Jeff and Sasha’s latest Substack chat, explained below:

It feels strangely unreal and almost spooky that Raquel Welch, whose erotic vibrancy seemed so overwhelming and ice cream sundae-ish back in the day, has actually died. She had a poised and occasionally brittle quality, but more essentially a pulse and a presence you could actually feel through the big-screen membrane. Alas…

Born into a Bolivian family in 1940, Jo Raquel Tejada (Welch was an acquired last name through an early marriage to Richard Welch) grew up in the San Diego / La Jolla region. Her beauty and hot bod opened many doors during her late ‘50s to mid ‘60s struggling period, but she always resisted attempts by filmmakers to over-exploit her sexuality.

It is HE’s humble judgment that the best film in which Welch starred or at least costarred in was Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73), in which she played Constance Bonacieux, the live-wire ally and girlfriend of Michael York‘s D’Artagnan.

Geraldine Chaplin had the more central or commanding female role, but Welch and Faye Dunaway were strong seconds. Plus Welch’s performance won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress — Motion Picture Comedy or Musical.

It should also be acknowledged that the deerskin bikini that Welch wore in One Million Years B.C. made her into an iconic figure in the mid ’60s. (Are we allowed to acknowledge the long-ago existence of glammy sex symbols? Will the Khmer Rouge commissars put an asterisk next to our names if we do?) And yes, she was pretty good in Bedazzled, I suppose, and in 100 Rifles with Jim Brown. And there was Myra Breckenridge, of course. And Bandolero!

Yes, she acquired the backstage rep of a difficult bitch during the making of The Last of Sheila (’73) and especially following her dismissal from Cannery Row (‘82).

But the only truly good, triple-A film that Welch was part of (and to her eternal credit) was the first Musketeers film. I never cared as much for the darker-flavored second one, The Four Musketeers (’74), in which Welch’s character was strangled to death by Faye Dunaway’s ruthless Milady de Winter.

The idea of Welch and Tom Luddy strolling through that Heaven Can Wait soundstage, knee-deep in those clouds and being asked to get in line and provide their names to the gray-suited checklist guy as they wait to board that white Concorde jet…

RIP RAQUEL WELCH (1940-2023) 💔

Here she is at her dazzling best in 1975 singing I’M A WOMAN with CHER. pic.twitter.com/v0Nr69EPF8

— James Leighton (@JamesL1927) February 15, 2023

Posted on 8.22.22: Perhaps it’s time for Raquel Welch, now 82, to step up to the plate and explain what happened a half-century ago during the making of The Last of Sheila (’73). Is she going to let the statements of costars James Mason and Ian McShane go unchallenged, or does she have fresh information that might alter the classic narrative?

According to an 11.12.72 Chicago Tribune piece titled “Raquel Plans Suit Against Director”, there were also complaints about Welch’s behavior. Welch announced she was suing director Herbert Ross for assault and battery as a result of an incident in her dressing room. She claimed she had to flee to London during the shoot “to escape physical harm”. Warner Bros later issued a statement supporting Ross and criticizing Welch for her “public utterances”.

Excerpt: “Shooting the monastery sequence just off Cannes proved to be troublesome for Welch. Gale force winds and rain disrupted the night shoot, and Welch was reluctant to leave her Venice hotel for fear of getting stuck in the storm.”

Mason said that Welch “was the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with”.

McShane: “Raquel Welch isn’t the most friendly creature. She seems to set out with the impression that no one is going to like her.”

We’re all familiar with the recent complaints about the Oscar nominations by the sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis.

In their minds they all got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.

In response Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Michelle Yeoh, a Best Actress nominee, suggested that they should cool their jets and wait their turn.

Prince-Blythewood: “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.” Deadwyler: “We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”

The essence of the lament seemed to be “we’re looking for some equity here and we haven’t received it…progressive Academy members know that the BIPOC narrative is about giving us the respect and adulation that is our due for the work but also in a payback sense, considering the decades upon decades of racist exclusion in this industry…we know we delivered first-rate work and yet we got shut out…some of you won’t say what happened but we can smell it in the wind…Andrea Riseborough‘s white supporters pushed her though but perhaps at our expense, or so it seems.”

In short, the sore losers were saying that in this time of revolutionary overhaul and the diminishing of Hollywood’s white-male heirarchy, equity needs to count as much as meritocracy (and perhaps even a bit more) in terms of handing out Oscar nominations.

In an exclusive Hollywood Reporter interview with Seth Abramovitch, Andrea Riseborough has addressed the sore losers with two statements — one sympathetic and understanding, and the other a bit more frank.

A.R.’s compassion and sympathy responise: “The film industry is abhorrently unequal in terms of opportunity. I’m mindful not to speak for the experience of other people because they are better placed to speak, and I want to listen.”

A.R.’s plain-spoken statement: “Awards campaigning is as acerbically exclusive as it has always been. I do not yet know which measures will best encourage meritocracy [but] I’ve been working toward discovering them and will continue to.”

