Daily Mail investigative reporter Laura Collins has visited the Kentucky backwater apartment of Carolyn Bryant Donham, 88 — the one-time Mississippi storekeep who accused 14 year-old Emmett Till of wolf-whistling her in the summer of 1955, and in so doing incited her deranged redneck husband, Roy Bryant, and his brother, John Milan, into killing Till. The brothers were found not guilty by a local jury. A long-buried unserved warrant for Donham’s arrest (dated 8.29.55) was recently discovered. Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (UA Releasing) will premiere at the ‘22 New York Film Festival.

Critical Drinker to actor-podcaster Clifton Duncan (6.26.22): “The original Star Trek series, from back in the ’60s…a lot of the writers had served in the military in WWII or Vietnam…giving them all kinds of experience…how chain of command works and how [soldiers] relate to each other in high-pressure situations, and also [they were different] in terms of general maturity about life. But when you look at it now, the people who are writin’ it, the worst hardship they ever had is that someone got their Starbucks order wrong or someone misgendered them on Twitter. That’s not comparable…they don’t have that same well of experience to draw on, and it shows.”

I’m not familiar with Duncan’s acting history (The Good Fight, Scrooge: A Christmas Carol with a Twist, Bluff City Law, NCIS: New Orleans) but he’s a smart, smooth-spoken interviewer, and his discussion with the Scottish CD (aka Will Jordan) definitely gets into the myopic, identity-driven, woke-terrorized nature of screenwriting these days…the climate is too nice, too safe, too sanitized.

YouTube commenter Konstantin Dahlin: “The people in the industry only virtue signal to the people around them. The people they fear. They do not dare step out of line because that can mean losing their jobs. This is a self-sustained ideology where you can have a room with 10 people and none of them is woke, and yet everyone will behave and talk as if they’re woke because they are afraid that some of them, or all, might be. Its a radical ideology that is self-sustained and based on fear. No one except authoritarian types and people with head issues [are cool with] this. Most people are normal, and normal people don’t like radical wokeness.”

I tried to explain yesterday why the notion of Cassidy Hutchinson lying to the Jan. 6th committee about that alleged altercation between Donald Trump and Secret Service guy Bobby Engel was highly unlikely. It turns out, in fact, that there are compelling reasons to doubt the alleged partial denial of this altercation by top Secret Service guy Tony Ornato.

Washington Post journalist and “Zero Fail” author Carol Leonnig speaking to Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough and Mika Breszinski: “Tony Ornato‘s situation is not so great. This is a person who worked as President Trump’s security detail leader…the #1 guy protecting the boss. Trump White House staffers and Secret Service agents have told me repeatedly [that Ornato] is a Trump acolyte, and [that he] will defend Trump to the end, and remains in contact with Trump world.

“Ornato has indicated that this story that Cassidy Hutchinson told didn’t happen. Well, Ornato has said a lot of things didn’t happen. As an additional remark, the Secret Service often tries to deny things that are unflattering. And then when the rubber hits the road, there’s a little bit more to it.

“[Trump] liked [Ornato] so much he installed him in a political White House job. That broke every Secret Service tradition in the book. [Ornato] stayed a Secret Service employee, but Trump had him directing the Secret Service…making sure that all of his campaign events, all of his photo ops…everything that he wanted to do to get re-elected went off without a hitch. That included campaign rallies that caused Covid surges [and] the forcible clearing of peaceful protestors from Lafayette Square. Tony Ornato was the secret hand behind all of that, and that’s what Trump wanted.”

HE hasn’t re-watched American Graffiti since…I forget but it’s been at least 20 or 25 years. And I don’t remember being that all blown away. I love Richard Dreyfuss‘s character and particularly his nocturnal adventure with The Pharoahs, but I was never in love with this film…sorry. It seemed to coast too much on ’50s pop tunes. I respect Graffiti but I’ve never been able to love it.

Posted on the New Beverly website:

“The sleeper success of American Graffiti kicked off the whole wave of ’50s nostalgia that threatened to overwhelm the entire decade, and yet Lucas’ film was set in ‘62. Even though on the outside the early ’60s just looked like The ’50s, Part 2, underneath changes were brewing. The big cities had all moved on. But small towns, like the one in American Graffiti, were able to exist in a bubble — at least until Kennedy was assassinated.

“While the movie has a great cast of girls, director Lucas makes it abundantly clear, when it comes to narrative, he’s only following the boys (Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Charles Martin Smith, Paul Le Mat).

