Why did Isaiah Lee, 23, attack Dave Chappelle the other night? Rolling Stone is quoting his 31 year-old brother, Aaron Lee, who says, almost anecdotally, that Isaiah “has been in and out of Los Angeles homeless shelters for the past decade and struggles with mental illness.”
Aaron added that Isaiah “doesn’t have any type of animosity toward [Chappelle] that I know about…it could have definitely been a factor, but I really don’t know.”
I’ve just been through a grueling moving period, and it hasn’t ended yet.
Attending to endless details and packing endless boxes in WeHo and taking them to the post office, sending the VW Passat back east on a big hauling truck, and then flying with Anya and a wailing Katya on an Alaskan Airlines red-eye last Tuesday night, and without a wink of sleep.
My system was knocked flat by this. Now I’m consumed by unpacking. Fatigue, lack of mental focus, sudden nap attacks.
Try doing all this crap and see how productive you are with a daily column, ya pricks ya.
That aside, I’ve been genuinely terrified of sitting through Everything Everywhere All At Once, and I’m certainly not paying good money to see it. (No streaming options as we speak.) Plus I would rather shove razor-sharp Exacto knives into my eyes rather than see the new bullshit Dr. Strange flick.
I apologize for not seeing Vortex, the latest Gaspar Noe which screened in Cannes last July but has only just shown up theatrically. (There’s no trusting the 90% Rotten Tomatoes score, of course.) I’ll catch it this weekend in Manhattan.
The next significant screening will be Top Gun: Maverick, on the morning of Tuesday, 5.10. I leave for Cannes on Sunday, 5.15.
In a letter sent to Deadline and posted today (5.5), Frank Langella has expressed profound gratitude to the Millennial actress who not only got him fired from the Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher, but has all but terminated his career because of a complaint about inappropriate leg touching and whatnot.
The 84 year-old Langella has said that he’s “enormously grateful” about having been fired and possibly cancelled industry-wide, as this incident has allowed him to do more reading, hiking, cooking, movie-watching and other leisurely pursuits.
“Life is relatively short, and yet so far I’ve relished eight and a half decades of glorious living on this bountiful blue planet,” Langella wrote. “I’m looking forward to filling my remaining years with joy and devotion and boundless Zen enthusiasm.
“So I can’t thank the actress in question enough…getting whacked and being metaphorically tarred and feathered as a sexist dinosaur has opened so many spiritual doors…thank you, anonymous actress who was playing the ‘young wife’ of my Roderick Usher character, and thank you, #MeToo mafia.”
I’m kidding, I’m fantasizing, I’m fooling around.
Langella is actually outraged about what has happened to him over the last few weeks. Here are portions of a “guest column” he’s written for Deadline:
“I have been canceled. Just like that.
“In the increasing madness that currently pervades our industry, I could not have imagined that the words collateral damage would fall upon my shoulders. They have brought with them a weight I had not expected to bear in the closing decades of my career. And along with it has come an unanticipated sense of grave danger.
“On April 14 of this year, I was fired by Netflix for what they determined to be unacceptable behavior on set. My first instinct was to blame. To lash out and seek vengeance. I interviewed crisis managers, tough connected lawyers, the professionally sympathetic at $800 per hour. Free advice was proffered as well:
“’Don’t play the victim.’ ‘Don’t sue. They’ll dig into your past.’ ‘Sign the NDA, take the money and run.’ ‘Do the talk shows. Show contrition; feign humility. Say you’ve learned a lot.’
“Apologize. Apologize. Apologize.
“I was playing the leading role of Roderick Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic The Fall of the House of Usher, modernized as an eight-episode series for Netflix. It is a glorious role and I had come to regard it as, most likely, my last hurrah. Bizarrely prophetic under the current circumstances.
“On March 25 of this year, I was performing a love scene with the actress playing my young wife. Both of us were fully clothed. I was sitting on a couch, she was standing in front of me. The director called cut.
