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Telluride News associate editor Suzanne Cheavens has reported about a July 9th meeting of the San Miguel Board of County Commissioners, which was mostly concerned with COVID-19 issues. It’s a fairly humdrum story, but then paragraph #13 comes along and suddenly you can feel the energy.

Cheavens writes that the “word” among Telluride officials is that the school district has declined to allow the 2020 Telluride Film Festival (if it actually happens) to use school facilities for screenings. That means that the Palm and Galaxy theatres will be off-limits during the Labor Day gathering.

Cheavans excerpt: “I have more questions and concerns that I have broached with [festival organizers],” said county public health director Grace Franklin. “The schools determined it’s not safe to be operating in any of those venues. It’s off the table.”

I’ve also been told (but have not heard directly) that the Werner Herzog theatre, the largest and grandest of all Telluride venues, may also be off-limits due to health concerns.

I had understood that Telluride’s Town Council would meet and make some important decisions about TFF on Wednesday, July 15th. But Telluride blogger Michael Patterson (“Michael’s Telluride Film Blog“) says this “doesn’t appear” to be correct. The Parks Committee “does have a meeting scheduled in Telluride on 7.15,” he says, “but the Town Council will not meet until Tuesday, 7.21.”

Take it with a grain.

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The Orange Plague hasn’t pardoned longtime pally Roger J. Stone Jr., but he’s commuted his 40-month sentence, a result of being found guilty on seven felony charges, including obstructing a congressional inquiry into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

N.Y. Times: “In a lengthy statement released late on a Friday evening, the White House denounced the prosecution against Mr. Stone on what it called ‘process based charges’ stemming from ‘the Russia Hoax’ investigation. ‘Roger Stone has already suffered greatly,’ the statement said. ‘He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!’

“These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice. his is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.”

The second half of Max Barbakow and Andy Samberg‘s Palm Springs (Hulu, now streaming), a time-loop wedding comedy a la Groundhog Day, is less irksome than the first half — I’ll give it that.

But even during the second half I only laughed once. Okay, maybe twice. And there are no laughs at all during the first 40 or 45. Plus the central situational incident is a wedding, and I’ve always hated wedding flicks (except, of course, for The Wedding Crashers and Robert Altman‘s A Wedding).

I’d been hearing for months how wildly funny Palm Springs is (Sundance ’20 attendees went apeshit), and how it sold for $17 million and small change. And now there’s the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings (94% and 84% respectively). And for all of it I sat on my couch like the Great Sphinx at Giza.

Groundhog Day was dry and deadpan and even nourishing in a mystical reincarnation sense, and all the richer and better for that. It didn’t explain why Bill Murray had fallen into this trap — it just pushed him into the pool and watched him try to figure it all out. But manic-surreal Palm Springs is hung up on all kinds of details and reasons and particulars, and it doesn’t have the slightest semblance of a mystical current. Plus it feels overly pushed and frantic and broad. Groundhog Day is at least 15 or 20 times better.

In the droll Murray role, Samberg has been stuck in the time loop for a long while (the source being some kind of churning inferno inside a cave), but in this outing the Andie McDowell romantic-interest character (played by Cristin Milioti) is also sucked in.

And so, of course, Milioti (whose character is the sister of the bride at the Palm Springs wedding in question) has to go through the usual stages — shock, disbelief, brittle facial expressions, eyes popping, shouting. In my book there are few things as unfunny as looks of stunned confusion — i.e., actors telling you over and over again that they’re staggered and at a loss for words (except for “what the fuck!”) when something extraordinary occurs.

You know Samberg and Milioti will challenge and irritate each other to death, but will fall in love by Act Three.

I understand, of course, that high-concept farce tends to go hand in hand with hammy acting, but this time almost nothing is funny. J.K. Simmons, another time-loop prisoner, shooting Samberg with real, flesh-piercing arrows isn’t funny. Samberg’s character says two or three times that despite the certainty of the same day being repeated that physical pain is nonetheless real, and so Milioti jumping in front of a speeding truck isn’t funny. Her younger sister falling and knocking her front teeth out isn’t funny. Strapping C4 explosive to a goat and blowing it into a thousand shards of flesh, blood, hair and bone isn’t funny.

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Most of us are presuming that for age reasons, Joe Biden won’t run for re-election in ’24. Nobody can even spitball who might be the official Democratic president nominee in ’24 (Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer) but rightwing media seems to believe that Fox News host Tucker Carlson, an instantly recognized brand who’s personable and no dummy, would be a formidable Republican candidate.

Peter Medak‘s The Ghost of Peter Sellers (currently streaming) is a fascinating documentary about the disastrous making of his own Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a 1973 Peter Sellers pirate comedy that turned out so badly it was never released theatrically.

