BARRY DILLER: “Look, the woke thing swung too far. The beginning process of it, which is, we should be more aware and more sensitive, is rational and reasonable. But when you take it to the extremes that the woke community has taken it…that pendulum swung all the way up and to the side of the socket. And it’s now starting to come back.

“And part of its starting to come back is that there’s been opposition to it. Yes, it is a lot from the hard right, but it’s also from just ordinary, normal-thinking folk who say, ‘well, gee, that’s ridiculous.’ You know, it’s ridiculous to shut off speech because one person out of two thousand…it will be too sensitive for that person to hear that. I think that it’s just like many things, it just went too far.

Earlier in the conversation…

DILLER: “And then along comes the pandemic, and that increases the shift because people stay home more, etc., etc. So there are more subscriptions, etc. The entire movie business crashes because there’s no movie theaters, because people can’t go to the theaters. And that whole infrastructure of– the hegemony, let’s call it, of Hollywood, which had ruled for 75, 80 years, it only took three or four years for it to totally disappear. Totally disappear in the sense that it’s over. There is no hegemony anymore of those, let’s call it those major motion picture companies. It’s truly finished. It is never coming back.”

HOOVER: Is there a reform formula for the Oscars?

DILLER: “No — they are no longer a national audience worth its candle because that audience is really no longer interested.”

HOOVER: They’re not interested in the awards and the showmanship of the awards?

DILLER: “They’re not interested in the whole process of it. Just, by the way, the awards don’t reflect their interests either. It used to be that there was congruence between the movies that people went to see and the awards that were given to those movies that were most popular. Not that they were the most necessarily or the least artistic or whatever, but there was a real correlation between popular movies and the giving of blessings on those movies and the people in them. But that disappeared a while ago, and the awards went to movies that nobody watched, nobody went to see. And then no one went to see anything because the pandemic came. So the whole house has kind of collapsed upon itself. And what I think is, is that the awards ceremony should be for the industry and not for consumers. And that would change everything.”

HE to Diller: The Oscar audience has shrunk big-time, but a voice is telling me that it will hang on at the level it is now. It won’t drop any further.

In the latest episode of The Hot Mic (recorded on 2.9), the incisive Jeff Sneider and the blustery, gravel-voiced, Seth Rogen-aspiring John Rocha discuss anti-Black racism in the industry and particularly the sore-loser attitudes of Gina Prince-Bythewood, Danielle Deadwyler, Till dierctor Chinonye Chukwu and the Woman King allies (3:02).

They also discuss the Jeff Sneider-vs.-Don Murphy thing (39:45).

Rocha sounds to me like an insufferably woke accusational shrieker. Like he’s stuck in 2019 or ’20. Everyone’s sick of this schtick, and in a year or two wokesters (“white people are hopelessly bad!”) will be searching for tall grass. God….he sounds like a male gurgly “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. Plus Rocha completely ignores the ELEPHANT IN THE “WOMAN KING” ROOM, which is that the African nation of Dahomey was a slave-trading nation….he ignores it!! And so does Sneider!

And what about proportionality? What does Rocha want, half of all nominees to be African American? The US population is 13% African American. What’s the percentage of African Americanas in the film/TV industry? An ASU study says that “recent studies show that Black actors comprise 12.9% of leading roles in cable-scripted shows (proportionately reflecting the overall Black population of 13.4%). The numbers behind the scenes aren’t as encouraging, though. Only 6% of the writers, directors and producers of U.S.-produced films are Black.”

But I’m not feeling or finding it, and I’m unhappy about this. I was dreaming about a fresh fix when I allowed myself to believe that a 2.15 Andrea Riseborough appearance at the Santa Barbara Film Festival was all but inevitable. But then, according to popular theory, Danielle Deadwyler’s reps put the kibbosh on that. I guess the DD juice is over. I should just accept it.

…that the beginning of the end of the “70s glory days would happen with the release of Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws, which was shooting off Martha’s Vineyard that summer and would open almost exactly a year hence, on 6.20.75?