Should have posted this yesterday: Last Saturday (2.11) I posted a “go, Maverick!” piece called “Lightning Can Strike Again.” The first four paragraphs read as follows:

“A while back I tried to sell my Paramount homies on a special Top Gun: Maverick HE advertorial. The idea had already been written and posted on 1.13.23 — I just wanted to repeat it with a little Paramount dough behind me. The piece was titled ‘A Film That Saved Hollywood Could Also Save The Oscars.”

“It seemed like the right pitch, and if you ask me this was underlined by the fact that Paramount recently launched a billboard ad campaign that echoed what my piece said.

“At a time when the old energy current between Hollywood and mainstream audiences seemed to be dropping left and right, Top Gun: Maverick had pumped new life into the spirit of things, and should be roundly celebrated for reaching out and connecting…for making something actually happen in theatres at a time when too many films seemed to be limping along.

“A Best Picture Oscar for a movie that had not only restored faith in exhibition but in Hollywood itself.”

Steven Spielberg tells Tom Cruise that “you saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ might have saved the entire theatrical industry.” pic.twitter.com/nPWR5BqiUV

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) February 14, 2023

Yesterday afternoon The Hollywood Reporter‘s James Hibberd reported about an overheard conversation between Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise during Monday’s Academy luncheon, and a highly significant one at that. Spielberg told Cruise that Top Gun: Maverick had “saved Hollywood’s ass” and might, in fact, have “saved the entire theatrical industry.”

I’m certainly not claiming authorship of this sentiment (a lot of people feel grateful about what Maverick accomplished) but it’s fair to say that I posted it first.

Five years ago Hollywood and especially exhibition struck a slow-moving iceberg (Covid, streaming, older audiences forsaking the cineplex habit) and began to sink. The freezing sea water was almost up to the main-deck railing, and then along came the RMS Carpathia…I’m sorry, Top Gun: Maverick to at least temporarily save the day. “The industry doesn’t have to die!”, said Maverick. “All we have to do is stop churning out castor oil woke movies and give Joe and Jane Popcorn what they want…films that actually engage and entertain.”

This is why Top Gun: Maverick deserves the Best Picture Oscar — not because it’s better than Tar or Banshees of the hellish and godforsaken EEAAO, but because it stood up and pumped new life into the spirit of moviemaking and movie-exhibiting.

Movie-Savvy Brooklyn Friendo: “If you can roll with a geriatric Philip Marlowe, the Neil Jordan-Liam Neeson movie (Open Road, 2.15) is a good deal better than the critics who are slagging it say [it is].”

If it weren’t for this opinion the title of this post would be “Marlowe Blows.”

Earlier today Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, announced her candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

This makes her the first Republican to challenge a certain bloated sociopathic mob boss, who may or may not emerge triumphant in the ’24 Republican primaries but hasn’t the slightest chance of defeating President Joe Biden in the general election.

Even with a majority of Americans persuaded that Biden is too old for a second White House term, Donald Trump‘s criminal record and sociopathic compulsions will prove a strict no-go. Which means there’s a half-reasonable chance that Haley or Florida governor Ron DeSantis (if and when he announces) could prevail.

And yet Haley has shown over the last couple of years that she’s a Trump toady, or at least is willing to sound like one, and is hence saddled with the appearance of an ethical problem. A case against her has been laid out by Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant who worked on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. The essay is titled “Nikki Haley Threw It All Away.” Here’s a taste:

“As governor, Haley’s defining action was signing legislation removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. This came after the horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and after social media photos surfaced of the murderer holding Confederate flags. Ms. Haley compared the pain South Carolina Black people felt to the pain she experienced when, as a young girl named Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, she saw her immigrant father racially profiled as a potential thief at a store in Columbia.

“‘Iremember how bad that felt,’ Ms. Haley told CNN in 2015. ‘That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.’

“Then came Donald ‘you had some very fine people on both sides’ Trump, and by 2019 Ms. Haley was defending the Confederate flag. In an interview that December, Ms. Haley told the conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the Charleston church shooter had ‘hijacked’ the Confederate flag and that ‘people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage.’

“In her 2019 book, ‘With All Due Respect,’ Ms. Haley mentions Mr. Trump 163 times, overwhelmingly complimentary. In one lengthy passage, she insists that she was not referencing him in her 2016 Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, when she called on Americans to resist ’the siren call of the angriest voices.’

“It is always sad to see politicians lack the courage to say what should be said, but sadder still to see them speak up and later argue any courageous intent was misinterpreted.

“It didn’t have to be this way. No one forced Ms. Haley to accept Mr. Trump after he bragged about assaulting women in the Access Hollywood tape. No one forced her to defend the Confederate flag. No one forced her to assert Mr. Trump had ‘lost any sort of political viability’ not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she ‘would not run if President Trump ran,’ then prepare to challenge Mr. Trump in the primary.

“There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that’s a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip.”

I’ve written two or three times about an extremely rare one-sheet for The Presbyterian Church Wager, which is what Robert Altman‘s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (’71) was called before it was twice re-titled. After learning of the original title certain Presbyterian Church honchos objected to their church being associated with the superficially tawdry subject matter (prostitution, gambling, opium use). The initial re-title was John Mac Cabe (the last name strangely spelled as two separate words), and then it became McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

What I’ve never conveyed until this moment was that I first learned of the existence of the Presbyterian Church Wager one-sheet when I saw it hanging in the interior lobby of the Beverly Canon theatre (205 No. Canon), a renowned art house for which the late Jerry Harvey (later of Z Channel fame) was the programmer and manager in the ’70s.

