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In the late ’90s or early aughts director-writer Jonathan Kaufer (Soup For One, Bad Manners) would invite a select group of pallies to his Beverly Hills manse to eat great food and watch DVDs. I was one of the regulars; so was David Poland. And a couple of times Tom Arnold dropped by.

Kaufer was married to Pia Zadora at the time. She was always upstairs. I think she may have come down once to say hello. My sense was that her relations with Kaufer were a bit strained. You could feel the vibes.

One night I was approaching Kaufer’s home in the dark, and I noticed a group of four or five standing by the main gate, seemingly unable to gain entrance. Arnold was among them. “Hey, how come you guys are all just standing around?” I said. “Because we’re assholes?” Arnold answered. From that moment he became one of the coolest dry-humor guys I’d ever met.

The movie that night was Norman Jewison‘s The Thomas Crown Affair (’68), and boy, what a disappointment. A hamstrung, perfectly groomed Steve McQueen in a three-piece suit. Everything he did in that film was so cool and polished and neutered. There was nothing the least bit edgy or bad-ass about him. At one point Arnold got fed up and said aloud, “Wow, everything he does is just so wonderful.”

The only portion that works is the chess game scene. Particularly the footage between 3:40 and 4:45. Otherwise, forget it. The 50th anniversary Kino Bluray pops tomorrow, on 2.13.18.

Kaufer died on 10.2.13 while driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. He swerved off the road, the car rolled and he was thrown from the vehicle. Regrets and affection — a good fellow.

Three days ago Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman wrote that Quentin Tarantino‘s “not Manson” movie “is in jeopardy at Sony and may not get made at all.” Because he’s been “hearing that Sony is having second thoughts because of Tarantino’s double trouble in the press” — the Uma Thurman Kill Bill car crash thing plus saying that Samantha Geimer was down for sex with Roman Polanski in ’77.

Tarantino has apologized for both, but he’s nonetheless been painted as a #MeToo bad guy. Tarantino’s apologies may have saved him, but in most instances the penalty for being so labelled has been instant death.

If I was Sony honcho Tom Rothman I wouldn’t deep-six Tarantino’s movie over offensive statements or stunt-driving missteps, but over the budget. I don’t know where Friedman heard that the Manson flick will cost $200 million, but maybe that’s a production-plus-marketing figure.

Last November The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit reported that the film, which will roll sometime this summer, would cost in the vicinity of $95 million, which, when you add the usual absurd marketing costs, means it would have to gross $375 million worldwide to break even, according to “one source” Kit spoke to.

Even with Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie costarring, nobody is going to beat down the doors of theatres to see a late ’60s hippy-dippy movie (never forget how Millenials regard the ’80s as ancient history) about desperate actors and a few delusional cultists stabbing some poor rich people to death. I’m not saying QT’s film won’t be buzzy or that it won’t sell a lot of tickets, but I doubt if it will sell enough to justify the cost. Because the milieu is fundamentally perverse and bizarre and dark and twisted.

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A little more than two months ago, it was announced that Russia’s Olympic team had been barred from the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The reason for this historic, forehead-slapping decision can be found in Bryan Fogel‘s Oscar-nominated documentary Icarus, which has been paying on Netflix since last August.

Talk about a timely documentary with the South Korean games just beginning and Russia conspicuously absent from each and every event.

Icarus director Bryan Fogel during last night’s Netflix party at Hollywood Athletic Club; (r.) Icarus co-producer Andrew Siegman.

The reason for Russia’s removal from the 2018 Winter Games was initially explained in a 5.12.16 N.Y. Times report about a massive state-run doping program, which has been organized and then exposed by Grigory Rodchenkov, director of Russia’s antidoping laboratory during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The Russian banning came after incontrovertible evidence, supplied by Rodchenkov, of “a brazen and pervasive state-run doping program that has likely tainted Russian results for the entirety of modern Olympic history,” as Vulture‘s Jada Yuan put in last year.