According to a Twitter caption, the Westwood premiere of Chinatown allegedly happened at Westwood’s Avco Cinema, even though it was slated to open on 6.20.74 at the nearby National Theatre. Why not have the premiere at the National?

Update: It was actually held at the old Directors Guild theatre. Allison Martino of Vintage Los Angeles: “Some noticed a car wash across the street from the Guild. Good detective work!”

The premiere of Chinatown at the Avco Theatre in Westwood, 1974. pic.twitter.com/nL0HQTMrNy

— Vintage Los Angeles (@alisonmartino) February 9, 2023

I’ve posted this summer-of-1974 photo three times before. For me the biggest stand-out element, more so than the dusty brown Ford Pinto looking to join Sunset Blvd. traffic, the VW camper wagon heading west and the run-down-looking city bus, are the thick sprouts of bleached yellow grass at the base of the billboard.

West Hollywood was a less attractive place back then, certainly in the daylight hours, but empty grassy lots were par for the course, and when the constant stink of smog and exhaust wasn’t as strong you could stand on a Laurel Canyon or Playa del Rey streetcorner in the early evening and smell the dirt and the grass and the other forms of under-watered shrubbery. Those aromas are gone now.

via GIPHY

Is it a bad look that a 17th century ancestor of Jeff Daniels was one of the Salem Witch Trial accusers? When you first hear this, yeah, but if you think about it for eight or nine seconds, not really.

If an ancestor or two did something awful or failed to stand up against evil during their brief hour upon the stage, I can only say “well, I wish they had been braver.” But unfortunately, most people go through life with their head down and avoiding eye contact with the beasts. Most people are mice — they just want to survive and get along, and unfortunately that means looking the other way when wrong-doing occurs, human nature being what it is.

“I’m afraid we can only do what it has been given to us to do, right to the end.” — Edward Anhalt by way of Jean Anouilh, Becket (’64).

Posted on 8.7.19: “Speaking as an X-factor white guy from a middle-class New Jersey and Connecticut upbringing, I don’t feel repelled or disgusted by my Anglo-Saxon heritage and family history.

“I deeply regret the cruelty visited upon immigrants and various cultures of color by whites, but the fact that racist attitudes were common throughout most of the 20th Century and certainly the 19th Century doesn’t mean that white people (more particularly my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, reaching back to the mid 1800s) were inherently evil.

“By current standards they seem insufficiently evolved, of course, but they were born into a certain culture and were dealt certain cards, and most carried the weight as best they could. They weren’t born with horns on their heads.

“Nor do I feel that elemental decency is absent in the majority of white people today. I feel profoundly repelled by the attitudes of your backwater Trump supporters, of course, but they are not me. I come from a family of relatively good, well-educated, imperfect people who believed in hard work, discipline, serving in the military and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and who exuded decency and compassion for the most part. I am not the devil’s spawn, and neither are my two sons or my granddaughter. I’ve witnessed and dealt with ignorant behavior all my life, but I’ve never bought into the idea of Anglo-Saxon culture being inherently evil. Please.”

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck‘s Air (Amazon, 4.5) is clearly and obviously the new Moneyball — a satisfying, adult-friendly, mid-range drama about innovation in sports marketing. This is my kind of movie, my kind of vibe. Hats off to Amazon, Damon, Affleck, original writer Alex Convery and costars Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Marlon Wayans, Chris Tucker and Viola Davis for helping to bring this kind of film back to theatres.

Sonny Vaccaro (played by Damon) was 45 when he signed Michael Jordan to his Air Jordan Nike deal, and he was never exactly the lean athletic type. That said, I wish Damon had trimmed down a bit before the film was made — he looks like he lives on McDonalds burgers and fries. I’m sorry but I’m the one watching this and I have right to state a preference, and I prefer the Jason Bourne version of Damon, who’s now 52 by the way.

Did Cary Grant (born in 1904) gain 15 or 20 pounds when he gots into his 50s? No — in fact he weighed less during that decade than he did in the 1930s. Movie stars have an obligation to look slightly better than the rest of us.

