Last night Warren Beatty did a half-hour q & a with TCM Classic Film Festival host Ben Mankiewicz following a 6:30 pm screening of Heaven Can Wait (’78), which WB co-directed with Buck Henry.
Beatty was sharp and playful and half-evasive, as always. If he wanted to (if he had the herculean will), Beatty could write perhaps the greatest American history novel and first-hand confessional of all time, as he was right smack dab in the middle of things from 1959 on…he was friendly with everyone who ever mattered (including all the big politicians and corporate tycoons), did everything, swaggered around, had affairs with dozens of accomplished women…a first-hand witness to and participant in the last great period of American history…what a life! And having been out of the game since Rules Don’t Apply, the wokester Stalinists never came for him,
If you turn the volume all the way and listen on headphones, you just make out what they’re saying. Barely.
Remember: Beatty is the only person to have been nominated for acting in, directing, writing, and producing the same film, and he did so twice: first for Heaven Can Wait and three years later with Reds.
Joe Biden had already wished everyone a “happy, happy Easter” and had also said “all right” (as in “okay, that’s enough of that shit”). So it’s not like he forgot to wave. Maybe he was saying to himself “look, I’m here, I wished everyone well, I smiled, I applauded the easter bunny, I was careful not to mention anything religious …why do I have to fucking wave on top of everything else?”
I attended two screenings yesterday at the TCM Classic Film Festival — HeavenCanWait (‘78) and InvadersFromMars (‘53). The announced policy was “masks on unless you’re eating popcorn.”
Over the last two or three weeks I read several articles about the seemingly close race between French president Emmanuel Macron and his arch-conservative, Putin-favoring challenger, MarineLePen. The general tone of the pieces was alarmist…”the sky might be falling!”
Not so much, it turns out. Macron has reportedly defeated Le Pen in a landslide — 58% to 42%.
Somewhere in Time opened on 10.3.80, but was filmed in the spring of ’79 or 18 months earlier. This synchs with Jane Seymour‘s account of her on-set affair with costar Christopher Reeve.
In late 2017 Seymour confided some of the details to the Herald Sun: “[Chris] was a wonderful man. We fell madly in love while we were doing the movie. We were both single, but kept it very hidden.”
Reeve and Seymour broke it off when Reeve’s ex-girlfriend, Gae Exton, revealed she was pregnant with a child — Matthew Exton Reeve, as it turned out, born on 12.20.79
“That was the beginning of the end of an amazing relationship,” Seymour said. “Chris and I were close friends until the day he died [in 2004].
Exton gave birth to a second child, Alexandra Exton Reeve, in December 1983.
HE-posted on 7.31.17: I haven’t written about Jeannot Szwarc‘s Somewhere in Time for 13 years, or since the sad passing of Christopher Reeve on 10.10.04. I’ve said before that Reeve gave one of his better performances in it.
I’ve never called Somewhere In Time a great or even especially good film, but it did develop a cult following about a decade after it opened, and it has — or more accurately had — one of the most beautifully executed single-shot closing sequences in a romantic film that I’ve ever seen, and one that almost certainly influenced the dream-death finale in James Cameron‘s Titanic.
I’m speaking of a longish, ambitiously choreographed, deeply moving tracking shot that’s meant to show the viewer what Reeve’s character, Richard Collier, is experiencing on his passage from life into death. I saw it at a long-lead Manhattan screening of Somewhere in Time 37 years ago, but no one has seen it since.
That’s because some psychopathic or at the very least criminal-minded Universal exec (or execs) had the sequence cut down and re-edited with dissolves. The version I saw allegedly no longer exists. All that remains today is the abridged version.
The sequence was a single-take extravaganza accomplished with a combination crane and dolly. It happened as Collier is dying on a bed in a Mackinac Island Grand Hotel room. His spirit (i.e., the camera) rises up and above his body, and then turns and floats out the hotel-room window and into a long, brightly-lighted hallway and gradually into the waiting embrace of Collier’s yesteryear lover, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour).
A completely fair assessment: “Democrats, for all their flaws, still see democracy as the essence of America. They see America and democracy as inextricably linked. They believe that one without the other is unthinkable. Republicans? Thinkable. Very, very thinkable.”
That lovingly restored version of HE’s beloved InvadersFromMars (‘53) screens tonight at the TCM Classic Film Festival at Mann’s Chinese 6 (which is a very small house, by the way).
Truth be told, William Cameron Menzies’ low-budget film suffers from a lack of polish and finesse (the most devout admirers admit that the cheesy parts are fairly comical) but — but! — the combination of Menzies’ famously impressionistic sets, that curious atmosphere of spooky ‘50s Americana, that green-faced, goldfish-bowl alien with the lizard pincer hands and that spellbinding musical score (<u>not </u> composed by Raoul Kraushar but the unsung Mort Glickman) still amount to something extraordinary.
In a twinkling of an eye (i.e., the last four or five days) Bill Murray, 71, has undergone a sudden industry devaluation. I’m not saying he can’t do any more Wes Anderson films but otherwise he seems to be suddenly “over.” As in more or less unemployable.
Unless, that is, Murray submits to behavioral rehab or goes on a major Apology Tour or something in that realm. I for one can’t imagine that Murray would swallow any humble pills. Old leopards can’t change their spots.
Murray is certainly the latest swaggering, boomer-aged hotshot actor to have behaved questionably (i.e., stupidly) in the vicinity of Millennial women on a film set, and thereby jeopardized his career.
Murray: “Hey, guys…I’m Bill freakin’ Murray and I’m just futzing around…or, you know, picking on a younger co-worker. Or experiencing a goofy mood swing. Or a dark one. But it’s cool, no sweat…been doing this for over 40 years.”
MillennialCo–workers: “Do you know why you’re a cautionary tale, Bill? Because you haven’t read the writing on the wall. We run the show now, not you. You will mind your on-set behavior, respect our rules and jump through our hoops or we will destroyyourlife…got it? Let this be a warning to all of the older assholes in this town…adapt or die.”
This is nothing less than generational cultural warfare.
The last time I briefly spoke with Murray was nine years ago (early May 2013) on the set of George Clooney’s TheMonumentsMen. He was “on” and funny and a kick — I was saying to myself “this is so cool…Murray is performing and cutting loose and it’s just me and the unit publicist enjoying the show.”
So Aziz Ansari’s BeingMortal is dead because Murray invaded someone’s safe space or pulled somebody else’s pigtail? What about “enough of this crap…everyone back to work?
This BeatTheDevil ad ran in the N.Y. Times in mid February 1964. In ‘79 I was the managing editor the ThousandEyesCinemaGuide, a TVGuide-styled monthly magazine that focused exclusively on Manhattan repertory cinemas, so I knew that realm pretty well but I’d never heard of the 5thAvenueCinema, which had given up the ghost in September ‘74.
In her testimony earlier today about a case seeking to disqualify Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from running for reelection for her role on Jan. 6, the Congressperson repeatedly lied, evaded, hemmed and hawed. She also said “I don’t recall”, “I don’t remember” and “I don’t think so.” Greene undoubtedly committed perjury.
Question: Did you advocate to President Trump to impose martial law as a way to remain in power? Greene: I do not recall Question: So you’re not denying you did it? Greene: I don’t remember pic.twitter.com/T2vNh6Jftt
Marjorie Taylor Greene says under oath that it is NOT accurate to say it was her opinion and wish that Congress not certify President Biden’s win… what? pic.twitter.com/aBa9u0v5bZ
