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…to live with a light sleeper with extra-sensitive hearing, a woman who can be woken up by damn near anything. And who chews you out when this happens.

Sleeping modes differ, of course. Some (like me) sink to the bottom of the pond and can’t be aroused by anything less than a 7.0 earthquake, and others (like the CEO of Tatiana, Ltd.) float on the surface of the pond. And I’m telling you that the slightest little piddly-tinkly-twinkly noise…a fork falling off a plate onto our glass-top coffee table, the accidental dropping of an iPhone battery, the mere snapping of a twig…wakes her up, and when that happens it’s like getting reamed out by Vladimir Putin.

I like to watch an old film to settle down with, and I always do so with wireless headphones. My movie time starts when Tatiana dozes off, around 10:30 or 11 pm. From that point on it’s “observe Moscow Rules or die.” If I want to get up for anything (a bottle of water, an ice pop, feed the cats) I’m careful to step extra-gently without shoes and only on the balls of my feet…I’m an angel walking on cotton balls. But that’s not good enough for General Strelnikov because if I walk on top of certain sections of wooden floor a slight groaning or creaking sound results…”you woke me uhhhp!!”

My name is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and I live in the Gulag Archipelago.

Respect for the late Jessica Walter, who passed yesterday at age 80. Walter achieved screen immortality when she portrayed Evelyn Draper, the estranged younger sister of Don Draper (kidding!) and the original psycho-nutso girlfriend in Clint Eastwood Play Misty For Me (’71).

After a single night of great sex with Carmel disc-jokey Dave Garver (Eastwood), Walter/Draper grasped and stalked and terrorized and wound up wielding a large kitchen knife. Audiences cheered when she met her doom at the finale.

16 years later Walter became the second most psychotic and terrifying figure in this realm with the arrival of Glenn Close‘s Alex Forrest in Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction (’87).

Alex caused blood to instantly drain from the faces of tens of millions of straight American male dilletante infidels…husbands and boyfriends who had once or twice slithered into a little involvement on the side without getting caught. Or had dreamt of this.

The idea with both Evelyn and Alex was that if you become intimate with them just once or twice, for a single night or over, say, a 24-hour period, you need to devote your life to them forever…leave your girlfriend, get divorced, invite her to live with you and become her lifelong partner as she prepares for a coming child, etc.

Walter’s peak feature-film period ran from the mid ’60s to early ’70s — Lilith, Grand Prix, The Group, Bye Bye Braverman, Number One, Play Misty for Me, etc. She kept working and hung in there and won an Emmy or two (she was oh-my-God-so-fucking-great in Arrested Development!…aaagghh wonderful!) all the way to the end. And don’t forget her voice work in Archer.

Solemn condolences and melancholy tidings in the matter of Bertrand Tavernier, who has passed at age 79. A great director (Coup de Torchon, Round Midnight, A Sunday in the Country, Let Joy Reign Supreme, Life and Nothing But, In The Electric Mist, The Princess of Montpensier), a brilliant fellow, French to the core but an internationalist, an avid cineaste and warm acquaintance to journalists the world over.

Monsieur Tavernier was simply a magnificent human being and a consummate Renaissance man — warm, gentle-mannered, passionate, knew everything and everyone. I was transported when I realized about 15 years ago that Tavernier was an HE reader, and doubly if not triply elevated when I met him at a journo gathering in Cannes a year or two later. We first chatted at the Algonquin Hotel in ’81 or ’82, during a press interview for Coup do Torchon. Quite the occasion.

We last met almost exactly a decade ago (3.9.11), during a French Consulate press encounter for The Princess of Montpensier, which might be my favorite Tavernier of all. Right now I can hear Bertrand whispering to me from heaven, telling me to stand tall and hold fast against the demonic Twitter jackals (I don’t know for a fact that he hated wokesters but I’m 98% certain of this) and to keep the cinema-love faith.

The exceptionally gifted George Segal was a necessary, nervy, highly charged actor for over 50 years (early ’60s until 2014). In his heyday he was an explorer of urban Jewish neurotics with underlying rage…half superficial, half pained and always guilty or bothered about something…at other times Segal was a smoothie…an amiable grinner with sandy brown hair and an eye for the ladies.

