Late this afternoon Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino and I discussed The Dark Knight Rises, the slaughter in Aurora, the temporary shelving of box-office reporting, the venality of the NRA and a few other things. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

The Lawrence of Arabia “balcony scene,” in which Jack Hawkins (Gen. Alllenby) emotionally manipulates Major Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), will be included as an extra on the forthcoming Lawrence Bluray. I’ve pasted the scene’s pages, taken from Robert Bolt‘s screenplay, after the jump. The following excerpt from a 2000 interview with original Lawrence restoration director Robert Harris, conducted by Geoff McNeal, offers some background:

Harris: “When we were completing the cut, we attempted to put together a balcony scene in reel 11B, in which Allenby works to get Lawrence to go back to Arabia. The scene had been hacked in the shorter version. David [Lean] wanted it in. [Screenwriter Robert] Bolt felt it was the finest scene he had ever written, which is saying a great deal. David directed the looping of dialogue in London with Peter and, lending his voice to the Jack Hawkins character, Charles Gray. We had requested that the studio check the voices on a few actors and select the best for the roll. They simply took the first on the list, which was Gray — a fine actor [who] sounded nothing like Hawkins.*

“When we put together the scene, it was obvious that Gray’s voice didn’t work. At precisely this time, David had to leave for the Cannes Film Festival, [and Columbia chief] Dawn Steel wanted to see the film before he left and we went about recutting the scene once again for a special screening. It was a horrific decision and something that I should have fought at the time, but didn’t. David wanted the Allenby lines revoiced and put back at some time in the future. [But] the cutting room was shut down and it never happened. I’ve been trying to get the extended scene reinstated ever since. It adds layers to the film which are unbelievably rich. Their feeling, and one cannot find ultimate fault with their position, is that David allowed the film to be screened in 1989 without the additional footage, thereby accepting it as ‘his’ cut.”

…and you all know the rest. Hawkins/Allenby says “that’s a feeble thing to say” and so on.

“I suggest that all moviesgoers join in a class action suit against the National Rifle Association. The 100 million moviegoers should be entitled to at least $20 each for the harm caused to them by this incident. The National Rifle Association should be sued for at least $2 billion for enabling the Colorado movie massacre.

“The NRA has fought consistently to prevent gun control laws that could have averted this tragedy. The facts are clear and overwhelming that gun control works. One has only to look at the countries that have strong gun control laws to see that they have much lower violent death rates and no massacres. The link between gun control and lower violent death rates is as scientifically proven as the link between smoking and cancer. Any reasonable jury when presented with the facts would understand this and see the connection.” — Notes to Aphrodite‘s Jay Raskin, posted a day or two ago.

I love the back-and-forth energy between Al Pacino and Charles Durning in this scene from Dog Day Afternoon. Although I suspect, knowing Pacino, that it was at least somewhat improvised, credit for most of the dialogue, I’m presuming, has to go to Frank Pierson, who won an Oscar for the DDA screenplay, and who died today at age 87. He was working right up to the end — his last credit was for Mad Men. Good fellow.

Pierson was a director-writer, but his best work was on the page. I’d like to be generous but the two best films he directed — A Star Is Born and King of the Gypsies — weren’t all that good. His best scripts were for Cat Ballou (’65), Cool Hand Luke (’67), The Looking-Glass War (’69), Dog Day Afternoon (’75) and Presumed Innocent (’90).

We’re less than two weeks away from the 50th anniversary of the 8.5.62 death of Marilyn Monroe, and I’m in possession of an 8.6.62 copy of the N.Y. Daily News that headlines her death. The whole thing, 48 pages worth. With a story about JFK urging tough drug laws and the N.Y. Yankees losing to the White Sox in the 13th inning and everything else that was considered news that day.

The paper it’s printed on feels like it could disintegrate in your hands, like something lifted out of an Egyptian tomb. It’s not even amber or yellowish any more — it’s brown.

I’ll never sell it but I wonder what it’s worth to serious Marilyn fans? A couple of hundred? More?

