I’ve seen Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan three times now — once at the ’05 Toronto Film Festival, twice on DVD. Why is it, then, that I’m seriously contemplating going to see it again as the final showing in the Aero’s “Mods & Rockers” series on Sunday night (8.27)? I’ve thought it over, and all I can figure is that it feels immensely cool to soak in the specialness of that early-to-mid ’60s Dylan thing, which isn’t “better” than the bolt around the current Dylan album or the late ’90s incarnation or the one that happened in the mid ’70s when he sang “Hurricane.” I only know that the ghost of electricity howled in the bones of her face only once, and then it very gradually faded over time.

I’ve heard a couple of good things about ABC’s five-hour TV movie The Path to 9/11, which will air over two nights — Sunday, September 10 (8: to 11:00 pm, PT/ET) and Monday, September 11 (8 to 10 p.m., PT/ET). It’s about the lead-up to the 9/11 tragedy starting with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The director is David L. Cunningham, the writer is Cyrus Nowrasteh, and the principal star is Harvey Keitel playing John O’Neill, the onetime FBI agent and WTC security consultant who was killed on 9/11.
I’m going to try and score a DVD screener, as it’ll be pretty damn difficult to give this film my full attention during the Toronto Film Festival, which starts on 9.7 and lasts until 9.17.
Cunningham’s film is obviously going to overlap over Paul Haggis’s Against All Enemies, a feature based on Richard Clarke‘s book of the same name. Haggis was going to direct a film with Sean Penn as Clarke and Vince Vaughn as John O’Neill, but I don’t know. I’m getting a funny back-of-the-neck feeling about this one. I think it may go south.

CNN will run a replay of its coverage of the 9/11attacks as it actually happened in real time on 9.11.06 on CNN Pipeline, starting at 8:30 ayem and ending at midnight. That means not on CNN’s cable station but online…kapeesh? The 9/11 viewing will be available for free that day — viewers normally pay $2.95 monthly or $24.95 per year. Iinteresting. (I almost wrote kewl.) But why not also make the full-day coverage available via a DVD box set of some kind?

I’ve heard from several people that there’s been some kind of unadvertised deal between Paramount Home Video and Circuit City to provide an Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier DVD package that contains 3 DVDs if — and only if — you buy it at Circuit City. And here’s a review on DVD Talk that mentions this Circuit City-only “third disc” version. And yet these versions were apparently recalled a few days ago and can no longer be found at Circuit City stores.

The review, amended on Sunday, 8.20.06, says, “Thanks to DVD Talk reader Ryan, who passed along this detailed information about Paramount’s bizarre decision to offer excised material from the first two DVD incarnations of Apocalypse Now as a bonus disc exclusively carried by Circuit City in limited supplies: ‘Please note that there is a Bonus Disc Three available exclusively at Circuit City. The disc has this written on it: ‘The Added Scenes and Expanded Themes of Apocalypse Now Redux’; Destruction of the Kurtz Compound with Optional Commentary; 1979 Theatrical Trailer; 2001 Trailer.
“The disc is packaged inside the cardboard outer sleeve and behind the digipack. Editions with the bonus disc will have a sticker on the outside which says “Exclusive Free Bonus Disc With Purchase of this DVD While Supplies Last.” Editions with the free bonus disc have a different UPC barcode: 032429010995.” It’s also worth noting that the ‘excerpts from the original theatrical program’ found on the first DVD have still not turned up anywhere, so again, Apocalypse Now enthusiasts would do well to hang onto at least the first DVD release.”
And yet I’ve called four Circuit City stores today (Saturday, 8.26) and spoken to six or seven employees, and they all said that (a) the Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier double-disc set isn’t sitting on the shelves, and (b) they had no idea there was a three-disc version being offered exclusively at Circuit City. The awareness and sophistication levels of these people was not impressive. Two asked me repeat the name “Apocalypse Now”, as if it was the name of some exotic herb.
Only one Circuit City employee had a clue about what I was talking about. Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier has been recalled, said an assistant manager at the Burbank Circuit City branch on First Street. The discs were sent back “about four or five days ago,” she said. The double-disc version is available in all the other stores at a price of $16 dollars and change (or thereabouts). Circuit City was asking $14.99 when they had them.