“‘He touched my leg,’ said the actress. ‘That was not in the blocking.” She then turned and walked off the set, followed by the director and the intimacy coordinator. I attempted to follow, but was asked to ‘give her some space.’ I waited for approximately one hour, and was then told she was not returning to set and we were wrapped.
“Not long after, an investigation began. Approximately one week later, Human Resources asked to speak to me by phone. ‘Before the love scene began on March 25,’ said the questioner, ‘our intimacy coordinator suggested where you both should put your hands. It has been brought to our attention that you said, ‘This is absurd!’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I did. And I still think so.’ It was a love scene on camera. Legislating the placement of hands, to my mind, is ludicrous. It undermines instinct and spontaneity.
“Toward the end of our conversation, she suggested that I not contact the young lady, the intimacy coordinator, or anyone else in the company. ‘We don’t want to risk retaliation,’ she said. When I mentioned that it was certainly not my intention to…she cut me off politely and said: ‘Intention is not our concern. Netflix deals only with impact.’
“When you are the leading actor, it requires, in my opinion, that you set an example by keeping the atmosphere light and friendly. Nevertheless, these were some of the allegations: 1. ‘He told an off-color joke’. 2. ‘Sometimes he called me baby or honey.’ 3. ‘He’d give me a hug or touch my shoulder.’
“You cannot do that, Frank,” said our producer. “You can’t joke. You can’t compliment. You can’t touch. It’s a new order.”
Various indignities that have resulted “are, to my mind, the real definition of unacceptable behavior,” Langella wrote.
“Cancel culture is the antithesis of democracy. It inhibits conversation and debate. It limits our ability to listen, mediate, and exchange opposing views. Most tragically, it annihilates moral judgment.
“This is not fair. This is not just. This is not American.
Frank Langella / May 5, 2022
HE assessment: It’s been clear for three or four years now that younger professional-class actresses (Millennials and Zoomers) have three abiding interests — (a) being as good as they can at their craft, (b) advancing and enhancing their careers through the usual strategies, and (c) terminating the careers of older male actors who’ve failed to respect #MeToo rules regarding on-set behavior.
HE to older male actors: If you want to die, these actresses will be all too willing to oblige. If you don’t want to die, regard Millennial and Zoomer actresses as cold-blooded Lithuanian assassins and behave accordingly.
99.4% of the time, a woman is a human born with XX chromosomes, a uterus, female sexual organs (i.e., no schlongola), smaller feet and a mellower, more humanistic, less territorial attitude about life.
I’m sorry if that upsets a certain percentage of well-meaning persons out there.
Geraldo Rivera on “The Five”: “Shame on Neil Gorsuch, shame on Amy Comey Barrett, shame on Ryan Kavanaugh” for saying they would uphold Roe in confirmation hearings and then doing the opposite…”they lied.”
I never thought I’d be praising a Rivera opinion voiced on Fox News, but this is one such occasion.
Gerardo’s rant begins around the 3:10 mark:
I know that the general view is that Johnny Depp & attorneys have presented a better case than Amber Heard and counsel, at least as far as public opinion is concerned. But Heard’s testimony today struck me as earnest and compelling.
So who’s partly lying and who’s mostly telling the truth? Watch Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. My presumption is that neither Depp and Heard are as pure as the driven snow.
After being bruised and body–slammed during last night’s show (Tuesday, 5.3) at the Hollywood Bowl, the intrepid Dave Chappelle joked that his assailant was “a trans man.”
Or not. The perpetrator might simply be a maladjusted, garden-variety impulse performer. The world’s full of such fellows.
Nobody knows anything except that (a) Chappelle was definitely assaulted by a dude of color (THR reports that Chappelle referred to his assailant with the “n” word), and that (b) the attacker was subsequently roughed up by either Chappelle’s bodyguards or the HB security guys or both.
I’m not speculating about motive but c’mon, do the math. That or Will Smith’s Oscar slap unleashed something primal in the populace. Or perhaps last night’s altercation was caused by a combination of both.