You can just smell the contempt in Dave Kehr‘s N.Y. Times review of Olive Films’ recently released Bluray of Fred Zinneman‘s High Noon. And who woulda thunk that Kehr, a brainy, tweedly-deedly Manhattan critic who knows from scholastic film culture like no one’s business, would side with Howard Hawks and John Wayne on the matter of Marshall Will Kane’s pleas for help from the citizens of Hadleyville?

Hawks and Wayne are famed for having expressed disgust that Kane would ask for special deputies to help him fight the Frank Miller gang after the noon train arrives. They thought this was unmanly and contemptible, and their eventual response was Rio Bravo, a 1959 western that was roughly about the same situation (i.e., bad guys coming to town to shoot it out) but was basically about homies sticking together and looking out for each other.

“Whatever message it was meant to convey, High Noon was always a sort of meta-western, conceived by a group of filmmakers who had little or no previous experience with the genre,” Kehr writes. Let me explain to Kehr what High Noon is meant to convey. It’s meant to convey that fair-weather friends are a dime a dozen, that most people are cowards or at the very least don’t mean what they say, and that when the chips are down there’s only person you can really count on — yourself. Got it?

Gary Cooper, who won an Oscar for his performance as Kane, “never seems quite right for the role,” says Kehr, particularly “as he goes door to door begging the terrified citizens to help him stand up to the vengeful outlaw (Ian MacDonald) returning on the noon train. At one point he even puts his head down on his desk and seems to cry.”

Are you feeling that Wayne attitude? Are you sensing that Hawks snarly-tude? This, apparently, is what your hardcore Rio Bravo fan thinks like, deep down. Real men are real men, and not only do they they not reveal that they’re scared, they just plum flat-out never feel scared, period.

“With Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift, Kane’s vulnerability might have registered with some dramatic and thematic force,” Kehr writes, “[but] Cooper retreats into a rigid self-consciousness.” Bullshit — he’s obviously sweating and fretting his way through this ordeal, holding on and manning up as best he can.

I agree with Kehr that High Noon‘s “vague critique of western machismo remains one of the film’s few identifiably liberal elements (one other being the Katy Jurado character, a Mexican woman who has suffered from discrimination). Foreman’s portrait of the townspeople as trembling cowards hardly seems designed to exalt the masses.

But Kehr is all wet when he tries to draw a link between High Noon and the Korean War and the threat of atomic annihilation, to wit: “What convinces in High Noon is the film’s sense of social malaise, of a community drained of coherence and conviction in the face of overwhelming fear — certainly a plausible portrait of a country in which, according to a Gallup poll in September 1951, about half the respondents believed that the Korean conflict represented the beginning of an atomically charged World War III.”

The straight-to-DVD-or-Netflix movie is one thing, but what do you call a film that’s apparently so dead it doesn’t even rate the video bin? How can a film be so bad that its producers don’t want to even earn at least some lunch and subway-pass money from this or that video platform? I understand write-offs but what’s the point of throwing a movie into a ten-foot-deep hole and covering it up with dirt?

Sienna Miller during filming of Beeban Kidron’s Hippie Hippie Shake

Case in point: Beeban Kidron‘s Hippie Hippie Shake, a piece-of-shit adaptation of Richard Neville‘s memoir about running Oz, the famed London counter-culture weekly, in the late ’60s. Shot in late ’07 and then gradually and sluggishly abandoned by distributors (including Universal), it’s not purchasable or rentable anywhere. I tried to watch it on Yidio.com and Lovefilm.com…nothing happened.

Don’t those nude scenes of Sienna Miller matter to anyone?

I think it’s because ’60s hippie movies always put out some kind of impossible-to-stomach, go-away-and-stay-away atmosphere. Four and a half years ago I wrote that “I’d love to see this Tim Bevan-Eric Fellner production do it right, but haven’t hippie films always been a problem? Isn’t there some kind of curse upon any film trying to reenact or reconstitute that old love beads-slash-Bhagavad Gita-slash-Moody Blues vibe? Isn’t there something immensely difficult if not impossible in trying to make that incense-and-peppermints chemistry seem palatable by the standards of 21st Century culture?”

