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Watching my Ishtar Bluray the other night led me to Peter Biskind‘s September 2010 Vanity Fair piece about the making of that misbegotten (but now forgiven in most quarters) 1987 film. And while I’ve read Biskind’s Beatty autobiography and should have some memory of this, I came upon an anecdote that sank in because it contains — I’m not exaggerating — perhaps the most eloquent and half-touching rationale for promiscuity I’ve ever heard or considered. And conveyed in only four words.

Biskind got the story from Ishtar costar Dustin Hoffman.

“Despite his growing difficulties with [director Elaine] May, Beatty never complained about her — except once. He and Hoffman were in the desert, along with 150-odd extras. He took his co-star aside and started venting.

“‘Warren was going off about how painful it was to make this movie with Elaine,’ Hoffman recalls. ‘He said, ‘I was going to give this gift to Elaine, and it turned out to be the opposite. I tried this and I tried that…’ He was so passionate, but in the middle of it — it’s like he had eyes in the back of his head, because there was some girl walking by, maybe 50 yards away, in a djellaba. He turned and froze, just watched her. I mean, this was while he was producing and everything was going in the toilet. But he couldn’t help it.’

Finally, Beatty turned back to Hoffman and asked, ‘Where was I?’

“‘Warren, let me ask you something,’ Hoffman said. ‘Here everything is going wrong on this movie that you planned out to be a perfect experience for Elaine, and here’s a girl that you can’t even see a quarter of her face because of the djellaba — what is that about?”

“‘I don’t know.’

“‘Let me ask you something else. Theoretically, is there any woman on the planet that you would not make love to? If you had the chance?’

“‘That’s an interesting question: Is there any woman on the planet’ — Beatty paused and looked up at the sky — ‘that I wouldn’t make love to? Any woman at all?’

“Hoffman continues: ‘He repeated the question, because he took it very seriously. This problem with the production was now on the back burner, and it was like he was on Charlie Rose.’

“‘Yes, any woman,’ said Hoffman.

“‘That I wouldn’t … ?’ said Beatty. ‘No, there isn’t.’

“‘Theoretically, you would make love to any and every woman?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘You’re serious.’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Why?’

“‘Why?’

“Hoffman: ‘He was thinking. He was searching for the right words. ‘Because…you never know.’ I thought that was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard a man say, because he was talking about spirits uniting. And then it was ‘Where was I? I just don’t know what to do about Elaine…’ But this took precedence.’

“Hoffman was right,” Biskind concludes. “Beatty was searching for perfection. It was the same passion that fueled his prodigious appetite for takes: ‘because…you never know.'”

There are always little things that people do that faintly irritate others. So faintly that they barely register, and are certainly not worth mentioning in mixed company. To casually do so would suggest a petty and neurotic nature, and who wants that? But this is a Saturday morning and very little is going on. Remember Holden Caulfield sitting on that bus and noticing the way a guy is trying to hide that he’s picking his nose? We all think this stuff.

I inwardly flinch (i.e., not so you’d notice) whenever I see a cluster of eight or ten people standing or walking together. It’s ever-so-vaguely threatening and it invites a faint feeling of contempt. The herd instinct is one of the lowest imaginable behaviors, connoting fear and/or uncertainty and a general lack of Gary Cooper-like qualities. I’ve always rebelled, even when I was five, against the idea of huddling with any group, for any reason. I would huddle for warmth, I suppose, but that hasn’t happened yet and what are the odds at this stage?

I also don’t care for anyone who takes little baby sips out of a bottle of any liquid. I’m talking about raising a bottle for no more than a second and sipping maybe half a jigger’s worth of beer or Coke or whatever. I scowl ever so slightly when I see this. Actors always baby-sip, perhaps having been taught this in acting school. (Or because they don’t want to take 15 or 20 man-swigs should the director ask for that many takes.) I only know that it looks spazzy. If you’re going to sip something, do it like Bill Murray would, with a certain leisurely cool. Don’t be weird or herky-jerky. Tilt your head back and sip a little more slowly and allow a little more liquid — a healthy half-mouthful, say, or roughly two jiggers worth — to slide in and be savored. Now that I’ve written this it’s going to be all the harder to deal with baby-sippers.

What could happen at tomorrow night’s Golden Globe telecast that would turn heads? A surprise win, I suppose, but it wouldn’t matter much in the greater scheme. No one cares about the preferences of this utterly discredited bunch. It’ll be okay if they give the Best Motion Picture, Drama award to The King’s Speech, as some are predicting. Tom Hooper‘s film will enjoy a gratifying nationwide moment. And good on Annette Bening if, as expected, she wins the Best Actress, Comedy or Musical award for her performance in The Kids Are All Right.

The only things that will matter are (a) Ricky Gervais‘ opening monologue and (b) a winner flubbing it in some small way during their acceptance speech. But who would? They’re all aware, of course, that everyone will be watching precisely to see if anyone pulls a Mickey Rourke, and I can’t imagine anyone being that reckless. Christian Bale won’t go there. He’ll more or less repeat what he said at last night’s Critics Choice Awards, something sincere, restrained and on the money.