Segal’s two best roles were in Paul Mazursky‘s Blume In Love (’73) and in Robert Altman‘S California Split (’74).

Segal worked hard and dutifully and never stopped pushing, but honestly? His leading-man peak period lasted only nine or ten years. Or if you want to be cruel about it, he was The Guy Everyone Understood and Related To for only about five years, between ’70 and ’75.

The golden period began with Segal’s breakout performance in Ship of Fools (’64), and then as a crafty prisoner of war in King Rat (’65). This was followed by his career-making performance as Nick, the ambitious and randy biology professor who beds Elizabeth Taylor but can’t get it up, in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (’66). Segal’s streak ended with his lived-in performance as compulsive gambler Bill Denny in California Split, opposite the wonderfully on-target Elliot Gould.

Segal didn’t catch serious fire until neurotic Jewish guys became a hot Hollywood commodity in the early ’70s. His first serious breakout came when he played a vaguely unhappy cheating commuter husband in Irvin Kirshner‘s Loving (’70). This was followed by his guilty, lovesick moustachioed Jewish attorney in Carl Reiner‘s Where’s Poppa? (’70).

After this Segal starred in six winners — The Owl and the Pussycat, Born to Win (drug addict), The Hot Rock (Kelp the locksmith), Blume in Love, A Touch of Class, The Terminal Man and finally California Split — my favorite of all his films.

Between the mid to late ’60s Segal starred in five films that were somewhere between interesting and pretty good but at the same time not great — The Quiller Memorandum (’66), The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
(’68), Bye Bye Braverman, No Way to Treat a Lady (’68), The Bridge at Remagen (’69) and…well, that’s it.

Segal’s last decently written role was as Ben Stiller‘s dad (and Mary Tyler Moore‘s henpecked husband) in David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96).

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Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth (’52) is one of the least deserving Best Picture Oscar winners of all time. We all know that. But when they show it on the streaming services, they ought to respect the original “boxy is beautiful” aspect ratio (i.e., 1.37:1).

As we speak, Amazon and Paramount Plus aren’t respecting this — they’re showing it within a 16 x 9 a.r., and that ain’t cool. Yes, a new Paramount Home Video Bluray with the correct boxy proportion with be out in a few days.

Cleavered version of DeMille’s epic, now streaming on Amazon and Paramount Plus

Correct 1.37 aspect ratio:

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We all know that Hollywood Reporter contributor Gregg Kilday is really saying about the current Oscar nominees, and in particular those for Best Picture: He’s saying that 2020 (which includes early ’21) has been a dud movie year and a general downer for all concerned.

Everyone knows this and wants to move on and return to normal. All hail gains by women and POC filmmakers but nobody really loves the wokester progressive surge except those who’ve directly benefited. (And don’t forget that wokesters are the Robespierre-like architects of cancel culture.) Everyone’s morose and bummed and nobody gives a shit about the ’20 and ’21 nightmare because it’s an asterisk and a tragedy — a gloomy movie year defined by streaming and domestic hibernation and the slow suffocation of our souls…half-dying under a grim cloud.

Joe and Jane Popcorn aren’t exactly caught up in the thrill of the Oscar race, to put it mildly. Even professional Oscar watchers are having trouble maintaining a semblance of enthusiasm.

Kilday has posted five or six mitigating quotes that basically say “oh, no, this is a great year and streaming makes everything more accessible and we’re living through a great time.”

He’s also posted one honest quote from Unbroken producer Matthew Baer: “The grand slam for the Oscar best picture is a popular movie with artistic ambitions fulfilled. But given theaters were closed, popularity is difficult to judge. It’s ironic that this year Nomadland is a leading candidate because the business itself became displaced. Also, given nothing else matters in comparison to recovering from COVID, while winning an Oscar is the ultimate victory for artists, it will have less meaning in American culture this year.”

If theatrical was alive and thriving, the leading Best Picture contenders…well, who knows? But we all suspect the same thing, which is that they wouldn’t have stirred much in the way of crowds.

