HE friendo: “Is Mank David Fincher‘s Ed Wood?  A passion project about a Hollywood legend shot in black and white that echoes the legend’s own film(s)?   Just as Ed Wood was shot to look like an Ed Wood film, Fincher has endeavored to make Mank look like a ’40s movie.”

The older I get, the more I adore Ed Wood. It’s a perfect film. I regard Johnny Depp‘s titular performance as his absolute career best. If Mank is even half as good, I’ll be very happy.

At age 92, producer-director James B. Harris is still with us. A longtime partner of Stanley Kubrick in the early days and a producer of Kubrick’s The Killing (’56), Paths of Glory (’57) and Lolita (’62), Harris also directed The Bedford Incident (’65), Fast Walking (’82) and Cop (’88).

And now comes disrepute — an allegation in a 10.24 Airmail piece by Sarah Weinman that Harris began an affair with Lolita star Sue Lyon when she was 14. Harris was 32 at the time.

The story was initially passed along by Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips, a childhood friend of Lyon’s. No one else has confirmed it. Weinman reached Lyon’s first husband Hampton Fancher, but he declined to comment. She also reached Harris but little came of it. Well, something did.

Weinman’s description: “Knowing I might not get another chance, I asked [Harris] straight out: Was he Sue Lyon’s first lover? ‘I’m just not going to talk about it,’ he said. It was a statement, without underlying emotion or self-reflection, not confirming but definitely not denying. Our conversation ended shortly thereafter.”

The allegation isn’t just that Harris crossed the perv line by having it off with a 14-year-old, but that the affair may have instilled a certain trauma in Lyon’s psyche.

Final paragraph: “There is no guarantee, with the level of mental illness in her family, that Lyon’s life would have stayed on course had she never made Lolita. But by doing so, Lyon became a clear example of art making a sucker out of a girl’s life, one whose price was too high to pay.”

Lyon money quote: “I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter.”

Last night around 11:30 pm I began to feel an achey sensation all over. That’s always a sign that you’re about to succumb to a fever or flu of some kind. I naturally presumed that I’d somehow been infected with Covid. Sure enough, the achey muscle thing led to a feeling of oncoming chills. I grabbed an extra warm blanket and huddled down and tried to sleep. I couldn’t, of course.

“Okay, I’ve been careful with the masks and washing my hands every time,” I thought to myself, “but I guess this fucking disease has finally gotten into my system.” I made an 8:30 am appointment to have myself Covid-tested at Dodger Stadium, which offers a fairly fast turnaround. I finally crashed from exhaustion sometime around 4 am, give or take.

When I woke up this morning at 9 am the aches and the chills were gone, and I hadn’t experienced any night sweats either. Somehow or some way, the thing that had visited my system a few hours earlier had taken a powder. Once again I’d dodged a bullet. All my life I’ve been thankful for my all-but-bulletproof German genes. Some of us are lucky in this respect. I know some get irritated when I say this stuff, but I’m just thankful.

I’ve decided against mailing my ballot because I prefer the organic atmosphere of a polling place. Until yesterday I had understood that early WeHo voting would begin at one of three locations on 10.30. Then a mailer announced that voting actually began today at Beverly Hills City Hall. I’m strangely looking forward to this.

I first got into Bryan Ferry in ’78 or thereabouts. I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to Roxy Music, but I sat right up in the my seat when “In Your Mind” came along. Two of the coolest things about Ferry, to me, were (a) his black shades and (b) the name “Bryan Ferry.”

“He is a strange man, Ferry, so full of contradictions. But in person he is more shrinking violet than lounge lizard.” — from a 2010 Telegraph profile.

“This Is Tomorrow” was released as the first single from “In Your Mind,” his fourth solo album. “Tomorrow” was inspired by an exhibition of pop art at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, devised by Richard Hamilton, who had taught Ferry at Newcastle University.

Here’s how it works these days. If you’re not tickled pink and singing arias about potential Oscar noms for every semi-significant film directed by or starring an artist of a non-Anglo ethnic heritage, there’s probably something suspect about your value system.

In other words, if you’re not a equal opportunity fellator in terms of your Oscar spitballing…if you’re not a wokester commentariat celebrationist like Clayton Davis or Erik Anderson then you might be a member of the Aryan brotherhood. (In yesterday’s tweet Davis alluded to my “white pals”…cute.) They’ve basically got you boxed in with no options except total capitulation to the party line.

Henry Gondorff to Johnny Hooker: “The fix was in and it really stunk, kid.”

January 29, 2021 will mark my fourth anniversary of life in Los Angeles. Here are five aspects of L.A. life that fascinate me, and one that doesn’t.