“Don’t tell me what it’s all about / ‘Cause I’ve been there and I’m glad I’m out / Out of those chains those chains that bind you / That is why I’m here to remind you…”

Between the mid to late 60s the late Burt Bacharach and his partner Hal David (also no longer with us) were well established as composers of light romantic pop tunes…light but sophisticated and even complex.

Bacharach experienced four significant career surges. One, when he became Marlene Dietrich‘s arranger (and apparently her lover) in the mid ’50s. Two, when director George Roy Hill decided to ignore classic narrative tradition by inserting a contemporary music video (“Raindrops Are Falling on My head”) into Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69). Three, his early to mid ’80s surge when he was partnered with wife Carole Bayer Sager (cowriting “Arthur’s Theme”, “Heartlight”, “Making Love”, “That’s What Friends Are For”). And four, when Elvis Costello saved Bacharach from a fatal association with boomer schmaltz with the Grammy-winning Painted From Memory (’98), which Bacharach co-wrote with Costello.

Do the vast majority of Millennials and Zoomers even know who Bacharach was? Or who Elvis Costello is? Of course they don’t.

Bacharach’s 15-year marriage to Angie Dickinson (his second, ’65 to ’80) must have been sensually wonderful. In ’77 they had a daughter, Nikki, who sadly took her own life in ’07. From ’82 to ’91 Bacharach was married to Sager, his musical soul mate. He married his fourth wife, Jane Hansen, in ’93. Together they had two kids, Oliver and Raleigh.

Bacharach’s autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart“, was published in ’13.

The 94-year-old Bacharach died yesterday (2.8.23) at his Los Angeles home.

Mother to Child: “And maybe you can put yourself at a 50% risk of heart disease by the age of 20! Don’t ever let anyone say you can’t go for it.”

Cartoonist and longtime chum Chris Browne, son of Hi & Lois and Hagar the Horrible creator Dik Browne and the guy behind the Hagar strip since ’88, has gone to Valhalla. His ship left port sometime yesterday. He and the Viking God Odin are now equally eternal, and I really wish Chris was still mortal, not just for his sake but my own. I really loved the guy.

“The Remembering,” posted on 4.6.18: “In the spring of ’80 I took cartoonist and longtime friend Chris Browne to an early press screening of The Shining. The old Warner screening room at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, I mean, on the eighth floor. Plush, nicely carpeted, 103 seats.

Browne has been drawing the “Hagar the Horrible” strip since ’88, and is quite the guy in cartoonist circles. But he was in a not-yet place back in ’80.

We were shown the slightly longer version that ended with Overlook manager Barry Nelson visiting Shelley Duvall in a hospital room after Jack Nicholson‘s frozen-icicle death. Like Steven Spielberg after his initial viewing, I wasn’t all that knocked out. It was only years later, having watched The Shining for the eleventh or twelfth time (who remembers?), that I realized it had seeped into my system and taken hold in some curious way.

A few critics were there along with Buck Henry (glasses, tan baseball cap), Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen.

As soon as the lights came up Browne whipped out his sketch pad and, in the space of two or three minutes, drew a cartoon of Henry and his friends in their seats, their eyes wide with terror and with little piss puddles on the floor below. Browne went up to Henry in the downstairs lobby and showed him the drawing. I can recall Henry’s dryly bemused expression with absolute clarity.

Yesterday I wrote Chris on Messenger and asked if he still had that drawing. If so I asked if there was a chance he could scan it and send it my way. Or, failing that, if could he re-draw it and send it along. (As noted, the original only took him three minutes to draw it inside the screening room.) Chris graciously agreed to re-draw it but (a) without McDowell or Steenburgen, and (b) without the pee puddles. So here’s Buck again, and here’s to the lightning-fast creative derring-do of Chris Browne.

“Death on a Bender,” posted on 3.20.07:

A pass-along from renowned cartoonist and old-time (i.e, ’70s and early ’80s hangover) Connecticut friend Chris Browne, who’s been writing and drawing “Hagar the Horrible” since 1988.