I have nothing novel or interesting to say about the original Romanoff’s…nothing at all. It was a famed Beverly Hills in-crowd restaurant that peaked in the ’40s and ’50s, and was frequented almost daily during this hallowed era by Humphrey Bogart, according to biographer Ezra Goodman. The owner, Michael Romanoff (1890 – 1971) was a character with a bit of a shady past. Some used the admiring, affectionate term of “con man”. He claimed to be descended from Russian royalty, but was actually born as Hershel Geguzin in Lithuania, worked as a Brooklyn pants presser, was deported to France in May of ’32 to serve time for fraud, etc. The movie crowd loved him. The first version of Romanoff’s, located at 326 No. Rodeo Drive (north of Wilshire), ran between ’41 and ’51; the second version (240 So. Rodeo Drive) ran from ’51 to ’62. Romanoff played a maitre’d in a studio simulation of Romanoff’s in A Guide for the Married Man (’67).

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Reminder: The 4K Psycho Bluray that was part of a 2020 Hitchcock 4K box set (9.8.20) will be purchasable as a stand-alone disc on 5.25.21. Don’t buy it!

Posted on 9.11.20: Last night I watched the new 4K UHD Psycho Bluray disc, and I’m very sorry to report that portions of it are grainstormed all to hell, and I mean totally smothered in swarms of digital micro-mosquitoes.

There were complaints here and there about the previous Psycho Bluray (the 2010 50th anniversary edition) being overly DNR’ed (digital noise reduction), and so the Universal Home Video grain monks (i.e., “the grainmakers”) went into the control room and took their revenge.

The new Psycho reminds me of that 70th anniversary grainstorm Casablanca Bluray that Robert Harris and Glenn Kenny were so stuck on, and which I hated.

The older DNR’d Psycho Bluray (which I can no longer find on Amazon) is much more pleasing to the eye. Yes, I know that the DNR’ed look isn’t what the film really looked like when it came out of the lab in ’60, and I couldn’t care less. All the surfaces and textures look clean and smooth and ultra-detailed, but now the Universal gremlins have injected hundreds of billions of throbbing mosquitoes into this classic Hitchcock film.

Plus there are some scenes in the newbie that appear way too contrasty. Steer clear of the 4K version and stick with the 2010 Bluray. If you don’t own a copy, buy one now.

By the way: As noted earlier, the 4K Psycho includes some excised material that had never been available before, including a brief glimpse of Janet Leigh side-boob as Anthony Perkins watches her undress through a peephole.

Also: The knifing of Arbogast (Martin Balsam) at the bottom of the stairs now includes two or three extra stabbing strokes. Except the sound of Arbogast’s “arrhhwwghhhh!” is oddly delayed. The knife plunges in a couple of times, but he doesn’t go “arrhhwwghhhh!” until the third stab. Brilliant.

Note: The top video clip is an ECU of the Bates Motel parlor scene from the new 4K disc. The Egyptian mosquito grainstorm effect is obvious to the naked eye. The below video clip is an ECU of a scene from the 2010 Psycho Bluray — very little grain to speak of.

Rifkin’s Festival is definitely among Woody Allen‘s worst films. (Here’s my 2.12.21 review.) But if Allen had included a scene in which the 77-year-old Wallace Shawn is knocked down and swept along by one of those rogue waves that routinely smash against the fortified San Sebastian coastline, it would have been a whole different thing. Just the thought of Shawn and costar Elena Anaya marvelling at the choppy seas and then…WHUHSHHH! Obliterated, devoured, soaked…both of them squealing like piglets. I hated Shawn’s crabby, gnomish septugenarian, you see, so his getting all-but-destroyed by a wave would have been…kinda perfect!

The San Sebastian waves are famous. It was derelict of Allen not to include such a scene.

As of today, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn is primarily known for three things. One, writing smart, sage, fair-minded assessments of films as they come along. Two, being one of the New York Film Critics Circle members who allegedly lobbied to give Best Actress trophies to Support The Girls‘ Regina Hall in 2018, and to Never Rarely Sometimes Always‘ Sidney Flanigan last December, and to bestow the NYFCC’s 2020 Best Film award to First Cow. And three, becoming possibly the first top-ranked film critic to actively push for the end of the career of a major-league filmmaker. Not saying this or that movie stinks, but “this guy needs to be erased, Goodfellas-style.”

