The rule as I see it is (a) celebrities are entitled to slap, shove or punch anyone violating their privacy with a camera because for dignity’s sake alone they have to strike back at the tabloid paparazzi malevolence, and yet (b) regular people aren’t allowed to get aggressive or hit anyone because they almost never have to deal with a stranger taking their picture and if they don’t like it, tough.

Yesterday Sunset Gun‘s Kim Morgan posted a very nice q & a interview with Eva Marie Saint. A little too nice, if you ask me.

Older showbiz folk tend to either recall their lives in a naked-blunt Klaus Kinski style (i.e., “I’m too old to muddy my memories with even a smidgen of bullshit”) or with excessive fondness. Saint lives in the latter camp. Every big name she’s worked with (Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Shepard) was fascinating or colorful or generous or curiously lovable.

And Morgan doesn’t even ask Saint about doing makeout scenes with Warren Beatty in All Fall Down (1962), back when Beatty was Rob Pattinson? (Especially with Morgan having just told filminfocus about “my obsession with stuffed animal claw machines, Dare Wright, and Warren Beatty as Berry-Berry”?) Saint’s heavy breathing with Beatty was hotter than anything she got into with Brando in On The Waterfront. Morgan has no interest in Beatty’s manner or personality at the time, what he and Saint talked about, where he thought his life was heading? C’mon!

I’m sorry but when everything in an actor’s past is seen as a variation on delightful or wonderful or heart-warming, the result is boredom plain and simple.

“The first test screening for Titanic was at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. [Director-writer James] Cameron flew there ahead, ostensibly to test the audio systems, while producers Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini and 8 or 9 20th Century Fox executives rode in on the corporate plans.

“Cameron had roped off seats for himself in the theatre. He likes to sit in the middle of the audience, but not next to an audience member who might reognize him and definitely not next to an executive, so Sanchini was his buffer. He had also rigged the audio so he could ride the volume the whole time — anything to focus on but the anxiety.

“Cameron almost always projects an image of complete confidence around studio brass. Some of the time, he’s faking. That day he was terrified. His reputation, Fox and Paramount’s money, peoples’ jobs were all riding on the fact that Titanic [had to be] better than good. “He said, ‘Someday I’m going to die at a preview screening of one of my films. I’m just going to have a heart attack and die. I know it. This where it’s gonna end for me,’ Sanchini recalls.

“When the lights went down he whispered to Sanchini, ‘We’ll know in the first few minutes if this has all been worth it.’ The movie started, with its sepia-treated titles and the deep-dive footage of the wreck, and the audience was wooden. No reaction. ‘We’re fucked,’ Cameron whispered to Sanchini. ‘It’s all over. There’s no point.’ But by 10 or 15 minutes in, the crowd started responding — a special-effects transition from the wrecked Titanic to the pristine one drew a ‘wow!’ and Leonardo DiCaprio earned some chuckles.

“The film seemed to get over some kind of hump with the audience, and Cameron exhaled.

“When the focus group leader interviewed the crowd after the film, it came out that the audience thought they were going to be seeing Great Expectations. That’s what they had been told, for reasons of security. They thought the first few minutes were a trailer for Titanic.” — a passage found on page 222 and 223 in an uncorrected galley of Rebecca Winters Keegan‘s The Futurist (Random House), due on 12.15.

Last night I attended the first prime-time public screening for Chris Smith‘s Collapse at the Angelika. It played just as powerfully for me as it did in Toronto. The show was a little more than four-fifths sold out. Producer-director Smith spoke before and after the film. There were many questions. More than a few people in the audience seemed pumped. I was too.

Collapse editor Barry Poltermann, producer/director Chris Smith at Tom & Jerry’s on Elizabeth, about 90 minutes after the finish of Smith’s q & a at the Angelika, following the 7:30 pm show — Friday, 11.6.09, 10:25 pm

Smith reported during the q & a that Collapse star/commentator Michael Ruppert has formed a band called New White Trash, and that the sound they’re putting out is somewhat reminiscent of material by Beck.

I tried to have a chat with Smith in the Angelika’s street-level lobby after the q & a, but people kept coming up and asking him stuff. The lobby music was too loud to record anything anyway. Smith is a bright, easy-going, fair-minded fellow. Obviously sharp and inquisitive, but not a hard-ass. He likes to laugh. He has a sense of irony about everything.

Smith is partnered with Collapse producer Kate Noble. They have places in Milwaukee and in North London. They’ve been staying with Cinetic Media’s John Sloss during their current New York sojourn.

We all went over to Tom & Jerry’s on Elizabeth Street after it was all over — Smith, Noble, Collapse editor Barry Poltermann, composers Didier Leplae and Joe Wong, myself, a 42West rep, various friends, etc.

(l. to r.) Collapse editor Barry Poltermann, composers Joe Wong and Didier Leplae, producer-director Chris Smith — Friday, 11.6, 10:55 pm.

