Hard-nosed assessments of Mel Gibson‘s compromised reputation by (a) Endeavor agent Ari Emanuel, (b) L.A. Times guys Robert Welkos and John Horn, (c) Variety‘s Gabriel Snyder, and (d) the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson. Plus two stories about this — the list is getting longer by the minute — by USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican.
The judgment is basically that Gibson’s Apocalypto (Disney, 12.8) is over as an Oscar contender — when Gibson campaigns he’ll be asked over and over about the anti-Semitic remarks and not the film, etc. — and that he has major career-repair work in front of him, to say the least. There’s even some rumbling about Disney possibly wanting to bail on its Apocalypto distribution deal. Seems doubtful. Who wouldn’t want to see it now? Out of major curiosity if nothing else?
I get all this and the people who are saying Apocalypto is toast as an awards contender probably aren’t wrong, but one question: what if turns out to be an exceptionally good and profound film? There are indications it may not be. (MCN’s David Poland, who has long criticized journos and columnists for making negative assumptions about movies that haven’t been seen and/or have had their release dates delayed, told Breznican “It could be bad enough that the movie has to be pushed [to a different date].”) But what if the indications are wrong and it turns out to be something out-of-the-park special? No matter, apparently. Gibson’s name is mud and that’s pretty much it. For now.

It’s been 22 years since the first Miami Vice season on the tube in ’84-’85, and I never rented the February ’05 Vice DVD that had that entire season on it. But reader Dewey Yeatts of Whitehall, PA, is saying that Michael Mann‘s just released Miami Vice features is based on a February ’85 Vice episode called “Smuggler’s Blues,” in much the same way that Mann’s Heat (’95) was a big-star feature version of the 1989 TV movie he wrote and directed called “L.A. Takedown.”

Is there anyone who’s seen the big-screen Vice who also remembers “Smuggler’s Blues” in detail? And if so, does Yeatts have it right?
Here are Dewey’s similarites: (1) The movie and the episode “both open with the death of a drug runner/informant and his family”; (2) “What follows is a federal officer pulling Crockett and Tubbs into a secret meeting also attended by Lt. Castillo. In both versions, the Fed knows about a leak in the system, and pleads with Crockett and Tubbs to go undercover and make contact with a drug lord”; (3) “In both versions, they hit the underworld to obtain transportation (in the TV show, they wind up in a plane piloted by Glenn Frey — in the movie, they go to work on the competition’s ‘go fast boats’ and then fly their own plane to Latin America)”; (4) “They then make contact with a drug lord, and the meetings in both versions are weird (though for different reasons”; (5) “After the meeting they go back to their seedy hotel room and check the doors and windows. (To my eye, the room in the movie seemed to be the exact same one from the episode — the movements of the detectives seem very similar during the sequence.)”
“The movie at this point sets up more twists and plot points, which is normal, since the film has nearly three times the running time of the episode,” Yeatts writes. “But Crockett’s seduction of Gong Li’s Isabella is right out of the TV show’s playbook. How many episodes involved around romantic entanglements that dovetailed with the “case”? And how many episodes revolved around one of the girl detectives being put in danger? (See next item…)
“In the TV episode, on the partners’ return to America, Trudy is taken hostage by the bad guys and wired for explosives. In the movie, upon the partners’ return to America, Trudy is taken hostage by the bad guys and wired for explosives. (It should be noted the radical difference in the way these scenes are handled in each version.)

“To my mind, the film may have lacked the show’s pastel fashions, had hipper music (in 20 years will the movie soundtrack seem dated? Of course it will) and almost zero humor (though I felt there were a few dry lines that crackled.) But overall, the movie to me played like a larger-scale episode. The story beats from “Smuggler’s Blues.” The romantic issues. The lady-detective-in-peril. Scenes of cars and boats going very very fast. (Mann did resist the urge to go Phil Collins on us however.) The end, where they are to meet at a point along the river, reminded me of a similar sequence in the pilot episode.
“In the end, Mann did not make an homage — he just made a better version of what was already pretty cool and cutting edge. The fact that all the major cop characters had exactly the same names (Switek, Zito, etc.) says that Mann was not turning his back on his creation — just enhancing it.”
“One last thing: although the Cro-Magnon audience I saw the film with was restless at times (you don’t want to know about Friday night screenings in my neck of the woods`– mouth breathers, the lot of them), the crackerjack third act (the siege in the trailer, the firework-laden finale) sent them out of the theater crackling. So the word of mouth may be better than you think. Let’s hope so. This is the movie that should get a sequel.”