It was, however, issued on VHS in ’85, and on a Region 2 DVD in 2016 — $7.98 to buy, $3.99 to ship.

The 36 year-old Medak, coming off the success d’estime of The Ruling Class (’72), agreed to direct Noonday Sun in order to work with Sellers, regarded worldwide as a comic genius who was worth his weight in gold. If, that is, the script was first-rate and everything else was in its proper place.

Alas, the Noonday script was allegedly shoddy and shooting at sea (off the coast of Cyprus) was sure to be technically difficult. But the torpedo that destroyed the movie (and which damaged Medak’s career) was the erratic, instinctual madness of his lead actor, who could be extremely skittish and difficult to work with.

Sellers often said that he couldn’t abide mediocrity. Apparently he inhaled a good whiff of the stuff (or so he believed) almost immediately upon arriving in Cyprus. And so he tried to escape by bringing hell.

The best disaster docs of this kind are George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coppola‘s Hearts of Darkness (’91), Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe‘s Lost in La Mancha (’02), about the calamitous undoing of Terry Gilliam’s first attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and Les Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (’82), about the arduous making of Werner Herzog‘s Fitzcarraldo (also ’82).

The Ghost of Peter Sellers is just as good and as necessary as these three. You really do have to watch it.

I was going to write about Medak’s film earlier this week, but I was depressed about being late to the party. I could have seen it at the 2018 Telluride Film Festival but I didn’t. I could have obtained a press screener earlier than I did. Bummed, man. Couldn’t get it up. I finally got going today.

A week-old discussion with a colleague:

HE: “Sellers was obviously the lunatic villain in this bizarre saga. Yes, they shouldn’t have made the damn film. Yes, it was a bad idea with a script that allegedly blew chunks. The only thing that was ready was the money. But Sellers was a crazy man.”

Colleague: “Sellers was crazy at times, but I honestly don’t think it was his behavior that ruined the film. And if that’s the case, why is he the villain?”

HE: “A producer says in the doc, ‘We all knew Peter was crazy, but we didn’t know how crazy.’

“Sellers was miserable during the shoot, but he was the powerhouse. He knew the difference between a good script and a bad or weak one. He wanted to have fun and do The Goon Show with Spike Milligan. But he had to know that the whole thing had a basic dubiousness and fragility.

“Yes, Medak saw that also, but he trusted in Sellers’ genius. Which was absurd, of course — if it’s not on the page it isn’t worth doing. Sellers played the innocent when he met Medak later on. ‘It was you and me vs. them,’ he recalled. Medak replied, ‘No, Peter. It was you.’

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In addition to the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins seriously contemplating a name change due to cultural concerns, a third topic of Native American identity and conversation is currently under review. Welch Foods Inc., the Concord-based company known for its grape juices, jams and jellies made from dark Concord grapes (as well as white Niagara grape juice), needs to gently, retroactively apologize for a racist advertising campaign from the 1950s than demeaned Native Americans. I’m speaking, of course, of the TV ads that featured the cartoon characters “Pow” and “Wow” and which utilized the slogan “woo-woo-woo-woo Welch’s!”**

** There are no YouTube capturing os the old Welch’s TV ads, but they were definitely made and broadcast. I’m not sure how many “woo”s were used in the ads — it could have been just two or three.

Hollywood Elsewhere is hoping and praying that Telluride ’20 will happen, and that a facsimile of an actual, real-deal award season will begin to take shape sometime around late October or certainly by early November, and that all will eventually end well.

2020’s Best Picture nominees will be judged and supported according to five determining factors: (a) how woke or welcome they are, or to what extent they focus on non-white or female characters, (b) how un-woke and potentially unwelcome they might be due to focusing on white-male characters, which are a generic no-no among Khmer Rouge cadres, (c) how good they are in terms of basic craft (directing, acting, editing, cinematography…I know, old-fashioned concept!), (d) how “desperate” Academy voters might feel in a COVID-damaged, take-what-you-can-get realm, and (e) whether or not they seem to defy the categories by way of occupying their own realm and passing alone some aspect of fundamental human truth.

I know nothing, of course. I’m just spitballing (yes, again), and I’m probably going to have to correct this post 15 or 16 times before 9 pm this evening.

I’m presuming that the top 12 contenders right now are (1) David Fincher‘s Mank (Netflix), (2) Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World (Sony), (3) Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater, (4) Thomas Kail and Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Hamilton (Disney), (5) Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix), (6) Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, (7) Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, (8) Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland (Searchlight), (9) Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods (Netflix), (10) George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix), (11) Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost (Screen Media) and (12) Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari (A24).

Jeremy Strong (Jerry Rubin) and Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman) between takes during filming of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Five of the 12 (Fincher, Sorkin, Howard, Lee, Wolfe) are Netflix releases, and three of these are paleface movies.

