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In yesterday’s Paths of Glory thread (“And Today’s Verdict Is…?“), LexG claimed that my recent assertion about Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood being based on the 1969 situations of Burt Reynolds and redneck movie director Hal Needham is a “Wells loony tune” riff. LexG allegedly knows this town pretty well, and yet he says “where did this gem come from?”

I’ll tell him where it came from — (a) common knowledge and (b) Reynolds and Needham‘s Wiki pages.

Tarantino will probably tap-dance or shilly-shally when some junket journalist asks him this point blank, but it all fits together. It’s right there on the page. The 1969 career situations of DiCaprio’s “Rick Dalton” (struggling, pushing-40 TV actor) and Pitt’s “Cliff Booth” (Dalton’s same-aged stuntman-buddy who shares his home) mirror Reynolds-Needham. Fucking obvious. Okay, with a little Clint Eastwood thrown in.

Cliff Booth, Rick Dalton in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

Burt Reynolds, Hal Needham during filming of Smokey and the Bandit.

In ’69 Reynolds, who had been acting on TV since the late ’50s (when he was in his early 20s), was a steadily working but diminished “known quantity” who was more or less poking along with B-level features like Sam Whiskey and 100 Rifles and short-lived TV series like Hawk and Dan August.

Reynolds had been trying and trying but was unable, during the first year of the Nixon administration when he was 33 years old, to break through into the bucks-up realm of A-level features.

And then, after 15 years in the business (when he was 20 or 21 he was told he couldn’t play a supporting role in Sayonara because he looked too much like Marlon Brando), Reynolds finally made it over the hump and became BURT REYNOLDS.

He accomplished this with the one-two-three punch of (a) his breakthrough lead role (studly survivalist Lewis with the bow-and-arrow) in John Boorman‘s Deliverance (’72), (b) that Cosmopolitan centerfold and (c) becoming a talk-show star with his amusing, self-deprecating patter in chats with Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and David Frost.

In the space of a few months Reynolds was no longer Mr. Semi-Obscuro but suddenly the cool guy whom everyone liked and admired.

Reynolds Wiki excerpt: “Deliverance director John Boorman cast Reynolds on the basis of a talk-show appearance. ‘It’s the first time I haven’t had a script with Paul Newman‘s and Robert Redford‘s fingerprints all over it,’ Reynolds joked. ‘The producers actually came to me first.’

“‘I’ve waited 15 years to do a really good movie,’ Reynolds said in 1972. ‘I made so many bad pictures. I was never able to turn anyone down. The greatest curse in Hollywood is to be a well-known unknown.'”

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A digital 4K restored version of Lawrence of Arabia played last weekend at the Bedford Playhouse. It was only the second time that this super-luscious, extra-detailed version (sourced from Grover Crisp‘s 8K scan) had been shown to an east coast audience — the first time was six years ago under the aegis of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Original Lawrence restorer Robert Harris, who introduced the Bedford screening, told me this morning it’s the finest looking version he’s ever seen, including any and all 70mm presentations.

The Bedford Playhouse has a 37-foot wide screen. Sony delivered the film on two DCPs. If only I’d had the time and scratch to fly back and attend. I’m told that the 4K version has screened out here, but I’ve never heard of any such showings.

You can stream the 4K Lawrence via Amazon, of course, but as good as it looks you’re not really getting the full whack. 4K streaming delivers something like 2.6K, depending on the breaks — only physical media can deliver the full visual boatload. High-end connoisseurs have been pleading for a 4K Lawrence Bluray for years, but the market for 4K Blurays is flat, limited and possibly sinking, as we all know. Believe or not, 45% of physical media enthusiasts STILL watch films on DVD.

Last year a European audio-reference site, avcesar.com, reports that Sony will deliver a 4K Lawrence disc sometime this year**. Here’s hoping.

** The site also reports that Warner Home Entertainment will deliver 4k Blurays of Heat and Wyler’s Ben-Hur in 2019.

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I’ve just invited the usual suspects to the annual night-before-with-journalist-pallies La Pizza gathering in Cannes. It’ll happen on Monday, 5.13 at 7:30 pm. I’ve made the reservation for 20 or 30…whoever shows up. Pass along the invite to whomever I’ve missed. Bring euros.

