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Yesterday the combined forces of Steven Gaydos and “Norton Ghomestead‘ tried to discredit a popular notion that Pauline Kael’s epic-sized New Yorker rave of Bonnie and Clyde was a key factor in that 1967 film’s revival, following a dispiriting late-summer release.

Ghomestead maintained that “Warner Bros. promotion guys, realizing that savvy showmen in the south were doing well with [Bonnie and Clyde] as a Thunder Road-like tale of high spirited lawbreaking, smartly capitalized on that [and thereby gradually] made it a hit”.

Gaydos reposted his 2003 Variety piece (“Truth takes bullet with Clyde tale”) which basically said that the legend about Kael’s review is not supported by research and that the film gradually became a hit through old-fashioned blood, sweat and tears — i.e., the promotional kind.

HE reply: I see. Thanks, guys, for straightening me out. So to sum up (and please correct me if I’ve got this wrong), Pauline Kael’s landmark reassessment in The New Yorker had little if anything to do with saving Bonnie and Clyde. Instead it was the Warner promo guys re-selling it as a “Thunder Road-like tale of high-spirited lawbreaking” to redneck audiences.

A film inspired by the French New Wave, a film that was clearly ahead of its time, a film that Francois Truffaut was initially interested in but passed on, a film with an art-filmy impressionistic sequence when Bonnie and Clyde visit her frail old mom, and another when they’re found wounded and bloodied by Okies,,..this alternately edgy and poignant film was reborn when WB sales guys pitched it to Nehi Cream Soda-drinking yokels. So Pauline Kael was incidental at best. Got it. Check.

I’ll accept the Gaydos assessment — “Bonnie and Clyde [was] carefully nurtured from Montreal to Manhattan with both studio and private promotion, solid reviews and solid business and given time to build into a breakout hit just as dozens of other films of the era had” — blended with the impact of the Kael piece, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Without tossing out the redneck promotion side-story, the likeliest scenario is that Beatty saved the film (and his own financial ass) by refusing to back off in his dispute with the antagonistic Jack L. Warner, to the point of threatening legal action.

Wiki excerpt: ” At first, Warner Bros. did not promote Bonnie and Clyde for general release, but mounted only limited regional releases that seemed to confirm its misgivings about the film’s lack of commercial appeal.

“Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde‘s producer and star, complained to Warner Bros. that if the company was willing to go to so much trouble for Reflections in a Golden Eye (they had changed the coloration scheme at considerable expense), their neglect of his film, which was getting excellent press, suggested a conflict of interest; he threatened to sue the company.

“Warner Bros. gave Beatty’s film a general release. Much to the surprise of Warner Bros.’ management, the film eventually became a major box office success.”

Paul Campos has posted a 4.29 article on lawyersgunsmoney about Joe Biden accuser Tara Reade. It’s essential reading. Rather than rehashing, just read it and ask yourself for 15 or 20 seconds why Reade’s 4.6.19 account of what allegedly happened between her and Biden in ’93 was one thing, and something else entirely when she told it to NPR’s Katie Halper on 3.25.20.

Campos: “I first commented on the story [last] Monday because Lynda LaCasse told Business Insider that Reade had told her the far more extreme assault story in 1995 or 1996, when they were neighbors. What I didn’t know at the time was that LaCasse had spoken with Reade in 2019, when Reade publicized the first story,” etc.

Just read it, just read it.

Campos conclusion: “Now of course none of this is conclusive by any means. It’s possible that Reade is in fact telling the truth about what happened, or perhaps that she’s telling the truth about what she thinks happened, although it actually didn’t happen. But it seems far more probable, weighing all the available evidence, that she’s lying about the purported sexual assault.”

From “Trump erupts at campaign team as his poll numbers slide,” by AP’s Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire: “President Donald Trump erupted at his top political advisers last week when they presented him with worrisome polling data that showed his support eroding in a series of battleground states as his response to the coronavirus comes under criticism.

“’I am not fucking losing to Joe Biden!,” Trump repeated in a series of heated conference calls with his top campaign officials, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.”

