Producer pally (reacting to yesterday’s “The Draining“): “Sheesh. Can you start your column with a more depressing headline and opening? Are you trying to drive readers away? Give us a break!”

HE to Producer Pally: “So the recipe for vigorous readership is fantasy, nostalgia, sweet music, re-voting past Oscar competitions, fairy tales and the like? We’re living through a cross between a Steven Soderbergh and a George Romero film — an open-ended pandemic nightmare with bumblefuck zombies howling about Gretchen Whitmer — life in a vast, shrouded minimum security concentration camp with wifi and streaming at home.

“On one hand I’m happy and counting our blessings — Tatiana and I are both healthy, working hard, taking occasional walks and watching a lot of streaming, and on the other hand I occasionally dream about snorting heroin. Because ‘life’ (that once-familiar state of natural being that occasionally included joy and rapture and various states of wonder **) has basically stopped.

Producer pally: “Stop the drama. It’s easy enough to find the middle ground without declaring an apocalypse.”

** As well as grimacing as young wine-drinking women shrieked with Irish banshee laughter in restaurants and bars…that was part of the symphony back then.

The vitality of American life is dying everywhere. The nectar is drying up, the adventure evaporating, soil turning to sand. A slow strangulation, culture grinding to a halt. I keep thinking of a line from a recent Rick Wilson piece about a coming “wave of financial despair that will make people crave the tender mercies of the Great Depression.”

Important: 3% of Republicans polled by USA Today believe that Trump acted too quickly in responding to the COVID plague.

From “Trump the Narcissistic Authoritarian Statist Declares He Has ‘Total’ Authority,” posted by Rick Wilson on 4.15.20:

Only healthy teenagers and track and field athletes in their 20s are shaped like Michelangelo’s David. Then again this 17-foot-tall statue was carved 520 years ago. Diets have changed. Today most American males and females (around 70%) resemble Fat David.

The terrible Notre Dame fire happened a year and a day ago — on 4.15.19. I visited the site roughly five weeks later. The fire was almost certainly caused by some guy working for a scaffolding company but we’ll never know who or how because the government of President Emanuel Macron won’t want to prosecute anyone, which would provoke the proletariat.

Wiki excerpt: “Macron has announced that he hopes the reconstructed cathedral could be finished by Spring 2024, in time for the opening of the 2024 Summer Olympics. The first task of the restoration is the removal of 250 tons of melted metal scaffolding tubes. This stage began in February 2020 and was to continue through April 2020. A large crane was put in place next to the Cathedral to help remove the scaffolding. The stained glass windows have been removed from the nave, and the flying buttresses have been reinforced with wooden arches to stabilise the structure.”

On 3.15.20 the work was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. No date has been set for starting up again.

Initially posted on 8.30.15: Whenever I eat alone in public I’m always checking or posting tweets or reading articles or whatever on the iPhone. (I almost typed “reading a newspaper” but when’s the last time I did that?)

One of the reasons I’m always reading is that I’m terrified of being one of those guys who just sits there and stares at his food, just eyeballing it like some hungry gorilla or a baboon under a tree. Guys who never once look up or regard their fellow diners or savor the atmosphere or take out their phone…none of that. Guys who just stare at the grub, examining the steamed mishmash and deciding which clump of broccoli or sliced baked potato or radish or red lettuce leaf to fork into next.

I watched a guy do this a couple of nights ago. “Gotta study this, keep on top of it,” he seemed to be saying to himself, “because I want to eat this right. Because I’ve been waiting for this moment for a couple of hours now and now it’s here, and the food is nice and warm…my bowl of vegetables, my sustenance…mine. And this is all I care about until I’m done.”

I sat there shaking my head and telepathically muttering to this guy, “You look like a wild dog eating a baby wildebeest, you know that?” The worst is when these staring-at-their-food guys are out with their wives or girlfriends and they still won’t avert their gaze from their plate. A worldly fellow with a date always chats, looks up frequently, eats small bites, asks questions, considers the architecture, smiles, etc. And if he’s dining stag he always reads something. Trying presenting a cultivated front, ya mutt.

As a proud owner of a Presbyterian Church Wager poster (along with Larry Karaszewski, Anne Thompson and Svetlana Cvetko), I’m wondering if anyone has ever seen this French-market poster for sale (can’t find it online) or if they know somebody who has one on their wall? How odd that the designer decided to change the last name of Warren Beatty‘s character from John McCabe to John Mac Cabe.

Posted on 5.6.19: A couple of days ago on Facebook, Larry Karaszewksi, the renowned screenwriter (along with partner Scott Alexander), director, producer and co-chair of the Academy’s Foreign Language Oscar executive committee, posted a photo of a rare cultural artifact — a framed poster for Robert Atman‘s The Presbyterian Church Wager, which later became McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Until Larry posted this I was under the impression that only three Los Angelenos owned mint-condition TPCW posters — Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, myself and dp Svetlana Cvetko. The poster hanging in my living room is an expensively scanned digital copy of an original that Thompson loaned me several years ago. Three copies were made; I persuaded Warren Beatty to sign them.

