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Deadline Mike Fleming reported earlier today that Mel Gibson will co-write and direct a remake of Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch for Warner Bros. It hasn’t been stated one way or the other if Gibson’s Bunch will be a straight remake or something else, but one of the paramount Hollywood rules is that you don’t remake a universally admired classic film — you remake a film that wasn’t so good in the first place but which your remake can improve upon.

What could possibly be gained by remaking The Wild Bunch? I know — there are tens of millions of idiots out there who can’t be bothered to stream the original but who would pay to see Gibson’s version, etc. What’s Gibson going to do, make it bloodier? Is he going to find middle-aged actors who can out-point the original performances by William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, etc.?

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Legendary Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back producer Gary Kurtz has passed from cancer at age 78. Condolences to friends, family, fans and colleagues. He was a realist, a great fellow, a true creative and a straight-shooter.

I was lucky enough to have met and interviewed Kurtz once, about 19 or 20 years ago. It was actually a tag-team interview with Film Threat‘s Chris Gore. It happened in a lobby of some Burbank office building. Kurtz had become one of my heroes after I read his disparaging comments about grand poobah George Lucas, whom he parted company with sometime after the release of Empire and before principal photography began on Return of the Jedi. Kurtz repeated these observations and more during our chat.

Wiki excerpt: “Kurtz claimed that after Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, Lucas became convinced that audiences no longer cared about the story and were simply there for thrills and entertainment, and began to deviate from the originally planned plotlines for Return of the Jedi, at which point Kurtz quit the series.

“Kurtz has also claimed that Lucas changed the emphasis from storytelling to prioritizing toy merchandising. In a 2010 interview for the L.A. Times, Kurtz revealed that he had become disillusioned with what he saw as the commercially-driven direction the franchise was taking, as well as the related changes that Lucas made to the plot of the third movie, which was originally much darker, and supposedly included the death of Han Solo.

“‘I could see where things were headed,’ Kurtz said. ‘The toy business began to drive the empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.'”

“‘Jedi’ Was A Metaphor for Corruption,” posted on 5.28.13:

“As all true Star Wars fans know, Jedi was a kind of tragedy as it strongly indicated to anyone who was halfway hip that Star Wars creator and Jedi producer George Lucas had sadly evolved into a shameless hack and that the Star Wars series was effectively over and would never again deliver the power, gravitas and coolness of The Empire Strikes Back.

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Someone please explain how Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court nomination will survive Deborah Ramirez’s sexual misconduct allegation, which is contained in a just-published New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer.

Ramirez is claiming that during a drunken Yale party in ’83, or roughly a year after the Christine Blasey Ford incident when the 17 year-old Kavanaigh was in prep school, the future Supreme Court nominee unzipped and thrust his gross animal member in her face. Ramirez admits to being drunk herself when this incident allegedly happened, but c’mon.

Kavanaugh’s nomination was already on the ropes due to Ford’s claim of sexual-assault in ’82, but add the Ramirez allegation and his chances of serving as a Supreme Court justice seem pretty close to nil. How does he wiggle out of this?

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What other interesting lead performances in high-profile films were based on either a previous performance or a well-known, real-life personality? All I can think of are (a) Albert Finney‘s Daddy Warbucks in John Huston‘s Annie (’82), which was partly based upon Huston’s manner and speaking style; (b) Peter Sellers‘ Claire Quilty in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (’62), which obviously adopted Kubrick’s Bronx-taxi-driver patois; and (c) Tony Curtis‘s “Junior”, the fake Shell Oil heir who romances Marilyn Monroe‘s “Sugar” in Some Like It Hot, and all the while doing a broad imitation of Cary Grant.

I’ve said three or four times that Irwin Allen‘s The Swarm (’78) is not just the worst disaster flick ever made, but one of the most comically awful films ever made, period. The usual distribution strategy for a stinker is to cut it down as much as possible without destroying coherency. It was therefore odd that Warner Bros. released a 116-minute cut into theatres. But you have to really admire the decision by Warner Archives executives to offer a two-hour, 36-minute version for the new Bluray. A 156-minute exploration of the synergy between killer bees and laughter. You also have to admire how much richer the colors are on the Bluray.

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Last April I read a 2017 draft of Adam McKay‘s Vice, the Dick Cheney movie. (The script was called Cheney when McKay typed the title page; it was later called Backseat.) It struck me as a dark political horror comedy with a chuckly tone. A friend who read the same draft calls Backseat “a mixture of McKay, Deadpool and Armando Iannucci.”