15 years ago a bizarre but historic Spike Jonze commercial appeared. Called “Pardon Our Dust,” it was ostensibly about a forthcoming renovation of Gap stores. But many of us (myself included) immediately recognized that the actual focus was rage against the corporate dominance of American retail culture. Wild but thought-provoking, it depicted a sudden burst of rebellion by Gap employees and customers alike.

I remember having a sharp argument with David Poland about this. Poland, who always knows everything, pooh-poohed my interpretation. “You don’t get it,” I replied. “It’s about people breaking loose and venting their frustration by way of exhilaration and mad anarchy…it’s the finale of ‘The Day of the Locust‘.”

The metaphor of Greg Stillson, the lunatic presidential candidate in Stephen King and David Cronenberg‘s The Dead Zone, is as American as apple pie — a flag-waving monster sociopath. Many believe that Stillson and Donald Trump are cut from the same cloth. Nine and a half years ago I noted that Sarah Palin seemed Stillson-esque on a certain level. So we all know the drill. Now King has said in so many words that Stillson is Trump and vice versa.

From a 4.26 N.Y. Times Magazine interview with author and twitter-hound from Maine:

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All below-the-line people look the same on movie sets — T-shirts, baseball caps, comfort shoes, hoodies, jeans, work boots, mandals with socks.

An electrician or wardrobe person or union carpenter or sound recorder will never dress like, say, Michelangelo Antonioni did on the set of The Passenger or Brian DePalma while shooting Scarface or Dressed To Kill (i.e., safari jacket) or Steven Soderbergh while directing Magic Mike.

Because the below-the-line Hollywood rulebook states they will never step outside the fashion realm of a basic sound-stage grunt. Not a complaint or lament — just how it is.

It was the same way 50 and 60 years ago, only different. Union guys who worked on sound-stage shoots wore the same regulation outfit — (a) a checked short-sleeve sports shirt or long-sleeve business shirt, (b) a pair of baggy, pleated, hand-me-down business pants, and (c) brown or black lace-up shoes with white socks.

On top of which sound stage guys of the ’50s and ’60s were almost always bald or balding. Somewhere between 85% and 90%. And if they had more than a few follicles they always looked like beefy-faced mafiosos or longshoreman from On The Waterfront.

Look at the Ten Commandments guy helping Charlton Heston — like a guy who might have worked at a small-town hardware store or at a shop where they built raw wooden furniture. Look at the bald guy handling the boom mike during the shooting of Psycho.

Hollywood union guys all had this shlubby look…a million guys who looked like the brother or cousin of “Hogeye,” the lighting guy who shined the light on Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

50-foot-tall terra cotta T-Rex located at 14655 Mulholland Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90077 (6 Bed, 9 Bath Single-Family Home, listing for nearly $6M).

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All my life I’ve dreamt of sailing a long distance on a sizable schooner. Five or six months, maybe longer. Not as an owner, God forbid, but as a traveller somehow paying my way. Or as a guest or crew member or whatever.

Down the Pacific coast to Mexico and Central America, through the Panama Canal and around the Caribbean, stopping in Belize, Cuba, Turks and Caicos and wherever the spirit points. And then across the Atlantic to the Canaries and then through the Strait of Gibraltar and then all around the Mediterranean — Spain’s Costa del Sol, southern France, Italy, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Egypt. Maybe even push on across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia.

This 37 year-old Rod Stewart music video got me going. The schooner it was filmed on, I mean. I went looking for a facsimile and quickly found one — the Atlantic, a ten-year-old, three-masted schooner, 212 feet long, steel hull, currently moored off the coast of Italy. God knows what a craft this size would cost, but if you’re loaded…

Excitement, adventure, exotic climes, unfamiliar sights and sounds, all of it nourishing. But never, ever on a grotesquely over-sized cruise ship.

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I’ve been asked to remove yesterday’s riff about Capone (Vertical, 5.12), which I saw the night before last. It wasn’t a “review” but I called it “a trip…plotless but flavorful and quirky as fuck thanks to Tom Hardy, and with one terrific, stand-up-and-cheer scene.” I was referring to the “If I Was King Of The Forest” sing-along. Nonetheless a Vertical rep asked me not to “react” to Capone until Monday, 5.11 at 9 am Pacific. The film opens (i.e., begins streaming) on Tuesday, 5.12.