Three years ago I wrote that “the rep of this poor misbegotten film has gone from intriguing to worrisome to there-must-be-something-wrong to massive fartbomb.”

Roughly 18 months ago Sydney Morning Herald reporters Gary Maddox and Steve Meacham wrote that “more than three years after the film was shot in England, rumours that Hippie Hippie Shake has turned out dismally have proved to be accurate. After a promised release failed to eventuate last year, the British production company, Working Title, has confirmed it will not reach cinemas. A distribution source said: ”There are cases where movies just come out really…badly.”

And yet in late ’08 two reviews were posted that said Hippie Hippie Shake was at least watchable — one from British blogger Matt Robinson and another from AICN’s “Harry Palmer.”

Benjamin Wallace‘s chatty, sometimes brazenly phrased Vulture piece about the dissolution of TomKat (“An Inquiry Into The Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise“) comes to the conclusion that apart from the venal Scientology element, the possibly-straight Cruise isn’t as much to blame for the breakup as much as Holmes’ feelings of being “trapped in someone else’s movie.

Illustrations by New York‘s Kagan McLeod.

“Promised above-the-title billing, [Holmes] never managed to move beyond a supporting role,” Wallace writes. “Where at 26 she found Cruise’s monster life ‘exciting,’ at 33 it just made her feel smaller. And it doesn’t require any overt or conscious cynicism on Holmes’s part, or mean she wasn’t genuinely smitten with Cruise when they wed, for her also to have expected the union to be a boon to her career.

“Marrying Cruise had done wonders for Nicole Kidman, who not only became massively more famous but whose acting career took off while she and Cruise were still together. And Holmes, who already had a hit TV series to her name and a $1 million role in Batman Begins at the time of her wedding, was starting ahead of where Kidman had. Indeed, marrying Cruise did make Holmes a lot more famous — there she was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, styled by Victoria Beckham — but it also, because of Cruise’s bizarreries, drove her Q rating downward. When her character was reprised in the next Batman movie, The Dark Knight, Holmes was passed over for Maggie Gyllenhaal.

“She got parts in mostly small movies, but they bombed at the box office. The Times called Holmes the ‘weakest link’ in Mad Money, and for her work in the Adam Sandler comedy Jack & Jill, she was nominated for Worst Supporting Actress at the 2011 Golden Raspberry Awards (her second nomination; she had received the first for Batman Begins).

“At the same time, unfavorable comparisons between her and fellow Dawson’s Creek alumna Michelle Williams became painfully inescapable. As Williams became a figure of sympathy because of her husband (the late Heath Ledger), Holmes became a joke because of hers. Holmes is said (scout’s honor!) to have been enraged by Williams’s success. While Holmes was playing Jackie O. in a mini-series that ended up airing on Reelz — that’s Channel 238 in the Time Warner NY cable system, if you’re wondering — Williams was playing JFK’s sometime-mistress Marilyn Monroe, in a feature film, en route to a third Oscar nomination.

“But Scientology, or rather its terrible reputation, offered a way out. Holmes, unable to get the kinds of roles she wanted, realized she could cast herself in the part of a lifetime. Like Truman in The Truman Show, she finally grasped her ontological status as a character in a fiction, and that self-awareness propelled her out of the story and crashing through the fourth wall. She knew a good third-act twist when she saw one.

“‘It’s not like she ever had a huge career to begin with. She was a rising star. Now she will have a huge career,’ says an editor at a leading celebrity magazine. Holmes, emerging from a seven-year, one-on-one apprenticeship with the world’s most famous action hero, simply rewrote the script.”

“Or maybe she didn’t. But what a story.”

