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From “Fox Feels the Pressure From Disney as Film Flops Mount,” by Variety‘s Matt Donnelly and Brent Lang: Taika Watiti‘s Jojo Rabbit, allegedly a doo-wacky, doo-wacky wah-wah satire of Nazism, “might prove a little too edgy for Disney brass accustomed to producing movies suitable for parents and kids. Searchlight has started to screen the film for its new parent company. Halfway through one recent viewing one [Disney] executive grew audibly uncomfortable, worrying aloud that the material would alienate Disney fans. His unease may have been over the film’s cutting-edge satire, but it was also an expression of the culture clash taking place as the two studios embark on their new union.”

Producer friend: “Recently went over to Fox to hear David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield , the co-presidents of Fox Searchlight, speak about the future of the company. They ran a short film montage before of the studio’s 25 years of making award-winning films. An impressive presentation. They both stressed that Searchlight made iconic movies for a price and won awards in the process, which promotes healthy box office. They said we’re looking for the original idea, not the obvious formula, and cited The Shape of Water as the film about the mute girl who has sex with the fish man. They got a standing ovation.”

From 8.11 N.Y. Times report by By Katie Benner, Danielle Ivory and Richard A. Oppel Jr.: “Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who apparently hanged himself in a federal jail in Manhattan, was supposed to have been checked by guards every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not being followed the night before he was found, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of his detention said.

“In addition, the jail had transferred his cellmate and allowed Mr. Epstein to be housed alone in a cell just two weeks after he had been taken off suicide watch, a decision that also violated the jail’s normal procedure, two officials said.”

Sunday afternoon N.Y. Post update: “There’s no surveillance video of the incident during which Jeffrey Epstein apparently hanged himself in a federal lockup in Lower Manhattan, law-enforcement officials told The Post on Sunday.

“Although there are cameras in the 9 South wing where the convicted pedophile was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, they are trained on the areas outside the cells and not inside, according to sources familiar with the setup there.”

Frank Capra‘s It Happened This Morning, as featured in the “Please, God” comment thread:

…the conspiracy crowd always rushes in and sets up house. Earlier today a retweet by President Trump indicated that he, too, thinks something probably stinks in Denmark. Is it possible that the decision to take Jeffrey Epstein off suicide watch was a matter of simple stupidity and/or incompetence? Yes, I suppose. But highly unlikely.

No one in the left or right conspiracy camp will ever believe that Epstein wasn’t “allowed” in some bumbling bureaucratic way to take his life. Many super-wealthy types (including the Clintons) are breathing easy today, but the first order of business should be the prison cell video. If Epstein offed himself without assistance (as most believe), this was almost certainly captured on security cam. If it turns out the cell camera wasn’t working or had been turned off…c’mon!

N.Y. Times reporter Ali Watkins writes that after attempting suicide on 7.23, Epstein “was placed on suicide watch and received daily psychiatric evaluations, a person familiar with his detention said. But just six days later, on July 29, Mr. Epstein, 66, was taken off the watch for reasons that remained unclear on Saturday, the person said.”

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Of all the Abbey Road tracks, “You Never Give Me Your Money” is my far and away favorite. Especially the piano and guitar work, and in particular the “magic feeling” section. I don’t know the exact release date of the Abbey Road 50th Anniversary remastered re-issue but c’mon…how much better can it sound? There ain’t no aural bump gonna blow through your mind. There are extra tracks and whatnot, but give it a rest. The actual 50th anniversary is 9.26.19 in the U.K. and 10.1.19 stateside.

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Updated Thursday evening: It’s hardly sticking my neck out to say that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman will definitely be Best Picture nominated, and that it’s looking like the odds-on favorite to win. Because apart from the story being about Robert De Niro‘s Frank Sheeran taking a long, hard look at his life, it’s also a Scorsese sum-upper — a kind of “who am I and what have I accomplished?” movie, the fifth and final Scorsese gangster flick that will assess the previous four (Goodfellas, The Departed, Mean Streets, Casino) along with itself, and issue a late-in-life assessment of the moral, ethical and aesthetic meat of the matter. Half street saga, half melancholy elegy. A cinematic equivalent. if you will, of Frank Sinatra‘s “It Was A Very Good Year.”

Speaking as an X-factor white guy from a middle-class New Jersey and Connecticut upbringing, I don’t feel repelled or disgusted by my Anglo-Saxon heritage and family history. I deeply regret the cruelty visited upon immigrants and various cultures of color by whites, but the fact that racist attitudes were common throughout most of the 20th Century and certainly the 19th Century doesn’t mean that white people (more particularly my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, reaching back to the mid 1800s) were inherently evil.

By current standards they seem insufficiently evolved, of course, but they were born into a certain culture and were dealt certain cards, and most carried the weight as best they could. They weren’t born with horns on their heads.

Nor do I feel that elemental decency is absent in the majority of white people today. I feel profoundly repelled by the attitudes of your backwater Trump supporters, of course, but they are not me. I come from a family of “good”, well-educated, imperfect people who believed in hard work, discipline and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and who exuded decency and compassion for the most part. I am not the devil’s spawn, and neither is my Russian-born wife or my two sons. I’ve witnessed and dealt with ignorant behavior all my life, but I’ve never bought into the idea of Anglo-Saxon culture being inherently evil. Please.

Bottom line: Rosanna Arquette‘s feelings of tribal self-loathing is what many Americans can’t stand about progressive lefties.

