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After 28 years with NBC and at 61 years of age, MSNBC’s Brian Williams could keep going for at least another 15 years, and yet the New Canaan, Connecticut resident has announced that he’s stepping down “to spend more time with [his] family.”

I don’t know what’s really going on here. The wealthy Williams is certainly entitled to do whatever the hell he wants. But since John Mitchell announced in July 1972 that he was resigning as Attorney General to spend more time with the family, that excuse has been universally derided as complete bullshit.

Williams knows that, of course. So using the words “spend more time with family” forces us to interpret it as a kind of code message. Williams is obviously telling us that the real reason is something else. I hope it’s not health-related.

Hats off to whomever designed this poster. Cool and classy, excellent poise and balance, a suggestion of tragedy. Kristen Stewart doesn’t wear a black outfit of any kind in the film, but that’s okay. The poster is the poster and the film is the film, and Spencer doesn’t live up to what the poster conveys or promises.

What are some other instances in which a poster was much more exciting and engaging than the film it was selling?

Tatiana has seen some of Lawrence of Arabia, but not all of it. And the portion that she’s seen, she’s never been enthusiastic about. Because she has some kind of blockage about the dusty Middle Eastern milieu or something. I’ve heard of other women having similar reservations, just as some guys might have concerns about seeing an all-female flick.

I spoke to one reluctant viewer, Sonya Collings, on Facebook this morning:

An excellent Peter Sellers story about the shooting of the Prince Feisal tent scene begins at 21:45…

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“I’ve never understood why Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three doesn’t get half the love that Some Like It Hot does. I will bravely defend this gem a week from Sunday (Nov. 21) at the Los Feliz American Cinematheque. Humor and satire so fast and brash that it makes His Girl Friday feel like The Tree of the Wooden Clogs!. Come on down!” — Daniel Waters on Facebook.

I’ll tell you why it doesn’t get half the love that Some Like It Hot does. Because some of it is dated, some of it isn’t funny, and one or two scenes are dreadful. (Don’t ask.) But Act Three, which is all about James Cagney‘s C.R. MacNamara, a ruthless Cola Cola executive, changing Horst Buccholz‘s Otto Ludwig Piffle, a scruffy, revolutionary Communist, into a monacle-wearing dandy in a three-piece suit within two or three hours, is dead perfect. Especially….

Cagney to Buccholz: “Is that all the gratitude I get for getting you out of jail?”
Buccholz to Cagney: “You got me into jail!”
Cagney to Buccholz: “So we’re even.”

I would love to watch this 1961 classic with an enthusiastic crowd, but I’m worried about the AC’s intention to show a 35mm print. I have the Bluray, and it looks absolutely exquisite. Why don’t they just show a digital version? Film is over-rated.

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A couple of weeks ago I saw Robert Weide‘s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IFC Films, 11.19), a decades-in-the-making portrait of the late beloved novelist, whose novels Weide fell for a long time ago. And then he met Vonnegut and bonded with him, and began filming the doc back in the early ’80s (or something like that), and now, 40 years hence, it’s finally done.

I’m a Vonnegut fan and therefore partial, but Weide’s film is an intimate and devotional portrait of a fascinating, very special Great Depression and WWII-generation writer…a guy who became an inspirational cult figure for God-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands of youths in the late ’60s and ’70s and beyond the infinite and all the way to Tralfamadore.

I’ve almost always been “somewhere else”, all my life. Hence the name of this column.

At any given moment I’m back in Paris or Prague or Hanoi, or in junior or senior high school or suffering through my tweener years, or tapping out a piece on my IBM Selectric in either my West 4th Street or Bank Street apartment, or hitting the Mudd Club in the early ’80s, or getting bombed or doing drugs with my friends in the early to mid ’70s or listening to David Bowie‘s “Beauty and the Beast” on a friend’s bedroom stereo in the late ’70s. Or traipsing around a wintry Park City during the hey-hey Sundance years (’95 to ’15).

Occasionally I’ll pay attention to people I’m talking to or events I happen to be witnessing or places I happen to be, but most of the time I’m Billy Pilgrim.

In the fall of ’85 I was working for New Line Cinema as an in-house publicist for A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge.

The Jack Sholder-directed thriller (which is better than half-decent) costarred Hope Lange, who at the time was shooting a supporting role in David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet.

One afternoon somebody called Lange about some p.r. matter. Before picking up she apparently had an idea that a Blue Velvet person was calling. Her tone of voice was very spirited and friendly during the first 15 or 20 seconds of the call, but things turned sour and rancid when she realized she was talking to a New Line person. As in “ohh, it’s you guys…can I help you?” (originally posted on 5.5.19)

When I think of the 40-ish Dean Stockwell, I think of his flitty weirdo-pervo characters. Like the mascara-wearing creepo-pervo he played in David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet (’86), and the mobster he played in Jonathan Demme‘s Married to the Mob (’88), for which he landed a Best Supporting Actor nom.

But the strongest currents in Stockwell’s career were stirred by his boyhood and young-man roles, specifically the son-of-Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement (’47) and the lead in Joseph Losey‘s The Boy With The Green Hair (’48), and then, as he got into his mid ’20s, Richard Fleischer‘s Compulsion (’59), Jack Cardiff‘s Sons and Lovers (’60) and Sidney Lumet‘s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (’62).

I’m sorry but Quantum Leap doesn’t even come to mind.

One thing I didn’t know is that Stockwell designed the legendary jacket cover photo of Neil Young‘s “American Stars ‘n Bars” (1976).

Stockwell died two days ago in New Mexico. He was 85. I’m very sorry but then again he led a full life…fuller than most.

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Leonardo DiCaprio as Jim Jones with the black hair, pot belly, tinted shades and bellowing voice? Not to mention the ravenous sexual appetite. Muttering into the microphone about revolutionary suicide as over 900 people (more than two-thirds African American) start sipping the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid? Good heavens, Jesus wept. Black as night, black as coal.

All I can say is, Leo sure likes to play flamboyant ogres from time to time. This plus Killers of the Flower Moon and Clint’s J. Edgar…he really likes to stir that perverse and creepy pot. The thought of all those dead bodies (918 commune members, including 304 children) in the baking Guayana heat. A meaty role, but talk about a madman surrounded by the furies..

Does anyone recall Powers Boothe‘s performance as Jones in 1980’s Guyana Tragedy?

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The announcement of Bari Weiss’s University of Austin, a non-accredited college looking to educate those who can’t stand illiberal wokester tyranny at typical ivy-league colleges, has inspired Hollywood Elsewhere to announce the the establishment of Wells University, a special educational counselling service for aspiring journalists and writers who are having trouble coping with woke terror in the workplace.

I am currently looking to rent or buy a campus-like cluster of red-brick buildings with ivy growing on the walls…no, seriously, the plan is to offer Zoom classes for young Zoomer- and Millennial-aged journalists and aspiring novelists who are looking to acquire coping skills in the current atmosphere of walking on eggs cartons…the Stalinoid, Robespierre-like terror in which former friends and associates are looking to ostracize or otherwise demonize anyone at the drop fo a hat…for harboring the wrong set of beliefs and attitudes and/or for using the wrong pronouns or whatever.

For over three years Hollywood Elsewhere has been dealing with fang-toothed back-stabbers who possess the spiritual karma of the Creature From The Black Lagoon. If anyone knows how to deal with these scumbags, it’s yours truly.