Posted on 4.16 20: “As a proud owner of a Presbyterian Church Wager poster (along with Larry Karaszewski, Anne Thompson and Svetlana Cvetko), I’m wondering if anyone has ever seen this French-market poster for sale (can’t find it online) or if they know somebody who has one on their wall? How odd that the designer decided to change the last name of Warren Beatty‘s character from John McCabe to John Mac Cabe.

Posted on 5.6.19: A couple of days ago on Facebook, Larry Karaszewksi, the renowned screenwriter (along with partner Scott Alexander), director, producer and co-chair of the Academy’s Foreign Language Oscar executive committee, posted a photo of a rare cultural artifact — a framed poster for Robert Atman‘s The Presbyterian Church Wager, which later became McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Until Larry posted this I was under the impression that only three Los Angelenos owned mint-condition TPCW posters — Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, myself and dp Svetlana Cvetko.

The poster hanging in my living room is an expensively scanned digital copy of an original that Thompson loaned me in 2008. Three copies were made. I asked Warren Beatty if he would be good enough to sign them. I dropped them off at Beatty’s home, and after two or three weeks I was told they hadn’t been signed. I waited another week or two, and then, not wanting Beatty’s gracious pledge to become a thing of any kind, I decided it would be better to just say “okay, no worries but let’s forget it…I’ll just come by and pick them up un-signed…no harm, no foul…thanks for pledging assistance but it’s totally okay if it can’t work…you’re a good fellow and thank you.”

The next day his assistant told me the one-sheets had finally been signed. I said “thanks enormously” and picked them up later that day.

A part of me would honestly love to work for Dunkin’ Donuts. A very small part of me. A micro-sliver. Okay, I hate the idea. Plus I might not have the character for such a job. Okay, I don’t have the character for it — let’s be honest about this.

The great Tom Luddy, co-founder and artistic director of the Telluride Film Festival…a gentle hombre who always greeted and treated me like a brother and who long ago turned me on to Adam Curtis‘s The Century of the Self, a gift that I’ve never gotten over…a world-travelling cinematic sophisto who understood everything, knew everyone and always championed this or that overlooked film…Tom Luddy has died at 79.

I first dealt with Tom through my Cannon Films employment in the mid to late ’80s. Four films which Luddy produced or associate produced — Barfly, King Lear, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Manifesto and Powaqqatsi — were financed by Cannon, and I was the in-house press kit writer. (I’ve never re-written anything in my life as much as I rewrote the Barfly press kit — Barbet Schroeder made me chisel and rephrase it over and over — I couldn’t even read it after the umpteenth try, but Schroeder taught me the meaning of “truly hardcore.”) And then Tom and I rekindled when I ran into him at the San Francisco Film Festival in the early aughts. And then Telluride, of course, which I began attending in 2010.

If you were ever lucky enough to attend a Frank Sinatra concert (which I did in Long Beach back in ’83), you’d know all about Sinatra’s emotional body language as he sang a song. He would act out the lyrics and the feelings. Luddy would do almost the exact same thing when speaking to the Telluride press contingent at the start of the festival. He would lean forward and convey his heart vibes about this and that film, gently grinning and making eye contact with some of us. You could really feel the fervor. Luddy’s regard for great cinema was religious…evangelical at times.

Roddy McDowall in heaven: “Is that how one says it? As simply as that. ‘Tom Luddy is dead…the soup is hot, the soup is cold…Luddy is living, Luddy is dead.’ [beat] Boast that you were honored to speak his name even in death! The dying of such a man, must be shouted, screamed! It must echo back from the corners of the universe. ‘Luddy is dead! Tom Luddy of Telluride lives no more!”

From Telluride rep Shannon Mitchell: “It is with deep sorrow the Telluride Film Festival announces the passing of its founder and inspiration. Tom Luddy died peacefully on February 13, 2023, in Berkeley, California after a long illness.

“Tom was a force in the film industry for nearly six decades. He had a life-long love and passion for film, and a tireless dedication to film restoration, distribution, and exhibition. His presence will be profoundly missed by the many people whose lives were touched by his kindness, artistry, and his innate ability to bring people together to make something beautiful.

“’The world has lost a rare ingredient that we’ll all be searching for, for some time,’ reflects Julie Huntsinger, Telluride Film Festival Executive Director. ‘I would sometimes find myself feeling sad for those who didn’t get to know Tom Luddy properly. He had a sphinx-like quality that took a little time to get around, for some. But once you knew him, you were welcomed into a kingdom of art, history, intelligence, humor, and joie de vivre that you knew you couldn’t be without. He made life richer. Magical. He called Telluride a labor of love for a very long time. We’re so much better off because of him and that labor.

“We at the Festival owe it to him to carry on his legacy; his commitment to and love for cinema, above all.”