42West has been sending out copies of Collapse to every political-minded commentator and talk-show host in the New York-Washington-LA realm. In a perfect world Smith would be talking soon with Charlie Rose, Bill Maher, Bill Moyers, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough…all of those guys.

Collapse will be opening next weekend in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Sunset 5. (That’s a shitty place to open a film in — why didn’t Ted Mundorff offer a booking at the Westside Pavillion?) It’s being offered now as a VOD on Cinetic’s FilmBuff.

How can anyone go to 2012 and then say “Naah, I think I’ll pass on the more or less factual, real-life version”? What kind of dull-brained slug do you have to be to make this determination? The only thing to do is to see both, I think. Yes, I intend to see Roland Emmerich‘s latest disaster-porn extravaganza; it’s having an all-media screening here on Monday night.

MCN’s Gurus of Gold, finally up and running, have Up In The Air in the top Best Picture prediction slot, fine, followed by Precious and The Hurt Locker. Wait…they have A Serious Man in tenth place following the unseen Invictus, Nine and The Lovely Bones, and one slot behind Inglourious Basterds? Am I reading this correctly? Jokey-dokey, baseball-bat-and-gloppy-brain-matter Basterds — a movie costarring the perpetually smug-faced Eli Roth — is a hotter Best Picture contender than A Serious Friggin’ Man?

Calling on the ghosts of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Andrei Tarkovsky and Fritz Lang to walk the earth, visit certain Gurus in their homes at 3 am and straighten their asses out.

Among the Gurus predicting that Serious won’t make the List of Ten are USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican and Suzie Woz (do they talk to each other?), the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, EW‘s Dave Karger (Dave!) and L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen. The 11.4 chart says the hardcore Serious-o’s include Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez, The Wrap‘s Steve Pond, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley (who only gave it a 10) and Greg Ellwood.

The L.A. Times/Envelope Buzzmeter will be up and running early next week.

I was amused at how chief N.Y. Times critics Tony Scott and Manohla Dargis gave the task of reviewing Chris Smith‘s Collapse (which opens today in Manhattan) not to second-stringer Stephen Holden but third-stringer Jeanette Catsoulis. It’s only the scariest and most riveting doc of the year — a theoretical portrait of the world’s end that will suck the air out of whatever room you happen to be sitting in. (Last week I called it “the thinking man’s 2012“).

Catsoulis is, of course, an excellent writer. But woe to the film looking for full-out Times consideration that gets reviewed by her, however smartly or perceptively. A Catsoulis review is a kiss of death. A black spot handed to a film distributor by Ben Gun or Long John Silver. By giving Collapse to Catsoulis, Scott-Dargis have essentially said to Times readers, “This is a fringe doc…an in-and-outer that mainstream audiences should perhaps ignore…not fully deserving of our attention.” In other words they read it wrong.

Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict turns on a bullshit premise– an attorney can’t refuse a reasonable cash settlement if that’s what his/her client is looking to get — but I love it anyway for the following reasons:

In no particular order: (a) the Boston-Irish flavorings, (b) Jack Warden, (c) that straight-whiskey, pinball-machine opening, (d) Edward Binns, (e) James Mason‘s face when he realizes his case has just collapsed in the face of Caitlin Costello Price’s testimony, (f) Charlotte Rampling, and (g) those portions of Paul Newman‘s performance that don’t overplay the suffering and sanctimony. (Example: when he tells that dirty Irish joke to a bunch of rummies.)

Richard Kelly‘s The Box, which opens today, was shooting in the Boston area two years ago; that in itself should tell you it has problems. The failing-grade RT reviews (44% hoi-polloi, 25% creme de la creme) are another. It’s Friday morning and the film is all but dead in the water — let’s face it. WB marketers knew it was a ruptured duck ages ago; that’s one reason why they took so long to open it.

So why did Media Rights Capital agree to fund the film after reading Kelly’s script? They had to know he’s not McG or Michael Bay, that his rep is that of a fringe-type guy who caught a wave off the video sales of Donnie Darko, and that he tends to make trippy head-bender flicks with labrynthian, multi-layered plots — any film geek could have told them that.

So there was no way he was going to make a quietly creepy, less-is-more, Ingmar Bergmanesque thriller out of the simple 1970 Richard Matheson short story that later became a Twilight Zone episode in the mid ’80s. (Which is what I would have preferred.) They had to know Kelly would take the story into the outer stratosphere. They also had to know that no matter what they may say in production meetings, brainy cult directors don’t make films for the Eloi.

The main problem, to go by just about every review, is that Kelly took a simple premise (if you could get rich by pushing a button that will cause a total stranger’s death, would you push it?) and loaded it down with waay too many oddball tangents and byzantine plot elements and metaphorical layers. In other words, he did exactly what any semi-aware, semi-comatose Media Rights Capital execs could have easily predicted would have happened when the project was green-lighted in early ’07.

I love Kelly’s stuff myself but he’s not “box office” — even his friends agree he’s not that. He’s off on his own beam. The problem with Kelly isn’t what he writes or directs; it’s the fact that the budgets for his films so far haven’t been set as realistically proportionate.