I agree with what everyone said yesterday. The poster art emphatically says “this is not a big classy fall movie from the formidable Ridley Scott, but another mid-range streamer.” Or, you know, a TNT movie from the early aughts. Or jacket art for a mid ’80s VHS tape. Or the new American Hustle.

From Anne Thompson‘s “We Need the Academy Awards to Save the Movies That Only Get Made Because Oscars Exist,” posted on 9.30:

“The Oscars need to stay classy and aspirational, but they increasingly alienate vast swatches of moviegoers who see them as simply representing woke limousine liberals. The board of governors often have blind spots when it comes to marketing themselves, and the Oscars. As they cater to ABC’s demands for a popular show with younger appeal, the board also makes dumbfounding rule changes — like not announcing all the craft categories, or Best Popular Film, requiring voters to be active — that generate so much blowback that they wind up reversing themselves.

“Some Hollywood insiders think the Oscars should be more democratized. ‘The Oscars are only vital for the industry future if they can engage their widest possible audience in celebrating the cinema, finding ways to make it relevant to many, fun, inspiring and important to culture,’ says one independent producer, adding that the awards ‘risk further alienating the public by continuing to feel self-congratulatory, insular, and elitist.”

Paul Schrader to Thompson: “It’s the big spotlight. We saw last year what happens when you put a dimmer on the big spotlight. It probably would have been better just to have a virtual announcement last year. It made the awards feel small, which is death to the concept of the Academy Awards. We have to reassert its place as the big show.”

The Soderbergh Oscars all but murdered the notion of the Oscars being “big” in any sense of that term. In one fell swoop they became the woke death-pill Oscars…Oscars trapped in an elite rhetorical closet…a combination of a “we need to share our stories at length” and “lemme outta here so I can snort some heroin in the bathroom” …the Oscar telecast from a train station that injected an unprecedented surge of despair.

Nobody wants to watch another Oscar telecast like that again…ever.

Friendo: “Did you read Aaron Sorkin‘s remarks about Scott Rudin in a 9.30 Vanity Fair interview? ‘Scott got what he deserves,’ he said. One could get the impression that the Being The Ricardos director-writer is establishing distance perimeters in order to shore up his Oscar campaign. Aaron is Oscar-ready.”

HE: “But right after that Sorkin said, ‘Right now Scott is lying flat on the mat, and I don’t know how it’s helpful for me to stand on his torso and kind of jump up and down.’ So he’s saying one thing and then saying another. Industry rule #1 is that you stand by your friendships and partnerships. If you’ve worked with someone and you’ve done well by each other, you don’t kick them when they’re down or have been credibly accused of something ugly. You can run and hide (that’s human nature) but throwing an ex-partner under the bus by condemning or distancing…well, it’s tricky. Sorkin is not saying “Scott who?” but he is saying “Scott was.” Does this make him seem principled or a bit hungry?

Vanity Fair‘s Rebecca Ford: “You’ve worked with Rudin throughout your career, on The Social Network, Steve Jobs, Moneyball, The Newsroom, and this play. Do you have a relationship with him anymore? What is it like to sort of see this unfold with someone who was your collaborator?”

Sorkin: “In the last, I think, 12 years, I’ve worked with Scott a lot — three feature films, an HBO series, and a Broadway play. And it was painful to read that Hollywood Reporter story, particularly because it’s pretty likely that some of those assistants who were being abused were working on something I wrote while they were being abused. So I took it personally. Whether it’s a movie set, or a rehearsal room for a play, or backstage for a play, or a television series, morale is important to me. And I take a lot of pride in creating a place where people are really happy to come to work, where they feel a sense of ownership, a sense of authorship, a sense of family. And we have that at Mockingbird. We’ve always had that in Mockingbird. So this came as a big shock.

