Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver deserves a salute for creating something that felt semi-original — a violent, fast-driving action musical of sorts. The presumed goal behind Wright’s recent campaign appearances has been to land a Best Original Screenplay nomination. In a fair and thoughtful world, that notion would still be in play. And maybe it still is. But I have a feeling that Kevin Spacey‘s radioactive dust might get in the way. Distractions should never matter, but this one might. I also suspect that if Wright hadn’t decided to inject Baby Driver with insanity serum during the last 15 or 20 minutes he would be in a stronger position now.

Posted on 11.2, 11:19 pm: A chat between Phantom Thread director Paul Thomas Anderson and Entertainment Weekly‘s Kevin Sullivan was posted at 12:31 pm today. The money quote is when PTA mentions Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rebecca as an inspiration:

“It’s not your standard love story. It’s more peculiar for sure. A lot of directors have tried and failed to make Rebecca. I’m probably next in line, but it’s a different story. I’m a large aficionado of those large Gothic romance movies as the old masters might do them. What I like about those kinds of love stories is that they’re very suspenseful. A good dollop of suspense with a love story is a nice combination.”

In other words Daniel Day Lewis‘s Reynolds Woodcock is Maxim de Winter, Vicky Krieps‘ Alma is Joan Fontaine, and Lesley Manville‘s Cyril Woodcock is Judith Anderson or Mrs. Danvers. Or something in that realm.

Earlier today, posted around 5 pm: I’m starting to question a certain rumor about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (Focus Features, 12.25). The talk has been that it becomes a kind of 50 Shades of Grey thing in the third act (i.e., “a classier version of 50 Shades of Grey“). Yesterday a friend passed along a notion that “the current trailer is a kind of a bait and switch….that it looks like it’s going to be a relationship drama that gets darker as it goes on, but that it has an unhinged third act.”  No specifics but the trailer is said to be somewhat misleading, or so some suspect.

I replied that the “classier version of 50 Shades of Grey” rumor has been kicking around for a while now. The friend said he’d been told that it goes “completely crazy” at the end, and was wondering if I’d heard any specifics. So I asked a guy who hears things from time to time, and he passed along a different kind of heresay, which is that Phantom Thread “is not explicitly sexual.” He’s been told that “it’s akin to 50 Shades when it comes to the controlling power dynamics and the parameters of their relationship, which she both embraces and subverts. But there is a real struggle for dominance.”

The trailer suggests that the power struggle is a triangle thing — Daniel Day Lewis‘ Reynolds Woodcock vs. Vicky Krieps Alma with Reynolds’ sister Cyril Woodcock, played by Lesley Manville, butting in and warning Alma. “Leave my brother alone, let him tend to his creations, you’re asking for trouble,” etc.

Deciding not to campaign Kevin Spacey‘s performance as J. Paul Getty in All The Money in the World (TriStar, 12.22) is an obvious no-brainer, given recent charges about Spacey’s off-screen behavior and the current “me too” atmosphere. But what if, just to play Devil’s Advocate, his acting in this Ridley Scott true-life drama turns out to be seriously distinctive and perhaps even dazzling?

The Oscars are essentially a popularity contest and so Spacey is dead in a political sense — I get that. But sometimes venal or damaged people do really good work. Any mature understanding of the nature of talent bears this out.

Has anyone ever compiled a master list of great performances given by actors whose off-screen behavior and character have been alleged or documented to be deplorable? Or a tally of great films directed and written by people who have something to feel ashamed about in a personal or relationship realm? You’d be looking at a fairly long list, I’d imagine. Hell, flip the equation over and ask yourself “how many hugely talented people and Oscar winners have lived lives that would win the Boy Scout or Girl Scout seal of moral approval?”

I understand that Steven Spielberg‘s The Post will screen on Sunday, 11.26 at the Los Angeles WGA theatre. Presumably for WGA members, whom the below invite has gone out to. Co-screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer (i.e., Singer actually rewrote Hannah) will sit for a q & a. This presumably means everyone else will be seeing it that week — press, Academy, DGA members, other guilds. Which makes me wonder when the trailer will hit. Surely within the next week or two, no? Spielberg is still editing — what director wouldn’t be?