I’ve seen Susan Lacy‘s Inventing David Geffen, an “American Masters” documentary that will air on PBS on 11.20.12. It’s a somewhat candid backrub piece that pretty much allows the 69 year-old supermogul to tell his life story the way he wants it told. Which feels okay as you’re watching it, I guess. It doesn’t excite but doesn’t offend either. And I watched it twice in a row, which says something.

David Geffen during Sunday’s PBS-arranged q & a at the Beverly Hilton hotel.

Lacy includes an occasional blunt comment (one-time litigant Neil Young shares a few choice phrases) about Geffen’s combative nature and scrappy business dealings so as to give a feeling that the doc doesn’t “flatter,” but it mostly does flatter in a sense because it underlines how an awful lot of people are scared of Geffen, and therefore respectful. They all kiss the ring.

Lacy’s doc is an engrossing sit because Geffen is a fascinating player, full of emotionality (some of it angry and combative) and contradictions and humor and fierce will. As a columnist I love rich hardballers (Geffen is worth over $5 billion) who are tough and know all the angles and how to play everything to their advantage, but Lacy’s doc is not about that territory. Not really. Inventing David Geffen is an agreeable thing, nostalgic for the ’60s and ’70s, flavorful and amusing at times and “honest” as far as it goes but basically friendly and affectionate. Lacy obviously likes Geffen, and after watching her film it’s hard not to feel the same. He’s a kick, he’s been around, he’s lived it, he knows everyone.

But if after seeing this film you want a less varnished portrait that’s probably closer to the real deal, dust off the late Tom King‘s 2001 biography — “The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys and Sells The New Hollywood.” Now that had real juice and adrenalin and aroma and nerve, you bet. Geffen hated it, calling it a hatchet job and conniving and agenda-driven, but if you read Lisa DePaulo‘s June 2001 New York article about how King and Geffen’s relationship began amiably with a written agreement to give King access and then deteriorated and got worse and worse until everything was poison, it’s hard to accept Geffen’s view that King just set out to trash him with little regard for truth or fairness or appropriate journalistic standards.

In any event Geffen attended a PBS press event Sunday at the Beverly Hilton to help promote Lacy’s doc. Most if not all of the journalists present had been given a DVD screener so it was all (a) questions about this and that and (b) the notoriously guarded and press-shy Geffen answering them as briefly and curtly as possible. Here’s an mp3 of the discussion. Here‘s how Deadline covered it. And here are my favorite quotes and exchanges:

“I’m not involved in DreamWorks at all,” Geffen said early on. I asked if that meant that he hasn’t seen Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln, and he said he hasn’t “but I hear it’s wonderful.” I asked if he knows how long it is, and he said, “I have no idea.”

“Failure is a great motivator,” Geffen said at the start of the session. (He could have said “there’s no success like failure, and failure is no success at all” but that’s taken.)

“Why were you driven?,” a journalist asked him. Geffen smirked and said, “Meet my mother.”

Asked to talk about Jewish background and how Judaism and the culture of Jewish guilt may have influenced him early on, Geffen said this: “My mother came to America from Palestine in 1931. My father met her in Palestine. They were socialists, really. I was Bar Mitzahed but we didn’t have much of a religious life. Does that not answer your question?” The journalist asked again about childhood influences and Geffen said, “Everybody’s childhood is an influence about what happens in their future, don’t you think?”

A journalist asked what Geffen might do if he was trying to get into the music business today (or words to that effect) and he said, “I’d kill myself.” What he meant is that he couldn’t abide what he sees as a lack of spirituality in today’s business. “When I was a kid all my peers wanted to play guitar and be in a band,” he said. “Today if you re growing up today your’e not as focused on the music business as much as being a programmer…that’s where success seems to lie.”

Would he try to get into the movie business today? How would he play his cards today if he was just starting out? “It’s very hard to get into the movie business, then and now,” he said. “It’s a very tough bullseye to hit. To get a job in the entertainment business is difficult. I found it difficult personally.”

Putting together $1.8 billion to finance DreamWorks, which he did in the space of two weeks back in ’94, “would be impossible today,” he said.

