Everyone’s maximum musical receptivity happens in their late teens and 20s, and young Steven Spielberg was right in that sweet spot (18 to 21) during the mid ’60s era when the Beatles were really cooking with petrol.

Has anyone ever heard of a baby boomer who wasn’t completely throttled and transformed by the trifecta of Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? What kind of walls did you have to live behind to be immune? And yet Spielberg didn’t become a Beatles fan until he listened to the White Album in late ’68. Where the hell was he in ’65, ’66 and ’67? What was he doing, living off the land in Borneo?

Oh and the Beatles were a “fad” for only the first few months after they exploded, and their musical maturity phase began to kick in around mid ’65. If you weren’t tuned into what they were doing between Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper you were a Martian. And by his own admission, that was exactly what Spielberg was back then.

So if he wasn’t “hearing” the Beatles during their most creative period what else has he missed over the last half-century? What other kinds of musical blockages has be been dealing with? Seriously — this quote is huge. It contains volumes, multitudes.

In the fall of ’82 I wrote a big, laborious piece for The Film Journal (which I was managing editor of) about the making of Tootsie and particularly the then-astounding notion that a present-day New York comedy about an actor who can’t get a job could cost $21 million, which at the time was way above the norm. Anyway I talked to several creative participants about it, including cowriters Robert Kaufman, Murray Schisgal and director Sydney Pollack. At at the end of the writing process I was fairly sick of it.

But I never heard this particular story from Dustin Hoffman before today.

The one element I didn’t care for was Dave Grusin‘s music. Too peppy, too coy, too cute-sounding, And I wasn’t a huge fan of Teri Garr‘s performance. But I loved the supporting turns by Pollack (as Hoffman’s agent), Charles Durning, Jessica Lange, Doris Belack, Bill Murray and Dabney Coleman.

Rick Wilson during today’s (4.21) “The New Abnormal” Daily Beast podcast, starting at 4:30:

“Joe Biden scans….look, back in the old days, when we [Wilson and his fellow Republican strategist] were trying to run against Barack Obama in 2009 and ’12, we threw everything [we could think of] at the guy…’he’s a socialist, he’s a Communist, he was educated by Bill Ayers‘….all this stuff, right?

“But Obama scanned to voters. I sat in a dozen focus groups and listened to them tell me, ‘Oh, he seems like a moderate guy, I kind of like him, he’s a good dude.’ And you couldn’t break it. You couldn’t break it.

“With Joe Biden, they believe there’s a fundamental decency…they may think he’s goofy, a little bit of an oddball, tells wacky anecdotes…but a lot of voters don’t think Joe Biden has malice. And a lot of voters do…a majority, a good solid majority of voters think that Donald Trump is corrupt and mendacious and does have a degree of cruelty in him.

“That idea, that the president can be nasty and transgressive and a dick…it kind of plays when there’s peace and prosperity. It doesn’t play when we’re in a Great Depression, Part Two. And when we don’t know how this disease is gonna play out, and how many people are gonna die. That suddenly is more serious to voters.”

The Trump/Republican/Open Up slogan for the 2020 election: “If grandma has to die in order to open things up and get the economy rolling again, then grandma has to die. And maybe your brother or brother-in-law in the bargain. We’re sorry but these are tough times and tough choices need to be made. Life is hard but the strong survive.”

The podcast title is “Dope Fiend for the Dow Jones.” Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast. The full podcast runs 25 minutes.

Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck was beautifully written — frequently funny, finely balanced, touched bottom in the second and third acts. Even though I prefer the sequel (Day of the Soldado) to the original, Sicario was a landmark Mexican drug-dealing movie. (The problem was that idiotic scene in which Emily Blunt‘s FBI agent picks up some dude in a bar and takes him back to her motel room…c’mon!) The dialogue and plotting in Son of Saul was minimal, but it was a major-league film with ten times the magnitude of The Hateful Eight.

And yet 82.9% of the responders believe that Quentin Tarantino‘s script, which was basically about tough talk, braggadocio and sudden bursts of violence (including the sadistic beating of poor Jennifer Jason Leigh), is superior to the other three. Four out of five!

I’ll never forget that Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich loved The Hateful Eight.

Posted on 4.14, here’s a sologui remix of George Harrison‘s original 1969 demo with Nina Simone‘s 1972 version. You could argue that “Isn’t It A Pity?” is one of the most on-the-nose titles in history. There’s a whole community or genre of songs, films, plays and novels that follow the basic template by (a) describing or depicting some kind of tragedy or downish scenario of one kind or another and (b) asking “given how sad or awful things are, can’t we do better?” John Lennon‘s “Imagine” is another effort in this vein. The more artful song, film, play or novel bypasses the “can’t we do better?” part. Because it’s an unnecessary question. Simply presenting a bad/tragic situation is more than sufficient. One example of the latter kind (i.e., stark representation) is Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Mungiu just lays it out plain. Either you get it or you don’t.

