In the early ’80s I pitched a monthly column idea to two or three publications called “Hollywood Weltschmerz: The Celebrity in Pain.” The idea was to interview Hollywood luminaries about hurtin’ stuff they’d recently gone through. I didn’t just love the idea because it was wholly original and would have gotten lots of attention, but because there would be endless amounts of material. I mean, actors, for God’s sake…are you kidding?

But the powers-that-be thought it was too strange, and suspected that actors plugging movies probably wouldn’t want to go there with a journalist, or that their publicist would object if they didn’t. (Weltschmerz is pronounced veltschmerz and defined by Websters as “sorrow that one feels and accepts as one’s necessary portion in life; sentimental pessimism.”)

Here it is nearly 30 years later and somebody — The Wrap‘s Eric Estrin — is finally having a go at a similar kind of thing, called “Hard Knocks.” Unless it’s not a column and just a stand-alone piece. (The layout art doesn’t convey the intent with 100% clarity.)

Estrin’s “artist in pain,” in any event, is comic Kevin Nealon , and he says something toward the end of the article that hit home.

“For me, I think, love has always been my biggest obstacle in this business,” Nealon writes. “I lost a considerable amount of weight after that. I was depressed, but I still went on and did standup no matter how gaunt I looked and sick I looked. People thought I had AIDS because I was so depressed.

“But I would get up on stage, and I found that being onstage was kind of an escapism type of a thing. It’s like going to Disneyland. You kind of forget about your troubles and you’re just onstage, doing your act. And then once you step offstage again you’re back into real life. But the more I performed, the more I would get over my distraction of being heartbroken. That was how I handled it.”

That’s precisely how I feel about writing this column. It’s hard work but living in it is also a kind of vacation. For eight or nine or ten hours daily I live in HE world as opposed to the one outside the window. There’s no ambiguity about which one I prefer.

It’s obvious within seconds of looking at clips from Little Ashes (Regent, 5.8.09), a drama about the young Salvador Dali, that it’s going to be received as a major embarassment. Particularly for Twilight star Robert Pattinson, who plays Dali. And I’m not gloating about this at all.

I’m not trying to be an obnoxious know-it-all here, but Pattinson looks flat-out silly in that upturned wax-stache. (Not in the poster portrait, which someone has Photoshopped so as to trim the upturned tips.) Look at the footage and there’s no accepting it. It looks like a cheap paste-on — a joke, a mistake.

If I’d been hired to replace director Paul Morrison the first thing I would have said when I walked on the set was, “Look, we all know that Dali is famous for the big wiry upturned moustache, but we can’t go with it because because it makes Robert look foolish. So as far as we’re concerned Dali’s upturned ‘stache didn’t kick in until he got older. Which there is ample photographic evidence to support. When he was younger he wore a Clark Gable ‘stache. End of discussion.”

(l.) Salvador Dali in his 20s, (r.) in his late 20s or early 30s. No upturned stache in either shot.

I haven’t read any first-hand reports about day-to-day Baghdad realities in a long while. I think I stopped being interested after seeing No End in Sight, which convinced me that Americans had screwed things up so horribly they needed to just get the hell out and never come back. But today I read a piece about here-and-now Baghdad that got me.

It’s called “Baghdad in Fragments” and was posted today by freelance journalist Michael J. Totten, who supplies his own half-decent photographs. It’s good reporting. He needs Pay Pal contributions. I’m going to send him one next week when I get some more money in.

Here’s a sample….

“Iraqi Police officers still routinely fire negligent discharges in the stations.

“‘I forgot my AK was loaded,’ one of them said to me recently after he damn near shot his foot off,” Lieutenant Kane said. “I asked him why he was carrying it by the trigger. ‘That’s how I always carry it!’, he said.”

“Lieutenant Kane rolled his eyes.

“‘They’re like Keystone cops,’ said another soldier.

“‘Some go out of the station with their helmets on the back of their heads and their shoes untied,’ Lieutenant Kane said. ‘They’re like kids.’

“‘Just wait until they’re running this place by themselves,’ I said.

“‘I don’t even want to get into that,” he said. ‘Some of these guys completely freaked out last week when Iraqi Army soldiers fired a warning shot near them. Their eyes got huge, and they were like, whoah.’

“‘This is Iraq,’ I said. ‘They aren’t used to that yet? I’m used to it and I don’t even live here.”

“‘Then there are other people,’ he said, ‘who shrug when bombs go off in their neighborhood as long as their windows don’t get blown out. They say ‘Oh, it’s just a bomb, it’s not a big deal.'”

Monsters vs. Aliens has failed with the Rotten Tomatoes creme de la creme, managing only a 58% positive. And it only hit 55% with Metacritic. What

does this signify? Any shot at a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination is most likely dead, for one thing. It certainly doesn’t mean any less box-office dough.

