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In Memory of Bygone Screams

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Women scream when King Kong breaks free on a New York City stage. Joan Davis screams a lot in Hold That Ghost! Doris Day screams just before the Albert Hall assassination attempt in The Man Who Knew Too Much. At the end of Vertigo James Stewart asks Kim Novak “why did you scream?” during that fateful moment at the top of the San Juan Batista bell tower. A nameless woman in Some Like It Hot screams when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon run across the lobby of the Seminole Ritz. Janet Leigh screams, of course, when the shower curtain is ripped aside in Psycho. One of the witches screams when a knife-wielding Mia Farrow enters the Castevet’s living room at the end of Rosemary’s Baby.

No doubt about it — there was a lot of female screaming going on in 20th Century movies. Which suggests there was some actual real-life, rip-roaring screaming going on from time to time. But you know what? For the most part female screaming was an invented dramatic device that had no abundant basis in fact, and perhaps not even an incidental basis.

In my entire life I heard a woman “scream” exactly once, and that was when I was two or three years old and my mother had opened the driver’s side door on a busy street and a passing car slammed into it and ripped the door off the hinges. And even that wasn’t really a scream — it was more like a frightened “oooggghhh!”

There was another moment on a LAX-to-JFK flight in ’02 or thereabouts that half-qualified. Our 757 jet hit a sizable air pocket and the plane plunged a couple of hundred feet in a twinkling, and a woman sitting next to me went “aawwwhhh!” — another gulpy moan.

When’s the last time a woman screamed in a movie? I can’t actually recall. 20 or 30 years ago? Longer?

I know that women “screaming” has definitely disappeared from the landscape. And that guys, oddly enough, have rushed in and taken their place. The last I heard anyone let go with a falsetto scream was when Lady Gaga‘s dog-walker, Ryan Fischer, was shot during that recent dognapping incident on Sierra Bonita Ave. The last time before that was when that Vietnamese doctor was dragged off that United flight in 2017.

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Swirling Rudin Clouds

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It’s no longer a matter of censure and condemnation — over the weekend an impression began to take hold that the goal of the burgeoning theatre-community movement against producer Scott Rudin is nothing less than career termination. They don’t want him chastised and repentant — they want him lashed, defrocked and gone.

Fairly or unfairly, this sentiment will probably be exacerbated by a video posted yesterday by David Graham-Caso that claims Rudin’s abuse of his late twin brother, Kevin Blake Graham-Caso, in late 2008 and ’09 while working for the producer was a significant factor in Kevin’s suicide last fall.**

DG-C: “You berated and demeaned, bullied and intimidated and harassed [Kevin] for eight solid months. It was so intense that he developed anxiety and depression and post-traumatic stress, and like many survivors of traumatic abuse, he soon found himself in another abusive relationship later on in his life. It was so intense that last October, he took his own life.”

From Greg Evans’ 4.18 Deadline story about the gathering punitive storm chasing producer Scott Rudin: “Actors’ Equity Association is calling on producer Scott Rudin, who ‘stepped back’ from his Broadway productions today in response to allegations of workplace abuse, to release employees from nondisclosure agreements.

“Earlier this week Equity, along with SAG-AFTRA and American Federation of Musicians Local 802, issued a joint statement condemning harassment, bullying and toxic environments and pledging ‘to hold accountable those who violate human and legal norms of fair, respectful and dignified conduct in the workplace.’ The statement did not specifically name Rudin.

“Some members of Equity have been calling upon the union to place Rudin on the ‘Do Not Work’ list, and have spread word on Instagram of a March on Broadway this Wednesday to protest Rudin as well as social justice issues related to the Broadway industry.”

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Not Hardcore Enough?

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From Dallas Morning News reporters Robert T. Garrett and Gromer Jeffers Jr.: Bolstered by favoring polls, Matthew McConaughey, who’s described himself as a mellow centrist, is apparently half-interested in replacing Greg Abbott as Texas’ next governor.

Excerpt: “If MM were to take the plunge and run for governor, the poll found, 45% of Texas registered voters would vote for McConaughey, 33% would vote for Abbott and 22% would vote for someone else.

“McConaughey’s double-digit lead over the two-term Republican incumbent is significant. The poll, conducted April 6-13, surveyed 1,126 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.92 percentage points.

“56% of Republican voters said they’d vote for Abbott, compared with only 30% for McConaughey.

“While Democrats broke 66% to 8% for McConaughey, and independents 44% to 28%, more than twice as many Democratic primary voters — 51% — said they wanted a progressive candidate for governor than wanted a centrist — 25%.

“That could pose a problem. McConaughey, who has criticized both major parties, has suggested he’s more of a moderate.

“Some of the Trump supporters warm to celebrities, and that sentiment, along with the wishes of one-fifth of the primary electorate for a more moderate nominee, might open a lane in the GOP primary for McConaughey, said UT-Tyler political scientist Mark Owens, who directed the poll.

“McConaughey gets a huge boost from tremendous name recognition and recognition for what he does to help Texans and add to the celebration of the state’s successes,” Owens said. “Most of our survey respondents know his story, but many are waiting to see how he opens his next chapter.”