Reader Ernie Souchak writes, “I don’t know if Circuit City is a Viacom company, but this deal is really obnoxious, and should piss off everyone else who’s selling this package, not to mention fans whose ‘Dossier’ is less complete than others’.” A friendly clerk named Lon at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer says two or three people have come into the store talking about the Circuit City-only, three-disc version and said they’d bought it, etc.
It’s looking like those three-disc Dossier DVDs are going to acquire the reputation of that Yesterday and Today “butcher block” Beatles album from 1966 with the severed baby-head and chopped-meat cover photo. The purported offensiveness of this immensely cool cover photo resulted in a sudden recall by Capitol Records before the album arrived in record stores.
If Paramount wanted to set this whole thing straight, they would assemble a genuine Complete Dossier with George Hickelnlooper and Fax Bahr‘s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apcalypse, a truly great 1991 documentary about the making of the film, and then issue that sometime later this year — a four-disc set in all.

Snakes on a Plane, the hottest internet sensation of the year that opened last weekend, will rank in eighth place as of Sunday evening with earnings of $5,812,000 — a drop of 62%. And Little Miss Sunshine, which expanded to 1450 theatres this weekend, will come in third with $6,928,000. The #1 film, as expected, is Invincible with a projected $16,198,000.

POV Online’s Mark Evanier is arguing that the Bruno Kirby- Billy Crystal piece by Nicholas Stix that I linked to yesterday (i.e., the one that suggested that Crystal might have been a “career-killing ogre” as far as Kirby was concerned). I don’t know anything about this, but Evanier makes some good arguments. I ‘m disputing one of them, though, and I want to point out something he didn’t mention:

“Perhaps Crystal blocked Kirby from being cast in City Slickers II and subsequent Billy Crystal movies,” he writes. “It was probably within his power to do so…but how could he stop Steven Spielberg from hiring Bruno Kirby? How could he stop Cameron Crowe or Ron Howard or…well, name the top fifty directors in the business these days. If one of them decided Bruno Kirby was the best actor for a given role, would that director say, ‘Let’s go with our second choice. I want to help Billy Crystal destroy Bruno’s career’?”

That’s well put and well-reasoned, but I also know from limited experience that when the word goes out on an actor or actress that he/she is bad news and/or more trouble than he/she is worth or has made an enemy of a very important person, etc., people pick up on this and they tend to steer away from him/her. It’s cowardly but people do this. Actors can go cold for long periods of time, and sometimes the cold streak starts when a big name hands them a black spot.

Once again, I’m not saying Crystal did this to Kirby — I don’t know anything — but I know that if a certain heavyweight decides to shun an actor, other heavy- weights pick up on this and figure, “If there’s a 1 in 100 chance I might alienate that heavyweight actor-director by hiring this character actor, why do it? Why not just hire someone else?” This is a town, trust me, that runs on terror, avoidance and backbones made of jelly.

The other thing that Evanier is missing out on are the indications of lying in Crystal’s responses to questions about Kirby put to him by USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna (a.k.a., Suzie Woz) on 9.12.01.

Wloszczyna asked Crystal, “The only thing I could come up with is that when you were making City Slickers II, you and Bruno Kirby had a falling out.” Crystal said, “He wasn’t in City Slickers II.” And Wloszczyna says back, “Yeah, I know, but there was some reason that he didn’t do it. Are you guys still friends?” Crystal answers, “I haven’t spoken to him — I think we are. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in a long time.”
Stop right there — anyone who says “I think we’re still friends” is dodging and side-stepping. And following this up with “I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in a long time” is, I suspect, a code phrase that means “I haven’t wanted to see or speak with him for a long time because of some shit that went down that I don’t want to get into again.”

Crystal later says to Wloszczyna, “This is a perfect situation. We’re here to talk about the movie, and you’re talking about something personal or whatever it is that happened, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago.” That’s an obvious tipoff that speaking about Kirby is an uncomfortable thing for Crystal. And saying the words “personal or whatever” is another lie — he knows it was personal and he’s saying “or whatever” to cover it up.

I’ve believed for years that prepared or carefully phrased statements often cover underlying truths, and that it’s always the words in passing — the obiter dicta — that give the real game away. A professed truth is always suspect, but you can always trust the obvious scent of a lie.

That said, I’m not pushing any kind of notion that Billy Crystal is a “career-killing ogre”, much less the devil. I have no knowledge or stake in any of this. Kirby may have torpedoed himself in all kinds of different ways as far as his career was concerned — I don’t know a damn thing — but Crystal definitely wasn’t being honest with Wloszczyna in that exchange, and that’s why I ran the link to Stix’s piece in the first place.

