Joel Schumacher text message from heaven to Indiewire‘s Ryan Lattanzio: I don’t mind saying that in life I was a better-than-capable director and sometimes a first-rate one. The Client, A Time to Kill, Tigerland, Phone Booth, Veronica Guerin, The Phantom of the Opera, Trespass, etc. But my finest and most confident film — ask anyone — was Falling Down (’93), an angry-white-man drama starring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall.

Falling Down didn’t have bat nipples or butt shots, but it was sly sociology and the most on-target, perfect-pocket-drop film I ever made — and one that connected with the culture in some kind of resonant and fundamental way. It came out 27 years ago and it feels like it was yesterday. Especially in heaven where there’s no sense of time anyway.

But then 2020 rolls in and I finally succumb to cancer and arise into the clouds, and the first thing I see when I arrive (they have iPads up here) is your Indiewire obit, and you don’t even mention Falling Down? Because…what, it’s not politically correct to pay respects to or even mention a movie about an angry white guy? Because middle-aged white dudes are regarded as bad news by wokesters, BLM-ers and #MeToo-ers…right?

I’m sure you’re a nice guy, Ryan, but this is why some people hate Indiewire. Because sometimes it tries to editorially convey a certain view of life. It observes but also instructs to a certain degree. Because it’s Woke Central, progressive to a fault, the People’s Central Committee, etc.

And on top of this your obit headline highlights three of my lesser achievements — St. Elmo’s Fire, The Lost Boys and Batman Forever? I don’t mind if people associate my career with the two Batman films and maybe have a laugh, but I don’t want to be “remembered” for them, if you catch my drift.

I did better, and I’m truly angry that you ignored my ultimate work. I’ve always held myself in check on earth and was certainly never one to lose my temper, but if I could come back to earth right now I would find the Indiewire offices and walk up to your desk and give you the dirtiest look imaginable. And I would hold it for a full minute.

“It really is important not to [try to] win. It’s like fighting with your wife,. You don’t win…you can’t win. Because you have to live with her. But maybe you can solve the problem and bring about peace.

“People from the radical left are 95% like you. Pull them out of the mob and they’re like your neighbor’s 19 year-old kid, who’s kinda clueless and rebellious.

“This is something I learned in part from Solzhenitsyn and in part from Jung…the way you set the world straight is by constraining the malevolence in your own heart.”

HE to Jordan Peterson: Tell that to Glenn Kenny.

The Ansel Elgort + Gabby unhappiness reminded me of a basic romantic truth. No matter how you slice it or divvy it out, breakups are always painful on both ends. There’s no gentle way to break the news. No sentiment ever made me recoil or flinch as much as “I’d still like to be friends…I really would.”

During my hormonal heyday I lowered the boom as much as I was cast aside, and I’m ashamed to admit that I was occasionally like Ansel in that I wasn’t especially caring or compassionate when the moment arrived. I almost always took the passive-aggressive approach by not calling or ducking their calls — of basically letting the relationship die from a thousand cuts or omissions.

Yeah, I know — deplorable cowardice.

Breaking up almost always involves lying. No one ever tells the truth. No one ever says “I’m sorry but I’ve come to regretfully realize that you have personality flaws that are too much for me to deal with, and so I think it’s best we go our separate ways.”

Every time I was told “I’m sorry but I need to be on my own journey for a while” or words to that effect, it almost always meant “I’m starting to see someone else that I like better, and I have the right to make choices…we all do…and my choice is to cut you loose.”

To be completely honest, back in the randy ’70s I was so terrified of being dumped that I routinely had three or even four romances (call them ardent flirtations) going at the same time. That way if one cut me loose I’d still have the other two or three to fall back on. I know what this sounds like. It sounds like I was a cad, and I guess I was.

But it didn’t seem that way from my perspective. It was the early to mid ’70s, and I was a kid in a candy store. I know — that’s a Jack Lemmon line from Some Like It Hot, but that’s how it was. Or, you know, how it felt.

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I despised Prometheus, of course, and thought that The Martian was way over-praised, but the following Ridley Scott films are totally approved and seriously admired: The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner, Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster, the directors’ cut version of Kingdom of Heaven, The Counselor and All the Money in the World. Oh, and the 1984 Orwellian commercial for the new Macintosh computers. So that’s 11.

African Americans and the rabid progressive-twitter takedown brigade, I mean. Pete is an old soul, a brilliant 21st Century engager and the embodiment of a next-world mentality. And you guys drop-kicked him. Nice going. Yeah, I love you too.

Ansel, meet Aziz. Aziz? Ansel.

The crowd at Donald Trump‘s big Tulsa rally seems a little light. Is it fair to say “sparse”? Plenty of roaming-around room on the main floor. Acres of empty seats in the upper decks. [Filed at 4:34 pm Pacific.]

Sasha Stone, Jordan Ruimy and David Poland were roughed up on Twitter yesterday, but Sasha got the worst of it. And for no rational reason. Let’s backtrack and review what actually happened.

According to an account posted yesterday morning by a 23 year-old New York woman named “Gabby”, she had sex six years ago with West Side Story star Ansel Elgort. It happened sometime during the month of December 2014, just after her 17th birthday. As the liason apparently happened in New York State, where the age of consent is 17, there was nothing illegal about it.

There was, however, something distinctly unpleasant and painful about it, according to “Gabby”. It was, she says, her first time. And six years after the fact, she’s incensed that Elgort wasn’t gentler with her, and that he failed to stop despite her anguish.

Her account, to be clear, doesn’t say that she pleaded with him to stop — it notes that he failed to note her physical discomfort and stop of his own accord. Awkward and unfortunate as the encounter may well have been, it seems to resemble the Aziz Ansari sexual misconduct episode — bad or insensitive sex followed by anger and resentment on the woman’s part.

An immediate reaction among some Twitter fanatics yesterday was that Elgort had shown himself to be a pedophile, which of course he hadn’t as the encounter (New York State law is very clear about this) was legal, not to mention the fact that he and “Gabby” were separated in age by only three and a half years.

Others amended this accusation and called Elgort an “ephebophile” — i.e., guilty of ephebophilia, which is defined as an adult (which Elgort technically wasn’t at the time, being 20 years old) who has a sexual interest “in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19.”

Okay but as I pointed out, the 20 year-old Paul McCartney did the same thing 57 years ago when he become romantically involved with the 17-year-old Celia Mortimer. At the time the age of consent in England was also 17.

Cancel McCartney!

Yesterday morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone tweeted that the Elgort-Gabby thing was not a case of pedophilia. (She didn’t mention ephebophilia.) Stone was and is 100% correct, but for the unforgivable crime of passing along an incontestable fact, she was savagely attacked all day long by a gathering of ignorant excitables (which, if you wanted to be mean about it, could also described as a pack of rabid, snarling, salivating Twitter dogs).

David Poland and World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, both of whom had questioned the hysteria triggered by “Gabby’s” statement, were also kicked, beaten and spat upon by wokester Twitterati.

Here’s a sampling of some of the Sasha-hating tweets that were posted yesterday:

Here’s Sasha’s own account of what happened — the piece is titled “Mass Hysteria, Twitter and the Fate of West Side Story.”