So I’ve substituted the post for a comment-thread riff about why the producers dumped the original title, Fonzo. Which, trust me, is what the film should be called. Capone is nothing — a generic chickenshit title.

No doubt a certain percentage of the potential viewing public might have presumed that this now-discarded title had something to do with Henry Winkler’s Happy Days character, Fonzie. (Who was famously referred to, don’t forget, by Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character in 1994’s Pulp Fiction).

Perhaps another group might have wondered if Fonzo might be somehow related to Ronald Reagan‘s Bedtime for Bonzo chimpanzee, perhaps a great-great-great grandson with a life and an identity all his own.

Still another demographic might have speculated that “fonzo” is a 21st Century manifestation of gonzo journalism a la Hunter S. Thompson.

Or perhaps a new kind of pasta (i.e., “fonzoni”) created by the people behind Rice-a-Roni, “the San Francisco treat,”

We can play these stupid word association games all day long. The American viewing public is brilliant at this.

Then again there’s always the remote possibility that prospective viewers might regard or respect “Fonzo” as a new permutation of the Al Capone legend — simply an Italian-American nickname used by friends of the famous Chicago gangster in the same way that “Fonzie” was a nickname for Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli.

Naahh, scratch that — too challenging.

VistaVision (large format) black-and-white films were a relative rarity in the ’50s, and they disappeared when VistaVision went away in ’61 or thereabouts. If you have a special affinity for black and white (as I do), you’re pretty much obliged to give the Amazon HD versions of William Wyler‘s The Desperate Hours (’55), Robert Mulligan‘s Fear Strikes Out (’57) and Michael Curtiz and Hal Wallis‘s King Creole (’58) a looksee. All shot in VistaVision. Four or five others went this way.

Vulture‘s Mark Harris has written a pissy, dismissive, incurious review of Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing.” He’s certainly entitled to his opinion, but reading the piece gave me stomach acid. Whereas I felt no adverse stomach sensations and experienced mostly pleasure while reading Allen’s book, especially the portion that covers his Brooklyn childhood and teen years.

Seriously — the first 80 or 90 pages of “Apropos of Nothing” are luscious. They’ll put a smile on your face. And Harris more or less pisses on them, in part because Allen delivers the same kind of riff that he used in Broadway Danny Rose, when Allen’s titular character describes a certain female cousin looking “like something you’d find in a live bait store.” Tribal self-loathing, par for the course, etc.

As I wrote on 3.29, Allen has a voice and a style and a certain shticky attitude, and much of the book is like listening to some streetcorner wise guy tell a story from a bar stool. And I’m sorry but unless you’re an Inspector Javert for the #MeToo community, “Apropos of Nothing” is an engaging read. Really. It’s easy to process. It flows right along. And it’s funny and cuts right through for the most part.

Most of Harris’s review makes a case that “Apropos of Nothing” isn’t the deepest or the most probing piece of literary self-excavation or self-examination ever published, which is true. But I weathered the mundane or underwhelming or overly glib parts. Harris, on the other hand, doesn’t like the fact that Allen is who he is, and that his voice is his voice.

“If you can read “Apropos of Nothing” with that in mind, “you’ll have a better-than-decent time with it,” I wrote. “And by that I mean diverting, chuckly, passable, fascinating, occasionally hilarious and nutritional as far as it goes.”

There are two portions of Harris’s review that made me fall over backwards in my chair.

“I understand those moviegoers who have no desire ever to watch or rewatch another Woody Allen movie,” Harris writes.

He does? One of our finest film historians and a highly perceptive film critic “understands” the nonsensical position of Woody haters, which is based on nothing but a blind belief that Dylan Farrow‘s account of what may or may not have happened on 8.4.92 is 100% reliable? There is nothing in terms of evidence or professional opinion (not to mention the account posted by Moses Farrow) that backs up Dylan’s account, but Harris nonetheless “understands” (seems to have no major argument with, feels a certain allegiance with) their ignorance. Shafts of light piercing through the clouds!

