I used to work for a New Canaan landscaping outfit in the mid ’70s, and the boss, Big John Calitri, used to subconsciously mutter pop labels and phrases as a kind of work mantra. One of his favorites was “Molson’s Golden Ale.” We’d be lugging bags of fertilizer and wood chips or planting balled saplings, and between exhausted grunts Big John would say “Molson’s Golden Ale.”

Then his son started to do it, and of his favorites was “Walter Chalmers.” It became a running joke between he, myself and one other guy on the crew. Whenever we were especially tired or facing an especially hard task, someone would say “Walter Chalmers.”

Who was Walter Chalmers? You’re reading Hollywood Elsewhere and you’re wondering who Walter Chalmers was?

11.11.16 Obit: What a sad irony that Robert Vaughn, an ardent lifelong liberal Democrat, has died with the knowledge that Orange Hitler will move into the White House on 1.20.17. Perhaps last Tuesday’s election hastened his end, and perhaps not. But if I’d been in Robert Vaughn’s slippers and ill and near the end, I would have probably said “oh, my God, this is ludicrous…I’m outta here.”

Vaughn was 83, and if you ask me his strongest performance was conniving San Francisco politician Walter Chalmers in Peter Yates‘ Bullitt (’68) — the bane of Steve McQueen‘s existence. In the annals of movie villains, all hail the sinister, calculating, rodent-like Walter Chalmers!

He also played David Blackman, a fetishy studio-boss character who liked to wear bras and garter belts during sex, in Blake Edwards‘ S.O.B. (’81). Every character in S.O.B. was allegedly based on a real person to some degree, and I’m told that Blackman was allegedly based on Johnny Carson, or more particularly an observation passed along by Morgan Fairchild (who was Carson’s lover in ’80 or thereabouts) that Carson enjoyed this, etc. Yes, it sounds ludicrous, grain of salt, etc.

Posted on 4.8.07:

The Wiki page says Vaughn played two roles in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments — a Hebrew golden calf paganist and an Egyptian charioteer (i.e., he allegedly stood right behind Yul Brynner’s Ramses in the campaign against Moses’ flock). Three…actually four years later he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as a drunken, self-destructive scion in The Young Philadelphians (’59).

He also played the most neurotic of the gunmen in The Magnificent Seven (’60).

Yes, Vaughn’s biggest, splashiest role was Napoleon Solo in the original ’60s series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. He also played Harry Rule in The Protectors, a ’70s TV series that I never saw or cared about in the slightest, and then General Hunt Stockwell in the 5th season of The A-Team — ditto.

He also has a six-year, 48-episode run (’04 to ’12) on the British TV series Hustle, and in ’12 appeared in a British soap called Coronation Street.

Zeke’s X reaction, which appeared last night, made me laugh out loud.

“Sometimes there’s God…so quickly!” — Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

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Time is at an absolute premium during the Cannes Film Festival, and 60 to 90 minutes is a sizable block of that stuff. But I must attend! I must diligently support and especially (if necessary) defend this presumably exceptional film from the bad guys.

HE approves of Sian Heder‘s yet-to-be-shot Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It sounds to me like the next Social Network — a GenX story about real life, which is to say the birth of serious video games in the ’90s. Based on the best-selling novel by Gabrielle Zevin, financed by the up-for-sale Paramount, etc.

Streaming as we speak on Amazon, Apple…

Trailers From Hell‘s Larry Karaszewski has been earning a sizable tax deduction by posting three riffs on the three biggest Bounty movies — the 1935 and ’62 versions of of Mutiny on the Bounty plus Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty — from Marlon Brando‘s heavenly Tetiaroa.

HE approves of all movie-related tax deductions…fine and good. And for the most part I agree with Karaszewski’s thoughts on the three films in question.

But it’s my humble opinion that Larry doesn’t show proper obeisancce before Bronislau Kaper’s score for the ’62 version.

To me Kaper‘s music delivers at least one-third of the total impact — at times it’s almost as if portions of the film were shot to properly accompany his grandiose, crash-boom-bammy, reserved-seat-presentation-inside-Loews-State score. Remove Kaper’s heart music and the film would amount to considerably less.

In all fairnress it has to be acknowledged that Karaszewski would never post an mp3 of an abbreviated entre’acte overture that was never used for the final film. Only HE would do such a thing.

Why hasn’t God seen fit to allow Hollywood Elsewhere to visit Tetiaroa? I’ve been all around Europe plus some of Northern Africa plus three visits to Vietnam…but never on Brando’s atoll. Why is life fundamentally unfair?

Before last night I had seen Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty four or five times. Okay, five, except now it’s six because around 10 pm I dove once more into Bigelow’s Olympic-sized pool, and man, it was beautiful.

Hard as nails, man…a tension opera, the real details, lean and mean, cinema verite, the confidence to “get there” in its own way, and when it does it pays off like a slot machine.

