In the long history of movie moustaches, only four have seriously enhanced an actor’s aura — Clark Gable‘s pencil-thin, career-long ‘stache (a 27-year stretch from ’33 to ’60), Robert Redford‘s in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69), Burt Reynolds‘ “Smokey” ‘stache and Billy Crudup‘s upper-lip growth in Almost Famous.

I guess I could bend over backwards and admit that Billy De Williams‘ Lando moustache in Episode #5 and #6 of the Star Wars saga was cool. And okay, Sam Elliott‘s handlebar in The Big Lebowski had a certain folksy authenticity. I’ll also allow that Daniel Day Lewis‘s Bill the Butcher ‘stache completed the satanic aura. Plus [thanks to HE commenters] David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr., Ronald Colman, William Powell, Errol Flynn, Lee Van Cleef, Vincent Price, Groucho Marx and Ernie Kovacs.

But otherwise moustaches are generally annoying and almost always a mistake. Certainly in a present-day context. And not just on-screen.

Moustaches are a machismo thing, of course. We’ve all read about rock stars stuffing toilet paper into their underwear before going on stage. I’m not saying each and every wearer of a moustache is coming from the same place, but they’re definitely looking to flaunt their masculinity.

It’s my personal theory that the moustaches worn by Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty in Mike Nichols‘ The Fortune caused that film to tank, or were certainly a decisive factor in that regard.

From Gunfighter Wiki page: “20th Century Fox hated Gregory Peck‘s authentic period mustache in The Gunfighter (’50). In fact, the head of production at Fox, Spyros P. Skouras, was out of town when production began. By the time he got back, so much of the film had been shot that it was too late to order Peck to shave it off and re-shoot. After the film did not do well at the box-office, Skouras ran into Peck and reportedly said, ‘That mustache cost us millions.'”

“Trump can’t promise the $400 weekly because it is unconstitutional — he can’t just tell government to cut checks for $400 (LOL). That’s why he is putting it off partly on the states, which creates a new bureaucracy. The best hope for any money before the end of the year is if Democrat and GOP negotiators can come together realistically. That is why this Trump smokescreen is getting so heavily criticized. There’s no THERE there, and he can’t even explain how it would work himself. Until Congress authorizes the money the wheels won’t turn. Guaranteed.” — note from industry pally, received an hour ago.

pic.twitter.com/p3RDKa6EtF

— _ (@RealEOC_2) August 8, 2020

I bailed on HBO’s Perry Mason five or six weeks ago. Right after episode #2. Too icky, muddy, smokey, gunky and grimly desaturated. Plus Matthew Rhys, the 45 year-old actor with the lined, Elmer’s Glue-All, beard-stubbled complexion, is too long of tooth to be playing a World War I veteran in 1931, particularly one who’s still trying to come into his own as an attorney.

“No way,” I told myself. “I will not sit through eight episodes of this shit. Life is too short.”

Perry Mason ended last night, and the general complaint is that it didn’t pay off, much less deliver a socko finish.

Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall: “If there’s a fictional character whose most famous gimmick, by far, is that he puts the real criminal on the witness stand and talks them into confessing, and you decide to not have him do that in your version? Well, you’d better come up with something really spectacular to do in its place. And the HBO series’ first-season finale utterly failed to do that.

The ending, says Sepinwall, is “cynical and extremely underwhelming. Previous Mason stories certainly leaned toward wish-fulfillment fantasy — tales of a man so noble, and so smart, that he needs only his wits to talk killers and other criminals into going against their own self-interest and admitting their guilt — but this feels like edgelord-style revisionism.

“It’s as if the HBO show’s writers couldn’t imagine Erle Stanley Gardner’s pure-hearted and persuasive creation existing in a more “realistic” world, so they had their guy cheat. But in not having Andrew Howard‘s Joe Ennis character take the stand at all — not even for Perry to try and fail to get him to confess — there’s no real drama at all to the season’s climax. It feels like both Mason and the show simply run out of ideas by the end, and just hope things will work out anyway.”

