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This article by New York journalist Nicholas Stix (posted on Tuesday and updated today) could have been called “When Billy Shafted Bruno.” It’s not mentioned in the lead graph or the second or third graph, but the heart of the story provides indications and quotes supporting a thesis that Billy Crystal “made” the career of the late Bruno Kirby, who died last week, and then he un-made him.

Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby

Or so the indicators indicate. Crystal certainly seems to have had an indirect hand in limiting Kirby’s acting opportunities and may have been, in a sense, a “career- killing ogre” as far as Kirby was concerned. By all means read Stix’s article, but in a nutshell it says the following:

(a) “Kirby was one of the hottest character actors in Hollywood in the late 1980s, through 1991, the high point of which was Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989), in which Kirby played the male second banana as the sportswriter- best friend of Crystal’s character. Sally would prove to be one of the greatest romantic comedies ever made, and the high point in the career of everyone involved in the production.”

(b) “In 1991, Kirby had an even more substantial role in City Slickers as Crystal’s character’s macho friend,. That same year, Kirby also won acclaim on Broadway, replacing Kevin Spacey as the male lead, playing the smallest of small-timers, would-be gangster ‘Uncle Louie’ in Neil Simon’s memory play, Lost in Yonkers which won four Tony awards.”

(c) “At that point, Kirby was one of the top character actors in the business, his career on a trajectory that was leading inexorably to Oscar nominations, and perhaps even a golden statuette. And then his career tanked. Following City Slickers, the names of most of the pictures he was in were so forgettable — obscure, direct-to-video duds that I had never even heard of — that I instantly forgot them.”

(d) “During or shortly after the making of City Slickers, Kirby and Crystal had a falling out, and not only would Crystal no longer work with Kirby, but neither would any of the many producers and directors associated with Crystal. As a result, while Kirby continued to work, he was cast in fewer movies and the ones he was cast in were, well … take a look for yourself: Golden Gate (1994), Heavenzapoppin’! (1996), A Slipping-Down Life (1999), History Is Made at Night (1999), One Eyed King (2001).

(e) “On 9.12.01, USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna interviewed Crystal as part of a press junket for America’s Sweethearts, and at one point asked for a worst-junket story: Wloszczyna: “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: “He wasn’t in City Slickers II.” Wloszczyna: “Yeah, I know, but there was some reason that he didn’t do it. Are you guys still friends?” Crystal: “I haven’t spoken to him — I think we are. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in a long time.” There’s an interlude and then back to the subject. Crystal: “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.” Wloszczyna: “But it’s about the movie, because the subject of the movie is the press and famous people.” Crystal:: “So now you’re my worst junket story.”

(f) “I think we are” still friends? “Something personal or whatever it is that happened, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago”? “Whatever”? With a guy you went from being practically vaudeville partner with, to not seeing or speaking with “in a long time”?

Three fascinating Dreamgirls interviews in tandem with costars Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Non-i Rose, written by ,em>USA Today’s Suzie Woz (a.k.a., Susan Wloszczyna). Except uhm….well, I lied about the “fascinating.” This may have something to do with the fact that Dreamgirls won’t be screened for another couple of months, probably. And I don’t see why Wloszczyna, whose last name is unspellable, doesn’t just change her handle to Suzie Woz full-time. This is America — land of hamburgers and simplicity and Ford Fairlanes. Answer this honestly: if you were the Pulp Fiction character named Antoine Roquemora and you found out your “street” nickname was Tony Rockyhorror, would you have a problem with that?

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett will be in Toronto to flog the TIFF showings of Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu’s Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27), as will Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott for the screenings of A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10). And a publicist friend called today about setting up an interview with a client.
But nothing can be scheduled, of course, because the Toronto Film Festival hasn’t made the schedules of press and public screenings available.
Remember that exchange from Beat the Devil when the ship’s captain announces that an engine part has cracked and the ship can’t leave port until a replacement arrives. “Now see here,” says an irate English passenger. “This vessel is schedued, most definitely scheduled, to leave port at midnight tonight.” And the captain says, “Scheduled, sir, but not, I fear, destined to do so.” (Dialogue by Truman Capote.)

