Text message from 12 year-old self to 2021 self at age 48: You get to watch movies all the time and just write about them and get paid for it? And even be friendly with some of the people who make them? Very cool. Plus you avoided alcoholism and escaped the high-pressure suburban commuter lifestyle that your father grappled with during his advertising career. And you built your own business that allows you to work from home and visit Europe and Asia and hit Telluride once a year? Double cool. On top of which, thank God, you didn’t have to suffer through the trauma of blacklisting that befell so many screenwriters in the ’50s…wait, what’s wokelisting? Never heard of that. Can you fill me in?

The approach of Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion in mid May (digital/VOD platforms on 5.14, Blu-ray and DVD on Tuesday, 5.18) offers an excuse to recall a similar kind of film — Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero (’73), currently streaming on YouTube for free and for cost on Amazon.

Noyce’s film is classic, grade-A moonshine, and so was Hero in its day.

Originally posted in July ’05: Loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about one-time moonshine smuggler and stock-car racer Junior Johnson, it’s about a young guy (called Junior Jackson and played by Jeff Bridges) on the wrong side of the law who went on to become a famous stock-car racer.

For me, Hero is the super-daddy of redneck movies — a slice of backwoods Americana that got it right with unaffected realism and showing respect for its characters, and by being intelligent and tough and vivid with fine acting.

Jackson is more or less content to smuggle illegal hooch until he gets pinched and his soul-weary dad (Art Lund) persuades him to think twice, and he eventually uses his car-racing skills to break into stock-car racing. Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ed Lauter, Gary Busey and Valerie Perrine are among the costars.

Johnson’s film was widely admired (serious film critics got behind it, especially Pauline Kael). And its influence in Hollywood circles seems hard to deny, its commercial failure aside, for the simple fact that it was the only backwoods-moonshine movie at the time that was seriously respected for what it was, as opposed to being (nominally) respected for what it earned.

As movies steeped in rural southern culture go, The Last American Hero had roughly the same levels of honesty and sincerity as Coal Miner’s Daughter, which came out in 1980.

My vocabulary isn’t sophisticated enough to describe the alternating tempos, sudden slowdowns and shifting rhythms in “Stop” (’66), a standout single from the Moody Blues and cowritten by Denny Laine and Justin Hayward. (Or was it Laine and Mike Pinder?)

The song reportedly reached #98 in the Billboard charts during April 1966 after getting lots of airplay on NYC AM rock radio (WABC, WNEW), and then kind of slipped away.

Relatively unknown to even hardcore MB fans — i.e., the ones who only know them from the ’67 to early ’70s period of Days of Future Passed (“Nights in White Satin”, Tuesday Afternoon”), In Search of the Lost Chord and On the Threshold of a Dream.

I know that a lot of breakthroughs happened in ’66, and this, in its own small way, was one of them.

How anal am I in terms of keeping my domestic surroundings (including the car) spotlessly clean and fresh-flower fragrant? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m somewhere in the realm of 7.5 or 8.

I’m nowhere close to being a Joan Crawford-level scrubfreak, and yes, I do tend to burrow into mindstreams while writing and am therefore not focused on house-cleaning during work hours. But I do believe in order, tidiness, hot water and Bounty paper towels, bristle brushes, taking the garbage out, watering the plants, Comet cleanser and sweeping up and vacuuming…I don’t know, two or three times per month.

When I was 21 and sharing a house with some people I given a short broom and dust pan as a Christmas present, because I was the tidiest person in the house by far. How many HE readers can honestly say “I was such a neat freak when I was young that I was actually given cleaning implements for a Christmas present?” None, I’d imagine.

But now I live with an obsessive who has wiped clean that memory and bestowed a new identity. I am now a coarse, snorting, hopelessly undisciplined animal who wasn’t brought up properly and lacks any sense of serious rigor in terms of wiping, scrubbing, vacuuming and the like — a person who creates and lives in “a pig’s place.”

Tatiana’s mother was in fact a Russian Joan Crawford — a “down on your knees with a bucket of hot water and a scrub brush” cleanliness Nazi who struck terror into her children’s hearts. When her mother announced an intention to visit Tatiana in college, the dormitory room was cleaned top to bottom in anticipation of her arrival, and even then her mother took one look, was seized with alarm and got down on her knees and went after the dust bunnies under the beds. And so, in a sense, I am living with that manic Crawford exactitude and fastidiousness on a daily basis.

From the very get-go (i.e., from the time I saw the very first trailer) my basic Mank feeling was that however accomplished the film might be as a whole, 63 year-old Gary Oldman is too old and too fat to be playing a guy in his mid 40s who was not Oliver Hardy-sized. And I hated the floppy haircut with the nine-inch locks.