“Best buddies Curt (Dreyfuss) and Steve (Howard) are leaving their small hometown of Modesto, California in the morning to fly to college back east. So the college that Curt and Steve are supposed to fly off to represents more than just a normal rite of passage for the two young men. The college represents the growing consciousness of the ’60s that exists beyond the Brigadoon-ish town they’re escaping.

“But Curt (who is Lucas’ stand-in — he wants to be a writer, and when he grows up he will write American Graffiti) is ambivalent about getting on the plane in the morning. He’s starting to think he might not even go.

“Of all the characters Curt is clearly the most intellectual, so then why is he hesitating going off to college? Usually the budding writer in these types of stories can’t leave their hometown fast enough. But Curt’s ambivalence suggests he’s a deeper sort than just a cocksure kid full of piss and gage who can’t wait to jump ship on his old hometown.

“Curt’s not really questioning going to college. He’s questioning the idea of leaving all the people he’s ever known. But even more than the humans he leaves behind, Curt’s questioning leaving the rituals of community that the young people of Modesto partake in.

“Like hanging out at Mel’s — the curb service diner that is the starting point of every youth in town’s weekend night. Mel’s where the burgers are juicy, the shakes are thick, the neon is pink and green, the music is rock and roll, and the fancy faced waitresses in colorful uniforms wiz back and forth on roller skates, balancing trays of burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Hanging out at high school dances, that even though he’s graduated, Curt could probably get away with for another year without looking creepy.

“What sets Dreyfuss’ Curt apart from his peers and the rest of the cast, is that he’s the only one who realizes how temporary these rituals are. Curt knows if he gets on that airplane tomorrow morning, everything that the film so nostalgically celebrates — he can kiss all that goodbye. The town and the life he leaves, won’t be the town and the life he returns to. If he even does return, which in all likelihood he won’t. Curt seems to know once he leaves he’s not coming back. Curt knows the boy who exists today will no longer exist even two years from now. That’s why he’s contemplating staying too long at the party.

“But Lucas balances Curt’s resistance with the cautionary example of Big John Milner (Paul LeMat). Milner is the guy who stayed too long at the sock hop. Milner acts and lives as if it’s 1958. He’s a few years older than the other boys. Big John chooses to hang out with kids who were probably freshmen in high school when he was the big-shot senior, instead of contemporaries from his old class. He continues to cruise the boulevard on cruise night and try to pick up high school girls. He continues to live off the reputation he created for himself in high school (the fastest drag racer in town).

“And Lucas gives him a dandy of a dilemma. A new guy in town, Harrison Ford’s Bob Falfa, who’s gunning to dethrone the king and take away the only thing Big John has left — his reputation. Milner’s situation is a neat twist on the high school football star who always planned on going pro but didn’t have the talent to go all the way, and lives in the glow of former gridiron glory.

Whether or not President Donald Trump tried to grab the wheel of a Presidential SUV on 1.6.21 in an attempt to steer the vehicle toward the U.S. Capitol is a matter of…what’s the expression?…small potatoes. Ditto whether or not Trump grabbed “the clavicles” of Secret Service guy Bobby Engel, the head of his security detail. It’s an amusing story and obviously indicative, if true, of Trump being subject to angry, dopey, volatile behavior, which many people have observed and commented upon for years.

But over the last 24 hours Team Trump has focused on Cassidy Hutchinson‘s second-hand recollection of this episode as an attempt to call her credibility into question. There are some out there who actually believe that Hutchinson lied yesterday…”lied“! Soldiers in the pro-Trump attack machine are calling her “Amber Heard II” and “Jussie Smollett.” But there isn’t a hint of fanciful logic supporting the idea that Hutchinson made this up out of whole cloth.

Hutchinson was told this story, she said, on 1.6.21 in the White House office of Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato, and in the presence of Engel, who was “sitting in a chair, just looking somewhat discombobulated and a little lost,” Hutchinson said.

Here’s the pertinent transcript:

LIZ CHENEY: “And was Mr. Engel in the room as Mr. Ornato told you this story?”

CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: “He was.”

LIZ CHENEY: “Did Mr. Engel correct or disagree with any part of this story from Mr. Ornato?”

CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: “Mr. Engel did not correct or disagree with any part of the story.”

LIZ CHENEY: “Did Mr. Engel or Mr. Ornato ever after that tell you that what Mr. Ornato had just said was untrue?”

CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: “Neither Mr. Ornato nor Mr. Engel told me ever that it was untrue.”

The N.Y. Times is reporting that “Secret Service officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, [have] said that both Mr. Engel and Mr. Ornato would dispute that Mr. Trump tried to grab the wheel of the car or that Mr. Engel was struck.”

Plus The Daily Beast is reporting that the Secret Service was never contacted by the Jan. 6 committee ahead of Hutchison’s testimony.

So what gives?

It would appear that either (a) Hutchinson is half-fibbing, or (b) Ornato and Engel are half-fibbing. But c’mon, no bullshit…what are the odds that Hutchinson would invent the SUV story?

Hutchinson said under oath that Ornato told her the particulars and that Engel was there listening and that Engel didn’t at that moment dispute Ornato’s account. If she was flat-out fabricating Hutchinson could be 100% certain that these guys would step up and say so. Does it make the slightest bit of sense that she would invent this story? To what possible end? She knew she would be immediately busted if she lied, and she’s not apparently the delusional or psychotic type so why would she invent this wild tale?

This is Rashomon, apparently. Check with the ghosts of Akira Kurosawa and/or Martin Ritt. Either Hutchinson is some kind of shifty, side-stepping liar in this instance, or she’s 100% dead certain that Ornato told her about Trump grabbing the wheel and then grabbing Engel’s throat, and has honorably passed this along to the best of her recollection.

Ornato and Engel…who knows? They’ve either persuaded themselves that this particular tale wasn’t passed along quite this way, or perhaps that it’s better for the sake of their own careers and/or the Secret Service’s reputation to dispute the story.

Salon‘s Igor Derysh, posted on 6.29: “Multiple officials who disputed parts of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson‘s testimony to the Jan. 6 committee were seen by some in the Trump administration as the president’s ‘yes men,’ according to Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, who wrote a book about the agency last year.”

I know that it makes no sense at all for Hutchinson to have fabricated the story. What half-sane person would recite a FLAT-OUT LIE on national television, knowing full well that the guy she claimed had told her the story in the first place (plus the guy it happened to and who overheard the original telling) would step right up and call her bluff?

Jon Stewart gonna Jon Stewart and and more power, but something snapped when I watched “The Problem With White People,” and things haven’t been the same since. A little more than a month ago Stewart was tributed at the Kennedy Center with the 23rd annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and I really couldn’t get into it, man…sorry.

When I think of Stewart now, I think he could maybe sorta kinda go fuck himself…no offense.

A little more than three months ago my admiration for and approval of Stewart stopped dead in its tracks. To repeat, Stewart’s “The Problem with White People“, which aired on his Apple talk show on 3.25.22, is what did it.

On 3.30 I shared my skepticism and revulsion at what this one-sided woke indoctrination seminar was pushing, and particularly the dismissal of Andrew Sullivan‘s opinions by Stewart and another of his guests, the odious Lisa Bond of Race2Dinner…it was so enraging. I wanted to throw something at my computer screen, although I dismissed that instinct a millisecond later because it was only 15 inches in front of my face and what was I going to throw anyway? A sliced tomato? The juice would get into the guts of my Macbook Pro and then I’d really be in trouble.

Stewart and Bond were basically parroting woke talking points, to wit: (a) all disparity equals discrimination, (b) meritocracy is merely a systematic smokescreen for white dominance, (c) the low marriage rate among African Americans is the fault of whites, (d) almost all American sub-systems or social standards are guises for white power, (e) the whole societal system in which we work and live is gamed in favor of whites, and therefore (f) white people have a duty to cleanse and overhaul these systems in order to alleviate the stain and the shame of institutional racism.

I’ve responded to these talking points with three significant HE posts about The 1619 Project, which is pretty much the historical cradle for wokester theology in the realm of American racism. The best of them was “What’s Your 1619 Beef?“, posted on 7.30.20. Here’s an excerpt:

“Slavery has always been an ignominious chapter in the first 245 years of US history (1619 to 1865) and racism has stained aspects of the culture ever since, but to assert that slavery and racism (which other cultures have shamefully allowed and profited by over the centuries) are THE central and fundamental definers of the immense American experience strikes me as a bridge too far.