Special added message: “I realize that the old La Pizza gang of five years ago is no more, in a sense, and that for the last couple of years the congregation has been divided into a kind of film critics’ version of the Hatfields and McCoys — i.e., wokesters vs. less woke. I hope this won’t get in the way and that politics can be left outside, but I’ll understand if certain wokesters decide to gather for their own night-before shindig. — Jeffrey Wells, HE”

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The original 181-minute cut, I mean. Saw it on the Universal lot. Rough sit. I never saw the 129-minute Alan Smithee version.

Needless to say this Manhattan coffee shop scene between Brad Pitt and Claire Forlani would’ve worked better without the double-hit ragdoll body bounce-flop…really bad CG. Imagine if just after Forlani walks off she hears the screech of tires and vague sounds of commotion, but doesn’t realize Pitt is dead until she reads about it the next day. Maybe a small photo in the N.Y. Daily News. It’s always better if you can nudge the audience into imagining a scene of violence rather than hitting them over the head with it.

BTW: Pitt was no spring chicken when Meet Joe Black was shot (he was around 34. had made Se7en three years earlier) but he looks 24 or 25.

Posted last night by Showbiz411‘s Roger Friedman: “We all want it, believe me. Everybody wants it. But the reality, I am told, is that Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not a lock for the Cannes Film Festival next month. Sony is set to release the potential blockbuster on July 26, but [nine] days from the big announcement of Cannes movies, the word is that the film may be ‘OUT’ for the time being.”

The rumor is that Tarantino is scrambling to finish the editing in time, but, Friedman writes, “it may take longer than April 18th” — Cannes announcement day — “or even May 21st, when it’s supposed to show at Cannes on the 25th anniversary of Pulp Fiction at Cannes.”

Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Rick Dalton” and Brad Pitt’s “Cliff Booth”, largely based upon Burt Reynolds and stuntman buddy Hal Needham, at a time when TV actor Reynolds was struggling to get into A-level features but without much success.

HE’s take on this? “Not finished in time for Cannes” = Sony management is afraid that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood may get buckshot by Cannes critics and has concluded it’s safer to just open it in July on the strength of the DiCaprio-Pitt-Robbie casting and the 1969 old-Hollywood-nostalgia marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that the main character — Leonardo DiCaprio‘s “Rick Dalton”, a TV actor trying but failing to break into features — is largely based upon Burt Reynolds, who was also trying in ’69 to maneuver his way into grade-A features but who didn’t get there until his starring role in John Boorman‘s Deliverance (’72). Brad Pitt‘s “Cliff Booth”, Rick’s longtime stunt double, is of course based upon Reynold’s good stuntman buddy Hal Needham, who went to directing redneck car-chase movies and who was ironically instrumental in destroying Reynolds’ career in the early ’80s.

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From Cannes press office: On Tuesday, 5.14, Jim Jarmusch‘s The Dead Don’t Die will be screened at the opening of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival (5.14 to 5.25), and in competition — a world premiere. HE passed along a rumor about Jarmsuch’s film going to Cannes ten days ago.

It certainly matters to me if Iggy Pop is playing a zombie, but will it matter to average low-rent horror fans (i.e., the less-than-discerning types who loved It)? You have to ask this stuff.

Tell me how this official synopsis differs from George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead (’68), except for the name of the town: “In the sleepy small town of Centerville, something is not quite right. The moon hangs large and low in the sky, the hours of daylight are becoming unpredictable and animals are beginning to exhibit unusual behaviors. No one quite knows why. News reports are scary and scientists are concerned. But no one foresees the strangest and most dangerous repercussion that will soon plague Centerville: The Dead Don’t Die — they rise from their graves and savagely attack and feast on the living — and the citizens of the town must battle for their survival.”

When Romero made his groundbreaking indie zombie film in 1968, there was an actual metaphor in play. An idea about debased or corroded human behavior somehow causing a rupture in the natural life-death cycle. Now the zombie thing is just another brand — a horror concept that became a movie and TV genre. Jarmusch being Jarmusch, I’m presuming that some kind of attempt has been made to refresh the metaphor.

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Daryl Duke and Curtis Hanson‘s The Silent Partner (’78), which I saw brand-new but haven’t re-watched since, was an excellent variation on Strangers on a Train. It was actually a remake of Think of a Number, a 1969 Danish film written and directed by Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt, and based on a novel by Danish writer Anders Bodelsen.

It delivered Elliott Gould‘s last alluring, well-written lead role before he downshifted into character parts, and Chris Plummer played a deliciously demonic bank robber and extortionist. A new Kino Lorber Bluray pops on 6.18.19.