Nikki Finke is quoting Lt. Steve Smith, the guy “in charge of the detective bureau for the Malibu/Lost Hills station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as saying that ‘the contents seem to be similar’ between the official reports and the four pages posted by TMZ.com indicating that Mel Gibson ‘blurted out a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks’ — ‘fucking Jews’ and ‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world’ and asking the arresting deputy ‘Are you a Jew?’ — during his DUI arrest early Friday morning. So there was no attempt at an early departmental cover-up, Smith is saying.

Adjusted weekend grosses are in, and Miami Vice‘s tally will be closer to $25,195,000. Business didn’t bump up very much on Saturday but it’s still the all-time biggest opening weekend for a Michael Mann film. And Little Miss Sunshine will end up with $357,000 after opening in seven theatres, and a per-screen average of $51,000. I saw LMS last night in Century City, by the way, and with a not-very-hip crowd. They got and responded to maybe 40% of the stuff that crowds seeing it at Sundance and at the L.A. Film Festival responded to with hilarity and occasional applause. [SPOILER! SPOILER!] When the hard-luck Hoovers are told near the end that they won’t be allowed to compete in any more California beauty pageants and Steve Carell‘s character says quietly, “I think we can live with that”, it got a good laugh in Park City…but last night’s crowd just sat there like a piece of day-old Wisconsin cheese on the kitchen counter. I hate watching good movies with dead audiences. I expected better from a West L.A. crowd, and I paid money for this experience on top of everything else.

This is a really dramatic photo of a huge movie-lot fire, but it had nothing to do with the well-being of Casino Royale , the latest James Bond flick starring Daniel Craig. A set simulating an area of Venice, Italy, that had been used by the Royale team was what caught fire. It happened earlier today outside of London, caving in the roof of a Pinewood Studios sound stage. But the movie wrapped a while ago so no biggie. No one was hurt and insurance will cover the damages.

‘I have a middle-aged soul. When I turned 38, I said to my wife, ‘Am I not 40 yet?’ I feel like I’ve been 40 for about seven years.'” — Paul Giamatti speaking to the Guardian‘s Gaby Wood. A lot of people and writers I know have described Giamatti’s Miles and Thomas Hayden Church’s character in Sideways as “screwed-up guys in their early 40s.” Giamatti was probably 36 when he shot the film in ’03.

An L.A. Times goes after the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in the Mel Gibson DUI anti-Semitic tirade story. Get ’em, sweat ’em….feet to the fire. What journalists do. But step back and think about this for a second. The Lost Hills cops may have tried to do a nice human thing, which was save a guy from great embarassment and career damage. Dishonest and procedurally incorrect, okay, but a fairly decent thing to try and do for a guy with an obvious problem or two. Put yourself in Gibson’s shoes minus the ugly epithets, and imagine that you’ve just stepped into it big-time. A couple of West Hollywood cops cut me a break about twelve years ago after I did something unwise, and I’ve never forgotten that.

I wrote Werner Herzog yesterday and asked whether Rescue Dawn will be included at the Toronto Film Festival roster. “At the moment we should treat the Toronto Film Festival as some sort of a rumor, as there is no clear confirmation yet,” he answered.
“I just arrived in London for music recordings with the cello genius Ernst Reijseger — we did the music together for my two movies The White Diamond and The Wild Blue Yonder, using five Sardinian shepherd singers and an additional singer from Senegal. With Reijseger I shall work on the transition of the film into the unreal. The score is being written by Klaus Badelt (who recently scored Poseidon), but Reijseger will contribute music for a very strange moment in the film.
“Last week I have done color corrections, ADR, and sound post-production. Some of the digital effects (yes, I do have a few of them) are almost finished, and mixing has to be done. My guess is that we shall have a 35mm print before August 20th.”
In a New Yorker profile of Herzog that appeared earlier this year, writer Daniel Zalewski wrote the following: “Herzog believes that modern life has disconnected humans from their most elemental pleasures. His films, accordingly, attempt to connect modern cinemagoers to their prelapsarian selves: the emotions are always primal, and landscape is integral to the drama. Herzog says, ‘You will never see people talking on the phone, driving in a car, or exchanging ironic jokes in my films…it is always bigger, deeper.'”