Pontius Pilate by way of Gore Vidal: “Where there is great striving, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great. We progress and mature by fault.”

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It was announced earlier today that the third installment in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise will be an adaptation of Jeffrey Toobin’s “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President.”

Pic will focus on Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, and the impeachment trial that most Americans were either bored or appalled by. (“Impeach Clinton for lying about getting a blowjob in the Oval Office?…please!”) Beanie Feldstein as Lewinsky, Sarah Paulson as the duplicitous Linda Tripp and Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones. No word on who will play Bill and Hillary.

Feldstein doesn’t strike me as the right actress to play Lewinsky. ML was 24 or 25 at the time and maybe a tiny bit zaftig, but she wasn’t exactly a Beanie. By which I mean she wasn’t…am I allowed to say chubby without getting jumped on?

Presumably it’s going to be about a selfish, super-powerful, silver-haired dude preying on a semi-innocent victim, but my understanding has always been that Lewinsky flirted ardently with Bill and that he flirted right back. ML wasn’t some baahing little lamb in the woods — she made an ambitious and calculated play for him, and then scored, and then was dumb enough to blab it all to Tripp, whom she had to know was in with the righties.

It would make a fascinating story if Murphy brings in all the contradictions and complexities. But as a straight-from-the-shoulder #MeToo saga? Life isn’t that simple.

Tatyana had never seen Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants, so we watched it the night before last. I was so glad we did. It’s almost eight years old now (having opened on 11.18.11), and quite the comforting, mature, finely-aged bottle of wine. So well written, so family-friendly in a non-puerile way, and so well acted by everyone, top to bottom. George Clooney was slightly better in Michael Clayton, but he was awfully good in this. Not to mention Judy Greer, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley, Matthew Lillard.

I was so angry that The Artist (a gimmicky trifle that no one cares about now) won the Best Picture Oscar in early ’12, and I’m still flummoxed by that. What were people thinking? The New York Film Critics Circle gave it their Best Film and Best Director trophy…shame on you! Nobody has even thought about this damn film for the last seven and a half years, and you guys thought it was just wonderful. You were on your knees. Philistines!

The winner should have been either The Descendants or Moneyball.

The Descendants, The Artist and Moneyball aside, seven 2011 films were nominated for Best Picture — Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris and War Horse. Only one of these films matters now — i.e., the Woody. I wouldn’t watch War Horse with a knife at my back now. (I had a rough enough time with it initially.) I mostly hated Hugo; ditto Extremely Loud. The Help….meh.

Could either The Descendants or Moneyball be greenlit for theatrical in the present realm? I could be wrong but my suspicion is that The Descendants would probably be a Netflix or Amazon project today. Which wouldn’t be a problem, of course. It just wouldn’t be a primarily theatrical thing, first and foremost.

George Clooney, Alexander Payne in Telluride’s Sheridan Bar — 9.2.11.

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A couple of months ago I shared some ambivalent, somewhat negative feelings I have about Oliver Stone‘s The Doors, which is why I haven’t purchased the recently released 4K Bluray. But a few days ago Stone posted some pics of a screening of this 1991 film in Bologna’s grand piazza. God, to have been there! Huge crowd, dark blue sky, high-tech projection, centuries-old architecture…peace and tranquility.

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I prefer to sidestep the biological reality of Ryan O’Neal being 78, and to think of him as the guy he was in the early to mid ’70s, when things were as good as they would ever get for him.

I had two minor run-ins with O’Neal in the ’80s. The first was after an evening screening of the re-issued Rear Window** at West L.A.’s Picwood theatre (corner of Pico and Westwood) in late ’83. As the crowd spilled onto Pico O’Neal and his date (probably Farrah Fawcett) were walking right behind me, and I heard O’Neal say “that was sooo good!” Being a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, this sparked a feeling of kinship.

Four years later I was a Cannon publicity guy and charged with writing the press kit for Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which didn’t turn out so well. I for one liked Mailer’s perverse sense of humor.

I did an hour-long phoner with O’Neal, and my opening remark was that he was becoming a really interesting actor now that he was in his mid 40s with creased features. He was too good looking when younger, I meant, and so his being 46 added character and gravitas. O’Neal was skeptical of my assessment but went along — what the hell.

In fact O’Neal’s career had been declining for a good five or six years at that point. He knew it, I knew it — we were doing a press-kit-interview dance because there was nothing else to say or do.

O’Neal’s last hit film had been Howard Zeiff and Gail Parent‘s The Main Event (’79), which critics panned but was popular with audiences. He had starred in four mezzo-mezzos before that — Peter Bogdanovich‘s Nickelodeon (’76), Richard Attenbrough‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), Walter Hill‘s The Driver (’78) and John Korty‘s Oliver’s Story.

Consider this HE anecdote about some 41-year-old graffiti on an Oliver’s Story poster.

O’Neal’s career peak lasted for five years (’70 to ’75) and was fortified by a mere four films — Arthur Hiller‘s Love Story (’70), Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (’72) and Paper Moon (’73), and Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (’75). (The Wild Rovers and The Thief Who Came to Dinner, which O’Neal also made in the early ’70s, were regarded as mostly negligible and therefore didn’t count.)

O’Neal has said for decades that his career never really recovered from Barry Lyndon — Kubrick had changed the film entirely in editing, and had made him look like a clueless and opportunistic Shallow Hal of the 18th Century. Plus the film had lost money.

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