I’ve been trying to sell my 65-inch Sony UHD 4K TV plus two Bluray players (a Sony 4K domestic plus my prized Oppo that plays only Region 2) + a Marantz AVR mixer + a 4K Apple TV player + a Roku player + wireless headphones + a black wooden cabinet that holds everything.
The whole kit & kaboodle is listed on Facebook Marketplace, Craig’s List and another forum that slips my mind.
Having sold stuff online before and dealt with a few shady types, I’ve learned five lessons. One, when someone offers to buy an item in question without first arranging to drop by and evaluate the merch, he/she is almost certainly full of shit. Two, that goes double for anyone who doesn’t have a Los Angeles-area phone # or won’t share his contact info when requested. Three, when the perspective buyer says he’s not in town but that he’ll send the dough via Zelle…another red flag. Four, when he asks for my street address so he can arrange for his brother (or wife or girlfriend) to pick up the merch, you know he’s a hustler. And five, if he can’t spell or write clearly that’s another “tell.”
Hence this recent exchange:
Anya, Katya and myself are sitting in the spacious, strikingly designed Alaska Airlines lounge at San Francisco Int’l Airport. (It has a Pinkberry.) Our SFO-JFK flight leaves at 10:20 pm; arrival at 7 am.
A visibly shaken and angry Senator Elizabeth Warren just spoke in-front of #SCOTUS. @TheNationalNews pic.twitter.com/KzQ2Z0Lg3b
— Willy Lowry (@willy_lowry) May 3, 2022
If there’s an extra-long wait to speak to an Alaska Airlines rep (i.e., to resolve an issue that can’t be handled online), they give you the option of getting a call-back. And the average wait is three to four hours. But not in the evenings — only during business hours. And so last night I waited to speak to an Alaska rep for two hours and 50 minutes, and was forced to listen to the most horrifying MUZAK for that length of time. And then it sounded as if I was about to speak to someone…”hello?” And then they hung up on me.
18 months before Covid shut down movie theatres I posted one of my melancholy “woe is us” pieces, titled “How Degraded Thou Art.” I have to fly in a few hours so there’s no time to settle in and write a big essay. But right now most of us feel pretty good about Covid fading away (despite Kimmel and Colbert‘s infection) and exhibition gradually coming back to life….right?
But once the old patterns settle in and we all get back to normal, it’ll probably be 2018 all over again…right? Or has something changed?
Some kind of technical glitch prevented comments on this essay in November 2018 so here goes again…
Late November is a good time to catch films in cinemas, of course, but otherwise the megaplex experience is generally a must-to-avoid, or at the very least a touch-and-go thing. Mainstream movies have been declining for many decades, and always because of stupid audiences.
In the early ’50s Manny Fatber wrote an influential essay called “Blame the Audience,” although if you consider what was playing in Manhattan in the late summer of 1953 it’s hard to understand what he was on about.
In 1964, Pauline Kael asked “Are the Movies Going to Pieces?” in The Atlantic Monthly, claiming that “the younger generation’s embrace of crudely made films and the intelligentsia’s fondness for intentionally confusing ones was responsible for Hollywood’s decline.”
On 1.21.72, right in the middle of the grandest, funkiest and most fabled era of auteurist glory, Dick Cavett asked four directors — Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Capra — if Hollywood was dead. He didn’t mean L.A.-centric filmmaking but the big-studio system that reigned from the ’20s through the ’50s. He was also observing that corporations and corporate-think had taken over from old-school moguls like Harry Cohn, Daryl F. Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer.
On 6.23.80 Kael published her famous New Yorker broadside — “Why Are Movies So Bad or, The Numbers” — about the increasing corporate influence upon Hollywood filmmaking culture.
I first began to sense the onset of megaplex theme-park cinema and the general loss of the spiritual in the early ’90s…a general feeling of alienation from the concept of theatres-as-churches and a gradual slide into the swamp.