“I’ll tell you that in a number of the follow-up stories that I read, you’ll see people quoted saying, ‘Everybody knew, everybody knew.’ And that’s ludicrous. Everybody did not know. I certainly didn’t know, and I don’t know anybody who knew. First of all, I have my own experience with Scott, and it’s a higher class of bullying, but I get it. The stories that I had heard over the last 12 years were the kinds of things that—they could have been scenes from The Devil Wears Prada.  There was no violence. There’s nothing physical at all in the stories that I heard. Had I known, there’s no chance I would’ve tolerated it, there’s no chance Bart Sher would’ve tolerated it, that Jeff Daniels would’ve tolerated it. So we didn’t know. And once we did, we did something about it.

Ford: “When you say you had your own experiences with a higher class of bullying, what do you mean?”

Sorkin: “Listen, I think Scott got what he deserves. He’s lying flat on the mat right now, and I don’t know how it’s helpful for me to stand on his torso and kind of jump up and down.”

Actual lyric: “If you’ll be my bodyguard / I can be your long lost pal / I can call you Betty / And Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al.”

HE version: “If you’ll be my bodyguard / I can be your long lost pal / I can call you Teddy / And Teddy weddy weddy, you can call me Al.”

Once you mishear something, you can’t hear it correctly. First impressions tend to be vivid and gut-level. I first heard Graceland 35 years ago (August ’86), but hearing errors stick to your brain matter. I knew from the get-go that the Paul Simon song in question didn’t include “Teddy weddy weddy,” but it doesn’t fucking matter.

It was sometime in the mid-fall of ’81 (call it 40 years ago), and I’d been working as managing editor of The Film Journal for a bit more than a year. I was working late (well after dinner, close to 9 pm) and decided to try my luck with Francis Coppola, who was staying at the Sherry Netherland. I should have gone through his publicist, Renee Furst, but she would’ve told me to wait until One From The Heart‘s release in February. So I just went for it. I cold-called him, he picked up, I somehow put him at ease and we talked for almost two hours. I recorded our chat and ran the transcript as a two-parter.

Secret ingredient: I dropped a quaalude (Lemmon 714) just before I called, and you know what quaaludes do — they loosen your inhibitions and make you feel confident and unflustered and loosey-goosey. So I wasn’t afraid to say anything, and I was feeling kind of empowered and eloquent and plugged in, and it all worked out. I never did another quaalude interview — this was a one-off.

“This new structural reading of The Sopranos was encapsulated neatly by Felix Biederman, a co-host of the leftist podcast ‘Chapo Trap House.’ Recording another podcast in November 2020 — after the presidential election was held but before it was called for Biden, a moment when nothing in this country seemed to be working — Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline.

“’Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,’ he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. ‘You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.’” — from a N.Y. Times Magazine essay, written by Willy Staley and posted this morning (9.29.21) at 5 am.

“Her presence seems at once to gesture in the direction of recurrent arguments about Bond casting — does the character have to be male? must he always be white? — and to wave them away. A Nomi franchise could be interesting, but I won’t hold my breath.” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review of No Time To Die.

“Which four would you choose?”, some Twitter guy asked. Easy: From Russia With Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger and Casino Royale. I also like For Your Eyes Only for attempting to return to the stripped-down, lean-and-mean Bond aesthetic. I also like the way Sheena Easton sings the title tune…”For your eyes only….only for yaaawwwoohh.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz: "We're questioning in your official capacity going and undermining the chain of command, which is obviously what you did."

Gen. Mark Milley: "I did not undermine the chain of command."

Rep. Matt Gaetz: "You absolutely did." pic.twitter.com/nzQP8EDeUc

— The Hill (@thehill) September 29, 2021

Milley's exasperated gasp to Rep. Ronny Jackson here speaks volumes pic.twitter.com/y4hIXYcr41

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2021

From a 9.29 Sasha Stone piece that is subheaded with “Daniel Craig Says Goodbye in Style“…

Sasha #1: “James Bond is most definitely for the masses. And it’s coming at exactly the right time. The American public has never needed movies more than it does right now.”