The story of how Rodchenkov came to confess his participation in this massive doping program, and how he was then forced to leave Russia for the U.S. in order to save his life, is the stuff of Icarus, which had its big debut at Sundance ’17 and was re-celebrated last night at Hollywood Athletic Club party on Sunset Blvd.

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Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein‘s I Feel Pretty (STX, 6.29) is basically about the power of a positive self-image. It’s about a plump, bordering-on-fat woman (Amy Schumer) who discovers a wildly positive view of herself after being hit on the head during a workout session. She suddenly sees a total knockout in the mirror. If she thinks she’s beautiful then she is, etc.

The premise is similar to that of John Cromwell‘s The Enchanted Cottage (’45). It was about a disfigured Air Force pilot (Robert Young) falling in love with a shy, homely maid (Dorothy Maguire), and how their feelings for each other transform them into handsome/beautiful, at least in their own eyes. The audience saw them as highly attractive also but the supporting characters in the film didn’t.

There probably isn’t any delicate, tippy-toed, politically correct way to say that the Schumer who stars in I Feel Pretty looks different than the one who starred in Trainwreck three years ago.

Note: Around 9:25 pm I somehow deleted this post on my WordPress iPhone app. I had to re-post all over again, but somehow the original comments were saved. I don’t know what happened.

Schumer in Trainwreck, which opened three years ago at South by Southwest.

Schumer in I Feel Pretty.

John Gavin, who had only one truly decent role as an actor and, when you get right down to it, only one really good line in his entire career, has left this mortal coil. He was 86. Until today I never knew (or cared to know) that the tall, handsome, dark-complexioned Gavin was born Juan Vincent Apablasa, and that he was of Mexican and Chilean descent, and was fluent in Spanish at an early age.

Gavin’s moment in the sun came when he played Fairvale hardware store owner Sam Loomis, the randy boyfriend of Janet Leigh‘s Marion Crane, in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho (’60).

His one great line happened when Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) visited Sam’s store in search of Lila. When Sam realized the conversation was becoming too personal and agitated, he told store clerk Bob (Frank Killmond) to “run out and get some lunch.” When Bob said, “Oh, that’s okay, Sam, I brought it with me,” Loomis said, “Run out and eat it.”

The Rock Hudson-esque Gavin was also pretty good in Douglas Sirk‘s Imitation of Life (’59) and as the young Julius Caesar in Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus, although he always brought a certain chiselled stiffness to whatever he played.

Gavin almost stepped in as the new post-George Lazenby 007 in Diamonds Are Forever (’71), but that went south when Sean Connery was lured back with a grand payday.

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I don’t know for a fact that Rod Lurie’s deathbed director (i.e., a major brand-name helmer who begged Lurie to never work with a certain actor, according to Lurie’s account) was the late John Frankenheimer, and that the actor Lurie promised to never hire was Val Kilmer. But these are pretty good guesses.

Lurie described the late unnamed helmer as a “mentor” on Facebook yesterday, which is the same term he used in describing Frankenheimer in a 10.4.16 interview to promote Killing Reagan. (Quote: “My mentor was John Frankenheimer.”) When I asked Lurie about this, he said “no comment.”

Frankenheimer is on the record for having loathed and despised Kilmer after working with him on the horribly troubled Island of Dr. Moreau shoot in the mid ’90s. Frankenheimer has been widely quoted as saying “even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that prick in it.”

Frankenheimer was also quoted as saying “I don’t like Val Kilmer, I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.”

The late, great John Frankenheimer.

Frankenheimer, whom I knew slightly, died on 7.6.02. By that point Lurie, who apparently became chummy with Frankenheimer after writing something fair and respectful during a rough patch in Frankenheimer’s career (possibly during or after the Dr. Moreau debacle), was well situated as a feature director, having made Deterrence (’99), The Contender (’00) and The Last Castle (’01).

So let’s imagine Lurie sitting by Frankenheimer’s bedside sometime in early or mid ’02, except Lurie isn’t Lurie — he’s me. Speaking with my attitude, my philosophy, my sense of things.