Here’s how hatred and prejudice are pried loose from the grooves of the brains of bigots. They are told by an aroused world community that if they don’t flush them down the toilet in a demonstrable and thoroughly believable way they are dead in the water as far as any commercial aspirations are concerned. They do what the world tells them to do not because they’ve “seen the light”, but because they want to survive and thrive. Sometimes friendly persuasion doesn’t do it. Sometimes a chasm opens up, the heart goes ballistic, the mind races and the waters part. And in this sense, what happened to Mel Gibson in Malibu two days ago may finally prove to be one of the most enlightening, wisdom-bequeathing turns in the road he’s ever experienced. And hail to that. God works in mysterious ways.

A Mel Gibson geiger-counter reading from Houston critic Joe Leydon, who wrote his morning to say his wife “just returned from a morning visit to the health club for a half-hour or so on the treadmill. The club isn’t exactly upscale, but it’s in a nice neighborhood — actually, a very nice neighborhood — and many of the folks who live around there are Jewish. (No, I’m not stereotyping: The very large Jewish Community Center is nearby, and the supermarkets have well-stocked kosher sections — something you don’t see nearly so often in other areas here in Houston. And, no kidding, the area is officially known as Meyerland.)
“Anyway, while at the health club she overheard some heated conversations by a few of the other members. Specifically, a group of middle-aged men and women who were talking about Mel Gibson. Mind you, when I say ‘heated’ I don’t mean they were arguing. I mean one or two were loudly griping, and the others were more or less nodding in agreement. Here is an almost verbatim quote from the dialogue: ‘Did you hear what that Mel Gibson did? First he made that Passion of the Christ, and now this. He’s never going to get another penny of my money again.’ Mrs. L. — whose mother, by the way, was Jewish — was more than a little surprised by the vehemence of the remarks. And even though she herself never saw Passion of the Christ – she’s a practicing Catholic, but was turned off by advance reports of blood and gore – she’s now tempted to view the film on video.
“This may be such an isolated incident that it doesn’t even begin to qualify as anecdotal evidence. And then again, maybe not. Either way, I’d be interested in seeing if there’s any kind of significant spike in Passion DVD rentals and purchases during the next few days. And I’m even more interesting in finding out: Have we only just begun to see the fallout from Mel’s misbehavior?”

And here’s the knowledgable and engaging Mr. Leydon, writing on his just-launched blog, on the persistent pleasures of The Manchurian Candidate. The black-and-white one with Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra, of course. “At once unmistakably of its time and undeniably timeless,” etc. I know this, we all know this…but it’s nice to read someone say it yet again. There’s a showing on Turner Classic Movies on Tuesday evening.

I’m cutting out around noon to go up to a Kirk Douglas black-tie tribute thing that the Santa Barbara Film Festival crew is throwing for him in Goleta (just west of Santa Barbara). I’ll be gone for the remainder of the day, so no burning the wick to the bottom and back to the skillet first thing manana.

In 1982 I flew from Manhattan to Laredo, Texas, to do a Douglas interview on the set of Eddie Macon’s Run for the New York Post. I’d hit it off pretty well with Douglas a few weeks earlier at a press get-together at Elaine’s, in part because I went on and on about how much I admired Lonely Are The Brave, and this vein continued in Laredo. I knew every one of his films and could quote dialogue from a fair number of them. “You’ve really done your homework,” Douglas told me at one point.
His work on Macon ended that day and he offered me a lift back to Houston in a small private jet, during which time I heard all kinds of great stories (including some amusing particulars about Henry Kissinger‘s closed-door exploits in the early ’70s). I spoke with Douglas a couple more times after that, and sat next to him at a Manhattan performance of “The Man” which his son Eric (who died in July 2004 after a fairly turbulent life) was starring in. We met a year and a half later at some swanky event at L.A.’s Century Plaza and I had the distinct impression that Douglas didn’t remember much from our day in Laredo. Celebrities are like that. He’ll be 90 years old this December, and a friend who spoke to him not long ago says mentally he’s still sharp as tack.