In a recent “Awards Chatter” podcast with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Dakota Johnson (The Lost Daughter) mentioned a well-known complaint about legendary director Alfred Hitchcock.

Johnson stated that her grandmother, Tippi Hedren, now 91, was hit on by Hitchcock during the making of The Birds (’63) and especially Marnie (’64), and paid a price because she didn’t acquiesce. “Hitchcock ruined her career because she didn’t want to sleep with him,” said Johnson, “and he terrorized her, [and] was never held accountable.”

Okay, no argument but Hedren’s acting talent had, I believe, some effect on her Hollywood fortunes.

Hedren is reasonably effective in The Birds but less so in Marnie. One of the reasons that film is so hard to get through is that she’s too clenched and brittle. That’s who the character is, of course, but you can sense that “clenched” and “brittle” is all that Hedren has. (Grace Kelly, whom Hitchcock had sought for the role, would have somehow made Marnie into a fuller, more sympathetic figure, or so I suspect.) Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut that Hedren “didn’t have the volcano,” and I think that’s a fair statement.

I’m not disputing that Hitchcock made things difficult for Hedren after she turned him down sexually, but I don’t think her career would have developed either way. Hedren had a limited amount of talent. She had the chops of a good-enough supporting player or TV performer, but overall she was far from Ingrid Bergman.

Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley (Searchlight, 12.17) is obviously a double-down noir — doom, baby, doom! Conceived, written and directed from the perspective of Herman Melville‘s damp, drizzly November of the soul.

My only possible quibble (and this just a fleeting impression) is with Bradley Cooper. He was 46 during filming, and I’m sorry but he seems too old to play Stanton Carlisle, who’s supposed to be an up-and-coming hustler on the make. With his fleshy face and beard stubble, Cooper looks like a guy on his way down. Tyrone Power was a more fitting 33 when he played Carlisle in the 1947 version.

Some are oddly resisting the inevitability of Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard winning the Best Picture Oscar. I don’t know what their blockage is about, but they’re definitely an embodiment of that John Lennon line, “Living is easy with eyes closed.” They can’t see it or feel it. Some kind of weird obstinacy.

Consider, for example, the Best Picture predictions of three Gold Derby stalwarts — Joyce Eng, Variety‘s Jazz Tangcay and Susan King.

Eng apparently believes in all sincerity that three Best Picture contenders — Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza — are more likely winners than Richard. Tangcay is actually predicting Dune (!!!) as the second most likely winner after Belfast. King has matched Eng’s enthusiasm for Campion’s film, but she doesn’t even have King Richard among her top five…mind-blowing!

Eng and King are gender-allegiance voters — they want Campion to win the Best Director Oscar (and I agree with them on this score — she’ll probably take it as a kind of life achievement tribute) and so they’re down for Dog as Best Picture — in for a penny, in for a pound.

HE to King, Tangcay and King: So far King Richard has won six Best Film audience awards at six festivals — Denver, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Chapel Hill — while Belfast has won three. What does that tell you?

Campion’s film has won no audience awards, although she won the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival, and was honored with the “Mind the Gap — Best Innovation” award at Mill Valley Film festival.

If nothing else the writing on the wall should remind you that in the Oscar realm, heart movies always beat art movies.

As I write this, Sutton Frances Wells has been taking it all in and sizing things up for 28 hours, give or take. She, Cait and Jett will leave St. Barnabas tomorrow and return to the West Orange homestead. Cait’s family arrives from Massachusetts next week for Thanksgiving and whatnot. Hollywood Elsewhere arrives for a two-day visit on Friday, 12.3. Maggie (Jett’s mom) will be primary caregiver when Cait and Jett are working.

Hey, Jett and Cait…may I return for an extra visit just before I return to LA (12.11 or 12.12)?

If you, the Hollywood Elsewhere community, were in charge of Martin Scorsese‘s just-announced Grateful Dead biopic, which period in the band’s history would you focus on?

Speaking as chief executive in charge of creative affairs for all of Hollywood and lands beyond, I would split the narrative between the band’s Palo Alto + Haight Ashbury beginnings (’65 to ’67) and the last year or so before legendary lead guitarist and guru-like leader Jerry Garcia (to be played by none other than Jonah Hill) succumbed to a heart attack caused by drug abuse (heroin), smoking, bad eating habits, etc. The first two-thirds in the ’60s, the last third in the mid ’90s.

It might be better to extend Part One to early ’69, which would allow for an extended sequence in which the band records “Live Dead” at the Fillmore West and Avalon Ballroom. To me “Live Dead” is the Mount Everest of Dead albums — it was also the first live rock album to use 16-track recording.