I was into this for a few seconds based on the headline and the illustration, but the poor spelling and grammar queered it.

It’s my humble opinion that L.A. Times reporters John Horn and Rachel Abramowitz have written more enthralling analysis pieces that this one, a sum-up about the increasingly strained relations between studios, producers and eccentric talent like Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan and M. Night Shyamalan, blah, blah. This mp3 of Mark Ebner‘s mouthing off about Cruise’s situation on a Calgary radio station on Wednesday, 8.23, is a livelier absorption. Ebner naturally embraces the Sumner-was-right scenario (Ebner and Andrew Breitbart’s Hollywood Interrupted book prophesized the Age of Celebrity Meltdowns) and he’s certainly not as measured or cautious as Horn and Abramowitz, but I prefer his take all the same.

There’s apparently been some feelings of hesitancy among Lucasfilm staffers about the transfers of the original versions of the Star Wars flicks on those upcoming DVDs (due 9.12). This message recently went out from Fox Home Video: “Due to an internal decision from the [George] Lucas camp, we unfortunately will not be distributing any screeners for these three releases.”

Did they do some kind of half-assed job (I’ve been reading all along that the DVDs would just be taken from the masters of the old Star Wars laser discs) that needed some last-minute tweaks or something? I mean, why not send out screeners? What’s the upside strategy in keeping the DVDs under wraps until 9.12? One assumes/presumes it’s because they’re afraid that the DVD reviewers will say the transfers look like shit. What other reading can I take from this? (Three calls to Fox Home Video this morning went to voicemail and yielded no callbacks.)

“These days [Tom Cruise] is like a charlatan who can’t manage to dupe anybody. He seems desperate to maintain his stature as one of the world’s biggest movie stars, even as he morphs into something no movie star can afford to be: a guy you wouldn’t want to know,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James in today’s edition. “[Viacom chief Sumner] Redstone soon fell into the usual showbiz doublespeak when he said of Mr. Cruise, “As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal.” He got that backward, at least from the moviegoers’ perspective. Tom Cruise’s real problem is: We just don’t like him anymore.”

Stirring praise for Factotum star Matt Dillon from critic Anthony Lane: “The beautiful joke of Factotum” — Bent Hamer‘s adaptation of Charles Bukowski‘s novel — “is that Dillon is nobility itself.
“He may also be savage, swiping Lily Taylor off her barstool with a backhand smack, and he is certainly wounded, rising from his bed to throw up and then swig his first beer of the day, yet there is something graven and classical in the brow and bearded chin which speaks of disappointed hauteur; he is like a leftover Roman, beaten up by the places he once aimed to conquer and falling, inch by inch, on his sword. In the words of one onlooker, ‘You look like you√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ve been around. You look like you√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ve got class.’
“Of all the pretty boys of the 1980s, Dillon has not just ripened most convincingly; he has discovered that the weatherings of age were exactly what he was waiting for.
“His racist cop was the best thing in Crash, and his rescue of Thandie Newton from an upturned car, with the flames crawling closer, has rightly burned a hole in viewers√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ minds. A sloppy actor would have made the scene redemptive; he would have smiled upon the woman as he dragged her free, and his enfolding hug would have told of lessons learned. Instead, Dillon was aghast, stiffened with something unredeemable, and he clutched at Newton as if he, not she, had been trapped inside the fire.”
I first saw Factotum at the May 2005 cannes Film Festival. I wrote last February after speaking to Dillon at Sundance tat his performance “as Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry Chinaski isn’t just more nuanced and naturalistic than Mickey Rourke’s riff on the boozy writer-poet in Barfly and Ben Gazarra’s in Tales of Ordinary Madness — it exudes an exceptional dignity.”

This London Times Online piece about the most audacious and penetrating envelope-pushers in terms of sex, drugs violence and religion is old and crumpled and covered in dust — it was published last Saturday, 8.19 — but it’s a pretty good rundown.