I believed every line, every scene, every frame.

Zero Dark Thirty is a great film for delivering a real drama (i.e., one disguised a a procedural) on its own terms and without going “Hollywood” except for one third-act line that includes the word “motherfucker.”

To me Zero Dark Thirty feels like dessert — like fresh strawberries and poundcake under a mound of Reddiwip.

Jessica Chastain gives one of the great hard-boiled performances of all time, and yet you can read her thoughts and feelings every inch of the way, clear as a bell.

When it first opened in late 2012 several Academy flabby-bellies complained thast Zero Dark Thirty was too cold or unemotional. This kind of “cold” and “unemotional” turns my spigots on like almost nothing else. Thank you, God, for giving me the genes and the luck and life experience that didn’t make me into one of them. Thank you for letting me see through to the nub and heart of things, and the ability to recognize the cinematic equivalents of the freshest, best prepared foods and the chemistry of Hostess Cupcakes.

It may not warm the cockles of your heart, but for me Zero Dark Thirty is Bigelow’s masterpiece. And big cheers in particular for Boal’s screenplay, which nails right through and hones it all down, scene after scene after scene.

A year and a half ago (December 2022) Keith Olbermann, whom I’ve always enjoyed and mostly agreed with, unfavorably described certain behaviors by ex-girlfriend Katy Tur. (They were “seeing” and mostly living together between 2006 and 2009.) Here’s a summary. I paid no attention then, but I’ve just listened to a 4.30.24 Olbermann podcast, the last third of which rehashes the Tur material.

The best policy when it comes to ex-lovers or ex-married mates is always to let it go. Shrug it off, try to be friends, try to be cool, turn over a new leaf. But this is fascinating. You don’t have to, of course, but you might want to begin listening at 33:15…

“It turned out that Kellyanne Conway was one of Katey’s sources. In fact, she might have been the main source for the networks and the big newspapers during the 2016 campaign and beyond. Apparently she cannot stop talking.

“But even so, Katy’s attitude towards [Conway] and against me was out of the blue and really offensive.

“Anyway, it passed, and maybe two months later I got a text from her at 9:14 pm on December 11, 2016. This is called having the receipts. Trump had won. Our nightmare had begun, and Katie had gotten a book deal about her experience. I’d been keeping a document in my laptop with hundreds of pages of Trump stories and links and commentaries that I used for the Resistance video series for GQ. It was my Trump doc, and given that Katy was writing that book. I’d offered to give her a copy of it so she had something chronological to use as research as she wrote her book because she hadn’t really been keeping notes — she’d just been trying not to get killed.

“I still have her text. It reads, ‘Do you still want to share your Trump doc with me?’ I joked back, ‘Sure, how much?’ And she joked back ’10, 20 dollars.’ And while we were texting, I emailed her the doc and I said, ‘No charge, but don’t forget my one demand — do not leave me out of your acknowledgments in your book.’

“More than a month later, at 2:35 pm on Sunday, 1.22, 2017. I was just back from LA and I had just done Bill Maher‘s show for the last time, and Katy Tur texted me about why they had never invited her to be on Bill Maher‘s show, and then she switched topics…’want to write this book?’ I wrote back at 5:32 pm…’What? You’re not serious? How would that work?’ That’s when she phoned. She was about to give the advance money back to the publisher. I can’t write a book. I’m like fifty thousand words short, and it’s terrible.”

“Late Blossoming Stockholm syndrome“?

…in which films about interesting female lead characters aren’t about female empowerment or revenge against male scumbags. Stories about women just hanging in there and holding their own as best they can…coping with tough or trying challenges and circumstances, and who suffer setbacks but then pivot and gain the upper hand…women who are adult, anxious, aggressive, capable, angry, defensive, morally conflicted, smart, determined, criminally inclined, scared, corrupted, more stable than unstable…women who have a steady, reasonable, non-fanatical sense of their own power and capabilities, and are (gasp!) straight like 95% of the women out there and aren’t caught up in political theatricality …women who just are what they are without the yoke of #MeToo mythology around their necks.

Adult women, in short, who behave like adult women in French films aimed at adults.

An 18-year-old Steve Wonder wrote this song? You coulda fooled me. I don’t associate Wonder with this kind of bluesy downerism. I’d certainly never listened to his original version until today.

The Rolling Stones version (i.e., the only one I’d ever listened to for decades) is included on Metamorphosis, a rarities compilation released on 6.6.75.

“I Don’t Know Why” was recorded during the sessions for Let It Bleed — on Thursday, 7.3.69 — apparently in the evening. It was this exact same night that everyone learned of the death of Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones, who had been found at the bottom of his swimming pool three or four weeks after he’d been fired from the band over drugs. (Jones announced his departure from the band on 6.9.69.)