Peacock, the NBCUniversal streamer that launched on 7.15, has ordered 11 episodes of a weekly late-night Larry Wilmore show. Yes, once a week. Like Real Time with Bill Maher. Maher is an established brand but once-weekly isn’t how things work now. Way back in the Mr. Showbiz and Reel.com days (’98 to ’04) Hollywood Elsewhere was a twice-weekly column. I shifted into the daily bloggy-blog format in April ’06. Imagine a columnist launching a new column these days that refreshes twice weekly….nope! That said, it’s good to have Wilmore back in the saddle.

833,839 viewers have watched this. Six years and two months old. Not a big deal. But it brought tears to my eyes.

Two days ago Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt, whom I know slightly and is not generally regarded as an excitable, hysterical, “fly off the handle” type, reported that Disney has “made an internal decision to suspend the 4K Ultra HD release of live action catalog titles from both their own vaults and those of their newly acquired 20th Century Fox label.”

Boiled down and according to his understanding, this means that “beyond new release theatrical titles, animated fare from Disney and Pixar, or Star Wars and Marvel-related projects, there were no plans at the studio going forward to release titles on physical 4K Ultra HD”, and that “future releases will be 4K digital only.”

Journo pally comment: “If Disney wants to make it hard to see The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, that’s one thing. But taking the entire Fox library down with them, especially coupled with Disney’s apparent unwillingness to license revival screenings (not that anybody would be able to tell right now), is something else.”

HE to Connected Industry Guy: “What have you heard about this ‘Disney jettisoning 4K physical media’ thing? Not just Disney but the entire Fox library. Sounds like a big deal.”

Connected Industry Guy to HE: “I wouldn’t be too concerned about this. I’d bet they’ve yet to fully evaluate the situation. They have a superb exec in Schawn Belston, who is quite able to lead them to proper potential 4K IP in the Fox library. There’s very little in the Disney library that’s actually 4K fodder. Most of the Fox IP that would be interesting is large format, so low in numbers. The situation needs to jell a bit.”

I subsequently reached out to Belston…crickets.

I’ve posted this photo three times since the birth of Hollywood Elsewhere in August ’04. This is the fourth posting. It was taken on a great blue-sky day in Italy 20 years and two months ago, somewhere south of Siena during a leisurely drive to Rome. I can recall the aroma and the summery air and the pastoral vibe like it happened yesterday. To this day I’m not sure what kind of flowers are dotting the landscape but I always default to poppies. I’ve tried to find this property a couple of times since; it may be the Val d’Orcia estate. If this image rings a bell for anyone and they know the address or can provide a Google capture, please get in touch.

Snapped sometime in late May of 2000

For decades the legend about the notorious Don’t Look Now sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie has been that it involved actual coitus and not just simulation.

Two and a half years ago Sutherland insisted that Peter Bart‘s recollection about Sutherland and Christie really doing it was dead wrong.

Sutherland said that the scene involved four people — Christie, himself, director Nicholas Roeg and dp Anthony Richmond — in a bedroom and that “the takes were 15 seconds long, maximum. ‘All right, Julie, hold your head. Okay, turn your heard a little to the side. Okay, Donald….all right Julie.'”

Seven days ago this video essay about the scene in question, “The Greatest Sex Scene in Horror,” appeared on YouTube.

The testy back-and-forth between Bart and Warren Beatty, Christie’s then-boyfriend who wanted some of the graphic portions removed, is amusing.

Out of the current U.S. population of 331 million, 5 million or roughly 1.5% have been infected by COVID-19. That doesn’t mean that 98.5% of the population hasn’t been infected because the numbers are imprecise, but it’s probably something in that general vicinity. 162,000 U.S. citizens have died from the virus, or .05% (1/20th of 1 percent). But it’s really not the infected and the deaths as much as the economic impact upon the entire nation due to business shutdowns and whatnot.

What makes this Lincoln Project video work is (and correct me if I’m wrong) the Phillip Glass score.

When you’re starting to regret your vote for Trump pic.twitter.com/hAofMi7qOz

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 8, 2020

From MOMA curator Dave Kehr, a 1902 short called The Flying Train. It depicts a ride on a suspended railway between the towns of Barmen and Eberfeld, Germany, which are due east of Dusseldorf. Shot on Biograph’s proprietary 68mm stock, which obviously “affords stunning visual clarity and quality, especially compared to the more standard 35mm or 16mm stocks,” etc. Twelve years before the start of World War I.