If Chuck Connors never did anything else, that look he gives the camera after firing off 12 shots from his specially modified Winchester 44-40 model 1892 would be enough. He doesn’t glare, doesn’t scowl, doesn’t smirk, doesn’t grin or suggest any kind of cockiness, and yet that look in his eyes manages to say “this is what I do, take it or leave it — I drill guys over and over, pretty much every week, and yet I’m even-tempered and respectable and so the law’s always on my side…pretty good deal, eh?” Yeah, it is. But who ever heard of a Winchester that fires 12 shots in a row? Look at it — where would 12 cartridges even fit?

A caustic observation about Blade Runner 2049 from Michael Deeley, British-born producer of Ridley Scott’s ’82 original, appeared in a 10.30 Screen Daily interview: “I’m not looking forward to seeing it, but I will. [Blade Runner 2049] is very long. It must have been cut-able and should have been. They can’t do better [box office] because they can’t play it more than three times a day because it’s just too long, which is of course self-indulgent at the very least, arrogant probably…it’s criminal.”

Remove the epithets and Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro said more or less the same thing on 10.7: “That 163-minute running time is a killer. Forget about the fact that Blade Runner 2049 has its slow moments. Once you count the trailer pre-show, how do you ask audiences to commit four hours of their time to sit in the theater?”

Blade Runner 2049 opened three and a half weeks ago. Has it been, in fact, a financial bust? The answer appears to be “yes.”

As of 10.29 the domestic tally was $81,538,180, and the overseas earnings were $141,595,133 for a grand total of $223,133,333. The negative cost is thought to be in the range of $170 million with p & a costs around $130 million for a total of $300 million.

D’Allesandro also reported that “those affiliated with the movie have been saying that $400 million is the magic break-even number,” although that estimate was based on a lower production cost estimate of $155 million.” 

Even if you accept $400 million as a break-even plateau, Blade Runner 2049 is nearly a month into its run and a bit more than $175 million short of that figure. ($400 million minus $223,133,333 — $176,866,667.) 

But Warner Bros. is in the clear. It has no investment in the film and has simply collecting a distribution free of somewhere between 8% and 10%. Sony Pictures Releasing is distributing internationally and is also not looking at a painful downside. If there’s a loser in the equation it may be Alcon Entertainment.

Nobody rises to positions of power and responsibility in the entertainment industry without knowing what everyone else is whispering and talking about. It’s therefore inconceivable that the people who are suddenly disassociating themselves from Kevin Spacey, like the Media Rights Capital and Netflix execs who announced yesterday that the forthcoming sixth season of House of Cards would be the last, hadn’t heard stories about Spacey’s aggressive offscreen sexual pursuits for years and years, and I mean stories that have been out there since the ’90s. Everyone knew and nobody bothered because nobody wanted to go there. The stories didn’t get in the way of business and revenue, and it would have seemed homophobic and punitive to admonish Spacey for his private activities.

But the mixture of today’s “me too” climate and the Anthony Rapp allegation, itself prompted by “me too,” have suddenly made Spacey seem toxic to everyone.

I spoke last night to a couple of veterans from the 1994 shooting of The Usual Suspects, during which Spacey aggressively jumped Bryan Singer‘s teenage boyfriend (an 18- or 19-year-old kid from France) and “stole him away,” so to speak. Singer walked in on an intimate moment and the shit hit the fan. The incident happened at the very end of the shoot, but Singer was so upset he refused to work with Spacey on a few remaining pick-ups that needed to be completed. A trusted source told me last night that the Spacey-Singer story was “all over town” a day after it happened. Anyone in the film industry who claims to have never heard about this or any of the other stories over the years is either clueless or dishonest — no third option. Everyone has “known” all along so give us all a break about being suddenly “concerned,” etc.

I wasn’t aware that The Silence of the Lambs (which is now 26 and 3/4 years old, having opened on 1.30.91) needed a 4K restoration. On top of which this trailer makes the colors look a bit bleachy. They’re certainly darker and warmer on the Bluray that I own. Remember that Jack Crawford is based on real-life FBI criminal profiler John Douglas, the author of the book that provided the basis for David Fincher‘s Mindhunter. For whatever reason Jonathan Demme‘s film will re-open in England on 11.3.17. I don’t see the point. Jodie Foster will probably never snag another role with as much built-in emotional resonance as Clarice Starling. (I’d honestly forgotten that Julianne Moore played the same character ten years later in Hannibal.) Foster was 28 when Lambs was filmed — she’ll turn 55 on 11.19. Director Jonathan Demme passed last April, at age 73.

