“A Cannes hint: watch out for Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Artist — a silent movie that will make a lot of noise!” — HE reader Deydou.

It was the early ’90s, and I was tooling along Santa Monica Blvd. on a nice, sunny afternoon in my relatively new but not quite super-hot Nissan 240 SX. But I felt the car looked and felt pretty damn good, and I was in a pretty good mood. Then I saw a ’60s muscle car of some kind (a yellow ’65 Mustang convertible?) with whitewall tires pull alongside me. It had a FOR SALE sign in the rear window. A very pretty…okay, hot girl was at the wheel, and her passenger window was rolled down.

I pulled up alongside at a red light, smiled at her and said, “How much?” She took one look at me and my wheels, waited a beat or two, shook her head slightly and said, “Too much.” My heart sank like a stone. Fragile as this makes me sound, on a certain level I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this, the most withering L.A. putdown I’ve ever suffered in my life. That’s Los Angeles in a nutshell. That’s the attitude that runs it. And the fact that I let that remark hurt me means that I’d bought into this mentality as much as she had.

Today is a packing and clean-up and last-minute runaround day before my 11:30 pm flight to NYC. So that’s all she wrote until I arrive around 10 pm at LAX. Speaking of which is there anything more hopelessly gauche than people who travel with oceanic steamer-trunk-sized suitcases? Every time I see a family with 275 pounds of luggage I roll my eyes.

Here’s a nice story from about how Pasquale and Louise Buzzelli & friends celebrated the death of Osama bin Laden last Monday. In an up-with-life, community-hug sort of way, I mean.

Pasquale and Louise Buzzelli are standing at far right.

It’s significant to me because (a) Buzzelli was the Port Authority guy who was in a stairwell on the 22nd floor of the WTC North Tower on 9.11.01 when it came crashing down and who somehow survived, awaking a couple of hours later on a concrete slab with only bruises and scrapes and a broken foot, and (b) because I’ve had dinner with Pasquale and Louise on the Upper West Side and know in my heart that they’re good people.

Buzzelli’s survival story is surreal and almost mystical It’s almost impossible to believe (to this day my son Jett refuses to buy it) but it happened. In fact Pasquale is almost the mythical “WTC 9/11 surfer.”

Now this is my idea of a fast-car, supercool, Steve McQueen-y car movie. None of that idiotic Fast Five horseshit. Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver moonlighting as a getaway driver, etc. Dodge the fuzz, play it smart, keep it real. I can tell already that Justin Lin isn’t fit to shine of the boots of director Nicolas Winding Refn. Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaacs, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks and Ron Perlman costar.

Here’s the conclusion of a brief q & a between TheWrap‘s Brent Lang and Michael Moore about the killing of Osama bin Laden:

Lang: “Do you think Osama was really buried at sea because of his religious beliefs?”

Moore: “That’s bullshit — ‘He was buried at sea according to Muslim tradition.’ I’ve got many Muslim friends where I live in Michigan. When I go to a Muslim funeral in Detroit, we don’t hop in a chopper after the ceremony and drop the body into Lake Erie. We’re so worried about upsetting the Muslim world. We just shot him in the fucking head — do you think they care how we conduct the funeral?”

Variety‘s Diana Lodderhose is reporting that Bill Murray will play Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson. And here’s the kicker: Richard Nelson‘s script, based on his British radio play, is about the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to President Roosevelt’s upstate New York home, called Hyde Park, in 1939. In other words, Murray is going to play host to Colin Firth and Helena Bonham-

Carter…right?

Because it won’t quite work to have someone else play the British royal couple…will it?

This is going to be a weird Murray performance. Murray doesn’t inhabit or impersonate others — he basically plays himself every time. he was great in Get Low, but he basically played Bill Murray as a small-town undertaker. FDR’s voice and speaking style are very distinct and well-known — indeed, oft-imitated. I don;t see how this is going to work.

So what happens during the visit, which occured during the summer before World War II broke out? Revelations of infidelity, that’s what. FDR’s affair with his distant cousin Daisy, that is.

Wait…what about Lucy Mercer?

Roger Michell (Notting Hill) will direct with Kevin Loader (In the Loop’) and David Aukin producing.

A friend has some Twilight Zone action figures from “The Eye of the Beholder” and “To Serve Man.” Created in ’02, they’re not an ongoing product line and are therefore rare. The “Beholder” doctor and nurse are going for $225 on Amazon. The “Serve” alien (one of a race of “kanamits”) is priced in the same range.

The weird 60 degree angle of the doctor’s right arm is wrong.

The fascistic leader ranting on the flat panels during the “Beholder” finale is a vision of a right-wing tyrant. Nativist right-wingers of whatever country or culture have always been essentially about fear of other colors and creeds…the “other.” They’re also about the worshipping of authority — scratch a right-winger and you’ll always find a longing for the serenity of having a strong daddy figure — and a high-fiving of Darwinian, may-the-strongest-teeth-survive, equal-opportunity greed. The comfort, in short, of embracing your inner prick.

Bloody death photos of Osama bin Laden will come out sooner or later, but not officially. President Obama decided yesterday that the photos would only agitate and wouldn’t prove anything, etc. But photos of other guys killed in the compound, posted yesterday by the Guardian, offer the viewer a pretty good idea of how Osama’s corpse probably looked.

There’s no dignity in being ripped apart by bullets and then photographed in repose. No dignity at all.

Last night N.Y. Times guys Mark Landler and Mark Mazzetti reported that last Sunday’s Navy Seals’ assault upon Bin Laden’s Pakistan compound was “chaotic and bloody [but] extremely one-sided, with a force of more than 20 Navy Seal members quickly dispatching the handful of men protecting Bin Laden.”

The only shots fired by the opposition came, in fact, “when Bin Laden’s trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, opened fire from behind the door of the guesthouse adjacent to the house where Bin Laden was hiding.”