One of the distinctive aspects of the ’17 draft were a couple of scenes in which Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) and his wife Lynn (Amy Adams) assess their situation in Shakespearean verse. I don’t recall if there were musical scenes in this draft but apparently one was shot.

In any event Vice (Annapurna, 12.14) research-screened last week in Los Angeles, and at least one guy who attended was enthusiastic.

“This is powerful political stuff,” he began. “A very didactic, matter-of-fact examination of Dick Cheney‘s empirical rise behind the scenes.

“McKay has removed the big comedic set-pieces from the film,” he added. “Missing from the new cut was an elaborate musical sequence and a substantial scene of Bale and Adams reciting Shakespeare. As it stands, the film still works. Now it’s just a more dramatic Big Short. It implements the same style of filmmaking (flashy editing and montage). Bale commits to a transformative performance, and Adams has two early volcanic scenes that can win her the Oscar. Steve Carell‘s Donald Rumsfeld is comic relief. And Sam Rockwell‘s George Bush is little more than a cameo — he appears in three scenes. Plays him as insecure and fragile as you’d hope.”

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At the end of yesterday’s Other Side of the Wind review I wrote that “it must have been a whole lot of fun to have been part of the shoot back in ’70, ’71 and ’72…hugely enjoyable for those who were there and sharing a magic moment.” I noticed in the closing credits that director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire) and Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy played partygoers. I wrote them and asked for recollections — they both responded.

McCarthy: “When I watched it I saw myself for about two seconds in a party scene shot with Cameron Mitchell and another actor I couldn’t identify. Joe McBride, who’s seen the film multiple times, said he saw me in two shots. Maybe when I get a DVD I can freeze-frame to be able to say with certainty how many times I’m onscreen and for how long. But the main thing was just being there.

“I was working as Elaine May‘s assistant on Mikey and Nicky during the day, then in the evenings — on and off for about a month — I would head to Bogdanovich’s house (212 Copa de Oro Road) to be part of Orson’s filmed ‘parties’ while Peter was away shooting Daisy Miller in Italy.

“I was even there for Orson’s 60th birthday” — 5.6.75 — “when he exploded in a rage when everyone paused late in the evening to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and present him with a cake. He was demanding that they continue working. Sometime after midnight, when there were maybe a dozen people left, he opened the freezer, pulled out a tub of ice cream and proceeded to eat the whole thing.

“But my favorite memory is of something that happened once a week. At 8 pm or 8:30 or whatever time it was, Orson would have a fit, yell at everyone in a fit of dissatisfaction and storm into his bedroom and slam the door behind him. A half-hour or an hour later, he’d come out in a fine humor and resume filming at once. My friend Gary Graver, the cinematographer, later told me what was really going on: Orson’s favorite TV series was Shaft (which aired from late ’73 to early ’74) and throwing this tantrum was his way of getting away to watch it.

“Working with Elaine and Orson, the two biggest mavericks in town, was my introduction to Hollywood.”

Crowe: “I think it was [during] my first trip to Los Angeles when my friend Phil Savenick said, ‘Let’s go be extras in an Orson Welles movie.’ It all felt very mysterious. We weren’t given the name of the film. We hung out all night in the backyard and big living room of a house in Bel-Air — Stone Canyon, I believe — and every thirty minutes or so, Welles would move through the set, look at us, and continue bantering with Peter Bogdanovich. We weren’t sure what was being planned or filmed. At a certain point cameras appeared. Welles appeared with Bogdanovich and shot a scene that took place in the backyard. There were long delays between takes.

“There were about thirty of us, and the best conversation among the extras was ‘If Orson Welles was a musician, who would he be?’ One of the extras argued strongly that he was like Stephen Stills, who wrote ‘For What It’s Worth’ and other classics at a young age. The other extras argued this theory down with relish. We finally decided the closest comparison was Brian Wilson. And right about that time, an assistant director came out and said, ‘Orson is going to bed. Anybody want to come back tomorrow?'”

What was Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone, boiled down to basics? During its 1959-to-1962 heyday it was a half-hour series about the fears, anxieties, neuroses and psychological maladies that flooded the anti-social undercurrents of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy eras. That or the issues that made Serling himself feel antsy and unsettled. It was not a show about “boo!” — it was about “what is this strange feeling I have in my gut?” or “why can’t I shake this memory from my childhood?” or “why do I feel trapped?” or “what if I just ran away from my high-paying job and moved to a small bucolic town called Willoughby…wouldn’t I be happier?”

