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The identity of Rust‘s female armorer, the person primarily responsible for the safety of prop guns used on the set of the tragedy-plagued Alec Baldwin western, has been revealed in a 10.23 Daily Mail story.

The Santa Fe Reporter‘s Jeff Proctor declined to name her yesterday as she hasn’t been accused or charged in a crime; ditto Indiewire’s Chris Lindahl in another 10.22 story. But the Daily Mail team — Lauren Lewis, Jennifer Smith, Keith Griffith, Dhawn Cohen, Elizabeth Ribuffo — charged right in and blew the bloody doors off.

The armorer is Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the 24 year-old daughter of “legendary” gunsmith Thell Reed. Rust‘s assistant director — the guy who shouted “cold gun” before handing the loaded weapon to Baldwin, who subsequently and by way of a purely foolish accident shot and killed the film’s director of photography, Halyna Hutchins — is Dave Halls (Fargo, The Matrix Reloaded).

The Mail reports that Gutierrez-Reed’s last job was as head armorer for The Old Way, a Nicolas Cage western. She allegedly stated after that film wrapped that “she wasn’t sure if she was ready to be a head armorer,” and that “she found loading blanks into a gun ‘the scariest’ thing because she did not know how to do it and had sought help from her father to get over the fear.”

It’s been reported elsewhere that various concerns (safety, long hours, a refusal to pay for nearby motels) resulted in a production crew walking off the set of Rust on Thursday morning. “When the crew began to pack up, they found a team of non-union workers waiting to replace them,” the story reports.

It’s also been reported that firearms were accidentally discharged three times — including once by Baldwin’s stunt double who had been told the gun was not loaded, and twice in a closed cabin.

Friendo: “In all that’s been written about the tragic gun incident, one question has strangely not once been posed: Why was Alec Baldwin pointing the gun directly at the director and cinematographer?”

HE to Friendo: “I gather that the shot called for Baldwin to fire almost directly into the lens. That’s been done a few times on other films, or so I gather. The bullet hit Hutchins in the upper chest, exited through her back and hit the director, Joel Souza, in the clavicle area (i.e., the bone that connects the breastplate to the shoulder).

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Herewith an acknowledgement of the 11.13 AFI Fest screening of David Fincher and David Prior‘s Voir.

One of the “visual essays about the love of cinema” is titled “Summer of the Shark” — a Jaws recollection by none other than HE’s own Sasha Stone. The essay is nicely narrated by the Awards Daily owner, and it tells about her cinematic awakening, if you will, when she first saw Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic.

The photo is of a movie-set recreation of teenaged Sasha watching Jaws in her 1970s living room.

The other essays are “Ethics of Revenge” by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, and “But I Don’t Like Him” by Drew McWeeny.

The entire thing will be shown on Netflix a few weeks hence. The trailer will also eventually pop through.

The people who cut this Being The Ricardos teaser obviously had zero interest in highlighting Javier Bardem‘s performance as Desi Arnaz, which is odd as Bardem allegedly outshines costar Nicole Kidman.

The best part is the I Love Lucy theme at the end, played over the credits.

This is a situational set-up teaser. Wildly successful couple with a hit TV show, running their own production company, dealing with the attendant pressures. There’s one brief allusion to Desi’s adultery in a magazine headline. Nicole’s narration implies that director-writer Aaron Sorkin sees this as Lucy’s story with cheating Desi as the bad guy.

Boardner’s is not opposite the old Desilu Studios (846 No. Cahuenga) — why do filmmakers insist on trying to sell this bullshit?

I thought the chocolate assembly-line factory routine was the big classic I Love Lucy bit, rather than the grape-stomping thing.

Friendo: “Nicole’s speaking voice is a problem. That is not Lucy’s very identifiable tonality.”

HE: “Totally Nicole’s voice — no attempt to even vaguely simulate Lucy’s braying tone. Then again 97% of the audience has no idea what Lucy sounded like. Many if not most of those who watched the ’50s show are dead.”

Amazon will release Ricardos theatrically on Friday, 12.10.21. The film will begin streaming on Prime Video on Tuesday, 12.21.21.

