Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley is quite an eyeful — magnificent cinematography by Dan Lausten (Mimic, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water) and knockout production design by Tamara Deverell. But like I said the other day, the lead should’ve been a younger guy — somebody in their early 30s, like Tyrone Power was in the mid 1940s when he starred in the original Nightmare Alley. Seedy and middle-aged Bradley Cooper…well, it’s certainly a different way to go. He kinda looks like a Grapes of Wrath hobo.

If I were Prince Harry, which is to say flush and abundant, I would have gotten micro hair-plug treatments a long time ago. He’s obviously loaded enough to have the very best-quality work done, and without going to HE’s clinic in Prague. I’ve had two treatments in that fair city, and I know what they can accomplish and what they don’t accomplish, and I’m telling you that no one has to rock the Glenn Kenny look unless they want to. As long as they can afford $2K and change per visit.

For his Oppenheimer biopic deal with Universal, Chris Nolan said he needed $100 million plus (a) a $100 million marketing budget, (b) total creative control, (c) 20 percent of first-dollar gross, (d) a blackout period during which Universal would not release another movie three weeks before or three weeks after his release, and (e) a 100-day theatrical window.

A little more than two years ago N.Y. Times contributor Nicole Sperling posted an article about a conflict between Netflix and exhibitors over playdates for Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman.

In the piece former 20th Century Fox distribution exec Chris Aronson stated that “more than 95 percent of movies stop earning their keep in theaters at the 42-day mark.”

In an 8.21.19 HE story about the story, I wrote the following: “Exhibitors fear that [Netflix’s] proposed 21-day window will persuade ticket-buyers to bypass The Irishman in theatres, as they would only have to wait three weeks to see it at home.

“90% of The Irishman‘s theatrical revenue will come from educated, review-reading, 35-and-over types who will want to immerse themselves in Scorsese’s wiseguy epic (it allegedly runs around three hours) and be part of the conversation, and most of these transactions will happen during the first three weeks, four at the outside.

“A portion of the under-35 megaplex mongrels may attend out of curiosity, but the bulk of the business will come from Scorsese loyalists and cultivated cineastes.

“So if Netflix wanted to be accommodating, they would agree to wait 45 days to stream — half of the window that exhibitors want. My hunch is that the deal with AMC and Cineplex will result in a 30-day delay. Somewhere between 30 and 45 == that’s where the peace lies.”

I’m astonished to read that Nolan believes that his Oppenhiemer-builds-the-atomic-bomb movie will be generating even modest theatrical revenue beyond the 42-day mark. Most movies that aren’t wowser-holy-shit blockbusters are usually “over and done” between the 14- and 21-day mark, 30 days at the outside.

7:10: “I gave up tweeting a lot…sometimes but why?…anything I would want to say on Twitter, I can’t say on Twitter…I’d be killed. I can say ‘good morning’ and the first ten responses would be, ‘Well, I guess with your white privilege it’s a good morning!…”

9:59: “The three most important words in a relationship are not ‘I love you’ but ‘let it go.'”

13:17: [Norm McDoanald‘s death] No one knew him well. [But] a guy who was never afraid to be too subtle for most people. He did the jokes he wanted to do. I love that. [And] I love that I found out he died after he died. Because to me, show business, we’re here for [the audience]… you’re not here for us.”

“Sometimes, the audience loves that. I’ve never been in that camp. I am not here to burden you. I am here to lighten your burden. So the fact that I didn’t know about this, nobody knew about this…good one, Norm!”

N.Y. Times:

Two comments about the North by Northwest Plaza hotel room scene between Cary Grant and Jesse Royce Landis. One about gratitude, and the second about great surprise.

Comment #1 is that a certain one-two exchange between these two makes me laugh or chuckle or smile every time. I know it’s coming, I know it by heart and it gets me without fail.

Emerging from the bathroom, a deadpan, vaguely disgusted Roger Thornhill (Grant) makes the following announcement: “Bulletin…Kaplan has dandruff.” And Thornhill’s mother (Landis) replies, “In that case I think we should leave.”

Mother and child, both appalled by dandruff. That in itself is funny, but I get an extra kick out of Landis’s droll delivery, and by the fact that I, Jeffrey Wells, am also repelled by dry scalp snowflakes, and I’ve derived a feeling of comfort from two movie stars sharing the same feeling of repulsion, not just with me but with hundreds of thousands if not millions of movie buffs**. We’re all in this together, guys!

Comment #2 is that until today (and I’m laying this right on the table without apologies) I’d never realized that when Thornhill/Grant says “bulletin,” he’s facetiously playing the part of a TV announcer and announcing important “news” about Kaplan’s scalp. Because all my life I’ve thought that when he says “bulletin” it’s because he found a dandruff treatment product called Bulletin in the bathroom, and that was how he’d realized Kaplan has this problem.