JoeMo says “see it only if you need a retro-monster fix, and in 3-D to offset the no-D script.” Lou-Lou calls it “a clunky and wildly unimaginative” film that “really doesn’t have a clue what to do with the 3D technique.” And yet the Village Voice‘s Robert Wilonsky gave it a full thumbs-up, calling it “a milestone,” and the Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy gave it a near-rave.

Monsters vs. Aliens “has bells and whistles, superb technical sophistication and dazzling visual effects, sound, fury and Reese Witherspoon,” wrote Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday. “What it doesn’t have is heart.

“At a recent Saturday morning screening full of youngsters and their adult charges, nary a giggle or delighted gasp could be heard, maybe because references to Dr. Strangelove are lost on the SpongeBob SquarePants set. Either that, or even little ones appreciate a good story. And that’s precisely what’s missing from Monsters vs. Aliens, which is nominally about a bunch of government-sponsored monsters that do battle with an evil alien squid craving world domination.

“That’s plot, not a story. And too often, Monsters vs. Aliens is about things, not characters. One exception is B.O.B., a forgetful blue gelatinous blob that, as voiced by Seth Rogen, not only elicits but earns his laughs. As for the rest of the movie, it will recede into your own B.O.B.-like memory bank, dissolve quickly and disappear forever.”

A just-received e-mail from Fandango.com’s Harry Medved reports that Monsters vs. Aliens is accounting for 57% of advance ticket sales. The second-place The Haunting in Connecticut is only tallying about 10% — dud. I Love You, Man is third at 5%, and the awful Knowing is fourth at 4%.

Agents are necessary enablers and unavoidable exploiters of the Hollywood financing, filmmaking and talent-finagling process. But I’ve never been all that interested in their comings and goings (apart from being grateful to certain agency guys for slipping me scripts). How many people outside of the Hollywood talent community follow agent activities with the same passion that Yankee fans follow Mike Lupica during the season? Damn few.

The most avid followers and chroniclers of agentry are a microscopic group of industry-savvy editors and reporters, and….whatever, all power to them. But they must at least sense that reporting on which agencies and agents matter and what they’re up to can’t be terribly engrossing. What they’re doing is basically a form of elaborate networking that allows them to coddle up to the most powerful and thereby gain the best early information. It’s also about practicing a form of oneupsmanship among themselves and other industry-watching journos.

You can’t ignore the game, of course. You can’t write about Hollywood without being at least somewhat conversant with the agenting community, blah blah, but learning and filing this knowledge is, for me, like eating spinach. All right, make it broccoli.

From the POV of your average Joe, agents are good for one thing — i.e., they make good fodder for characters like Ari Gold on Entourage and Tom Cruise‘s Jerry Maguire. I’m not so moralistic or simplistic as to think that agentry is (trot out any cliche) an essentially arid and manipulative calling or whatever, but I do know that with some exceptions agents are not and never will be true movie “Catholics.”

The most important shared trait among the gifted folks who make movies that matter — before, now, forever — is their profound and lasting belief in movies as a kind of spiritual calling or faith, and in theatres as churches. Agents are necessary facilitators in the roundabout creating of said Catholicism (in the sense that they sort out bottom-line issues that need settling), but I’ve never found that nuts-and-bolts function to be especially soul-stirring. Who would?

Good agents know their stuff, of course, and are obviously expert at sensing true talent and sniffing out the best projects. But I don’t think they get Catholicism. I don’t they be good agents if they did. As this column is about Catholicism and aimed at Catholics, I’m sure that the agenting commmunity gets why I’ve never felt the hunger the way Sharon Waxman and Nikki Finke and Kim Masters always have. No offense, guys. No offense all around.

The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman reported last night that William Morris toppers Jim Wiatt and Dave Wirtschafter announced to staffers Thursday morning that the rumors about an Endeavor merger were true.

“They said they were sorry they had not been more communicative, and that they still don’t know if it’s going to happen,” Waxman writes, quoting “[a] person who spoke to someone who’d been in the room. “It was idiotic not to say anything before now.”

Waxman is understandably perturbed because, as she writes, “I recently wrote that I believed that a merger wasn’t in the offing. It’s what I had been told by senior sources on each side, despite the acknowledgement that talks have proceeded on and off for the past many months. A senior person at one of the two agencies told me that he knew of the talks, but didn’t think it would be completed because the culture of the two agencies were so very different.

“A merger is still not guaranteed” and yet “talks are underway. Joe Ravitch of Goldman Sachs is apparently representing Endeavor, and Ron Olson of Munger Tolles is apparently representing William Morris.