In a recent interview with Ryan Seacrest on KIIS-FM, Gervais reportedly said “I’m going to go all out this time…I’m going to make sure they’re never going to invite me back.”

Update: As expected, The Social Network, The Fighter The King’s Speech (particularly Best Actor winner Colin Firth) and Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman were the big-time winners at tonight’s Critics Choice Awards.

Network won for Best Picture, Best Director (David Fincher ) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin). Portman won for Best Actress. The Fighter ‘s Melissa Leo and Christian Bale won for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, and the cast won the Best Ensemble award. The Original Screenplay award went to David Seidler for The King’s Speech.

Earlier: I’ll be semi-live blogging the Critics Choice Awards, which are about to begin in Los Angeles. I’ve never really watched this show but I’m a BFCA member, etc. A first time for everything. I think I’ll stay on this entry and expand as I go.

9:08 pm: Schwarzenegger’s monologue…meh. Montage of film clips from year’s best films…shrug. Ashton Kutcher‘s dismissive riff about Schwarzenegger…needlessly negative.

9:11pm: The Fighter wins the Best Ensemble Award. Works for me. Does this indicate a Best Supporting Actress win for Melissa Leo (who looks great, by the way, with darker hair and a black pants suit)?

9:14 pm: True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld wins for Best Younger Actor (or Young Emerging Actor or whatever it’s called). She’s the best thing about Joel and Ethan Coen‘s film so fine, cool.

9:20 pm: Eva Mendes presenting the Best Supporting Actor award. Gotta be Bale, gotta be Bale, gotta be, gotta be…Christian Bale for The Fighter. “Dickie’s winning this as well…for his buoyancy and passion for this…and for Alice…give it up for David O. Russell…Paramount, Relativity…every single crew member…such a good spirit…I couldn’t do this without my wife and my beautiful daughter.”

9:25 pm: Ed Helms presenting Best Action Movie award. Inception, right? Yes, Inception.

9:36 pm: Davis Guggenheim and Lesley Chilcott‘s Waiting for Superman wins for Best Documentary. Hope, inspiration and constructive positivism in the classroom triumphs over the the exacting true-bullet indictment that is Inside Job.

9:39 pm: I know that much of dramatic television is smarter and truer than the content of most feature films, but I’m going to bypass the winners in this realm. No offense.

9:49 pm: The winner of the Critics Choice Best Comedy award is…Easy A? Really? The winner of the Best No-Laugh-Funny Dramedy is Greenberg. (Kidding…although it really deserves to win something.) And the winner of the Best Animated Feature award, of course, is Toy Story 3. Director Lee Unkrich thanks everyone. Fine, solid, down with that.

10:13 pm: True Grit‘s Josh Brolin presenting the Best Supporting Actress award. Melissa Leo wins! Called it, felt it, knew it. Her speech was simple, dignified, honest.

10:18 pm: The Best Adapted Screenplay award goes, of course, to Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network. Best Original Screenplay award goes to David Seidler for The King’s Speech. “If you’ve been a stutterer and could not speak, it is wonderful to be heard.”

10:31 pm: Greg Kinnear presenting the Best Director award to David Fincher for The Social Network. Fincher isn’t there, Kinnear accepts for him. Right on top of this Jimmy Kimmel and Emily Blunt come out to present an altruism award — the Joel Siegel Award — to Matt Damon for www.water.org. “For just $25 you can bring clean water to a kid for life,” Damon says. “Feel free to join us.” Kimmel’s mock put-downs of Damon during the intro were the funniest lines of the show so far, and Damon zaps him back pretty nicely.

10:41 pm: Julianne Moore presenting the Best Actor award, and the Critics Choice award goes to — knock me down with a pinky push — Colin Firth for The King’s Speech. “Actors — I — have a need for attention and approval that borders on the infantile. I will be wearing this [award] around my neck as a talisman, to give me magical powers.”

10:51 pm: Kevin Spacey presenting the Best Actress award — suspense, suspense. And the award goes to Natalie Portman. A very gracious speech. Relaxed. Hits all the right notes. “Darren, you made me skinny and you’re also indirectly responsible for making me fat.” A tough world, Annette Bening — but there’s always the Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical.

10:59 pm: The great Jane Fonda presenting the Critics Choice Award for Best Picture. Of course…The Social Network! And the whole gang takes the stage. And producer Mike DeLuca — Mike! — has the honor of delivering the acceptance speech.

Aaron Sorkin‘s screenplay for The Social Network was made available a few hours ago on Sony’s Social Network site.

The spiking of Cari Beauchamp‘s 5000-word Vanity Fair piece about the aggressive Hollywood reporting wars between Deadline‘s Nikki Finke, TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Janice Min was not, I’m told, a “space issue.” Earlier today N.Y. Post media columnist Keith J. Kelly quoted “sources” saying that the story was killed “because it wasn’t catty enough…they wanted a catfight story.” He also ran an official Vanity Fair explanation that “with so many articles trying to get into the issue, it didn’t make the cut.”