“I’ll tell you what I want. I want to walk around New York City at a fairly vigorous clip. I want to love and support my wife and my sons every way I can. I want to sail into the mystic. I want to stay in touch with everyone and offer as much offer affection, trust, intellectual engagement and friendship as I reasonably can. I want to live forever. I want good health, and to me that also means good spiritual health. I want to keep most of my hair and never grow breasts or a pot belly. I want Japanese or South Korean-level wifi wherever I go. I want to read and know everything. I want to bask in love, family, friendship and the purring of my three cats until the end of time. I want several pairs of slim ass-hugging jeans. I want to be clean shaven. I want well-made shoes, preferably Italian suede or Bruno Magli or John Varvatos. I want to keep all my Blurays forever. I want fresh gourmet food but in modest portions. I want color, aromas, travel. I want challenging hiking trails in high Swiss places. I know it’s not possible, but I’d prefer to always be in the company of slender people. I want to zoom around on my Majesty and use the Mini Cooper only when it rains or when I need to buy a lot of groceries. I want mobility and adaptability and the smell of great humming, rumbling cities. I want European-style subways, buses, trains, rental cars. I want a long Norman Lloyd-type life, and I insist that my mental faculties stay electric and crackling forever. I’ll always want a couple of folly-loaded Jackery battery chargers for my iPhone 6 Plus. I want occasional bowls of plain yogurt and a constant supply of fruit and vegetables. I want beautiful scenery from time to time. I want to hang with golden retrievers and other high-affection dogs. I want to be up early and go to bed late every day of my life, and take 45-minute naps around 4 pm. And I’ll always want a 65-inch OLED along with an Oppo Bluray player with region-2 capabilities plus Amazon, Vudu, Netflix and everything else on a Roku player. And I always want little packets of strong Italian Starbucks Instant somewhere nearby. And I want to re-visit Venice, Prague, Rome, Paris, Arcos de la Frontera and Hanoi every two or three years. I don’t want to get my head chopped off but I want to visit the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iran) as well as Russia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Ukraine before long, preferably on a motorcycle or at least by train.” — An earlier version of this, a riff on a “Carlos the Jackal” quote, was posted on 11.29.14.

I’m filling out my Sundance press accreditation form this weekend. This led to memories of last January’s festival, and a particularly awful time I had watching Alexander Moors‘ The Yellow Birds, an Iraq War PTSD drama. Jason Hall‘s Thank You For Your Service deals with nearly the exact same subject, but in a way that I found ten times more affecting and effective. Maybe because I didn’t have to deal with Alden Ehrenreich, whose gloomy-Rabbinical-student performance all but sank Yellow Birds.

As far as I can tell Yellow Birds never found a North American distributor. Which, if true, suggests that buyers felt the same way I did. Like me they probably sat in their Eccles seats in a state of numb submission, toughing it out and waiting for something (anything!) interesting to happen.

How can the Sundance guys approve films like The Yellow Birds and yet turn down well-made genre flicks, which they’ve been known to do from time to time? It just reenforces the idea that the term “Sundance film” is not a myth. John Cooper and Trevor Groth are known for preferring a certain kind of solemn, squishy, angsty, social-issue, ahead-of-the-curve, relationshippy black-gay-transgender politically correct film.

If Sundance had been going in ’73 and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero had been submitted, they would’ve turned it down because it’s got too many car chases and is about rednecks smuggling moonshine.

The Yellow Birds is about the investigation of the death of an Iraq War combatant named “Murph” (i.e., Daniel Murphy, played by Tye Sheridan), but more precisely about evasions and suppressions on the part of Murph’s PTSD-aflicted comrade, John Bartie (Ehrenreich), when he returns home.

Murph’s mom Maureen (Jennifer Aniston) naturally wants to know what happened, and Bartie’s mom Amy (Toni Collette) is seriously concerned about her son’s totally withdrawn, zombie-like manner. There’s also a Sergeant Sterling (Jack Huston) with his own buried trauma issues, and a CID investigator (Jason Patric) with a persistent interest in what happened between Murph and John.

The Yellow Birds has moments of visual beauty but is otherwise disappointing — it doesn’t connect or sink in. And the ending is seriously weak tea.

After it ended I ran into a Los Angeles guy who runs a film series, and so I briefly shared my reservations about the film and Ehrenreich in particular. He said he “liked” The Yellow Birds and so did the people he was sitting with, and that Ehrenreich’s ability to reanimate Han Solo wasn’t an issue as far as Yellow Birds is concerned.

In an Indiewire piece posted earlier today, producer, industry consultant and former Fine Line production executive Liz Manne outed herself as a major anonymous source for a controversial, once-heavily-criticized 1998 Premiere story that described a culture of sexual harassment at New Line Cinema, which at the time was run by Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne.  