“You find yourself getting old and bald…”

After Geffen was mistakenly diagnosed as HIV-positive in the early (or was it the mid?) ’80s, “I just stopped working,” he said. “Here I am, I thought. I’d been working all my life and made all this money and didn’t have any fun really. Didn’t get high. So I’m gonna get high and get laid. People were dropping like flies in the ’80s. A very scary period of time. I like working. I’ve always worked, always enjoyed, always thought it was fun going to the office.

“Has anyone ever said no to David Geffen?,” he was asked. “Of course, there were many,” he said. “I wanted REM. I can’t think of which ones.”

And then came the best quote of the day: “It’s not about the ones who say no,” Geffen said, “[but] about the ones who say yes. Your life isn’t made up of people who aren’t in it.”

Asked about this reported interest in buying either the NY Times or LA Times, Geffen said he “was not looking to be a newspaper owner as an investment…I was going to buy the NY Times out of my foundation and make it a non-profit. Because I think the NY Times is essential. A very important newspaper. It’s very hary hard to survive as regional or logcal newspaper todaty. The NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are national newspapers.”

A journalist said that “a few years ago Carly Simon outed you as the guy she wrote about…” and right away Geffen cut him off. “That’s simply not true,” he said. “I’m not saying I’m not vain, but I’m not her vain. I thought the same thing about that as I thought about my marrying Keanu Reeves, whom I’ve never met.”

He said he’d “had no input into this film, honestly,” referring to Lacy’s doc. “I had nothing to do with the makeup of those questions. I wanted to tell the story as accurately as I can. I had no idea what this was gonna be. I didn’t think I was a good candidate for this thing. But I was happy with it.

“I’m proud of all the things I’ve done,” he said. “I [see] this film and I think, “wow, you did have all that.” I don’t think about the past. I think about what I’m doing now. I really don’t reflect on my career. I don’t like to talk about myself. I avoid it as much as possible. When I saw the film, I thought ‘wow’…I was impressed.”

A journalist asked what gets him up in the morning. “Whatever I’m gonna do,” he replied. “I like talking to interesting people. Reading great books. I can read four or five books a week. I don’t carry a cell phone. I’ve never texted anyone in my life. I’ve never [used] an ATM machine…or whatever it is.”

“Was that your key to success, being the smartest man in the room?,” a woman asked. “I never thought I was the smartest man in the room,” Geffen answered. “I really did very poorly in school. I thought I was dumb. I think other people thought I was dumb too. I had any number of jobs I was fired from, between high school and when I got to the William Morris Agency [in ’64]. And I got to WMA and I was delivering mail, and I heard the agents talking on the phone [in their offices] and thought to myself, ‘Oh, they’re bullshitting on the phone. I can do that.'”

By the way: Tom King, whom I knew slightly and liked as far as it went, died at age 39 in mid April 2003. Here’s the L.A. Times obit. Here’s a link with my own response to his passing.)

Last Wednesday I had lunch with two upcoming Criterion Blurays — Sunday Bloody Sunday (out 10.23) and Rosemary’s Baby (out 10.30). They met me at Le Pain Quotidien at 12:30 pm. We chose a quiet table and ordered tomato and mozzarella salads and lemonade all around.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Thanks for coming, fellas. I know you’ve been busy recently.

Rosemary’s Baby Bluray: Not at all, Jeff. Thanks for the invite.

Sunday Bloody Sunday Bluray: Good to be here.

HE: So when you guys were movies back in the prehistoric celluloid days, you came out within…what, three years of each other?

RM Bluray: I came out on June 12, 1968 and Sunday was almost exactly…

SBS Bluray: I think it was almost exactly three years later, on July 1, 1971 in England. And in early September of ’71 in the States.

HE: Have you guys met before this?

RB Bluray: Never. But why would we? (to SBS Bluray) You good?

SBS Bluray: I’m good. As I’m sure you are. It’s gratifying to be getting some new attention after 40-odd years.