Reaction to research screening of Being The Ricardos, posted by Jordan Ruimy on 8.20.21:

Five days ago a friend sent me the Jamie Costa/Robin Williams “ROBIN test footage scene” clip, and wrote that he finds it “distracting when someone playing a real person is too accurate in voice and mannerisms, almost like they’re doing an impression versus someone like Anthony Hopkins interpreting Richard Nixon. Despite it being a not great movie, Rod Steiger pulled off a respectable W.C. Fields. While this is uncanny, I’m not sure how it would wear over an entire biopic.”

My immediate response: “Are you KIDDING? This guy is great. Not just a great impersonator but a first-rate, real-deal ACTOR. In my eyes, at least. Thanks for alerting me…amazing.”

Directed and edited by Jake Lewis, the clip features Costa as Williams on the set of Mork and Mindy in march 1982 when his costar Pam Dawber (Sarah Murphree) told him about the death of John Belushi.

I love the moment when Costa / Robin asks Dawber, “Did they say anything…you know, like, how [John Belushi] died?” Answer #1: “Gee, Robin…whadaya think might have happened? Any suspicions?” Answer #2: “Three guesses, Robin, and the first two don’t count.” Answer #3: “John was a secret agent like Chuck Barris, and he was shot last night by a Russian sniper.”

I’m happy to read that Rene Rodriguez is extra-double impressed with the new Taxi Driver 4K UHD Bluray, which is part of the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection, Volume 2, but is not yet purchasable as a stand-alone.

But really, how much better could the visual values be on this disc? Shot on 35mm Eastman color negative 100T 5254/7254 film using Arriflex 35 BL camera and Zeiss super speed lenses with portions captured on 16mm, Taxi Driver can only look as good as it can look.

I’ve seen it in theatres, on laser disc, DVD, Bluray and 4K streaming, and it looks fine but will never knock anyone’s eyeballs out.

The Amazon 4K streaming version looks pretty great, in fact.

The long-awaited commercial release of Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune is only days away. Theatrical + HBO Max on Friday, 10.22, with many theatres launching the night before. And with that, Average Joes and Janes will render a verdict about whether or not Dune belongs on a list of potential Best Picture contenders.

In this light, Dune has four Gold Derby handicappers in its corner — IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson (#2), Yahoo‘s Kevin Polowy (#1) and Variety‘s Clayton Davis (#3) and Tim Gray (#1).

So in a sense these four critics will be facing the music this weekend also. As you and your movie-watching brethren watch this 155-minute sand epic, say to yourself “it wasn’t just the usual gifted suspects who created this film — director-cowriter Villeneuve, dp Greig Fraser, screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth and star Timothee Chalamet — but also Thompson, Polowy, Davis and Gray, who’ve done what they can to lend award-season cred.”

In a strictly illegal sense, Dune “opened” yesterday morning when pirates began streaming an alleged HD version. I’ve only pirate-streamed two movies in my life — Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse and Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in Manhattan — and see no reason not to wait for Thursday.

But I’m telling you right now I can’t wait to hate this thing. At least I’m honest about this. Every fibre of my being wants to loathe it. By the same token if I like it and say so, it’ll mean more than praise from some snivelling gladhander critic.

And then two weeks later comes Chloe Zhao‘s Eternals, which I’m also looking forward to despising with every fibre of my being. Because Eternals hates me. I know how it’s going to make me feel, and so I’m turning it around and pledging to give it back before the fact. Death to Marvel unless it’s the Marvel films I like. Death to superhero franchises. Death to superhero wisecracks. Death to dinner-table camaraderie. Death to all of it.

Friendo: “Technically Dune is wonderful.  It will probably sweep all the tech awards at the Oscars.  Still stuck with that storyline which is a bit on the ‘who cares?’ spectrum.  Oddly enough the most compelling and likable character is Jason Momoa‘s.

“David Lynch‘s 1984 version is 2 and 1/2 hours long. The new film ends at around the 90 minute mark of the Lynch film, so basically it’s another hour of storytelling that if they get to make Part 2, which will actually take a lot longer than an hour.”

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Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, both in their 50s, are too old to play Lucille Ball in her early 40s and Desi Arnaz in his mid 30s in Aaron Sorkin‘s Being The Ricardos (Amazon, sometime in late December). I’m sorry but they are. Human biology and all that.