Including the fact that I harbor no ill feelings about Kilmer. I helped report that “Psycho Kilmer” Entertainment Weekly article that ran in mid ’96, but I had a nice chat with him at a party he threw at his home back in ’04 or thereabouts. (He had just finished working on Oliver Stone‘s Alexander.) I ran into Kilmer again in the fall of ’11 while having lunch with Descendants costar Judy Greer. We waved and smiled as Kilmer sat at a nearby table. When I tried to pay the bill the waitress told me the check had been taken care of by “that man sitting over there,” except Kilmer had left by that point.

Anyway….

Frankenheimer: I want you to promise me one thing, Rod. I may not be around much longer, but I want to know that you’ll never, ever work with that prick. Please.

Lurie: Uh-huh.

Frankenheimer: Will you promise me this?

Lurie: No Kilmer?

Frankenheimer: I want your word.

Lurie: For what…the rest of my life?

Frankenheimer: We’re friends and I want you to promise me this.

Lurie: Look, John, I love you like a father and I’m sorry for what you went through, but you can’t…

Frankenheimer: What?

Lurie: You know as well as anyone that we all…

Frankenheimer: Rod…

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The family of the late Jill Messick, a chronic depression sufferer who committed suicide yesterday, is claiming that Messick was “victimized” and partly nudged towards self-destruction by certain charges alleged by former client Rose McGowan.

McGowan’s charges appeared in a 10.28.17 N.Y. Times story as well as her recently released “Brave” book.

A longtime producer and former Miramax exec who served as McGowan’s manager when the actress was allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein in January 1997, Messick allegedly felt diminished by statements that McGowan made about her not being a vigilant-enough defender of McGowan during a time of great anger and trauma, and then undermining her claim of having been raped in an email written to Weinstein.

Jill Messick and Brad Grey, now both deceased, in 2007.

In a 10.28.17 story by N.Y. Times reporter Susan Dominus, McGowan said that the 1.28.97 Sundance Film Festival meeting with Weinstein at Deer Valley’s Stein-Erickson lodge was arranged by Messick.

McGowan has said that Messick comforted McGowan when she learned of the attack. “But in the months to come,” Dominus wrote, “McGowan did not feel supported by her management team.

“Anne Woodward, now a manager herself, was a young assistant in Messick’s office at the time, and was in on many of Ms. Messick’s calls. ‘I remember that Rose was extremely upset and did not want to [accept a hush money offer from Weinstein],’ Ms. Woodward said. ‘She wanted to fight.’

“[But] no one around her, as Ms. Woodward recalls, supported that instinct. ‘It was an emotionally shocking way to see a woman being treated,’ Ms. Woodward said. ‘That’s what stuck with me.'”

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Life Of The Party (Warner Bros., 5.11) is the latest comedy from Melissa McCarthy and husband/co-screenwriter Ben Falcone. The trailer is selling another coarse McCarthy vehicle, this one about a klutzy divorced woman who returns to college to get her degree, much to the chagrin of her daughter (Molly Gordon). Everyone’s been referencing Rodney Dangerfield‘s Back To School (’86), about a wealthy but amiably crude fellow who does the same thing, much to the chagrin of his son (Keith Gordon). But the first film to run with this story (I think) was High Time (’60), in which Bing Crosby played a successful resturateur (i.e., hamburgers) and widower who goes back to college at age 51.

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In his 30s, director James Foley was in a pretty good groove. I’m talking about an eight-year period in the ’80s and early ’90s. The R-rated Reckless (’84) was nothing to get overly excited about, but then came At Close Range (’86), which I’ve long regarded as Foley’s near-masterpiece.

Next was Who’s That Girl (’87), a mostly misbegotten screwball comedy with Madonna, followed by an edgy, hard-boiled noir called After Dark, My Sweet (’90), which I don’t even remember. But then Foley rebounded big-time with the flinty, hard-boiled, universally admired Glengarry Glen Ross (’92).