Here’s an enjoyable Sunset Gun appreciation (12.24.16), or more precisely a discussion of the film by Goyld and Kim Morgan.

I’m also a big fan of Duke’s Payday (’72), the drama about a country-music star shitheel (Rip Torn). No Bluray or HD streaming as we speak.

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Posted by yours truly at the tail end of yesterday’s comment thread about Pete Buttigieg: “An NBC News poll says 68% of Americans are cool with a gay presidential candidate — a big change since 2006. 14% enthusiastic, 54% comfortable. Under 35s are overwhelmingly supportive — 75%. 56% of seniors are cool with the idea — up from 31% in 2006.

“The 32% of the general populace that doesn’t like the idea represents your bedrock Trumpster base — deep-red Bumblefucks, ultra-staunch conservative Christians, old-realm types who long for a Frank Capra-Jimmy Stewart-Bedford Falls world plus alpha-male homophobes and racists.

The irony, of course, is that if the old-realmers would open their eyes they’d realize that the left-Christian Pete Buttigieg is Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart and Bedford Falls. He just has a husband at home rather than Donna Reed. Plus his campaign bio says he’s never succumbed to thoughts of suicide.

“You can say it’s worrying that 32% are opposed to a gay Prez, but then again only a relatively small percentage of Americans have even given Mayor Pete a cursory once-over. It takes the Average Joe months to catch up. Plus that 32% of naysayers could very possibly diminish over the course of the next 12 to 15 months.”

In response to this Spicerpalooza said, “The people who won’t vote for Pete because he’s gay would never vote for a Democrat anyway.”

Gray suit and a black T-shirt…cool. But with shiny white sneakers? I’ve always harbored an inexplicable animal dislike of Taron Egerton, and this cinches it. The white shoes aren’t entirely Egerton’s doing — it’s the fashion frame of reference he grew up with. I’ve long contended that Millennials (Egerton was born in November ’89) have the worst fashion sense of any generation in the history of western civilization.

I think it’s kinda great that Francis Coppola, who will turn 80 in three or four days, is really and truly planning to direct Megalopolis, which he’s been preparing for many years and almost got rolling 18 or 19 years ago.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported this earlier today.

Pic is “the story of an architect’s battle to build an ideal world…a hero’s fight to realize his dream to build a city of the future,” Coppola said in ’01.

On 9.16.15 One Room With A View‘s David Brake described the lead character, Serge Catalane, as “a genius architect, controversial icon and lover of debauchery.”

Coppola to Fleming: “I plan this year to begin my longstanding ambition to make a major work utilizing all I have learned during my long career, beginning at age 16 doing theater, and that will be an epic on a grand scale, which I’ve entitled Megalopolis. It is unusual. It will be a production on a grand scale with a large cast. It makes use of all of my years of trying films in different styles and types culminating in what I think is my own voice and aspiration.”

Megalopolis is “not within the mainstream of what is produced now, but I am intending and wishing and in fact encouraged, to begin production this year,” Coppola said.

Due respect, but inspiration and the chance to deliver a profound artistic creation is usually something that passes through you, like stormy weather through Kansas. You either manage to do something with it or you don’t, but all film artists of note have peak periods in which they’re channelling Godly currents. Mostly this happens in their late 30s, 40s and 50s. There are always exceptions to the rule, of course, but it is not an expression of disrespect to say that Coppola is well past his spiritual and creative grace period, and that he’s almost certainly not going to get it back at age 80 or 81. He might, yes, but look at the odds.

Coppola’s last ambitious failure was 35 years ago — The Cotton Club. His 21st Century indie films — Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt — were entirely negligible. He obviously had a monumental run in the ’70s. His last ambitious mixed-bagger was One From The Heart, which premiered 38 years ago. He’s had his day. We all know this.

I nonetheless find it wholly admirable and salutable that he’s planning to make Megalopolis soon. All power to him.

Earlier today the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s Barry Hertz tweeted an opinion about Will Smith in Disney’s Aladdin…a three-word opinion, I mean, that is certain to become a meme and live in a kind of film-twitter infamy:

“New look at Aladdin includes full performance of ‘Friend Like Me’ (including Will Smith “briefly beat-boxing”). I’m going to be honest: it is pure nightmare fuel. It just looks…unnatural. The #CinemaCon audience liked it, though. Wishful thinking, I guess.”

What does “pure nightmare fuel” mean? That Hertz was suddenly imagining an actual nightmare scenario in which the blue-skinned Smith genie is chasing him around a big cave and threatening to turn him into an animal?

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