HE exception #1: I’m sorry that sounds too much like that infamous poster slogan for 1974’s That’s Entertainment! — “Boy, do we need it now!”

Sasha #2: “We need [movies] in order to remember what it’s like to sit alongside our fellow Americans, regardless of political party, skin color or religion. They give us that rare chance, outside of going to church or sporting events, where we can share an experience in the dark with the smell of popcorn wafting through. At the cineplex you are among people you don’t know and [absorbing] a message you all will share. Sometimes that can be a transformative experience, if the movie is good enough.”

HE exception #2: Due respect to other moviegoers, but I don’t want to sit next to most of you. You’re loud and coarse and checking your phones all the time, and you suffer from ADD and you sometimes laugh at the wrong things or fail to laugh at the right things. I’m totally cool with Telluride Film Festival patrons, but…well, I’ve said it.

Sasha #3: “There isn’t a whiff of politics in No Time To Die — it is mostly pure fun, with a little bit of seriousness.”

HE exception #3: Sorry, but there is a whiff of politics in this film, but…aahh, forget it.

Sasha #4: “We need [movies like No Time To Die] because they give us hope. It’s no time for movie theaters to die. No time for James Bond to die. No time for the market to die. No time for isolation and fear. No time for division. No time for hatred.

“[Except there is hatred.] I get the feeling the Hollywood utopians kind of want Bond gone. I get the feeling they kind of like him but sort of want him to settle down or retire. I get the feeling they wish that [ticket-buyers] didn’t like alpha males as much as they do so that the utopians could continue to fundamentally alter everything that defined our species before [woke Stalinism]” — i.e., before 2016.

HE exception #4: I don’t know what Sasha could be alluding to, but I kind of resent it. Actually, I’m seething. I’ve half a mind to contact a few of HE’s comment threaders and maybe buy some torches and go over to Sasha’s place and make trouble.”

There are several Hollywood landmarks we’ve all heard of or peeked at — John Barrymore‘s Bella Vista, Beachwood Canyon’s Wolf’s Lair, the beige-pink Godfather compound (i.e., Jack Woltz‘s horse’s head home) on No. Beverly Drive, Guillermo del Toro‘s “Bleak House,” the Double Indemnity house.

And now, at the northeast corner of Fairfax Ave. and Wilshire Blvd., there’s a new one — “Woke House” or, if you will, “Inclusion and Equity House,” otherwise known as the Academy Museum.

It’s the Temple of Hollywood Redefined — the emphasis being partly on Hollywood lore and glamour, but mostly about identity and inclusivity and progressive cultural ideals and the Academy’s commitment to fulfilling same. About how Hollywood is a much better industry now than it used to be, and how we should all celebrate that fact. (But not too much!) The past is represented, of course, but the museum is mainly about doing the right thing for people who used to be benched on the sidelines or were made to wait in line out in the parking lot.

Welcome, film lovers, and thank you for your $25 ticket purchases, but never forget that you’re now in a place of wokester instruction.

Among the museum’s “guiding principles” is to always remember the sometimes sordid, colorful past, and to always be mindful of the Jonathan Shields legend (i.e., sometimes the best films are made by heartless sons of bitches) in The Bad and the Beautiful, and to remember that making great films has always been a grueling, uphill struggle…to never forget the scandals and suicides and cover-ups, and to recall that after seeing Sunset Boulevard Louis B. Mayer huffily told Billy Wilder than he had bitten the hand that fed him, and that Wilder’s immediate response was to tell Mayer to go fuck himself…to remember that during the ’50s the industry looked the other way as several honorable screenwriters were blacklisted and forced to work in Europe…to never forget that Jack L. Warner hated Bonnie and Clyde, and that producer-star Warren Beatty had to beg him to re-release it, and only then was it celebrated…that in the late ’50s Sidney Poitier was unable to rent a Beverly Hills home due to racist real estate agents, and that he was at least able to stay at the Chateau Marmont…that 20th Century Fox boss Daryl F. Zanuck used to carnally impale aspiring actresses every afternoon in his 20th Century Fox office…that local men and women of color were hired to portray Skull Island natives in King Kong, and that they were probably glad to get the work, even though it meant wearing bone necklaces and grass skirts….to never forget the endless oppressions and exploitations and greedy conflicts and deviant devotions that have always been at the heart of Hollywood creativity…oh, wait, I’m sorry…this is from an old Graveline Tours pamphlet.

