wired

90 minutes were eaten up this morning at the vet (the first of three all-in-one vaccines for Mouse), and then three and a half to four hours were consumed trying to find a place that could do a first-rate scan of a 41″ x 18″ poster of The Presbyterian Church Wager , the 1971 Robert Altman film that was renamed as McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I finally got it scanned and burned to a CD for $86.87; brand-new poster-sized prints will be ready by tomorrow or the next day.

My Sir Speedy guy couldn’t scan full-scale one-sheets; ditto the local Kinkos and a place on Wilshire called Luscen. I went upstairs to an office of an architect named Jackson and asked where they scan their architectural drawings, and one of the office guys directed me to a place on Robertson just north of Olympic called Ford Graphics. Except the Ford guy only does black-and-white scans, and so he sent me over to the West L.A. branch on Military, which handles color.
Mouse, by the way, was with me the whole time and being fairly cool about it — no crying, sitting on my shoulder, checking things out, etc.
Then as I began to remove the poster from the metal-and-glass frame at Ford we realized moisture has seeped in and the lower-right portion of the poster had stuck to the glass. I had to spend a long 10 minutes slowly slicing the sticky paper shreds off the glass with a razor blade. Then I had to wait for the scan to be done and put to disc, and then I had to go back to my Sir Speedy guy and give him the disc for digital touch-ups and printing.
It all reminded me that copying and restoring old materials is a fragile undertaking, and that you have to treat all the materials with kid gloves. But what a beauty this thing is. Those rich blues and reds, the Victorian-era trim on the perimeter, etc. About as rare as rare-ass movie posters come.

The cursive caption beneath the oval-shaped monochrome photo of Beatty and Julie Christie reads as follows: “Mr. John Q. McCabe & Mrs. Constance Miller — Town of Presbyterian Church 1902.”

Here’s an excerpt from a q & a between Film.com’s Mark Bourne and Elvis Mitchell, longtime host of KCRW’s “The Treatment” and now the host of TCM’s Elvis Mitchell: Under The Influence, which debuts this evening at 8 pm and then repeats again at 10:30 pm. An interview with Sydney Pollack starts it all off.

MB: “With the interviews you’ve done so far for the TV show, and to a lesser extent your radio show…”
Elvis Mitchell: “Oh, thank you, ‘a lesser extent’…”
MB: [sudden panic]: “No, no, no, I mean…”
Elvis Mitchell: “Oh, no, okay, this is what got me into therapy, right?
MB: Well, since we’re talking about the TV show….
Elvis Mitchell: “Beautifully done.”

So 20th Century Fox chief Tom Rothman has hosted 16 episodes of “Fox Legacy,”the Fox Movie Channel show, and there are no YouTube clips to embed? Today’s N.Y. Times story by Brooks Barnes reports that Rothman “has developed a cult following for his historical monologues and self-deprecating style. He gets fan mail — no less a viewer than Steven Spielberg recently dropped him a note — and more episodes are on order.”

Do the top people who make a film take on the look and mood of same? Or does the film take on the look and mood of these top people? Consider this photo of Mamma Mia writer, director and co-producer Catherine Johnson (l.), Phyllida Lloyd (center) and Judy Craymer (r.), which was used for a 7.6 N.Y. Times profile by Sylviane Gold. What does this photo tell you (or at least suggest) about the character and tone of the film?

Johnson, Lloyd and Craymer

Someone has finally said something a wee bit contrary about The Dark Knight — amazing. Variety‘s Anne Thompson feels that the 152-minute film (a) goes on about a half-hour too long, (b) is “overwhelming” and made her feel “over-pixellated,” (c) “starts to go off the tracks” with its handling of Aaron Eckhart‘s Harvey Dent character, and (d) doesn’t spend enough time with Christian Bale‘s Bruce Wayne/Batman. Here‘s Justin Chang‘s Variety review, also up today.

A brief salute to 16 year-old Nick Plowman, a pretty good writer who runs a nice-looking film site called fataculture. (Whatever that means.) He’s from Johannesburg, South Africa, has been blogging for a year now, and is a member in good standing of the South African press. He even attended last May’s Cannes Film Festival. He says he has “big dreams to come to the US some day and continue my film journalism there.”

It’s always cool to see a 16 year-old getting down to it and…you know, slamming away like he’s 26 years old with rent and car payments and utility bills to cover each month. I wish I’d been doing something like this when I was 16 instead of just getting sloshed with my friends. My son Jett, of course, wrote a weekly column for this site when he was 16 and 17, which I naturally admired.