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Impersonation, I Presume

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This six-and-one-third-year-old TMZ post purportedly contains audio snippets of phone chats between Scott Rudin and former Sony honcho Amy Pascal. I only just heard it yesterday for the first time.

The post announces that the clips were captured as part of the November 2014 Sony Hack, but until somebody proves otherwise I’m assuming it’s actors reading scripted dialogue. It’s too SNL to be real.

It’s also very funny. Because it’s mostly about food (“Godawful sushi”, tacos, “a triple caramel Macchiato”, Butterfingers) and perspiration, bawling out an Uber driver, hating Splenda, etc.

Soderbergh Scheme Finally Sinks In

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The 4.25 Union Station Oscar telecast will have the visual look and atmospheric intrigue of a movie. The nominees and award presenters will be captured in various corners of the 83 year-old train station while speaking lines and sharing observations and who-knows-what-else?

The usual approach — super-gala, stiff-necked, proscenium-arch behavior — is being jettisoned for something looser and jazzier and more thematically-driven. Perhaps an actual story might be told?

The camera operators will get a workout — I can tell you that.

“It’s not going to be like anything that’s been done before,” Soderbergh said during yesterday’s news conference. The pandemic and the Union Station venue has “opened up an opportunity to try something that hasn’t been tried.” The ceremony will be shot like an actual movie, with presenters “playing themselves, or at least a version of themselves

Plus longer acceptance speeches, Soderbergh promised. “We’re giving them space,” he said. “We’ve encouraged them to tell a story, and to say something personal.” I don’t want to be an alarmist but I fear what this kind of “personal” may unleash. I sense arias of myopic hyperbole, otherwise known as wokester shit. Please.

Late yesterday afternoon Tatiana and I drove down to the Union Station complex to see what we could see. One, we saw nothing except barriers and fences and dead-faced security guards explaining the basics. Two, it was awful to hang around the rear regions and passages of a train station with no point or purpose…I felt small, lost, marginalized. For the time being I won’t see the grandiose art-deco showplace aspects of the station until everyone else does, eight days from now.

So we said “fine, fuck it,” drove up to Disney Hall to take some photos, and then pushed on to El Cholo for a light supper.

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Exceptional Nightmare

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The defiant insanity and racial resentments that Donald Trump tapped into and exploited like some diseased reptilian con man will continue to fester and reverberate for years. A flat-out traitor and sociopathic crime boss, the man needs to be tried and convicted and do serious time in an orange jump suit.

How did this bloated sociopath eek out an electoral college victory in 2016? Because (a) a serious percentage of average Americans (especially older males) wanted something more than just the same old moderately bureaucratic, modestly measured government policies that, they believed, were stacked against them and favoring POCs, (b) too many middle Americans hated Hillary Clinton and too many liberals resented how the DNC Hillary cabal played dirty pool with Bernie Sanders and his supporters, and (c) your smugly under-educated, dad-jean-wearing, American working-class types (partly repped by the rural white-trashers who stormed the Capitol on 1.6.21) liked what Trump was saying — “Time to get greedy again, fuck the environment, stop fretting about the greater good and raise the white-guy flag.”

Not To Be Taken Away

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I hadn’t listened to this Who Are You track in a long, long time. Suddenly it’s the new ear worm; I can’t let it go. And talk about lyrically dense…an angry, exhausted, devotional song about the agony and the ecstasy…creative frustration and release.

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Fauci Wouldn’t Say It

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Rep. Jim Jordan to Dr. Anthony Fauci: “When do we get our [post-Covid] liberties back? Tell me the number.” Fauci could’ve blurted out the truth, but he wouldn’t.

HE to Jordan: The liberties return when the vaccine-defying morons on the right (especially large swaths of hinterland Republicans, especially in Texas) grow a few more brain cells and agree to submit to the vaccine for the greater good. And when a significant portion of African Americans do the same, or when POC’s access to the vaccine improves.

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Once Burned, Eternally Suspicious

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If you know anything about Criterion Blurays of late 1930s Cary Grant films, you know that the results tend to be (a) smothered in billions upon billions of digital grainstorm mosquitoes and (b) are a little too much on the dark and inky side. I’m not saying the forthcoming Bringing Up Baby Bluray (7.6.21) will deliver the same textures and treatments given to The Awful Truth, Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday, but a wise consumer should do a lot of research before purchasing. Team Criterion generally cares much more about grain structure than about making an old film look great with that old silvery, silky-smooth sheen that we all love.

Special Castings

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Last night Bright Wall/Dark Room (‪@BWDR‬) tweeted the following: “You can pick ONE actor and put them into any movie ever made. Who do you pick & what do you put them in?”

The mid ’60s version of Steve McQueen as (a) Neil Macauley in Heat, (b) John McLane in Die Hard, (c) Vincent in Collateral and (d) Casey Affleck‘s character in Manchester By The Sea.

Humphrey Bogart as Bat MacPherson (aka “Kilgallen”) in Only Angels Have Wings.