This is the strangest piece about The Searchers that I’ve ever read. Written by Alex Cox, it’s supposed to be about his watching John Ford‘s 1956 classic western in Utah’s Monument Valley, where it was shot. Cox describes the drive (a little bit) and then sidewinds into a perceptive but relatively generic appreciation of the movie, blah, blah, the duality of John Wayne‘s Ethan character, blah, blah. What happened to the outdoor movie-watching experience? The desert dust inside the boots, the way they bleachers felt, the size of the screen, whether it was sufficiently audible, what kind of people showed up, etc.?

Cartoonist-satirist Mike Russell did a sitdown last month in Oregon with Beerfest boys Eric Stolhanske and Steve Lemme (two from the Broken Lizards comedy troupe who costarred in Super Troopers), and here’s how it went down.

When I was living in my cockroach-infested, struggling-young- journalist Soho pad in the late ’70s, there were all those Jean Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti pieces painted all over Soho and the Bowery.
SAMO was Basquiat’s graffiti alter-ego — it basically meant “same old shit‘ — and I remember being hugely disappointed when I met Basquiat himself on a street corner and he told me in passing it was pronounced “same-oh”. I had always preferred “sam-oh”.

Some of the slogans were “SAMO as a neo art form,” “SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy” and “SAMO as an escape clause.”
Anyway, I’ve never forgotten a certain SAMO graffiti that said the poiltical power of McDonalds had become equal to that of the CIA or the Vatican. I saw it somewhere near Broadway and Prince. That was something like a Major Moment for me, burned into my brain. McDonald’s = pernicious, anti-human, scourge of cvilization.
McDonalds is on the wane these days. In this country, anyway. The fearsome corporate franchise beast of 2006 is Starbucks, of course. Which is why I paid attention a week or so ago to that story about actor Rupert Everett joining forces with his Bloomsbury district neighbors to try and prevent a Starbucks outlet from moving into the neighborhood.
And then it all came together today with one big whammo when I saw this world map about the spread of the Twin Corporate Cancers of Starbucks and McDonalds.
The chart says there are 6200 Starbucks around the world with an average of 3 new outlets opening each day, and 13,000 — 13,000? — McDonalds around the world generating $41 billlion in annual income. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Sounds light. If someone told me there were 130,000 McDonalds outlets worldwide, I would buy that.

Paramount Pictures “remains firmly in the grasp of a man so out of touch with the modern world that when citing the support he’d had for his remarks, Sumner Redstone told reporters he’d had a congratulatory call from Vanity Fair celebrity chronicler Dominick Dunne, who told him he behaved like Samuel Goldwyn. Being compared to Goldwyn has a nice ring to it, but the truth is that Redstone really has far more in common with N.Y. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. That’s why I suspect that no matter how many good pictures get made at Paramount, as long as Redstone is around, studio executives won’t last any longer than Yankees managers during Steinbrenner’s heyday. Both men live in a world where winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing.” — from Patrick Goldstein‘s latest “Big Picture” column.

A recap & post-mortem on the Redstone-Cruise- Wagner-Grey kerfuffle from Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson. Here’s one thing we definitely agree upon, which is that turmoil and transition can sometimes provide a creative blessing in disguise. Thompson writes that not having a Paramount berth is just such a situation for Cruise: “Freeing himself from a studio like Paramount could be the best thing to happen to him.” And I said last May in my “Upside of Taps” piece about Cruise’s implosion that “if he’s smart (and he is), he can damage control his way out of this, to some extent. Just downplay the weirdo stuff and focus on the work, the work, the work. This a big opportunity for the guy. He’s begun of those life passages that can lead, with the right attitude, to non-material riches.”

I’ve never run a fluffball item of this magnitude on Hollywood Elsewhere before, but you know me…anything to push along the Little Miss Sunshine bandwagon. If you have any “mad money” to spare and you’re on Robertson Blvd., Kitson is the place to drop into. Except I don’t have any mad money because advertising revenues suck in the summer months, so that lets me out and then some. Nonethless, Kitson has a big Sunshine display in the window….cool. I love those family-size buckets of Dinah’s Fried Chicken.

Kitson window display on Robertson Blvd. south of Beverly Blvd.