Kidman and Bardem can be de-aged with makeup and CG, of course, but will the audience buy it? Or will I be the only one carping and nitpicking while everyone else says “whatever”?

It’s one thing for an actress in her mid 50s to play 15 years younger, which is what Kidman will be doing when she portrays Ball in the early 1950s, when I Love Lucy was hitting its stride and she was in her early 40s. That’s presumably doable with makeup and careful lighting.

But a couple of days ago Sorkin mentioned to TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz that the film will include a scene of rehearsing for Too Many Girls, the 1940 George Abbott musical that Ball and Arnaz costarred in. (And which occasioned their first meeting, which led to their marriage later that year.) That will require the 52 year-old Bardem to play 30 years younger, as Arnaz was 22 or 23 when Girls was shot. Likewise Kidman will have to attempt to look 29 for this section of the film.

From EW summary of Sorkin-Mankiewicz interview: “Sorkin [reveals] that the film focuses on three points of ‘friction’ between Ball and Arnaz that really occurred but that Sorkin has condensed into the timeline of a single week.”

To the best of my knowledge there was one point of friction between Ball and Arnaz — Desi’s infidelity.

“Unregenerate Desilu Hound,” posted on 9.20.21: “As Lucy and Desi prepare over the course of a single week to shoot an episode that will go down in history as having some of the funniest and most memorable scenes to grace television, we will be enthralled to peek into why despite all of that passion and success their world-famous relationship could never be.”

“Cutting to the chase: Arnaz’s Cuban upbringing taught him that catting around outside the bonds of marriage was perfectly acceptable or at least workable.

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I happen to love black-and-white for its own silver-toned luminosity, but every so often you say to yourself “good as it looks, this monochrome film would have been fascinating in color.”

Howard Hawks‘ Red River is at the top of this list. I would have dearly loved to see Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard in Techniolor…how could it have been hurt by that? And speaking of Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings and Bringing Up Baby would have been glorious in color. Which others?

Last May Lee Hill riffed on what killed the Mickey Rourke brand:

“Too much insecurity about what it is to ‘be a man in today’s world’ has derailed so many great American actors. Marlon Brando is at the top of this list. Warren Beatty isn’t on that list because he was addicted to politics and romance (and also managed to work that into his film work). Rourke sought solace in boxing as James Caan did in rodeo and treated his primary gig as a lark.

“I also think that so many actors of a certain generation lacked a formal education beyond high school and relied so heavily on intuition and not always savvy business advice…I’m sure that didn’t help either.

“The bottom line is that people stopped going to Rourke’s films because no one wants to see a great actor coast through a piece of shit movie when they are paying for parking, a babysitter, and trying to forget a shitty day at work, etc.

“And somehow in recent years we have arrived at the opposite extreme with Timothee Chalamet, who would probably start to have a really interesting career when he hits puberty around the age of 45.”

Two days ago (Monday, 10.11) Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos sent a lengthy email to Netflix employees following the Dave Chappelle trans controversy over The Closer, according to Variety‘s Matt Donnelly.

Sarandos basically doubled down on Netflix’s support for Chappelle and reiterated the company’s intention to not pull The Closer.

I wish I could report that Sarandos’ email also said something like “a lot of us are frankly tiring of woke Twitter fanatics losing their shit whenever a performer says or tweets the wrong thing, including things they may have said 10 or 20 years ago, the idea being to cancel a show or ruin a career and generally spread terror throughout the community.”

I would be an even happier man if I could add that Sarandos wrote, “I’m not the only one who’s sick of this woke bullshit. Almost everyone is, and I’m talking about moderate liberals and people like Chappelle and Jimmy Kimmel and Sasha Stone and Bill Maher and Jerry Seinfeld as well as Average Joes and Janes who watch Netflix.

“Most of us hate you, in fact, and we’d really like to dump you on some South Pacific island so you can all torture and cancel each other and leave us the fuck alone.

“Woke crusades started out great in ’16, but it quickly got out of hand, and over the last three or four years the liberal media world has been snowflaked and Twitter-terrored to death, and a lot of us are really sick of it. And if you don’t like me saying this out loud, that’s too fucking bad. Because you can always quit.”

Alas, Sarandos didn’t say any of this. But I’ll bet you twenty dollars that he was thinking at least some of it when he wrote the message.