The museum’s actual guiding principles are (a) Illuminate the Past, Present, and Possible Futures of Motion Pictures and the Academy, (b) Embrace Diversity and Be Radically Inclusive, and (c) Educate, Provide Inspiration, and Encourage Discovery.

The Embrace Diversity thing has a drop-down menu, and one of the mission statements says that the museum intends to “foster an anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and anti-sexist culture built on transparency and accountability that ensures that all staff, communities, audiences, and partners are treated with respect.”

Jesus H. Christ already!…I feel I’m being scolded and swatted on the hand with rulers by woke nuns!

From Sasha Stone‘s “No Time (for Movie Theaters) to Die”: “But I see where the Academy is coming from. They are trying to address the needs of people who have been left out for far too long, [and] they can afford to depict themselves and their story any way they want to.

“For instance, when Sacheen Littlefeather accepted the Best Actor award for Marlon Brando in 1973, she was booed. The stunt was mocked and derided back then for bringing politics into the awards. It was embarrassing for the Academy. But all of these years later, she is celebrated in the Academy Museum as a point of pride. And indeed, when you watch her speech now she seems like a time traveler from 2021.”

There’s a large room in the museum that celebrates Oscar recipients, and Littlefeather’s speech is one of the highlights. Flatscreens show various winners celebrating their big moment, but not that many. You’d think that acceptance speeches by world-famous Oscar winners would be front and center. But for the most part the room focuses on people of color and historic moments of inclusivity. Sidney Potier, Rita Moreno, Gone With The Wind‘s Hattie McDaniel, Sayonara‘s Miyoshi Umeki, etc. (Where’s the Minari grandma, Youn Yuh-jung?) Plus Dimitri Tiomkin accepting an Oscar for his High and the Mighty score, Tatum O’Neal accepting a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Paper Moon, etc.

Yes, I covered the same turf in “Please Don’t Call It The Death Star” (9.21).

“The Unchosen One” is a curiously moving short doc (15:58), directed by Ben Proudfoot, about how feelings of loss and hurt have lingered inside ex-child actor Devon Michael, now 32. They resulted from Michael not being chosen by George Lucas to play Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace (’99).

Michael was one of three finalists for the role — himself, Almost Famous costar Michael Angarano and Jake Lloyd. Lloyd got the part, of course, and we all know how critics and fanboys responded.

Would things have turned out any better if Michael had been chosen? Perhaps not given the quality of Lucas’s film and the presence of Jar-Jar Binks, but my sense is that he probably would have been better than Lloyd, partly because of a certain curt intensity and directness of manner — guarded but watchful — and partly because almost anyone would’ve been an improvement over Lloyd. I’ve always presumed that Lucas chose Lloyd at least partly because of his cute looks.

I’m again recalling that moment when hundreds (including Paul Thomas Anderson) poured into Mann’s Village in Westwood to see the world premiere of the Phantom Menace trailer. It happened in the early afternoon of Thursday, 11.6.98. Every Los Angeles film fanatic with blood in his or her veins was there. The movie that nobody stayed for after the trailer was shown was Edward Zwick ‘s The Siege, which the crowd was mocking with a chant….”Siege! Siege! Siege!”

And then The Phantom Menace opened on 5.19.99, and the whole thing came tumbling down. It doesn’t matter how much money that mostly tedious film made. In the minds of many it destroyed the Star Wars theology. True believers were shattered, crestfallen.