From Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” re-tweeted today by Tim Grierson:

“Myth of the Cocaine Movie,” posted on 1.14.13:

Game show host and comedian Marc Summers is now 71. Burt Reynolds died on 9.6.18 at the age of 82. They collided on Jay Leno‘s Tonight Show on 10.17.94, or nearly 30 years ago. Summers was 43, Reynolds was 58. I’d never seen this video clip before today.

Summers wiki quote: “Reynolds was going through a bad divorce with Loni Anderson. This was not planned, it was all real. Jay called me afterward and asked, ‘What’s going on between you and Burt?’ It was like survival of the fittest. I was a comic. You wait your entire life to get on the Tonight Show, and I wasn’t going to let this guy fuck it up for me.”

There can be no final closure on the life and career of the late and great William Friedkin until someone in the Friedkin camp spills the beans about what actually happened with the French Connection censorship thing.

They can’t just leave this confounding, weird-ass episode hanging in the air. C’mon, spill it already…give it up!

Woke-censoring his own Oscar-winning film runs so contrary to who and what Friedkin was his entire life, or certainly since he became big in the early ’70s…totally insane. Maybe, strange as it sounds, he approved it or even instigated it. Maybe he’d gone squishy on some level…I don’t know.

Either way the facts have to come out. Someone in authority has to say “this is why it happened, and why the woke-censored version is streaming only in the U.S. but not Canada or the British isles or other territories.” And when the French Connection 4K disc comes out, the entire film has to be represented. C’mon, please…air it out once and for all and put this stupid issue to bed.

[Originally posted on 7.18.15 but re-wrote and re-edited] The following is a true story. I was starting something with an L.A. woman (actually a fellow journalist of a vaguely similar ranking) in, I think, the early aughts. Okay, maybe the late ’90s. I was mildly intrigued as far as it went (i.e., not head over heels), but then she eventually conveyed what the situation was.

She was “seeing” two guys at the time. Meaning that she was boning them concurrently without either of them knowing about the other, or so I understood. It took a while for the truth to come out, but she gradually informed me that I was basically being auditioned as a back-up in case one of them didn’t pan out. She was serious. There were two pitchers on the mound (alternating innings?) and I was being told that if I wanted to I could start warming up in the bullpen just in case.

I told her I didn’t care for this arrangement, and her response was to basically say “whoa, really?…you’re throwing away an opportunity here.” Yeah, I was. My thinking was that I might step into a situation if a woman is seeing another guy — maybe, depending — but not two. Okay, I’ll be even more honest. If she had told me I could start “pitching” along with the other two and then come what may, I might’ve taken the deal.

I don’t think she was uninterested in me as much as more interested in where things might go with the first two guys. I know she was at least interested enough in me to say “go warm up in the bullpen and we’ll see.”

Okay, a lot of people juggle relationships. Younger people, I mean. I guess to be extra fair about it the woman from the late ’90s was just being upfront whereas no guy in this history of civilization has ever admitted to seeing two or three girls simultaneously. Guys tend to be covert about that stuff.

Comment from Seb Booth: “Between men and women of equivalent attraction levels, it is far easier for women to just get laid on average. Plus ugly and fat women can still get laid easier than ugly and fat dudes on the same level (unless they’re loaded).”

On the night that Unforgiven won the Best Picture Oscar, which happened on 3.29.93, none of us had the slightest inkling that roughly two decades into the 21st Century (or 30 years hence) corporate Hollywood would be operating under the adhere-or-die principles of China’s Great Cultural Revolution, and that films that reflected the creative vistas, mindsets and inclinations of the dudes who were pretty much running things back in the early Clinton era would be all but suffocated.

Which isn’t to say that the moral, administrative and attitudinal changes brought about by wokester commandants starting around five or six years ago (post-Moonlight and post George Floyd BLM-ers, LGBTQ-ers, #MeToo) didn’t transform the Hollywood industry into a much more fair, just and humane thing. They did.

These changes also ensured, however, that the kind of urgent, occasionally irreverent and sometimes super-bull’s-eye films that occasionally poked through between 1930 and 2015…those kind of films would, for the most part, never again be made for theatrical.

Because the Hollywood Maoist system (“Don’t offend Zoomers or Millennials!…don’t wink at or even acknowledge outmoded attitudes!…don’t allow any representations of the way life was on the planet earth before woke-ism came along…all casts must prominently feature women, actors of color and LGBTQs”) has largely outlawed this approach or aesthetic.

No Oscar Poker topics du jour this time. Instead Jeff and Sasha let their emotional hair down and share abbreviated versions of their life stories and career histories. Who they are, what they’ve been through, how they got to this point, etc.