People‘s Julie Jordan and Karen Snyder had obviously heard that relations between the engaged Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan weren’t all that smooth, which is why they called around before the July 4th holiday. “Sources” told them the director and actress are still together, and McGowan’s rep said her client will star in three of her fiance’s upcoming projects — Barbarella, Red Sonja and Woman in Chains! — “despite reports to the contrary.”

It is written on stone tablets that a lovestruck director will hold on to his actress girlfriend/wife as long as he “does” for her. If the projects they team on don’t happen or don’t make money, sooner or later she’ll push on to the next guy. It’s that simple. Fiercely ambitious, marginally talented actresses are not human, of course, and I’m not the only one to have detected the whiff of an idea over the years that McGowan is a bit of a Jezebel. So it’s really just a matter of fate and time. Life is hard then you die.
That said, the project I’d most like to see is the chicks-behind-bars movie. As long as there’s a little lezbo action and as long as McGowan and a couple of fellow prisoners escape at the end of Act Two. Barbarella could be cool, but some studio suits reportedly don’t believe that McGowan is enough of a star to justify a big special-effects budget. Red Sonja didn’t work the first time around so why go there?

I’ve always been amazed that a line of dialogue this clueless and old-farty was used for a mass-market, right-in-the-swing-of-things entertainment that opened in December 1964. The author was either Richard Maibaum or Paul Dehn. It would have been out of character, yes, for Sean Connery‘s James Bond to have been a Beatles fan, but to have him speak of listening to their music with earmuffs on! Astonishing for a pop hero figure to have blurted this out at that time in history.

In March 1970 a career achievement Oscar was given to a beloved, well-known actor. At the end of his speech the 66 year-old recipient expressed great excitement at “the astonishing young talents that are coming up in our midst…I think there’s an even more glorious era right around the corner.” Cary Grant had that exactly right, didn’t he?

Asked by Tim Appelo to name his favorite all-time books about Hollywood, author Peter Biskind — who is still laboring on his Warren Beatty biography, which may (I say “may”) be released sometime next year — has named seven books. Presumably off the top of Biskind‘s head and obviously less than comprehensive, but here they are:

Peter Biskind

David McClintick‘s “Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street,” Stephen Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate,” Julia Phillips‘ “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” John Gregory Dunne‘s “The Studio,” Leo Braudy‘s “The World in a Frame,” Thomas Schatz‘s “The Genius of the System” and Lillian Ross‘s “Picture.”

Appelo has allowed two wrongos to slip by, I’m afraid. Bach’s book is not called “Heaven’s Gate: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate.” And the author of “Picture” (i.e., not “The Picture,” as Appelo has it) is Lillian Ross, not Roth.
I would add the following to the must-read list: Otto Freidrich‘s “City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s“, Julie Salamon‘s “The Devil’s Candy,” Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution,” Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss‘s “The Cleopatra Papers,” David Thomson‘s “Suspects” and “The Whole Equation and “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” William Goldman‘s “Which Lie Did I Tell?” and Biskind’s own “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures.”

As Religulous producer-star Bill Maher or “God Is Not Great” author Chris Hitchens will tell you, anything that undermines any religious myth is cause for popping open the champagne. So Ethan Bronner‘s 7.6 N.Y. Times story that calls into question the legend of Jesus of Nazareth’s resurrection after three days in the tomb is a big whoopee in this regard. Cue the heartland Christian preacher types who will try to deny and spin this thing for all they’re worth.
The gist is that “a recently discovered three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles…because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.”

It’s been a couple of weeks since Patrick Goldstein‘s Big Picture blog started up, and it’s still hard to find the damn thing. Plus it looks too much like Goldstein’s regular “Big Picture” column. Why haven’t those doofusy LAT tech guys created a separate look and identity for the Goldstein blog? The dead-tree column and the blog are next to indistinguishable.
My understanding of the L.A. Times‘ online entertainment coverage is that The Envelope is the main portal. Except there’s no clear, easy-to see link to either Goldstein’s dead-tree column or his blog. Shouldn’t there be links to both? And shouldn’t there be an unmissable link to the blog on the dead-tree column and vice versa? Go to the L.A. Times‘ main search engine and all you get…ahhh, forget it. Who has the patience for a site that can’t provide simple comprehensive direction?
The Envelope does, however, have a clear, easy-to-see link to Pete Hammond‘s “Notes on a Season” 5.27 column about the Cannes Film Festival.