“‘I know enough only to believe that they would really like this to happen,’ said one individual who will be affected by the merger. ‘I’ve no clue about the Ari (Emanuel) of it all, or Patrick (Whitesell) or Adam (Venit). If they’re talking, they’re serious. Yet there has to be some degree of difficulty.’

“Many degrees, in fact — some psychological, some legal. Much has been written, and more will be, about the clash of cultures that will ensue should bowties-please William Morris consummate its union with testosterone-heavy Endeavor.

“‘There’s the wedding,’ said one wag, ‘and then there’s the marriage.’

“Everyone in Hollywood remembers that Ari snuck files out of ICM in the dead of night, part of starting Endeavor back when Jim Wiatt was at ICM. “They were never close,” one former colleague recalled today. A senior film executive who was once an agent said he thinks that a merger will result in a period of turmoil, and lots of opportunities for competitors to poach clients and gain market share.

“‘If I were still an agent, I’d be thrilled,’ said this executive. ‘Lots of partners, egos, people who want their name on the door. If I were an agent I’d be very happy. I’d make mincemeat out of them in a week.’

Eight days ago a brilliant dissection of the current financial apocalypse by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi appeared. I ran a link-and-excerpt last Monday. Today I read an evasively worded, self-justifying whine piece by former AIG financial products unit exec vp Jake DeSantis about why he resigned three days ago. Then I re-read Taibbi’s piece and went into one of my quiet-seething modes.

Then, for mild comic relief, I re-watched the above South Park “Bailout!” clip, which ran a day after DeSantis resigned.

Then I started re-focusing on Joseph Cassano, the ultimate AIG bad guy.

“Then, in January 2009, AIG did it again,” Taibbi’s piece reads at one point. “After all those years letting financial products division president Joseph Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano’s old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly!

“Yes, that’s right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

“‘We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats,’ AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

“‘But didn’t these ‘highly expert people’ basically destroy your company?’ I ask.

“Pretto protests, says this isn’t fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit’s operations in an orderly fashion.

Joseph Cassano, former CFO of AIG’s Financial Products divison, said to be currently “hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London.”

“The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can’t even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. ”

These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs,” says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. “They don’t function well without them.”

And I haven’t had my coffee or taken a shower yet.

“I think you should call out Sean Penn and his reps for their blatant lie in the New York Post over how he didn’t demand to be cut out of Crossing Over and some shit about the role being ‘experimental.’

“All lies, all cover-up. Penn demanded that Harvey cut him out of the film because he had issues with the honor-killing storyline (which , in the film, isn’t even an honor killing). It should also be mentioned that once he was out Penn refused to refund the $1 million fee for five days work and [that] Weinstein forced director Wayne Kramer and producer Frank Marshall to pay $50 grand for half the cost of a reshoot day.

“I hate the idea that Penn’s behavior is being whitewashed by his reps. Even Harvey is pissed off that Penn put him in the position of having to choose between leaving him in the film or ending their professional relationship. By cutting Penn out, Harvey created the perception that Crossing Over was damaged goods (along with Harvey’s other butchering of scenes) since almost every critic has mentioned Penn’s involvement at one point in their opening review. Some have even drawn conclusions that Penn wanted out of the film because it allegedly sucked so bad.

“Make no mistake — Penn’s role in the film was important, and the film lost a lot of depth and emotional resonance (and a more spiritual ending) by cutting Penn out — not to mention a beautiful Alice Braga performance and the entire backstory to her character.

“Harvey Weinstein should be pressured into reinstating the Penn storyline in the DVD release. Clearly, there has been no controversy over the supposed ‘honor killing’ storyline, so there will be no heat on Weinstein if he does so. No one seems to care about it. What matters now is that on its own terms, as Peter Travers in Rolling Stone has said, ‘the scene, as it now stands, condemns a misguided individual, not an entire culture.’

“Penn knew exactly which Crossing Over script he was signing on for. The truth is that he suddenly ‘found religion’ when he got lobbied by the National Iranian American Council, an Iranian image watchdog group, and decided he didn’t want to contribute to the negative image Americans have of Iran.

“Maybe Penn should donate the million bucks he pocketed from Crossing Over to Amnesty International and help stop the actual honor killings that do take place in Iran, as well as executions (many of them stonings) and other human rights violations taking place on a daily basis.”

About 21 months ago Peter Bogdanovich wrote a New York Observer piece extolling the rich, classic, sophisticated virtues of Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo. Being a much bigger fan of High Noon than Rio Bravo, I got fairly upset about the Bogdanovich article, and particularly about the inexplicable attitude of righteousness from the Rio Bravo clique. I responded with a July 2007 piece that explained very clearly why all the RB freaks need to shake it off and give it up.