It doesn’t mention what a ground-breaker Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff was in 1966 for its first-time-ever use of terms like “screw you” and “up yours”. It sounds comically lame in today’s context but no studio- funded film had used coarse street dialogue before.
Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs (’71) is mentioned for the Susan George rape scene, which for years has made compassionate and senstive people feel guilty when they watch it because it delivers a kind of dark twisted turn-on. (Yes, yes…Peckinpah was a sexist dog but the arousal factor is still there.)
And I’ve never even heard of No Orchids for Miss Blandish (’48), a crime drama about a relationship between a gangster and an unsullied woman in her 30s. The film isn’t on DVD or even VHS, but the Times piece says that one British critic called it “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen.”

I’ve seen the initial one-sheet poster for Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn, which will screen at the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s close to awful. It’s not Herzog’s doing but the film’s producers, Gibraltar Films (or perhaps its distributor, Conquistador Worldwide Media), and it’s utter mediocrity. The decision to allow the poster be dominated by Christian Bale‘s fleshy, overfed, clean-shaven face sends exactly the wrong message.

Bale’s puss is overbearing and the concept has no soul, no texture, no implication of poetry — nothing that suggests that the movie being sold is a Werner Herzog creation, which is as close of a guarantee of something layered and profound as you can find anywhere.
In fact, the poster says nothing except for the fact that Bale (represented with a photo that has nothing to do with how he looks in the film) is the star. It looks precisely like the kind of Cannes market screening poster/trade ad that a low-life distributor looking to cash in on Bale’s Batman popularity would throw together in a state of huckster desperation. There’s a coarse mentality at work here — you can smell it 100 yards off.
Rescue Dawn is an “action drama” (i.e., the producers wish it would simply be that) costarring Bale and Steve Zahn. Based on Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, it’s about German-born Dieter Dengler, a German-born U.S. military pilot who was shot down over Vietnam/Laos in ’65 and captured and then escaped from a jungle prison camp and eventually made it back to safety.
Here, apparently, is a black-and-white shot of Herzog speaking with Marlton — the hulking sumo wrestler-type gentleman with the black toupee/wig in the black sunglasses standing to the right. It’s a photo taken from the Gibraltar Films website.

In this brief excerpt from a forthcoming Mean magazine interview with director Chris Nolan, Better than Fudge columnist Josh Horowitz gets Nolan to say two clear-cut things about his second Batman flick, to wit:

The green-haired, jut-jawed Joker, as he appears in the pages of “The Killing Joke”.

(a) “The title of the film” — The Dark Knight — “has been chosen very specifically… it’s quite important to the film”, and that (b) Heath Ledger‘s Joker will be less Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson than the Joker portrayed in a comic like “The Killing Joke.” Or, as Nolan puts it, “I would certainly point to ‘The Killing Joke’ but I also would point very much to the first two appearances of the Joker in the comic. If you look at where the Joker comes from there’s a very clear direction that fits what we’re doing very well.”

Roger Friedman‘s analysis of the Cruise-vs.-Paramount fallout covers a lot of ground, but a lot of it sounds like follow-the-bouncing-ball speculation.
Did Paramount allegedly being in some kind of temporary cash-poor position have anything to do with Sumner Redstone’s announcement that the studio wasn’t renewing its deal with Cruise/Wagner Prods.? (This sound especially questionable.)
Doesn’t Redstone’s stated reason for Paramount severing ties with Cruise — “unacceptable” off-screen behavior — smack of hypcocrisy considering the various bad behaviors (including studio chief Brad Grey‘s past dealings with Anthony Pellicano) that have been tolerated at Paramount? (Deadline Hollywood‘s Nikki Finke raised this point also in her column about the mess.)
What impact, if any, did the alleged rift between Cruise and Paramount/ DreamWorks honcho Steven Spielberg (which stems from Spielberg’s alleged concern that Cruise’s summer of ’05 Scientology antics hurt the War of the Worlds box-office) have on Paramount’s attitude about maintaining its ties with C/W Prods.?
Is Warner Bros. the studio most likely to extend a new housekeeping deal to Cruise/Wagner?