Late this afternoon a person who had contact with Beauchamp during her research said that the Vanity Fair quote is bullshit. There was, I gather, some reticence from at least one of the subjects (and perhaps from all three) about participating in a story that, it was feared, might have become a semi-demeaning caricature — a chronicle of tempestuous personalities, perhaps something in the vein of those old Hedda-vs.-Louella duels of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, three tough cyber-journalists overdoing the avarice in trying to out-scoop and out-maneuver each other, etc. Beauchamp tried to allay concerns by offering assurances that article would be a business piece, but toward the end, my source contends, it devolved into something that Beauchamp wouldn’t put her name on.

Beauchamp’s story would have appeared in VF‘s annual Hollywood issue, which will be out on February 2nd.

Since last summer’s Sad Keanu meme, Keanu Reeves has starred in Mark Mann‘s Generation Um…, spoken about wanting to make another Bill and Ted movie (middle-aged air guitar) and is moving forward on a 47 Ronin flick that sounds real. I’ve had this idea that The Day The Earth Stood Still hurt him, but that awful film grossed $230 million worldwide so it’s not like Keanu’s in “movie jail,” so to speak.

“Clint Eastwood is without a doubt the fittest and most active octogenarian on New York’s Park Avenue as he climbs spryly out of his black SUV and strides into the Regency Hotel, acknowledging the greetings of the staff with a friendly wave. ‘He can’t be 80,’ someone whispers in amazement. ‘No way.'” — from a 1.14 Telegraph profile by John Hiscock.

There’s like…uhm, a reason for that? For Clint looking as good as he does, I mean. It’s called working out every day for two hours. That, I’ve been told, was his regimen during the making of Invictus in South Africa. (Okay, maybe the source slightly exaggerated.) At 80, serious daily workouts don’t just make you look good — they fight the natural diminishings that happen in old age. When I visited Montana with my dad about 15 years ago we happened to speak to a couple in their mid 70s who were bike-riding and back-packing from state to state, and they had the vigor and muscle tone of 47 year-olds. So that’s the ticket if you don’t want to end up like most octogenarians. Kill yourself every day at the club.

The New Yorker cover, the first photo of Andrew Garfield in Sony’s forthcoming Spider-Man film and the 1.13 announcement that Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was delaying its opening for the fifth time (the new debut is set for 3.15.11) all seemed to break at the same time.

Late last night Hot Blog commenter Scott Mendelson wrote that “Sony must be a little pissed at all the horrible press that Turn Off the Dark is getting. So no, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they released the official still this week, since they don’t want people exclusively talking about Spider-Man in the same breath as Springtime For Hitler.”

I truly and honestly shrugged when I read last night’s “bombshell” headline about former Golden Globe publicist Michael Russell charging the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with fraud and corupt practices as part a lawsuit seeking $2 million in lost salary and additional damages. Isn’t “whores R us” the HFPA’s lifelong mantra? Hasn’t the town been snickering about these clowns for years? Ricky Gervais will kick this around in his opening monologue and…what else? Nothing.

This just-announced dramatic feature ACE (American Cinema Editors) nominees are Black Swan (Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E.), The Fighter (Pamela Martin), Inception (Lee Smith, A.C.E.), The King’s Speech (Tariq Anwar) and The Social Network (Angus Wall, A.C.E. & Kirk Baxter).

The Best Edited Comedy or Musical noms went to Alice in Wonderland (Chris Lebenzon, A.C.E.), Easy A (Susan Littenberg), The Kids Are All Right (Jeffrey M. Werner), Made in Dagenham (Michael Parker), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss).

I’d really like to read a paragraph or two explaining how the cutting in Easy A, which I thought was perfectly fine, is so good that it deserves an ACE Award. I’m not disputing the reasoning behind this — I’d just like to hear it explained with precision and feeling.

The three nominees for Bst Edited Animated Film are Despicable Me (Gregory Perler & Pam Ziegenhagen), How To Train Your Dragon (Maryann Brandon, A.C.E. & Darren T. Holmes, A.C.E.) and Toy Story 3 (Ken Schretzmann & Lee Unkrich, A.C.E.).

This dramatic feature noms echo the DGA nominations to the extent that True Grit again didn’t make the dramatic feature film cut. It’s generally accepted that Best Picture nominees are looking at diminished odds if they haven’t been nominated by the major guilds. In this sense MCN’s David Poland (“True Grit is now the Best Picture frontrunner“) has some ‘splainin’ to do.

My Canadian-bought Ishtar Bluray arrived today. Watching it now, smiling, going with it, chuckling now and then. It’s a comedy, yes, but you have to forget about it being one. Laugh or don’t laugh, but either way it’s Ishtar — one of the best faintly funny farces ever made. About delusion, middle-aged failure, life without a net, the unbearable absence of talent, friendship, futility, pretty eyes, idiot shenanigans and dumb luck.

Ishtar is a bit like a biplane that lifts off a partly muddy runway, rises 30 or 40 feet, comes down again, splashes through puddles, lifts off again…over and over, trying and trying, and you have to love it for that. The fact that it doesn’t roll strike after strike is what’s so endearing. Every so often you want to reach out and give it a nice hug. This is a great comedy about losing. And the Marrakech cafe sing-along (“There’s No Business Like Show Business”) is one of the happiest scenes I’ve ever known.