The last time Tatyana and I went hiking in Sullivan Canyon was almost exactly two years ago. We returned yesterday afternoon around 3:30 pm. We walked up Old Ranch Road, eyeballing the various horse stables and handsome ranch-style homes, and then up a horse trail to the woodsy Sullivan Canyon area, which goes on and on. A small number of industry folk live on Old Ranch Raod. (We spotted two walking their dogs.)

We started out with masks and gloves but it became too hot to wear them, especially as we hiked uphill. We ran into some other maskless hikers but we all kept our distance.

I was onto the emptiness aesthetic back in ’79 when I tried to raise funding for a monthly magazine called Nothing. It was supposed to be like Interview only more so. The Nothing idea didn’t fly because celebrities of a certain stripe or calibre who had agreed to give interviews would’ve had to be in on the joke — “I’m basically an empty vessel with nothing much to say, but then again we’re all ‘nothing’ in a certain sense…all of us just atomic molecular matter, passing through for 75 or 80 years and then whooshing into the void.” Five years later along came the emptiest famous person in world history — Angelyne — and the rest is history.

Now the world is full of empty coke bottles, all clamoring for our attention on Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter and Facebook. The Kardashians took Angelyne’s vacant aesthetic and ran with it in a much more profitable way.

The New Haven-residing Brian Dennehy has left the earth. Cardiac arrest, 81 years old. Respect and condolences for a gifted, passionate actor who cared more for the exaltation of great acting than whore paychecks.

Dennehy won two Best Actor Tony Awards, for his lead performances in Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman (’99) and Eugene O’Neill‘s Long Day’s Journey into Night (’03) as well as a Golden Globe in 2000 for playing Willy Loman in a TV version of Death of a Salesman. Not to mention a Stratford Shakespeare Festival performance in Shakespeare‘s Twelfth Night plus a noteworthy stage turn in a Stratford production of Harold Pinter‘s The Homecoming.

Just eight years ago Dennehy played a supporting role (not Hickey) in a Goodman theatre production of Eugene O’Neill‘s The Iceman Cometh, and again when the production was revived in 2015 at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn.

How ironic that Dennehy’s best-known role was Will Teasle, an arrogant and rather bone-headed small-town sheriff in Ted Kotcheff‘s First Blood (’82) — a breakout role that launched his film career. Dennehy was 41 or thereabouts when the film was shot.

I’m not sure what Dennehy’s second-best-known film role was or is. You’d have to pick between the kindly alien in Ron Howard‘s Cocoon (’85) the lead role in Peter Greenaway‘s The Belly of an Architect (’87) or his Joseph Wambaugh-like novelist in John Flynn‘s Best-Seller (’87).

I’m sure I’m overlooking a half-dozen other choice performances, but for better or worse I keep coming back to his rural asshole performance in First Blood. Go figure.

Poor, dessicated, syphilis-afflicted Al Capone (Tom Hardy) near the end of his life. Plotzing in South Florida (he resided at 93 Palm Avenue in Miami Beach), shuffling around in a bathrobe, sucking on a fat stogie, haunted by his violent past. Capote was only 48 when he died.

Josh Trank‘s film, which began filming two years ago in New Orleans, is now called Capone. Trank directed, wrote and edited. Costars include Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon, Kyle MacLachlan, Kathrine Narducci, Jack Lowden, Noel Fisher and Tilda Del Toro.

Hardy loves to play grotesques, obsessives, creepy oddballs. The Kray brothers in Legend. John Fitzgerald in The Revenant. Eddie Brick in Venom. Tommy Riordan Conlon in Warrior. The all-but-indecipherable Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Leo Demidov in Child 44.

Over the last decade I’ve liked three of his performances — building contractor Ivan Locke in Locke (my all-time favorite), Farrier the Spitfire pilot in Dunkirk, and Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road.

I own a relatively recent 4K UHD Amazon version of Byron Haskin and George Pal‘s The War of the Worlds (’53). It’s one the most dazzling eye-baths in the history of upmarket restorations of Technicolor classics. Pure dessert. (There’s also a great-looking 4K version on iTunes.)

It was shot by George Barnes, whose dp credits include Spellbound, None But The Lonely Heart, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Samson and Delilah and The Greatest Show on Earth. The poor man died of a heart attack in May 1953, or roughly three months after The War of the Worlds opened in major markets.

I can’t imagine…no one can imagine how the upcoming Criterion Bluray version (July 7, “new 4K digital restoration”) could possibly top the Amazon or iTunes UHD versions. The Criterion disc will look fine, of course, but what’s the point? I’ll be surprised if any half-knowledgable film fanatic calls it a serious bump-level Bluray. It’s not in the cards.

Wait…is Criterion planning to add teal tints?