Foley directed six decent but mezzo-mezzo dramas between ’95 and ’07 — Two Bits (’95), The Chamber (’96), Fear (’96), The Corruptor (’99), Confidence (’03) and Perfect Stranger (’07). And then he more or less shifted over to a journeyman TV realm. Foley directed 12 episodes of House of Cards between ’13 and ’15, and two episodes of Billions in ’16.

And then — aahck! aahck! — Foley returned to features last year by directing 50 Shades Darker, which no one paid the slightest attention to, and then he doubled down on this dubious association with the about-to-open 50 Shades Freed.

I re-watched At Close Range last year and really re-admired it, and everyone swears by Glengarry Glen Ross. We all have to pay the rent, the butcher and the plumber, but it seems a shame that the guy who finessed these two films and made them into semi-classics is currently reduced to the 50 Shades realm.

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So Ron Howard‘s Solo: A Star Wars Story is going to be a kind of goofy adventure romp…right? Clearly, Anthony Breznican‘s EW cover story is conveying this and then some. Solo won’t just be witty or bantery or sporadically amusing but “the funniest Star Wars movie yet.”

Have previous Star Wars films been “funny”? They’ve all been occasionally nudgy or quippy to some extent, and were never 100% dramatic (even The Empire Strikes Back had moments of humor). You could argue that The Last Jedi has been the most digressively humorous of all the installments, but it still couldn’t be called comedic.

Then again a humorous approach was what original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, fired by producer Kathy Kennedy on 6.20.17 and replaced by Ron Howard, had in mind all along…right?

Last summer’s stories about the whacking of Lord and Miller seemed to agree that while Lucasfilm, Kennedy and Solo screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan believed the duo would be supplying a certain comedic flavor, Lord and Miller more or less believed they were hired to make an adventure comedy.

A 6.22.17 Breznican-authored EW story reported that “ever since filming began back in February ’17, Lord and Miller, who are known primarily for wry, self-referential comedies like The LEGO Movie, 21 Jump Street and the pilot episodes for Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Last Man on Earth, began steering the Han Solo movie more into the genre of laughs than space fantasy.”

The presumption was that Howard would be modifying Lord and Miller’s comedic approach, at least to some extent. But now EW‘s cover is all but calling Solo a laugh riot.

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A 15 year-old discussion about Roman Polanski‘s 1977 statutory rape episode has come back to bite Quentin Tarantino in the ass. The chat was between QT, Howard Stern and Robin Quivers, and of course was aired on Stern’s show. In early ’03 Tarantino’s remarks were obviously beyond the pale, but in today’s atmosphere…? Forget it.

Earlier this morning there were YouTube captures of the actual verbal discussion, but Sirius XM has had them removed. Here are portions from a Variety transcript:

Tarantino: “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape. That’s not quite the same thing. He had sex with a minor. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word ‘rape,’ you’re talking about violent, throwing them down; it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world. Throwing the word ‘rape’ around is like throwing the word ‘racist’ around. It doesn’t apply to everything that people use it for. He was guilty of having sex with a minor.”

Quivers: [the sex wasn’t consensual.]

QT: “No, that was not the case at all. She wanted to have it and dated the guy.”

Quivers: “She was 13!”

QT: “And by the way, we’re talking about America’s morals, we’re not talking about the morals in Europe and everything.”

Stern: “Wait a minute. If you have sex with a 13-year-old girl and you’re a grown man, you know that that’s wrong.”

QT: “Look, she was down with this. She’s talked about it since, ‘No, he didn’t really do anything to me. It was a technicality for being 13.’”

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A friend who’s seen Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Warner Bros., 2.9) says it’s nothing to write home about. A brief episode inflated into an okay but no-great-shakes 94-minute film. Padding, back-story and whatnot. Starring the real-life Thalys train hero guys — Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, and costarring Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer.

The all-media screening is on Wednesday night, at more or less the same time as Universal’s Fifty Shades Freed screening.

Dorothy Blyskal‘s screenplay is based on “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Soldiers” by Jeffrey Stern, Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos. Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer costar.