HE’s own Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander are penning the script. Don’t hold back on the “horse”, guys…keep it real.

[7:33 mark] “Before you get sick, you are sick. And this is a very sick country. Still is. I don’t mean mentally although that too. But physically. Why [won’t the media] talk about that?

“Let’s call it Factor X. If there was a factor that is responsible for 78% of the Covid deaths and hospitalizations, wouldn’t you have to — really, journalistically — report that? I’m talking about obesity. People in the media, people in the government are afraid to even mention it. Again…78 percent? 88% of worldwide deaths are in high-obesity countries. 40% of Covid deaths are [among] people with diabetes. And yet no one will mention it.

“I do, and they hate me for it. The last person who [tried to get people to participate in their own health] was Michelle Obama, and it did not go over well.”

Conservative hinterland types (including Trump loyalists) ignored Michael Showalter‘s The Eyes of Tammy Faye because they figured it would just trash rightwing American Christians — i.e., too predictable. And blue urban regions didn’t pay much attention either because they already knew that hinterland Christian yahoos are myopic and gullible and deluded — why pay to be reminded of that fact?

Nonetheless Searchlight marketers are trying to re-ignite interest in the film for the sake of Jessica Chastain‘s Best Actress campaign. I believe she deserves to be one of the five nominees, and that she’ll probably make the cut.

Saying again that Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s same-titled doc about Jim and Tammy Faye is a more absorbing film than the Showalter-Chastain.

Between Rock and Hard Plac

I’m of two minds about Paramount Home Video’s new 4K Bluray of Milos Forman‘s Ragtime, which popped yesterday.

Why not just buy the damn thing, watch it and sort out the issues as I go along? Because I’m torn about it.

On one hand Ragtime, mainly set in the New York City area between 1905 and 1910, is a generally respected effort. Plus it seems all the more noteworthy now considering that a film of this type (released in the fall of ’81) would never be made for theatrical today.

Nobody has ever called it great or mindblowing, but some admire the devotional labor-of-love thing — the wonderful yesteryear detail, the ambitious scope, the old Model-T cars and horse-drawn wagons, the period-perfect clothing.

Plus a fair amount of work went into making Ragtime look as good as it possibly can. Plus the package includes a “directors cut workprint” that runs 174 minutes — 19 minutes longer than the original 1981 theatrical release version (i.e., 155 minutes). For me this is the biggest attraction.

Plus it offers some deleted and extended scenes. Plus a presumably engaging discussion between screenwriter Michael Weller and the esteemed screenwriter and man-about-town Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Forman on The People vs. Larry Flint. So it sounds like a decent package.

But on the other hand I know that Ragtime is an underwhelming, at times mildly irritating film. It certainly seemed that way when I caught a press screening sometime in the early fall of ’81, inside the Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle. And no, I haven’t seen it since. I felt that as engrossing as some portions were, it didn’t feel right. It felt spotty. And it certainly didn’t catch the sweep, texture and wonderful authenticity of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 book, the reading of which I adored.

It was great to see the 80-year-old James Cagney back in action, but I really didn’t care for some of the casting choices (especially Elizabeth McGovern as Evelyn Nesbit and the way-too-young Robert Joy as Harry K. Thaw).

And I never understood why so much attention was paid to the tragedy of Coalhouse Walker (Howard Rollins, Jr.), whose racially-provoked standoff was just one of many sagas that Doctorow passed along. Ragtime is so intently focused on this one character and his injured sense of honor that it could have been titled Ragtime: The Saga of Coalhouse Walker.

I realize that in accepting the challenge of compressing Doctorow’s fascinating cultural tapestry into a two and a-half-hour film, the efforts of Forman, Weller and the uncredited Bo Goldman were all but doomed from the start. In a perfect world Ragtime would have been produced as an eight- or ten-hour miniseries. Then it might have had a chance.

The daughter of Jett Wells and Caitlin Bennett arrived just after 11 am New Jersey time —11.17.21. Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston. 8 lbs., 2 ounces. Labor began last night around 9 pm — 14 hours start to finish. Epidural administered around 3 am. Everyone is fine, all is well, morning has broken, all choked up.

Speaking as a leather-jacketed samurai poet clear light rumblehogger, I’m not that down with being called “grandpa”. It’s not what anyone would call a difficult hurdle, but the “g” word always makes me think of The Band’s “Rocking Chair.”

I know that Diet Coke isn’t especially healthy, and that it’s almost synonymous with Trumpism. But I’m a junkie all the same — my brain associates the taste of it with feelings of normality and assurance — and right now the shortage…hell, the absence of silver Diet Coke cartons on supermarket shelves is causing a certain distress. All the other soft drinks are there in abundance — Diet Coke is the only one that’s AWOL.