1. WEATHER & NATURE.

Warmish weather all year round except for January, February and March, and the close proximity of the Pacific Ocean. I still don’t believe in such happiness. The beauty of the canyons is amazing. I stopped going to the gym because free hiking is a great alternative. Plus you get nature’s aesthetic pleasure, and wonderful fresh air.

2. FRIENDLY AMERICANS

Social behavior is tied to culture and education, of course, but 90% of the time people here sincerely smile and wish you a good day, or so my feelings tell me.

Not too long ago I was sitting in our black VW convertible, top down, at a traffic light on Melrose Avenue. A police car stopped on the right. A very cute police officer smiled and asked, “Wanna race?” I was slightly embarrassed and just smiled back. He smiled too and said, “Not today. I got it. Next time, right?”

Click here for remainder of column at tatiana-pravda.com

..but what’s the theatrical alternative for No Time To Die? Wait until spring/summer of ’21, and who knows if a vaccine will be in place by then and if it’ll make much of a difference if it is, given the rural anti-vax attitude?

Pandemic life is a tragedy…everything that was once vital or incandescent has been stalled, diminished, smothered, stopped altogether. Everything worth savoring or celebrating has become a variation of dreary, mopey or flat. If No Time To Die has to debut on Apple or Netflix, or debut theatrically overseas and then stream in the U.S. after a couple of weeks, so be it. Life has become such a grim proposition that it probably won’t matter. Death and diminishment are everywhere.

“…but maybe I can keep you from voting for the other guy. Voter suppression is 100% a Republican thing.”

David Fincher: “It wasn’t until [my father] retired from writing magazine stories that he said, ‘I’m thinking about writing a screenplay.’ He was 60 or 61, and the first thing he said was, ‘What should I tackle as a subject?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you write about Herman Mankiewicz?’ He was tickled with that idea, and he went off and gave it his best shot, but it ended up being limited in its scope. It was [about] a great writer obliterated from memory by this showboating megalomaniac.”

David Fincher's new movie Mank is a genuinely deep dive into film history with a jolting contemporary punch. I loved going long with this remarkable director for @vulture. https://t.co/dxWZYNKX65

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) October 23, 2020

I spent almost an hour figuring how to order a new brown-leather wristband for my six-year-old Swatch. Sooner or later leather rots and disintegrates. Yeah, my Swatch looks like the one in this video.

You can’t just order a leather wristband straight from the Swatch site, of course. And you can’t just tell the sales people what the serial # on the back of the Swatch is. You have snap a photo and send it along. And then they’ll eventually get back to me and I’ll give them a card number, etc. A three-week process.

I bought my current device inside the Grand Central Station Swatch store in ’13 or thereabouts. There are currently no Swatch stores in Los Angeles — the closest is in San Francisco. And don’t look down your nose either. Three or four years ago a smooth character who fancied himself a connoisseur of costly, extra-cool Swiss watches asked where I got this one. He was impressed by it, and so was I in that context. I didn’t want to confess so I lied and said I’d forgotten.

Is there something exceptional about Steven Yeun‘s performance in Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari (A24)? Is he a potential Best Actor contender? Just wondering.

Okay, I’m not “just wondering.” I’ve been goaded by a 10.23 Clayton Davis Variety piece about how Yeun “could become the first Asian American Best Actor nominee.”

Apart than the name-checky Asian representation wokester angle that Davis is all hopped-up about, is there something fundamentally wowser about Yeun’s performance? He plays a struggling South Korean paterfamilias in this 1980s American heartland drama, which apparently won’t open until sometime in early ’21.

A week or two ago I had a chance to stream Minari via the Middleburg Film festival streaming site. But like an idiot, I forgot to watch it. The link has since expired.

Since Minari premiered at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, I’ve been hearing that Yeun’s performance is good and steady but…

Minari “is fine,” a friend told me earlier today. “[But] you won’t be doing somersaults over it. Critics are such suckers for immigrant stories these days.”

A trusted industry player who gets around and has seen Minari says that “not even in a year like this one is Minari anything but a Spirit Awards level thing.”

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “Minari is too subdued for Academy tastes. It’s more of a memory thing than any kind of story. Clayton Davis lives in his own world. He likes to create his own Oscar-race narratives, purely based on his own tastes. That’s not how it works. Minari was not screened at TIFF or NYFF, nor was it part of Telluride’s lineup. It’s been mostly forgotten.”

Critic pally: “I haven’t seen the movie, so I have no opinion. But here’s what we know: The media world, the movie world, and especially the Oscar world is now woke, woke, woke, and (in case that’s not enough wokeness) 27 more helpings of woke. I hate it, you hate it, but that’s how it is. So they’re looking for this movie to be this year’s equivalent of The Farewell.

“I can’t say if Yeun is deserving or not, but for this era it kind of sounds like business as usual.”