following year), not to mention Presley’s untimely death in August ’77.

Priscilla wasn’t around at the time, of course, but c’mon…it’s about her long relationship with Presley and Coppola ignores his death, which happened only four years after their 1973 divorce?

To go by Keegan, the film’s 14-year saga happens between Priscilla’s first meeting with Elvis in 1959 at a party in Germany (she was born in May 1945) and sometime in mid 1969, or roughly two years after their Las Vegas wedding on 5.1.67. Exactly nine months later the now-deceased Lisa Marie Presley was born (2.1.68).

A few weeks or months later Priscilla “began taking private dance lessons” while the constantly-catting-around Elvis was filming Live a Little, Love a Little (released on 10.23.68), and she fell heavily for the instructor, identified only as “Mark” in Priscilla’s “Elvis and Me.” They did the nasty but not for long.

Priscilla had another, longer-lasting affair with Afro-haired karate instructor Mike Stone in ’72, but that, apparently, was after her separation from Elvis. There was apparently some back-and-forth, some push-pull variance of feeling. Presley forcefully had sex with Priscilla after he got wind of the Stone affair, or something like that. They did, however, divorce the following year. And yet they were seen holding hands after it was finalized.

The forceful-sex story seems to contradict reports that Elvis declined to have sex with Priscilla after Lisa Marie’s birth. (He apparently had some kind of bizarre hangup about mothers being used goods.) As many Presley biographers have reported, Elvis was totally into jailbait, or young teens starting around the age of 14.

All in all, Coppola’s film bypasses a lot of dramatic potential. It doesn’t even include their separation and divorce…c’mon.

Keegan’s story ends with this paragraoh: “[Last] May, Coppola screened the film for Priscilla. ‘When I saw the movie, I tried to separate myself and live it as if I was just a fan or just someone that’s wanting to see the movie,’ she says. ‘At the end, I actually…I was quite emotional. Only being 14. You look back and you go, ‘Why me? Why am I here? Why am I driving in a limo, going through the gates of Graceland with Elvis?’”

She meant that? Priscilla, 78, knew who Elvis was as well as his many biographers, and she was actually wondering why she was being driven through the gates of Graceland at age 14 or 15 or whenever it was?

It goes without saying that Keegan never mentions the bizarre 18-inch height disparity between Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis in Coppola’s film.

The real-life Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 59-inch-tall Spaeny (roughly the size of a ten-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.

Any film starring or costarring Paul Mescal gets an HE demerit. I really, really don’t like this guy, and I’ll repeat what I said yesterday, which is that if I were gay I wouldn’t “do” him on a bet. (Somebody replied that Mescal wouldn’t “do” me either…fine.) I’ve only seen Mescal in Aftersun and I’m already sick of him.

This aside, Garth Davis‘s Foe looks and feels like a bummer. Mescal’s character is “informed by a stranger that he’ll be sent to live on a large space station, and his wife (Saoirse Ronan) will be left in the company of someone else”?…eff that jazz. I know this film is going to put me into a very bad place. Saoirse Ronan clearly gives another first-rate performance…sorry.

Next Monday evening (8.28) all-media invitees in New York City and Los Angeles will revel in some good Denzel whupass. I for one would love to see those gangsta flash-mob store thieves receive a little Denzel discipline, but that’s me.

If only my life’s journey had led me, in the parlance of Quentin Tarantino, toward “the gay way” and the absolute joy of having some Iceman dude “ride my tail.” Alas, I’m straight (along with 95% or 96% of the population**), and so I can only press my nose against the glass and wonder what this way of life…this way of being…might be like.

Vanity Fair exclusive: “All Of Us Strangers follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a 40-something writer living alone in a nearly deserted high-rise outside of London. His neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) drunkenly flirts with him one night, a steamy, if messy, meet-cute that develops into a tender relationship.

“Between encounters with Harry, Adam finds himself drawn back to where he grew up. In that house left behind by the family long ago, he finds his parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) getting on with life — [which is] odd as his parents died in a tragic accident when he was a child. He’s hardly thrown off by their presence or their youthfulness; he finds comfort in merely being able to see them again. To tell them he’s gay. To understand them as adults. To imagine their bond that never could be.

“’It’s an opportunity to revisit your parents long after they might have passed and to have a dialogue,’ says Oscar nominee Graham Broadbent (The Banshees of Inisherin), who, alongside producing partner Sarah Harvey, first brought Haigh the book to adapt. ‘What would you tell your parents about your life if you were an adult and they were no longer with us?'”

If I was gay I would never, ever hook up with Mescal — not my type, doesn’t do it, forget about it.

The AMPTP seems to be offering a half-decent deal. They’re gaslighters, of course, but they’re calling it “the highest wage increase for the WGA in 35 years.” Then again what do I know? Nothing.