The article, written by John Connolly and fact-checked by Premiere staffers (including then-editor Jim Meigs and senior film editor Glenn Kenny), was called “Flirting With Disaster.”

The article asserted that all kinds of nasty shenanigans (drinking, drugs, sexual harassment) were happening at New Line, and that Shaye and Lynne ran the place “like a college dorm,” according to a producer who spoke anonymously to Connolly. The piece began with a story about a boozy New Line party that happened the year before (1992) at a lodge in Snowmass, Colorado, and about how Lynne made an aggressive sexual pass at an unnamed female executive. 

That executive, according to Manne’s Indiewire piece, was Manne herself. As noted, she flat-out admits to having been one of Connolly’s anonymous sources.

In hindsight, the Connolly piece can be appreciated as a tough expose that described a predatory climate that sounds all too familiar by today’s understandings. But because it depended on anonymous sources (when she left the company Manne signed an exit agreement that forbade her from talking to anyone about anything in any context) the article was strongly attacked as an example of reckless or irresponsible journalism.

Two of the attackers were Movie City News’ David Poland and Variety‘s Peter Bart. Coincidentally, there was also a “Reverse Angle” article on page 51 in that same issue of Premiere, written by Harvey Weinstein of all people, that complained about “the reckless use of unnamed sources.”

From Poland’s 6.17.98 MCN article: “Can you say ‘hatchet job?’ I know for sure that Premiere magazine can. It had to be the phrase of the day when it decided to print its story, ‘Flirting With Disaster’” on alleged sexual and drug-related misconduct at New Line Cinema. I am often disgusted with the state of entertainment journalism, but usually it’s because we throw softballs in exchange for access to the talent that sells magazines, newspapers and TV shows. (And yes, some Web sites.) This time, it’s the opposite. 

“What was Premiere thinking when it ran the results of John Connolly‘s eight-month ‘investigation’ which added up to little more than a handful of gossipy accusations by unnamed sources that any reporter working this beat on a regular basis could have come up with over a three-day weekend?”

Last night I finally saw James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1), which has generated pseudo-hip excitement since debuting at last March’s South by Southwest. It’s basically an amusing-but-never-hilarious thing — it never bored me but it never quite lifts off the ground either. But it’s worth catching, I’d say. It falls under the heading of “necessary viewing.”

On the other hand a lot of cognoscenti who should know better have gone apeshit over The Disaster Artist (what award-season handicapper suggested it might even be worthy of inclusion on a best-of-2017 list?), and I’m telling you right now that it’s time to calm down. It’s fine for what it is, but take it easy.

It’s basically a flat but unaffected true-life saga of the making of a notoriously awful indie-level film called The Room, which, after opening in ’03, gradually acquired a rep of being so bad it’s hilarious and perhaps even brilliant in a twisted-pretzel, ice-cream-cone-slammed-into-the-forehead kind of way.

Based on Greg Sistero‘s same-titled memoir about the making of The Room and his bromance with the film’s vampirish director-writer-star, Tommy Wiseau, The Disaster Artist is basically a curio, a diversion. It generates a kind of chuckly vibe on a scene-by-scene basis, but that’s all.

Why? Because watching a clueless asshole behave like a clueless asshole isn’t all that funny if you’re watching what that’s like on a line-by-line, incident-by-incident, humiliation-by-humiliation basis from a comfy seat in a screening room.

It might seem a bit funnier if you’re watching it ripped or better yet ripped with your friends during a midnight show somewhere. Or if you’re watching it ripped with producer-costar Seth Rogen and producer Evan Goldberg in a private screening room. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been high in a long time, but I bet it would help. All I can tell you is that the Academy fuddy-duds I saw it with last night at the London Hotel screening room were chortling from time to time, but no one was howling with laughter or rolling in the aisles.

The Disaster Artist is basically a one-joke thing that says over and over that having no talent and being a total moron is no hindrance to making an attention-getting film if — a really big “if” here — you’ve got a few million to throw around and you’re willing to spend it freely on production and marketing and so on. It also says that if you’re a profoundly stupid actor and generally beyond redemption in terms of knowing how to produce, direct and write it can be “funny” for people to watch you struggle and fail in your attempt to make a shitty little indie drama that no one will pay to see, etc.

But if your film turns out to be “so awful it’s astounding,” the film says, you might have a shot at a certain kind of notoriety.