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“Jerry! Sandra showed me some your fiction and your awards, and I have to say ‘powerful stuff.’ Almost too powerful. I’m wondering if your mind can function down on our level. I grew up in Pacific Grove, and I started reading…what’s his name?…I started reading Steinbeck when I was nine. [Tossing a script on the table.] Here’s a piece of shit, Jerry. I wrote and re-wrote it, but it ain’t workin’. If you can make it work, you’re on…okay?”

Some of us remember Permanent Midnight (Artisan, 9.16.98), a mild-mannered addiction dramedy in which Ben Stiller played author and screenwriter Jerry Stahl.

I thought this pitch-meeting scene with Fred Willard as the creator of Mr. Chompers was quietly hilarious in a deadpan way, mainly because I didn’t sense an effort on anyone’s part (least of all director-writer David Veloz) to make it feel funny. It just was.

Permanent Midnight opened a quarter century ago, and I’m suddenly thinking I’d like to give it another spin.

I was at People at the time, and in an early draft I happened to pass along that Stiller, who needed to look like an emaciated addict, had lost weight by adhering to Dick Gregory’s Bahamian Diet powder, which Stahl had ironically referred to as the “junkie diet.”

Instantly alarmed by the term, Stiller’s team (including producer Don Murphy and publicist Kelley Bush) ganged up on me during a conference call. I was merely amused by Stahl’s term and thought it was okay to mention considering that Stiller was playing a brilliant opiate addict, etc. The term was deleted, of course.

Has this Permanent Midnight recollection stirred any poignant memories?

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden arrived a little bit late for the Westminster Abbey funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Which was rude — let’s be honest. And so the Bidens had to wait to be seated — understandably.

I realize that over 500 foreign heads of state, monarchs and dignitaries attended the event, and that a certain seating protocol is enforced when it comes to major funerals of this sort. But it still seems a bit odd that the President of the United States would be seated in the 14th row. A slight diminishment or vague insult of some kind. No?

I hate posting about this because Orange Plague made a thing out of it, but let’s imagine a similar fictitious British scenario. It’s June 1962, let’s suppose, and President Kennedy is attending a Westminster Abbey funeral for, let’s say, the recently departed Prime Minister Harold MacMillan (who actually passed in 1986). I somehow can’t accept that JFK would have been seated in the 14th row.

Biden works out and takes care of himself, I realize, but if I were he I would make a greater effort to walk like I’m in my mid ’50s or thereabouts. I would summon all my strength and make a greater effort not to sway ever so slightly and shuffle along like a geezer.

If Don Lemon had been paying closer attention, he would understand that the reparations narrative has taken a hit since promotions for The Woman King began, which in turn inspired closer study of the Dahomey slave trade history.

His face at the end is the payoff. 😂 https://t.co/z7KMdOSDYb

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) September 20, 2022

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…is an excellent thing to smell, taste, feel. I spent two hours getting tickets for the NYFF. I was right at the front of the line and OF COURSE they were sold out of seats for both She Said screenings. And then I caught a 2 pm screening of a film I can’t write about until Tuesday, 10.4.

A 9.19 Hollywood Reporter article by Rebecca Sun recounts the highlights of Saturday’s (9.17) Academy tribute to Sacheen Littlefeather.

The 75 year-old Native American activist became famous 49 years ago when she conveyed Marlon Brando‘s refusal to accept his Best Actor Godfather Oscar, an act meant as a protest over how negative depictions of Native Americans in Hollywood films.

A portion of the fourth paragraph in Sun’s piece is curiously worded. Saturday’s event “was a nearly two-hour program,” she writes, “attended by a mixed crowd of people indigenous to and originating from lands beyond what is now known as the United States.” Does “beyond what is now known as the United States” mean Canada, Alaska and Mexico? Or, more simply, the North American continent?

Sun seems to basically be saying that the lands and cultures that existed before the United States of Whiteman came along were more spiritually rooted and wholesome.

Littlefeather: “I’m crossing over soon to the spirit world. And you know, I’m not afraid to die. Because we come from a we/us/our society. We don’t come from a me/I/myself society. And we learn to give away from a very young age. When we are honored, we give.”

Littlefeather has the right idea in a sense. We all love the idea of reuniting with deceased loved ones when we pass on, but if there’s one aspect of life that I’ve always understood to be an absolutely solitary journey, it’s dying. Merging with the infinite and the altogether is a glorious notion, of course, but you do have to cross that suspended footbridge all on your lonesome.

A Woody Allen rep is spinning Allen’s recent quote (provided to La Vanguardia, a storied Spanish publication) about making his currently shooting film his last and final.

“Currently [Allen] has no intention of retiring,” the rep said. “He said he was thinking about not making films, as making films that go straight to streaming platforms is not so enjoyable for him, as he is a great lover of the cinema experience.”

HE to Allen rep: Allen is first and foremost a filmmaker, and has been for the last 50-plus years. How is “thinking about not making films” not a de facto declaration of an intention to retire, at least as far as filmmaking is concerned?

The same thing happened four years ago when Robert Redford announced he was packing it in. The very next day a p.r. spokesperson said “no, no, not true…Bob is still very much active and in the game!” Redford said that his retirement statement was “a mistake.” And then, of course, he retired.

A 9.17 IndieWire piece by Samantha Bergeson has attacked Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, 9.28) for being pro-life. I’m presuming that others in the wokester press membrane have had similar concerns. The objection is over a scene in which an unborn fetus talks to Marilyn Monroe / Norma Jean from inside her womb and asks her not to kill again, as she did during a previous abortion.

Excerpt: “The fetus who actually speaks to Monroe while she is gardening and asks if she will ‘do the same’ to it as she did to the other, i.e. terminate her pregnancy — results in a violently bloody miscarriage after Monroe trips over a rock at the beach and collapses in sand.

“Dominik [has] categorized his film as capturing ‘what it’s like to go through the Hollywood meat-grinder’ and [has] bragged that his magnum opus is ‘like Citizen Kane and Raging Bull had a baby daughter’…one who seems to have grown up to be Amy Coney Barrett.”

Industry friendo to HE: “Is Blonde a rightwing pro-life movie? That scene where the unborn fetus asks Merilyn not to kill again? This is a film from one of the most progressive production companies in the business. So I find it very surprising.”

HE argument: “As Blonde is completely absorbed by the mentality and emotions of Marilyn/Norman Jean, it’s reasonable to presume that the talking fetus is from her own imagination…that the guilt-wracked actress is hearing the fetus talk to her and beg for its life…it’s not crazy to interpret this as a reflection of Marilyn’s own thinking and is not as agenda being put forth by Andrew Dominik.”