“Many factors drove the expansion and gradual strengthening & shaping of this country, and particularly the spirit and character of it — immigration, the industrial revolution and the cruel exploitations and excesses of the wealthy elites, the delusion of religion, anti-Native American racism and genocide, breadbasket farming, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick C. Douglas, the vast networks of railroads, selfishness & self-interest, factories, construction, the two world wars of the 20th Century, scientific innovation, native musical forms including jazz, blues (obviously African-American art forms) and rock, American literature, theatre and Hollywood movies, sweat shops, 20th Century urban architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, major-league baseball, Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig, family-based communities and the Protestant work ethic, fashion, gardening, native cuisine and the influences of European, Mexican, Asian and African cultures, hot dogs, the shipping industry, hard work and innovation, the garment industry, John Steinbeck, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, JFK, MLK, Stanley Kubrick, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Malcom X, Taylor Swift, Charlie Parker, Elizabeth Warren, Katharine Hepburn, Aretha Franklin, Jean Arthur, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carol Lombard, Shirley Chisholm, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen, barber shops & manual lawnmowers, the auto industry, prohibition & gangsters, the Great Depression and the anti-Communism and anti-Socialism that eventually sprang from that, status-quo-challenging comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Steve Allen (“schmock schmock!”), popular music (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles), TV, great American universities, great historians, great journalism (including the National Lampoon and Spy magazine), beat poetry, hippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement, pot and psychedelia, cocaine, quaaludes and Studio 54, 20th & 21st Century tech innovations, gay culture, comic books, stage musicals, Steve Jobs, etc.

Two other HE retorts: (a) “Spreading ‘1619 Project’ Gospel,” a 7.8.20 piece that liberally quotes from Andrew Sullivan‘s “How The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism” (posted on 9.3.19), and (b) “Stephens: 1619 Project ‘Has Failed’“, an excerpt of Bret Stephens‘ “The 1619 Chronicles“, which appeared on 10.9.20.

Answer: Because they’re worth it.

On the subject of tweeners and young teens behaving in a way that has struck some as impossibly entitled and impudent and fickle…”a whole field of fucking brats”, Adam Carolla says the following at the 11:15 mark:

“We used to have a heirarchy. For instance, when I grew up I was scared shitless of every one of my friends’ dads. You would never…I was in my house a year and a half ago, and one of my daughters’ friends roller-skated past me in my house…can you imagine roller-skating in a friend’s house when we were nine or ten years old?….you go into the kitchen now, just randomly walking into your kitchen and one of your kid’s friends will just be making waffles…when we were kids, on the very off chance that we might go out to dinner?…no one wanted our input as to what restaurant we’re going to…now the conversation starts with “we’re going out to the restaurant” and the kid says “I don’t want Mexican food”…when we were growing up it was “we’re going out to dinner, we’re fucking lucky, zip it.

“The key component [today] is ‘you fucked up the kids, you fucked up your own life, and you’ve fucked up society because [somebody] will have to hire one of these little fuckers when they turn 22.'”

So Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, 9.23) was primarily shot in black-and-white (which I love) and at times within a 1.37 aspect ratio. But not entirely. Occasional color sequences used for…what, replicating sequences from her color films?

HE theory: The black-and-white conveys the sad and vulnerable stuff, the widescreen black-and-white is used for public appearances, and color pops in every so often for snippets of Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, River of No Return, The Seven-Year Itch, The Prince and the Showgirl, Let’s Make Love, etc.

Marilyn Monroe‘s best films were in black-and white, of course — The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, Clash By Night, Don’t Bother to Knock, Some Like It Hot, The Misfits.

From Ben Dalton’s Dominik interview in 2.12.22 Screen International: “In summer 2021, reports emerged that Netflix was unhappy with the more controversial aspects of the film, including a scene featuring bloody menstrual oral sex. ‘That’s not true!’ laughs Dominik, who describes the claim as ‘hilarious’.

“Dominik does confirm, though, that a rape scene in Joyce Carol Oates’ book appears in the film. There was a back-and-forth with the streamer — which has yet to comment on the situation — about what was acceptable to include.

“‘It’s controversial, there’s a bit for [Netflix] to swallow,’ says Dominik. ‘It’s a demanding movie — it is what it is, it says what it says. And if the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the fucking audience’s problem. It’s not running for public office.’”

Jordan Ruimy is reporting (and Netflix has confirmed) that Blonde‘s running time is 166 minutes.

I’m presuming that Blonde will screen at both the Venice and Telluride festivals, which will kick off, respectively, on 8.31 and 9.2.