“We know that a number of you have been left angry, disappointed and hurt by our decision to put Dave Chappelle’s latest special on Netflix,” Sarandos wrote in an email obtained by Variety.

“With The Closer, we understand that the concern is not about offensive-to-some content but titles which could increase real world harm (such as further marginalizing already marginalized groups, hate, violence etc.)

“Last year we heard similar concerns about 365 Days and violence against women. While some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.

“The strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last thirty years, especially with first-party shooter games, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries. Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse — or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy — without it causing them to harm others.”

Donnelly: “That Sarandos would wade into a debate about the potential harmful effects of content is notable, given that those who condemn Chappelle’s jokes have specifically cited the physical danger that anti-trans ideology poses to that community.”

Is this the beginning of the end of woke terror and a return to sensible liberalism? Maybe, maybe not. But it smells to me like teen spirit.

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Yesterday Joseph McBride, author of the forthcoming “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge” (Columbia University, 10.26), announced on Facebook that he’d just recorded a commentary track for a forthcoming Kino Bluray of Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (’59).

The Bluray is 4K UHD. This will be the first time that SLIH has been released in this format (3840p x 2160p). Your standard Bluray resolution is 1920p x1080p, of course. The Kino transfer will be the same beautiful version that Criterion released in November 2018.

And yet there was a problem with the Criterion Some Like It Hot, and that was the 1.85 aspect ratio. It needlessly and nihilistically slices off the tops and bottoms of the image, which has been 1.66 since the beginning of time.

Very slight slicings, agreed, but why chop off perfectly good visual information? It’s nothing short of perverse and diseased, but that’s the occasional way of Criterion eccentricity. They can be serious jerks when they feel like it.

Open message to Kino Lorber: “Why not differentiate your SLIH release by offering more than just a 4K UHD version? Why not give Billy Wilder‘s film more height by using a 1.66:1 aspect ratio? That’s the a.r. that everyone went with before Criterion came along with their completely unnecessary 1.85 version. Aspect ratio obsessives like myself would be deeply grateful if you would oblige.”

Before the handsome Criterion Bluray version came along the entire civilized world had agreed that Some Like It Hot is a 1.66 film.

That included Kino Lorber itself, which released a Some Like It Hot Bluray with a 1.66:1 a.r. in May 2011.

An old ’90s Criterion laser disc of SLIH, released in the early ’90s, used either a 1.66 or 1.37 a.r.

Look at any non-Scope United Artists release from the ’50s or ’60s; they were all mastered at 1.66 on laser discs and DVDs.

Look at these DVD Beaver screen capture pairings — the higher 1.66 versions are obviously above, the 1.85 versions below.

In a No Time To Die debate piece with Owen Gleiberman (“Is No Time to Die a Triumph or a Letdown? And Where Does the James Bond Series Go From Here?“), Variety critic Peter Debruge has written the following:

“The question now on everyone’s mind is who will take over for Craig. I suspect future installments will transpire in a parallel (but only just) dimension, the way past hand-offs have gone. That means we probably won’t see Lashana Lynch again.

“But introducing a Black woman as 007 opens the doors to a whole range of actors, and proves that of course Idris Elba or Riz Ahmed or Florence Pugh (my vote, if any Eon execs made it this far) could fill those shoes. He’s been played by a Scot (Sean Connery) and an Aussie (George Lazenby) already.”

The notion of Pugh being a successor to Daniel Craig and all the other Bond boys over the past 60 years…this idea is beyond ludicrous.

I’m not allowed to say this, but here goes anyway. Pugh, who recently went through the soul-draining Marvel motions with ScarJo in Black Widow, is TOO LITTLE to be play a Bond-like MI6 figure. She’s only 5’3”, for decency’s sake. I don’t think Lynch will get the gig either, but at 5′ 9″ she at least has the stature.

I know that nobody cares about bulk and muscles and upper body strength these days. A seasoned action director recently insisted to me that effective movie fighting is all about balance and agility and Thai combat techniques, etc. Whatever, man. But there’s no way in hell that Florence Pugh will come within 100 miles of playing a 007 figure down the road.

I might not have a problem with Riz Ahmed stepping into the role. The only problem is that he’s kinda short also — only 5′ 8″.