HE: You guys never played as a double-bill somewhere? At the Carnegie Hall or Bleecker Street Cinema or the Thalia back in the ’70s?

SBS Bluray: Not to my recollection.

RB Bluray: Maybe we did. Who remembers? [Laughter]

HE: In any case, for those who aren’t up to speed I’d like to review some basics. Sunday, you were produced and shot in England but released by major distributors in every country. I think United Artists released you in the U.S., if I’m not mistaken?

SBS Bluray: Correct.

HE: And Rosemary, you were shot in the U.S. and released by Paramount.

RB Bluray: Right.

HE: And being non-Scope films, you were both projected in the same flat format in the same theatres in both the U.S. and England, presumably with the same lenses and aperture plates and yaddah-yaddah. Same all around.

RB Bluray: Presumably.

SBS Bluray: Okay…I see where you’re going with this.

HE: Where am I going?

SBS Bluray: We came out in roughly the same era, and we’re both being released as Criterion Blurays in October, both of us mastered by the same Criterion technicians and creatives, and yet I’m being issued with a 1.66 aspect ratio.

RB Bluray: Oh, God…!

SBS Bluray: And Rosemary’s Baby is coming out at 1.85. [Melodramatically] Why is that?

HE: Okay, how come?

SBS Bluray: Because I was produced and shot in England, a country that was rolling with 1.66 at the time. It’s a gesture to British theatrical tradition.

HE: But your director, the late John Schlesinger, was operating in the same theatrical and commercial realm as Roman Polanski, the director of Rosemary’s Baby.

RB Bluray: Sure.

HE: Schlesinger was British but he was very much a part of the U.S. film industry. He’d directed Midnight Cowboy in ’68, of course. And both Schlesinger and Polanski, who’d come from Poland but was a British resident in the mid ’60s when he made Repulsion and who understood the system they had…they both knew that the lion’s share of their support and funding came from the U.S. film industry so there were no illusions about how most people — Americans, I mean — would see their films, which was within a 1.85 aspect ratio.

SBS Bluray: John knew that. Of course he did. But being a British-born filmmaker, he composed me so I’d look good at 1.66 as well as 1.85.

HE: As I’m sure Polanski did with Rosemary. He knew there were two systems. So why, then, has Criterion chosen to show you, Sunday, with a 1.66 aspect ratio when the reality was that very few if any viewers in the U.S. saw you at 1.66. To hear it from Bob Furmanek and Bob Harris and others, 1.85 was the absolute rule in the U.S. going back to the ’50s. So why haven’t you been Furmaneked, Sunday? Don’t get me wrong…

RB Bluray: [Amused] Yeah, what is this?

HE: I love that you’re coming out at 1.66. Really.

RB Bluray: But how come Criterion has given you more height than me?

HE: Because Polanski told them you’re coming out at 1.85. He ordered it.

RB Bluray: Then why did he approve Repulsion at 1.66? Just because he shot it in England? Presumably Criterion is bringing out Sunday at 1.66 for the same reason, because it was shot in England. But who cares at this point? That was forty odd years ago.

HE: We all live in a 16 x 9 world these days. When it comes to rectangular images and aspect ratios, I mean. Thank God some people have held the line with 1.66 here and there and 1.33 or 1.37 in the case of pre-1953 films , but it’s all very, very abitrary.

Where is the conversation now with Benh Zeitlin‘s vibrant, visionary film now playing in well over a hundred theatres? What are the second- and third-wavers saying at this juncture? It’s an ongoing discussion, never static, just wondering. (Tip of the hat to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet for asking first.)

I bought these Bruno Magli (Magli is pronounced “Mahlee”) shoes 12 years ago in Venice, Italy. They’re the highest-qualilty shoes I’ve ever owned, and easily the most uncomfortable. They feel like they’re made of wood. It would be agony to wear them more than five or six hours at a stretch. But I’d rather suffer with a pair of beautiful shoes than walk around in super-comfortable shoes that look atrocious.

Shoes that will be worn and in good shape long after I’ve left the planet