I’m not certain if critics of past decades have advocated for this or that career to be fully and finally killed. Many looked the other way when certain screenwriters were blacklisted in the late ’40s and ’50s, of course, but that was a different thing. Maybe some influential critic of 60 or 70 years ago actually wrote “it’s time for the career of John Garfield or Abraham Polonsky or Carl Foreman to be suffocated” and I simply haven’t read about it. I’m just saying that I went “whoa” when I read the headline above Kohn’s article. Because actively lobbying for the final eradication of a filmmaker’s career…well, Kohn’s rep before today has always been that of a congenial, nebbishy, mild-mannered fellow…even-toned, comme ci comme ca, let the chips fall, roll with the tremors.

I have a discreet, longstanding relationship with the Movie Godz. They’re basically spiritual remnants of once-living filmmakers who hover and contemplate the filmmaking world. There are 12 as we speak. They all have Twitter accounts, of course, and are constantly refreshing. Once a month they assemble and hash things out, and sometimes they’ll share a thought or two.

All I can say is that during last week’s meeting, some said that they feel left out of things. Nobody cares who they are or what they think. Their frustration is so great that they’re now talking about cancelling someone or something because (I’m not saying this makes a great deal of sense) if they can destroy the reputation of a film or filmmaker, they’ll somehow feel more engaged with the 21st Century world, a good portion of which is driven by terror and intimidation.

Except that, unlike Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, they don’t hold with the idea of cancelling this or that individual filmmaker or actor for perceived moral or ethical crimes. They shared great relief, for example, that they didn’t get into the brief and idiotic Ansel Elgort flare-up that happened last June.

They finally decided that the best approach would be to cancel certain films retroactively…films that the world could have done without when they were first released, and which the presently-constituted film world would be better off not watching as we speak. As in “get rid of even the memories of these movies…eliminate their existence on Bluray, no streaming, no nothing.”

I’m not saying this is a good thing (HE believes that all films should be preserved and available for new generations to watch and react to) but if you happen to agree with the Movie Godz and feel that some films should be permanently exterminated, what titles would you suggest?

Yesterday afternoon Variety‘s Clayton Davis and Jazz Tangcay began a Twitter discussion about their favorite movie houses. There’s a certain strata of younger GenX, Millennial and Zoomer movie mavens who immediately default to scary movie houses when the topic arises. Hence Clayton’s mention of….now I’m forgetting but it might have been the Amityville house, something in that vein. And then Jazz kicked in with her favorite — “the house in Mother!“…scary Darren Aronofsky!

The Psycho house, The House on Haunted Hill, the huge gothic mansion in Robert Wise‘s The Haunting…some people just think this way.

Here are Hollywood Elsewhere’s top-five favorite movie homes: (a) Phillip Van Damm‘s semi-fictionalized Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home near Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, (b) the sprawling Connecticut ranch-style home (French doors, sycamore trees) owned by Katharine Hepburn‘s wealthy mother in Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks and his wife “Slim” built a Bel Air home based on the Bringing Up Baby house, and called it “Hog Canyon”, (c) The side-by-side homes owned by Aurora Greenway and Garret Breedlove in Terms of Endearment, located on Locke Lane in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood (which I actually visited in April 2006); (d) the Spanish-flavored Double Indemnity home, which I just visited a few days ago, (e) the elegant mountainside home owned by John Robie (Cary Grant) in Alfred Hitchcock‘s To Catch A Thief (Sasha Stone, her daughter Emma and I actually visited the Saint-Jennet home just prior to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival).

The second cluster of five (#6 thru #10): (f) The Evelyn Mulray home in Chinatown, located at 1315 South El Molino Drive in Pasadena; (f) the Leave It To Beaver-styled home in Nancy Meyers‘ Father of the Bride, which is just down the street from the Mulwray home at 843 So. El Molino; (h) Joel Goodson’s bordello home in Risky Business, located at 1258 Linden Avenue, in Highland Park, Illinois; (i) Lester Townsend‘s Glen Cove mansion (brick facade, long curved driveway) in North by Northwest, known in reality as the Old Westbury Gardens (71 Old Westbury Road, Old Westbury, New York, NY 11568); (j) Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten‘s Shadow of a Doubt home (904 McDonald Avenue, Santa Rosa).

Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine’s homes in Terms of Endearment, located on Locke Lane in the River Oaks section of Houston.

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