Jeff writes for Hollywood-elsewhere.com, and Sasha writes for awardsdaily.com (and Substack).

Remember that late-night radio show hosted by Jack Nicholson‘s David Staebler in The King of Marvin Gardens? Which was basically about Stabler relating personal stories of his youth and whatnot, some of which were invented or at the very least exaggerated? Just for fun I could launch a whole mp3 series of 100% honest “David Staebler stories” about my oppressed, half-miserable childhood and my almost entirely miserable teenage years, full of trauma, unrequited lust, seething resentment and Kafka-like depression. I could record them weekly or twice weekly and post as I go along.

Anyone who says “aahh, fuck this jazz, just talk about movies…c’mon, that’s what we’re here for!”…well, I’ll include many tales of certain standout films that I saw as a young lad and largely clueless teen. When I feel like it, I mean. Maybe as a separate Substack.

Again, the link.

The great Robbie Robertson, 80, departed earlier today in Los Angeles.

Good fellow, great musician. The Hawks, Bob Dylan guitarist in the early electric days, The Band (“The Weight”, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, “Up on Cripple Creek”), solo recording artist and soundtrack composer for Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, The Color of Money, Casino, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon).

After catching Flower Moon during last May’s Cannes Film Festival, I noted the following: “Robertson‘s musical score ignites with a reverb-y guitar riff that heralds the mixed-blessing discovery of oil on Osage land, and soon after settles into a steady metronomic rhythm that suggests the sound of native drums in the distance or perhaps just over the hill.”

Posted on 11.30.19:

I’m sorta kinda wondering why the New York Film Festival honchos didn’t select Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix), the much anticipated Leonard Bernstein biopic costarring Cooper and Carey Mulligan, to fill one of their major gala slots.

The film will have its world premiere in early September at the Venice Film Festival, but it’s long been calculated or at least presumed that Maestro will have its U.S. debut at the NYFF’s Lincoln Center venue, Alice Tully Hall — right next door to where Bernstein often conducted.

Cooper, Todd Phillips, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg are among the producers, which makes it feel like kind of a heavyweight deal. So why wasn’t Maestro chosen as the festival’s opening night, centerpiece or closing night attraction?

I’m presuming it’ll be announced later this month as a special premiere, but it all feels a tiny bit weird. It makes you wonder “what’s wrong with it?” Why are the NYFF programmers giving Cooper’s film the “sit down and wait in the lobby” treatment?”

Jordan Ruimy is reporting today what most of us have been presuming all along.

One, widespread Stalinist obstinacy about Woody Allen‘s alleged guilt in the 31 year-old matter of Frog Hollow has all but eliminated any possibility of Allen’s Coup de Chance finding a U.S. distributor.

And two, the chances of Coup de Chance being favorably reviewed by U.S. film critics at the Venice Film Festival are fairly low, given the fact that critics are no longer “allowed” to give his movies a fair shake.

So given the near-certainty that (a) many American critics are going to slag Coup de Chance despite reports that it’s one of his better films, (b) the fact that it won’t be playing Telluride, Toronto or New York because their respective programmers are terrified of being condemned for showing Allen’s French-language film, and (c) the fact that many on the Woody side of the fence (i.e., critics and columnists who are highly skeptical of the Clinton-era allegations against Allen) won’t be attending the Venice Film Festival…

Given all this doesn’t it make sense from Allen’s strategic perspective to allow these opinion-sharers a chance to see it prior to Venice, either via a NYC screening or a special link?

You’d certainly think so, but with roughly three weeks to go before the Venice Film Festival there’s nothing shaking in the Woody camp.

Over the last several weeks I’ve twice written Allen’s sister Letty Aronson, with whom I’ve exchanged emails and whom I interviewed at Shutters several years ago, about my interest in wanting to see Coup de Chance prior to its Venice Film Festival debut. I was hoping she might steer me to someone charged with arranging screenings or sending out links.

With Woody’s former publicist Leslee Dart retired and knowing that Roger Friedman and Keith McNally saw the film last April in NYC, reaching out to Letty seemed reasonable. Alas, total flatline from her end. A friend tells me Letty “has someone” who works with her, etc. But it’s like they’ve taken a vow of omerta.

It seems inconceivable that Woody and/or his reps wouldn’t be open to showing the film to friendlies and neutrals prior to Venice. I’m a regular Telluride attendee, but of course that festival’s honcho, Julie Huntsinger, isn’t “allowed” to show Coup de Chance in the same sense that Thierry Fremaux wasn’t “allowed” to show it during last May’s Cannes Film Festival. In response Coup de Chance dp Vittorio Storaro called the Cannes shut-out appalling and deplorable (“They’ve lost all common sense“).