I sent this message to a friend celebrating the sum of it, the all of it.

During the 1958 filming of Some Like It Hot, it took 59 attempts before Marilyn Monroe was able to say “where’s that bourbon?” in just the right way, or at least to director Billy Wilder‘s satisfaction.

For years this was a fascinating, oft-repeated anecdote — an example of how much effort and sweat it could take to get a scene right. But many such stories have cropped up in the 60-plus years since the Monroe-Wilder incident. Stanley Kubrick was alleged to have asked Harvey Keitel to perform a certain scene in Eyes Wide Shut more than 59 times. (I forget the exact number.) And of course, David Fincher is legendary for asking his actors to do dozens upon dozens of takes.

But now comes Mank costar Amanda Seyfried with a story about Fincher having her perform a single line — “You think I can just relax?” — roughly 200 times. The story was passed along yesterday by Collider‘s Tom Reimann.

Seyfried quote: “I was part of scenes with tons of people in it and we would do it for an entire week. I can’t tell you how many takes we did, but I would guess 200, maybe I could be wrong and could be way off. Uhm, I could be underestimating by five days of one scene when I didn’t have one line…‘You think I can just relax?’ No, because there are probably about nine or 10 different camera angles that had been on me at one point.”

From Jennifer Szalai‘s 6.17 N.Y. Times review of a National Security Adviser’s tell-all: “In ‘The Room Where It Happened,’ John Bolton Dumps His Notes and Smites His Enemies”:

From Washington Post analysis by Aaron Blake:

Last weekend Margot Robbie‘s producer husband Tom Ackerley offered further proof that the low-rent bruh uniform (about which I reposted three days ago) is scrupulously followed worldwide, regardless of wealth or status. Shorts, low-thread-count T-shirt, backwards baseball cap, closely-trimmed whisker beard, whitesides without socks. From Timbuktu to Tunbridge Wells to Tallahassee, they all look like the exact same bruh.

Regimentation, sartorial fascism, the primal urge to belong, etc.

The couple and friends played at the Loz Feliz 3-Par Golf Course (3207 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039), a nine-hole operation located near Atwater Village and located alongside the L.A. river.

Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley at Loz Feliz 3-Par Golf Course.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming announced this morning that Kristen Stewart will play the late Diana, Princess of Wales (aka Diana Spencer) in Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer.

Due to roll in early ’21, the Steven Knight-scripted drama will “cover a three-day period in the early ‘90s, when Diana decided her marriage to Prince Charles wasn’t working, and that she needed to veer from a path that would put her in line to one day be queen,” Fleming reported.

Diana’s chosen path, as we all know, turned out to be sporadic and wayward, and was chiefly defined by a series of extra-marital and post-marital affairs (Barry Mannakee, James Hewitt, James Gilbey, Oliver Hoare, Theodore Forstmann, JFK Jr., Bryan Adams, Hasnat Khan). It ended tragically when she and the totally worthless Dodi Fayed died after a high-speed car crash in Paris on 8.31.97.

Right off the top, the Larrain-Knight project is flawed for two reasons.

One, nobody cares about Diana’s decision to bail on her marriage to Prince Charles in ’91 or thereabouts. What they want to see, of course, is a Harold Pinter-esque drama about her tragic, idiotic affair with Fayed with a special focus on (a) the particulars of her last few hours of life, and (b) the worldwide reaction to her death including the funeral and the Elton John performance of “Goodbye, English Rose.”

And two, the 5’5″ Stewart is way too short to inhabit the physical realm of the 5’10” Diana. Diana was seriously statuesque (5’10” in heels = six feet) and nudging the giraffe realm while Stewart — be honest — is smallish. It would be one thing if she stood 5’7″ or 5’8″ but she’s five full inches shorter than the Real McCoy — you might as well call it half a foot.

Plus Stewart doesn’t look anything like Diana in terms of eye shape or facial bone structure. She was a passable Jean Seberg as they shared certain similarities, but even the makeup guy who transformed Charlize Theron into Megan Kelly would be at a loss.

By the way: The 5’10”, 44 year-old Theron would be too old to play the 31 year-old Diana in Larrain’s film, but she could play the 36 year-old Diana in the Dodi Fayed version.

Larrain has twice cast too-short actresses as famous women — the 5’3″ Natalie Portman as the 5′ 7″ Jackie Kennedy (which didn’t work — Portman was simply too runty), and now Stewart as Spencer.

My pet theory is that Larrain, who himself only stands 5’7 1/2″, prefers to cast women who are shorter than himself.

It’s been quite a few years since anyone saw a “boxy” (1.37:1) version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which opened almost exactly 60 years ago. Yes, it was shot with an assumption that first-run theatres would project it at 1.85:1, but it was protected for boxy viewings as well as 1.66 aspect ratios, and the prints weren’t hard-matted at 1.85 either. I know because I inspected one in a booth once. (I was a licensed projectionist in Connecticut starting in ‘81.). And TV stations used to broadcast it boxy. Ditto VHS cassettes.

All to say I would kill to be able to buy a Bluray of a boxy Psycho. And what about Universal offering a domestic Bluray of that German TV version with the slightly risqué added footage?

“Okay, you might catch something if you pay to see Chris Nolan’s Tenet, sure. But life is full of risk, and if you don’t go out on a limb you won’t be able to reach any fruit. Your choice — be bold and hit the virusplex, or stay home on the couch and count your blessings.”

In a 6.12 piece called “The American Press Is Destroying Itself“, Matt Taibbi has nailed the current p.c. zeitgeist, and his observations are downright frightening.

“The American left has lost its mind, [having] become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline [while] torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

“The leaders of this new movement” — the BLM absolutists, Millennial wokester “safeties” and their terrified chickenshit allies — “are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

“They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ out loud to a data scientist fired from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones! And now this madness is coming for journalism.

“Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically ‘problematic’ editorial or social media decisions. The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety, and others saw challenges to management.”

Please read the whole thing, but the bottom line (and just because Mark Harris might disagree with this notion doesn’t mean it’s not true) is that the progressive left HAS lost its mind, and you don’t have to be a conservative or (God forbid) a Republican to acknowledge this. I began as a good Democrat in my tweener and teen years, and I’ve regarded myself as left-leaning iconoclast since I was 20 or thereabouts. But over the last two or three years calling myself a staunch leftie has become untenable. Because the left has gone lunatic.

The wokester “safeties”, POC feminist blame-shriekers, cancel culture advocates, #MeToo tunnel-visionists (Taibbi doesn’t even mention the nonsensical conviction, in defiance of established facts, that Woody Allen is guilty of molesting Dylan Farrow in August 1992), progressive guilt-trippers and fanatical Khmer Rouge purists are running the journalist asylum.

These people are beyond scary, and yet the idea that come November voters will have to choose between allowing these progressive banshees free reign and giving another term to the salivating, sociopathic racism and curdled delusion of Donald Trump is a false scenario.

The thing to cling to in this surreal hurricane is sensible, skeptical, carefully measured liberalism — the kind that isn’t so terrified of being accused or white privilege and/or racism that a semblance of reality actually penetrates the cerebellum. I’m talking about the Bill Maher, Joe Rogan (except for his hateful dismissals of Doddering Joe), Matt Taibbi, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Brett Stephens, Bari Weiss, Sasha Stone, Richard Rushfield, Jordan Ruimy and Katie Herzog cabal.

Boiling it down to eight words, I really can’t be a leftie any more. Because the 21st Century “woke” terror (named in honor of Maximilien Robespierre and the “French reign of terror” of the 1790s) has become too manic, too smothering, too horrifying.

I’ll never be a rightie (I took too many acid and mescaline trips in my 20s for that to ever happen) and the idea of being a comme ci comme ca centrist sounds boring as hell. I just know that the shrieking, accusatory, career-cancelling, sensitive-to-a-fault left has gone around the bend and over the waterfall. They’re just as unhinged and foam-at-the-mouth frightening as the bumblefuck Trump supporters who will attend the Tulsa rally on Juneteenth (i.e., Friday the 19th).

And while I still trust the N.Y. Times‘ reporting on foreign matters, COVID and climate as well as book, film and theatre criticism, I don’t trust them at all in terms of reporting about our domestic racial turbulence and certainly not on the opinion pages — they’ve totally gone over to the regimented BLM-filtered side and are now representing the activist journalism fraternity in this respect.

To bring it all back home, Taibbi has written that “people depend on [journalists] to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?”

Publicist to HE (received on Monday, 6.15): “We know it is hard to predict your schedule for this summer, given the current state of the world right now, but he’d like to know if you are still planning on attending the Telluride Film Festival, like last year. Keep us posted if you will be there and your coverage plans. Thanks in advance!”

HE to Publicist: “All paid up and booked up, and wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

Tatiana is also attending this year. We’re once again staying at the Mountainside Inn, the “poor man’s Telluride Film Festival lodging option”. Except the lease-holder got greedy and decided to up the rent, so I’ve paid $1700 total for five nights (9.2 through 9.7). As Tatiana has never seen the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley, the plan is to fly to Phoenix (Southwest’s LAX/Burbank to Phoenix “El Cheapo” fare is $49 each way, $90 RT), drive to the GC on the way up, and stop in Monument Valley on the way back.

Clint Eastwood celebrated his 90th birthday on Sunday, 5.31. A cruddy-looking YouTube capture was posted on Tuesday, 6.2. Hollywood Elsewhere has chosen to run a higher-quality TikTok version.

A month ago a filmmaker friend told me that “the major [exhibitor] chains have moved their opening date from June 26th to July 8th. This is why Tenet moved, I think. And who knows if July 8th will hold? I wonder what this will do to the Russell Crowe film?”

The trades reported this morning that the the biggest chains — Regal, AMC and Cinemark — will begin phased re-openings on Friday, 7.10. The first two releases will be Crowe’s Unhinged and Sony’s The Broken Hearts Gallery. Disney’s Mulan (which I am making an absolute point of never, ever seeing) opens on 7.24 and then Tenet (originally set to premiere on Friday, 7.17) opens on Friday, 7.31.

Regal Cinemas will start the openings on 7.10, with all 541 sites humming by Friday, 7.24. AMC Theatres and Cinemark Theatres are more or less following suit.

Don’t let that headline fool you. HE will attend the all-media screening of Tenet in a hazmat suit, and will then attend a public screening because if I know Nolan, I’ll need at least two viewings to even begin to figure out the basics.

I’ve never wanted to see Billy Wilder‘s A Foreign Affair (’48) and I probably never will see it for one basic, fundamental reason. Male lead John Lund isn’t good enough to romance (i.e., have carnal relations with) Marlene Dietrich or Jean Arthur. Yes, it’s that simple.

When I say “not good enough” I mean he’s not an A-lister. Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Kirk Douglas or John Wayne would’ve been acceptable, but not Lund. I will never patronize a film in which a B-level actor (especially one with a Gable-like moustache) gets down with an A-level actress. Bad for morale, bad all over.

Lund, who died in 1992 at age 81, was eulogized in a London Times obituary as follows: “[His] film career was cut to a familiar pattern: the young actor imported to Hollywood after a big success on Broadway begins by playing the handsome guy who gets the girl, then descends by gradual degrees to being the male lead in minor westerns and occasionally, in major films, being the handsome guy who does not get the girl because he lacks the spark of the hero who does.”