“Goddamn it, the Rio Bravo cult has gone on long enough,” I declared with a contained fury. “Bogdanovich calls it ‘a life-affirming, raucous, profound masterpiece.’ I’m going to respond politely and call that a reach. I admire Hawks’ movies and the whole Hawks ethos as much as the next guy, but it’s time to end this crap here and now.” And then I explained the ins and outs, ups and downs, why and wherefores, etc.

That seemed like the end of it — but no. 2009 being the 50th anniversary of Rio Bravo‘s release, another rabid fan — Wall Street Journal columnist Allen Barra — has picked up where Bogdanovich left off with a 3.26 article called “Rio Bravo, Still Popular and Hip and Hip at 50.” Tenacious little buggers, these Hawksians.

“It wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards,” Barra begins. “It was scarcely taken seriously by the critics on its release, and it’s never made into the American Film Institute’s top 100. But Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, which had its premiere half a century ago this month, may be the most popular cult film ever made.

“The phrase ‘cult favorite’ conjures up images of wobbly hand-held camera shots and little-known actors. But Rio Bravo was shot in glorious [Eastman]color and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history. Most cult films are too hip to be popular, and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But Rio Bravo is that rarest of films — both popular and hip.”

Popular among the Rio Bravo monk-elites, he means. Ask yourself honestly, HE readers — have any of your friends ever suggested watching it over a pizza on a Thursday night or a Sunday afternoon? I’m enough of a Rio Bravo admirer to have bought the Bluray version, but if I were Barra or some other WSJ writer I wouldn’t be delusional enough to think it worthy of a big 50th anniversary fanfare salute like this.

“The first 10 or 12 minutes of Rio Bravo are terrific,” I wrote in ’07, “in the way Hawks introduces character and mood and a complex situation without dialogue. I also love the way John Wayne rifle-butts a guy early on and then goes, ‘Aww, I didn’t hurt him.’ But once the Duke and Walter Brennan, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickinson settle into their routines and the easy-going pace of the thing, Rio Bravo becomes, at best, a somewhat entertaining sit-around-and-talk-and-occasionally-shoot-a-bad-guy movie.

“More than anything else, Rio Bravo just ambles along. Wayne and the guys hang out in the jailhouse and talk things over. Wayne walks up to the hotel to bark at (i.e., hit on) Dickinson. It tries to sell you on the idea of the big, hulking, 51 year- old Wayne being a suitable romantic match for Dickinson, who was willow slender and maybe 27 at the time but looking more like 22 or 23.

“Plus the villains have no bite or flavor — they’re shooting gallery ducks played by run-of-the-mill TV actors. Most of Rio Bravo is lit too brightly. And it seems too colorfully decorated, like some old west tourist town. It has a dippy ‘downtime’ singing sequence that was thrown in to give Nelson and Martin, big singers at the time, a chance to show their stuff. Then comes the big shootout at the end that’s okay but nothing legendary.

“Does Rio Bravo have a sequence that equals the gripping metronomic ticking- clock montage near the end of High Noon? Is the dialogue in Rio Bravo up to the better passages in Fred Zinneman‘s film? No. (There’s nothing close to the scene between Gary Cooper and Lon Chaney, Jr., or the brief one between Cooper and Katy Jurado.)

“Is there a moment in Rio Bravo that comes close to Cooper throwing his tin star into the dust at the end? Is there a ‘yes!’ payoff moment in Rio Bravo as good as the one in High Noon when Grace Kelly, playing a Quaker who abhors violence, drills bad guy Robert Wilke in the back?

“Floyd Crosby‘s High Noon photography is choice and precise and gets the job done. It doesn’t exactly call attention to itself, but it’s continually striking and well-framed. To me, the black-and-white images have always seemed grittier and less Hollywood ‘pretty’ than Russell Harlan‘s lensing in Rio Bravo, which I would file under ‘pleasing and acceptable but no great shakes.’

“Dimitri Tomkin wrote the scores for High Noon and Rio Bravo, but they don’t exist in the same realm. The Bravo score is settled and kindly, a sleepy, end-of-the-day campfire score. High Noon‘s is strong, pronounced, ‘dramatic’ — so clear and unified it’s like a character in itself. And I’ve never gotten over the way the rhythm in that Tex Ritter song, ‘Do Not Forsake Me O My Darling,’ sounds like a heartbeat.”

The Museum of Modern Art’s film department threw a superb party last night for the launch of the New Directors, New Films series, which kicked off with a screening of Cherien Dabis‘s Amreeka. Beautiful lighting; nothing but excellent people. Thanks for the invite.

Alexis Dos Santos, Amreeka director Cherien Dabis, Laurel Nakadate, So Young Kim, Tatia Rosenthal, MOMA film dept. chief Rajendra Roy, Marian something, Adam something, Jack Pettibone Riccobono, Richard Pena, Jytte something.

Amreeka director Cherien Dabis, MOMA film dept. chief Rajendra Roy.