Contenders that focus on characters of color or women are Hamilton (non-European-descended actors portraying the Founding Fathers), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Da Five Bloods, Minari (Korean-American family struggling to hang on and stay afloat in ’80s Arkansas) and Nomadland (Frances McDormand as a roaming 60something woman of the highway).

Three of the Netflix movies — Mank, Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy — are about white characters and set decades in the past.

Is West Side Story going to be processed as a partly Puerto Rican tale, or will viewers and voters default to a shorthand notion that it’s a 63 year-old adaptation of a classic white-guy creation (Steven Spielberg, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, William Shakespeare)?

I don’t think Hamilton has a chance as it’s not really a film and was shot four years ago to boot. So in terms of the African American experience Lee and Wolfe are the only players, and the presumption is that the only stand-out Bloods contender is Delroy Lindo for Best Supporting Actor. Am I wrong?

A gut feeling is telling me that the five finalists are likely to be Mank, Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy, Nomadland and Stillwater. What do I know, right? Obviously the old school never-Netflix crowd isn’t going to be comfortable with this but what can they do about it?

Year in and year out my thinking is that high-calibre craft and emotional involvement are the most important factors, and that the old Tom Stoppard/Real Thing riff about “cricket bats” still applies.

Stoppard: “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

“This [cricket bat] here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly

“What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock it might…travel.”

In short, my hunch is that the cricket-bat factor is likely to be strongest with Stillwater, Hillbilly Elegy, Nomadland, Mank and The Trial of the Chicago 7. Just spitballing.

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On the 16th anniversary of the passing of Marlon Brando, here’s a riff that I posted on 2.25.05: “You never cared about this stuff, and you really couldn’t care less from wherever you might be now, but I’m profoundly pissed that the Oscar show producers (Gil Cates and Lou Horvitz) didn’t give you a special tribute reel of your own last night.

“Pissed and ashamed and a little bit disgusted, to be honest.

“There’s no question you were the most influential actor of the 20th Century. No one had the same impact-grenade effect…nobody. You’ve been among the deity of reigning pop icons for as long as I can remember (along with Humphrey Bogart, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, et. al.), and you’ll still be there 50 years from now. You rewrote the damn book.

Marlon Brando / 1924-2004

“But you were a bad (indifferent?) politician and a bit of a self-loather, and you let your unresolved, screwed-up stuff define too much of your life and image over the last 40-plus years.

“On the other hand Johnny Carson, whose departure happened just recently, was better liked by the industry and public, and he was a sublime Oscar host all those years. And so the Oscar guys decided to pay a special extended tribute to Carson and not you. They took, in short, the politically easy road and revealed their personal colors, not to mention the industry’s basic value system.

“Cates and Horvitz lumped the great Marlon Brando in with all the other dear and departed during last night’s ‘In Memoriam’ tribute…all right, they gave you the last slot at the end of the montage and used four stills instead of one or two…but it was still like someone saying matter-of-factly, minus any sense of sufficient sadness or reverence, that Marlon Brando is merely dead.

“The Brando tribute reel that Cates and Horvitz didn’t show (and probably never even cut together) should have proclaimed — trumpeted — that Marlon Brando lived. He lived and screamed and wept and re-ordered the universe as people knew it in 1947 in New York City, and then rocked Hollywood in the early to mid ’50s, and left them both in a state of permanent shakedown and reexamination by the time of his effective departure from creative myth-making in 1954 or ’55….and then shook things up again when he briefly re-emerged as The Man in the early ’70s (The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris).

“And all the Academy could muster was a more-or-less rote acknowledgement that you left the room in 7.1.04. Sorry, Bud, but you knew a long time ago what this town is basically about.”

Last night I finally watched episode #2 of HBO’s Perry Mason series. It continued, of course, with that smokey, gunky, grimly desaturated, grimey thing. But I finally figured out what’s really bothering me about this show, and here it is:

Matthew Rhys, who plays the titular lawyer-investigator, is too long of tooth to be playing a World War I veteran in 1931.

Combat soldiers are generally 18, 19 or 20, so let’s bend over backwards and say Mason was 20 when he fought against the Germans in 1918. That would make him 33 in 1931. Except by any biological yardstick Rhys looks at least 12 or 14 years older than that. He’s currently 45, but with his creased Elmer’s Glue-All complexion and facial features starting to sag he might as well be 47 or even 48. (Remember how Cary Grant looked in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House? He was 44 or thereabouts, but he looked 38 or 39 at the oldest.) And if Rhys looks 47 or 48 he might as well be 49 or 50.