Does anyone think that the latest Twilight Zone reboot, which will be hosted by Jordan Peele because Get Out was a racially-stamped reboot of Ira Levin‘s The Stepford Wives, which of course has nothing to do with the Serling aesthetic…does anyone think that this new streaming Twilight Zone will come within 100 miles of the deep-down fears, anxieties, neuroses and psychological maladies of the Trump era?

My presumption, in fact, is that Peel’s Zone will deliver cheap horror wanks because that’s what 90% of the viewing audience likes. They don’t want to know from their deep-down fears, anxieties, neuroses and maladies, and would probably run in the opposite direction of any streaming series that delivers anything resembling this.

Variety story: CBS announced Thursday that Peele will serve as host and narrator of “The Twilight Zone,” the revival of the classic science-fiction anthology that he is producing with CBS Television Studios and Simon Kinberg for CBS All Access. Peele and Kinberg are set to serve as executive producers alongside Win Rosenfeld, Audrey Chon, Carol Serling, Rick Berg and Greg Yaitanes.

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The gifted Cary Fukunaga has been hired to direct the 25th James Bond film, which is untitled as we speak. A smart move for the Bond producers — a critic friend calls the Japanese-American director “a real chameleon who always rises to every occasion” — and, be honest, a paycheck gig for Fukanaga.

There’s a term for any name-brand director helming a Bond film — slumming. The pay is great but you’re still submitting to the factory-level requirements of a well-worn, whore-level franchise.

It’s no small footnote that Fukunaga will be the first American-born director to helm a Bond film; all the others have been British, New Zealanders (Martin Campbell, Lee Tamahori) or German-Swiss (Marc Forster).

What is the worst, most banal aspect of the Bond franchise that Fukunaga could theoretically turn away from? The Travel & Leisure luxury settings. Almost every exotic location that Daniel Craig‘s 007 visits is pornographically luscious — the perfect spot for your next damn-the-expense getaway with your wife or girlfriend. Agreed, the ambitious Mexico City tracking shot that Spectre began with avoided this trap but otherwise my head is flooded with memories of Mr. Bond revelling in drop-your-pants, Kardashian-level splendor. Which I hate because with minor variations flush travel-destination settings are exactly the same the world over. They spread the corporate poison.

It’s been nearly three years since I reviewed Spectre (“All Bond Films Are Vaguely Numbing…What?“), and I recall it like yesterday:

The virulent pan of Spectre (MGM/Columbia, 11.6) by Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson is almost…touching? Mendelson is really, really disappointed in this thing — “the worst 007 film in 30 years,” he claims, or since, like, A View to a Kill or whatever.

This indicates, obviously, that Mendelson doesn’t go to Bond films for a nice wank-off, like most of us probably do. He apparently believes that Bond films have the potential to redeem and cleanse and change our lives…okay, his life for the better. Skyfall came a lot closer to this, he contends, and…uhm, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were relatively decent? Something like that.

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Remember the opening of Lawrence of Arabia with Peter O’Toole rumbling along that winding country road without a helmet? That was me yesterday afternoon. God bless Connecticut’s optional helmet law. I cruised all over Wilton, Ridgefield, Norwalk and Westport. Never in my life have I driven a two-wheeled vehicle without a helmet, not even in Europe. Do I think it’s a good idea to forsake one as a rule? No, but the wind whipping through your hair feels wonderful, and that wild and free sensation seemed to intensify the road aromas. It was symphonic.

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If after reading Daphne Merkin’s just-posted Soon-Yi Previn interview as well as Moses Farrow’s 5.23.18 essay (“A Son Speaks Out“)…if after reading these personal testimonies you’re still in the “I believe Dylan Farrow” camp…if you haven’t at least concluded that there’s a highly significant amount of ambiguity and uncertainty in this whole mishegoss, then I don’t know what to say to you. There’s probably nothing that can be said to you.

Journo pally: “Ugh…I’m starting to loathe Ronan and Dylan Farrow.”

Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book has won the Toronto Film Festival’s Grosch People’s Choice Award for most popular film! Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma and Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk were the second and first runners-up. A Star Is Born came in…what, fourth? Astonishing. (What happened to the suspected ballot-stuffing thing?) HE’s mind is officially blown. Downside for Green Book: It’s now in danger of being labelled the Best Picture front-runner.

Documentary Award: Free Solo. The Biggest Little Farm and This Changes Everything were the second and first runners-up.

Midnight Madness award winner: The Man Who Feels No Pain. Assassination Nation and Halloween are the second and first runners-up, respectively.