Have I ever done a Google search for “Bulletin dandruff treatment” over the last 25 years? No, and that’s on me.

** How many people alive in the year 2021 are ardent fans of this 1959 Hitchcock film? A lot fewer than there were back in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, I’ll bet. A voice is telling me that a certain percentage of Millennials have heard about it and may have even watched it once or twice. (Jett and Dylan had watched it by the time they were six or seven.) But Zoomers? Probably not so much.

Below are three comments (two from VictorLazloFive, one from Kristi Coulter) about a piece I posted earlier today called “Feldstein’s Lewinsky Is A Lie.”

It states what is obvious to anyone who’s seen the series and is able to Google photos of Monica Lewinsky as she looked in the late ’90s — Beanie Feldstein not only doesn’t resemble Lewinsky in any persuasive way, but she was obviously cast with an idea that Feldstein would represent, within the mindset of the series, an alternate version of Lewinsky — smaller, rounder, less vivacious, more of a fawn-in-the-woods quality.

Which is ironically at odds with strenuous attempts on the part of the producers to make other cast members resemble the Real McCoys as much as possible.

There’s no disputing this — the producers went for absolute look-alike realism when it came to choosing various actors to play Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp, Paula Jones, Hillary Clinton, Ann Coulter, George Stephanopoulos, Michael Isikoff and everyone else (and then gave them makeup, hair stylings and whatnot that would complete the effect) but they had a whole different standard in mind when it came to casting an actress to play Lewinsky. Obviously. And yet the following comments appeared:

From Owen Gleiberman’s Cry Macho review: “Even though he doesn’t rule physically anymore, the 91 year-old Clint Eastwood we see in Cry Macho is just as rooted in the domineering presence of his mystique as he ever was. He’s just quieter about it.

“The movie turns into a romance: When they’re at that ranch, the woman who runs the adjoining cantina cooks for them, and she and Clint strike up a flirtation so sly it kind of sneaks its way into the movie. The actress Natalia Traven has a face that seems to have lived, just like Clint’s, and it’s sweet to see them pair off. But it’s not more than sweet.”

HE to Gleiberman: A subtle, pleasing flirtation between Clint and Natalia…fine. She’s 40 years younger but that’s cool. Some years ago Terrence Stamp (now 83) was asked about love and relationships, and he said “I’ve fallen off that horse.” That probably goes double for a 91 year-old.

Early this afternoon a Variety piece shared a downbeat assessment of the still-unfolding Toronto Film Festival. Written by Matt Donnelly and Angelique Jackson, it was titled “Toronto Film Festival Soldiers on Through COVID-19, but Where Are the Movie Stars?” HE’s question is more to the point — where the hell was Reinaldo Marcus Green and Will Smith‘s King Richard, the biggest hot-button film of the ’21 Oscar season so far and the likeliest winner of the Best Picture Oscar?

King Richard premiered in Telluride on 9.2, but Toronto honchos couldn’t persuade Warner Bros. to show it there also? In the old days Toronto would screen each and every Best Picture contender that was making the rounds, bar none. But for whatever reason (possibly Covid concerns) Warner Bros. decided against it.

Jordan Ruimy: “2021 was TIFF’s worst edition by far. I can’t believe they couldn’t even nab King Richard — that would have easily won the People’s Choice award. The only logical explanation for King Richard not going is that WB just wanted to skip Toronto. And where were C’mon Cmon, The Lost Daughter, The Hand of God and Cyrano? And you’re absolutely right, by the way, about the inexplicably over-praised Spencer and Belfast.”

King Richard will be AFI Fest’s closing-night film on Sunday, 11.14.

A trailer is only a trailer, but it appears as if Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story is going to be “more” than Robert Wise‘s 1961 Oscar-winning version — more vivid, more ethnically authentic, more alive, more fully felt, angrier, cooler, artier, more intense, more multi-shaded, less “Hollywood”-ized.

If the original Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents stage musical hadn’t opened at the Winter Garden in ’57, if Wise’s film hadn’t won all those Oscars four years later, if there hadn’t been so many revivals and re-interpretations over the years…if Spielberg’s film was a brand spanking new period musical, all pink and damp and fresh out of the nursery, it would be a huge wham-bammer. The Gold Derby whores would be calling it the presumptive Best Picture winner. But it’s not that.

West Side Story is an old chestnut that reflects a world that no longer exists…a capturing of urban racial tensions among poor Irish and Italians vs. poor Puerto Ricans during the mid-Eisenhower era, in a once-grubby part of Manhattan…it’s the umpteenth version of a musical that’s nearly 65 years old, and there’s just no getting around that.

The only shot I don’t like is the overhead view of the Jets and Sharks approaching each other with intense shadows merging in front of them — that’s Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski pushing the boundaries.