It just doesn’t work to watch a guy who’s well into middle-age try to figure out if he wants to be a private-eye bottom-feeder or not. Professional identity crises are something you go through in your mid to late 20s or, at the very latest, your early 30s. I for one don’t want to watch a 45 year-old guy trying to figure out who and what he is. He should handled that shit 15 or 20 years ago. So there it is — my basic problem with Perry Mason.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has invited 819 actors and filmmakers to join up and pay their dues. The AMPAS membership tally now comes to now 9300. In keeping with recent patterns, the additions will further diversify the ranks. 45% of the fresh recruits are women and 36% are under-represented ethnic/racial minorities, for a total of 86%. The international (i.e., non-domestic) makeup of the new crew is 49% from 68 countries.

So are the remaining invitees who aren’t female or under-represented ethnic-racial minorities (what is that, 55% or less?) males or, God forbid, European-descended males with pale complexions?

As I understand the new-members situation, Scott Feinberg‘s Hollywood reporter headline — “Film Academy Invites 819 New Members, With 36 Percent People of Color” — isn’t quite right as the term “people of color” has been retired in favor of the above-mentioned URERM (i.e., under-represented ethnic/racial minorities).

For years the Academy has used the “person of color” term. Except that partly alluded, I’m told, to people of Spanish heritage and residence (i.e., citizens of Spain). In the eyes of the Academy, for example, Antonio Banderas was regarded (until today) as a person of color. Which is kind of odd as Spaniards are not “people of color” any more than Mick Jagger is. Anyone who’s seen a Pedro Almodovar film will tell you that while their hair is frequently dark (along with auburn, blonde and what-have-you), they all have fair, Wonder Bread-ish, Ozzie-and-Harriet complexions.

And so AMPAS is now going with the more egalitarian-sounding under-represented ethnic/racial minorities, which draws a sharper line. As long as they continue to keep white guy additions to a bare minimum, we’re good.

No sadness in the passing of the great Carl Reiner at age 98 — only cheers, gratitude and celebration. I worshipped the fact that he was on Twitter and a lucid Trump hater right to the end. Reiner once told Larry King that he didn’t post his tweets from a smart phone but from a desktop — whatever works.

A couple of days ago I happened to re-watch Reiner’s All Of Me (’84) and decided it was both his and Steve Martin‘s finest flick ever. Not to mention Lily Tomlin and Richard Libertini‘s.

My second favorite Reiner film is (and has been for a long time) Where’s Poppa? (’70), followed by the interesting if somewhat preachy Oh God! (’77) and finally The Jerk (’79), which also starred Martin.

On The Dick Van Dyke Show, which Reiner created, produced, cowrote and costarred in as the Sid Caesar-like Alan Brady, he was the original tempestuous, egotistical, insecure tyrant. (On a sitcom, I mean.) And he was a great straight man to Mel Brooks in their “2000 Year Old Man” routines, and I loved his angry impatient guy schtick in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (’63) and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (’66).

Reiner Wiki: “Of all the films I’ve directed, only Where’s Poppa? is universally acknowledged as a cult classic. A cult classic, as you may know, is a film that was seen by a small minority of the world’s filmgoers, who insist it is one of the greatest, most daring, and innovative moving pictures ever made. Whenever two or more cult members meet, they will quote dialogue from the classic and agree that ‘the film was ahead of its time.’ To be designated a genuine cult classic, it is of primary importance that the film fail to earn back the cost of making, marketing, and distributing it. Where’s Poppa? was made in 1969 for a little over $1 million. According to the last distribution statements I saw, it will not break even until it earns another $650,000.”

Reiner was a Jewish atheist, which he came to largely from the influence of the Third Reich. Quote #1: “I became an atheist after Hitler. I said, what is this? If there was a God, would he not be hearing 18 million people, 16 million Jews, or 20 million other people, saying, ‘Please God, don’t do this, make him stop?’ God was so busy doing what? Striping zebras or fixing the long necks of giraffes?” Quote #2: “I have a very different take on who God is. Man invented God because he needed him. God is us.”

Director-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, Carl Reiner in front of the Aero on 9.20.14.

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So it’s been semi-confirmed that the slightly more risque version of Psycho (half-glimpse of Janet Leigh side boob, extra stabbings of Martin Balsam) will be included in Universal Home Video’s forthcoming 4K UHD Alfred Hitchcock box set. Terrific, but it’s not enough. As I explained a couple of weeks ago, the only thing that will deliver serious tumescence will be the boxy (1.37:1) version of Psycho — a version that was shown on TV and pay cable tens of thousands of times during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. It was only in the mid aughts, or when the influence of Bob Furmanek and the 1.85 fascist cabal began to hold sway, that the idea of only showing a cleavered version of Hitchcock’s 1960 classic became the default go-to. HE believes that aspect ratio crimes should be prosecuted in the Hague, and that Furmanek, no offense, should be defendant #1 in the dock.