“But as a film historian, I can’t remove [Allen’s] films from my cultural vista,” Harris adds, “because they’re not only his. [For] Annie Hall is also an essential part of Diane Keaton’s filmography, and of Gordon Willis’s, and of Colleen Dewhurst’s, and of Jewish filmmaking, and of New York romantic comedy.”

In other words, if it weren’t for the charms of Annie Hall plus the creative participations of Keaton, Willis and Dewhurst, Harris might be tempted to remove Allen’s films from his “cultural vista”? I’m not going to bellow like a buffalo and slap my forehead as I list all the great and near-great films Allen has directed and written and acted in. But I will say this: I’m stunned.

Harris excerpt: “Dwight Garner, who artfully tweezed this book for the New York Times, wrote that he believes that ‘the less you’ve read about this case, the easier it is to render judgment on it.’ I have little to add to that except how deeply I wish I had read less.”

Harris seems to be saying that he hasn’t read Moses Farrow’s history of what happened between Woody, Mia and Dylan. If he has he certainly hasn’t mentioned this in the review. If he hasn’t read the essay, Harris should know that most of the details and accusations against Mia in Woody’s book are backed up by Moses, who by the way is a professional marriage and family therapist.

There’s a passage in Allen’s book that “stopped me in my tracks”, Harris writes. It says that “[Mia] didn’t like raising the kids and didn’t really look after them. It is no wonder that two adopted children would be suicides. A third would contemplate it, and one lovely daughter who struggled with being HIV-positive into her thirties was left by Mia to die alone of AIDS in a hospital on Christmas morning.”

But if memory serves this is all in Moses’ essay. Is Harris implying that Moses’ perspective and viewpoint aren’t worth considering? If he’s not implying this, why the hell didn’t he at least mention that Moses and Woody are on the same page?

Repeating: Expressing disgust at a candid, well-written (if occasionally redundant and overly gracious in terms of costars and collaborators) memoir by one of the most acclaimed film artists of our time, and in so doing signaling lockstep solidarity with #MeToo cancelling, is not a becoming profile, to put it mildly.

The brilliant Shirley Knight has passed at age 83. A baby buster from Oklahoma, Knight’s acting career spanned nearly 60 years (’59 to 2018). She peaked between ’60 and the late ’70s, but never slowed down. Her last film, Periphery, was released two years ago.

Knight’s performance as the escaped housewife in Francis Coppola‘s The Rain People (’69) is probably her strongest career highlight, followed by her Oscar-nominated turns in Dark At The Top Of The Stairs (which I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never seen) and Sweet Bird of Youth (’62).

Her relatively small supporting role in Richard Lester‘s Juggernaut (as a cruise-line passenger who has a fly-by-night affair with the ship’s captain, played by Omar Sharif) wasn’t any kind of career milestone, but her performance was first-rate. Her best moment was when she danced with Roy Kinnear.

More recently I was impressed by her mother-of-Helen Hunt performance in As Good As It Gets (’97), which was eccentric, spirited and funny.

I never saw Knight’s Tony-nominated performance in Kennedy’s Children (’76), and I don’t even remember her in Endless Love, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or Grandma’s Boy…sorry. And I never saw her in Redwood Highway, a 2013 indie in which she costarred with Tom Skerritt.

I spoke to Knight at a party about four or five years ago. I told her I wished I could re-view The Lie, a 1973 live-TV drama that was written by Ingmar Bergman and dealt with a stale upper-middle-class marriage. It was captured live and on videotape at the CBS Television Center on Beverly and Fairfax. Knight played George Segal‘s wife who was having an affair with Robert Culp, or maybe the other way around. (The fact that it included a discreet semi-nude scene was striking for television back then.) Knight said she’d never seen it, and didn’t know if it had been offered for rent or sale or anything. Apparently a cruddy-looking MUBI version was viewable not long ago.

Here’s a lively q & a from 2010.

Knight in The Lie, a 1973 live TV presentation that was written by Ingmar Bergman.