Herewith a director speaking to Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson about Oscar preferences:

“Oldman was too old to be in Mank. If he was playing this 20 years ago, great. But there’s something a bit weird, when watching the scene with Tuppence Middleton putting him to bed drunk and pulling off his pants — that’s his wife? She’s [34], Oldman is [63]…is she supposed to be a young wife? It turns out she was the same age as Mank. Why not cast an older actress to play Oldman’s wife?

“Things like that distract from the craft and great performances in that movie. It would have been better with someone else playing that part. He’s an incredible actor, but there’s nothing in the movie to explain why he’s 20 years older.”

Respect and salutations for the late Monte Hellman, a ’60s-era Roger Corman protege who went on to become a formidable director of (a) Warren Oates, (b) the legendary Two-Lane Blacktop (’71), (c) a couple of acid westerns — The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, (d) Cockfighter, (e) the Italian-lensed China 9, Liberty 37 and (f) the Steven Gaydos-penned Road to Nowhere.

Hellman served as editor on Corman’s The Wild Angels (’66), Bob Rafelson‘s Head (’68), Sam Peckinpah‘s The Killer Elite (’75) and Jonathan Demme’s Fighting Mad (’76). Hellman also was an exec producer on Quentin Tarantino‘s Reservoir Dogs (’92).

Hugs and condolences to Hellman’s friends, colleagues, fans and family. He was 91 — born on 7.12.29.

The Many Saints of Newark, which allegedly deals with racial relations between Newark-residing Italian-Americans and Blacks in the late ’60s, has been delayed so often it looks like up to me. But this is the kind of undercurrent-of-tension scene I’d love to see more of. Saints began filming on 4.3.19, and was initially slated to open on 9.25.20, even with Covid. But re-shoots happened, and then it was bumped to 3.12.21. And then again to 9.24.21. Apparently there’s a degree of faith in award-season contention. It’ll open simultaneously in theatres and on HBO Max.

I didn’t realize this at first, but now I do. When I noticed in a recent Mare of Easttown trailer that Kate Winslet‘s “Mare Sheehan” character was limping like Dustin Hoffman‘s Ratso Rizzo character, I subconsciously decided that I was less interested in catching this seven-episode series. This doesn’t mean I was uninterested — just that I didn’t feel a great urgency. I intend to watch episode #1 (“Miss Lady Hawk Herself“) this evening and go from there. Presumably the HE community has already given it a looksee.

Alissa Walker, the urbanism editor at Curbed.com, to THR‘s Kirsten Chuba: “It just seems like [Oscar night at Union Station will be] one of those nights where it’s going to be hugely chaotic. It would be worth it if at least more celebrities took the train to the event, a promise to take transit in solidarity with transit riders.

“Otherwise you’re just going to have this horrible town car parade of people trying to come up to a train station, which is just so comical. It gives us another great reason to make fun of Los Angeles.”

“Perhaps in one sense this guilty verdict will be remembered as the inverse of another landmark verdict — in O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial. When O.J. was found not guilty in 1995, public response split along racial lines. The reaction to today’s decision, by contrast, could be fairly unified — a largely shared feeling of relief that justice has been done. After all, the protests after the killing of George Floyd last summer had broad public support.” — N.Y. Times‘ Emily Bazelon, posted around 2:20 pm Pacific.

“At George Floyd Square, the memorial to where Floyd was killed, a woman nearly collapses in tears. When she straightens, she manages to croak out, ‘We matter. We matter.” — N.Y. Times‘ Shaila Dewan.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, we’re all on the verge of concluding the grimmest, most under-charged and minor-seeming Oscar season in Hollywood history.

The following was spoken by “Producer #1” in a 4.19 Anne Thompson Indiewire story focusing on what the industry is thinking and feeling about the “does anyone really give a shit?” Oscars.

From “Scott Rudin ‘Stepping Back’ From Film, Streaming Work Due to Abuse Allegations,” a 4.20 Variety story by Brent Lang and Matt Donnelly:

“Rudin is one of the most successful producers in entertainment history, having won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and 17 Tony Awards. His films include No Country for Old Men, The Social Network, Lady Bird, The Firm and The Truman Show. He was still active in the prestige space, recently acquiring the rights to the best-seller ‘Shuggie Bain,’ but no longer had the major studio support that he once enjoyed.

“Tastes [have] shifted from the pedigreed dramas and comedies that Rudin preferred to make in favor of superhero fare, though he’s continued to work regularly.”

Rephrasing: “Taste in movies has shifted from movies written and directed by the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Greta Gerwig, Sydney Pollack and Peter Weir to blow-the-doors-off popcorn fare directed by Zack Snyder, James Gunn, Taika Waititi, Jon Favreau, Adam Wingard, Ryan Coogler, etc.”

HE reaction: Stab me in my carotid arteries with a pen knife.