I’ve been healthy for so many decades that I’ve never thought about it. Until lately, that is. Even though I’ve been careful I wonder each day if my luck will hold out. I’m probably not the only one who frets about this. Tomorrow is promised to no one, especially in these times. But man, what a feeling in the morning when I breathe deeply, taking that living-room air all the way down into the bronchi, bronchiole and alveoli, and I swear to God the lungs feel as clean as they did when I was ten, even though I smoked for 15 years or so. Famous last words, right?

Posted yesterday by N.Y. Times columnist Charles Blow: “Donald Trump doesn’t care about being caught in a lie. Donald Trump doesn’t care about the truth.

“Donald Trump is a bare-knuckled politician with imperial impulses, falsely claiming that ‘when somebody’s the president of the U.S., the authority is total,’ encouraging protesters bristling about social distancing policies to ‘liberate’ swing states, and saying that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be “overthrown, either by inside or out.”

“Trump has completely politicized this pandemic and the briefings have become a tool of that politicization. He is standing on top of nearly 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.

“In 2016, Trump stormed the castle by outwitting the media gatekeepers, exploiting their need for content and access, their intense hunger for ratings and clicks, their economic hardships and overconfidence.

“It’s all happening again. The media has learned nothing.”

A couple of months ago I expressed a reasonable concern that Criterion’s Great Escape Bluray (5.12) might be teal-ized. Now comes a review from DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze that says Criterion has gone for “yellowish, golden, sometimes green or earthy hues” — no teal whatsoever — and that it looks “brighter, shows more detail and depth and looks quite strong in-motion.”

Excerpt: “Make no mistake — with four teal-tinted disasters to their credit, a Criterion Bluray of a late 20th Century color film is now something to be feared. With Criterion having teal tinted four highly regarded classics (Teorema, Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Sisters), I’m naturally dreading what might happen this time around.”

Here’s hoping that Criterion has abandoned the teal-tinting inclinations that all but destroyed their Blurays of the four above-mentioned titles.

Kyle MacLachlan praised this mask on Instagram this morning and I immediately concurred. It was designed and manufactured by “NYC cosplayer, bibliophibian and glitterwitch” rhaps0die“. The only problem is that the red ear straps aren’t looped or elastic — you have to tie them together. Once she works this out I’ll buy a couple, if she’s selling.

For months I’ve been pining to see The Many Saints of Newark, otherwise known as the Sopranos prequel. It was going to open on 9.25.20, but now it’s been bumped to 3.12.21. I’m very sorry to hear this.

The early word was that Many Saints would deal with the 1967 Newark race riots. Although the film deals with racial relations, I’m hearing that the Newark riots are more of a backdrop than a plot element. What is it then? Basically a portrait of the culture that Tony Soprano came from and the seminal influences that ushered him into the life of a New Jersey crime boss. I’m told it runs around around 115 minutes.

Set in Newark during the mid ’60s and early ’70s, it focuses on three characters who figure heavily in the Sopranos legend. Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the father of Christopher Moltisanti. “Johnny Boy” Soprano (Jon Bernthal), the father of Tony Soprano and capo of the original Soprano crew who goes to jail in the mid ’60s and is released in ’71. And Livia Soprano (Vera Farmiga), Tony’s chilly and manipulative mother.

The somewhat lesser figure of Junior Soprano, brother of Johnny Boy, is played by Corey Stoll, and a pair of lookalike brothers are played by Ray Liotta. Significant secondary characters are played by Leslie Odom, Jr. and Michela De Rossi.

The late James Gandolfini played Tony Soprano in David Chase‘s legendary Sopranos series, which ran from ’99 through ’07. Michael Gandolfini, his 19 year-old son, plays Tony in the second half of The Many Saints of Newark.

I’m hearing that Michael is quite good at filling his father’s young shoes, and that he nails a lot of his dad’s mannerisms and way of talking, etc. Quite the connection.

A portion of “Down Neck,” an episode of the first season of The Sopranos, re-appears in The Many Saints of Newark. Particularly an incident in which young Tony hides in the trunk of his father’s car when his dad drives to an amusement park. Or so I’ve been told.

The word is that this is a good and interesting film, and that it has a lot of tasty period flavor and interesting character perceptions, and will strike chords among Sopranos fans.