Yesterday “High Sierra Man” took exception to an observation I posted about Steve McQueen‘s Le Mans that I posted in “Roar of Motor Oil, Smell of the Crowd“, to wit: “Le Mans marked the end of McQueen’s superstar phase.”

High Sierra wrote: “Except after Le Mans he famously got his name above Paul Newman (a clever battle of marquee placements) on blockbuster Towering Inferno, starred in breakout hit The Getaway, starred in the epic Papillon and a few years later died. So you’ve got that on your side. Worth noting: ten years after McQueen died he was still a brighter burning screen star than 95% of the wankers clogging up our current cinemas. McQueen Then, Now, Forever.”

“Filmklassik” agreed, calling my statement “frankly silly. McQueen was being offered EVERYTHING in the 1970s. Everything.”

HE to High Sierra Man and others: Agree about ‘then, now and forever.’ Always have, always will. But I was referencing Gabriel Clarke & John McKenna’s 2015 doc Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans. Their film stated very plainly that this ‘71 race-track pic was the film that broke McQueen’s spirit as well as his legend to a significant extent, and that things were never quite the same after it.

In my mind McQueen had a great 14-year run from ‘60/‘62 (The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is For Heroes) to his last quality spurt (Junior Bonner, The Getaway and The Towering Inferno) that ended in ‘74. Call it 15 years.

But his Godly McQueen aura, that quietly measured and invincible thing that peaked with Bullitt, that Zen-like, supercool man-of-few-words + awesome motorcycle and Mustang-driving era was shorter — The Great Escape to Le Mans or roughly an eight-year stretch.

Late last night I noticed The Longest Day playing on a huge flat-screen inside a Montmartre bar-cafe. Not in the tourist area but on rue de Ruisseau, which is strictly inhabited by locals. My thought was “wow, that’s odd….what Parisian would want to watch this heavily sanitized, conservative-minded, nearly 60-year-old war film that was produced by old-school Hollywood types?” The 75th D-Day anniversary aside, I can only surmise that oldsters have recollections of the trauma that their parents went through during the German occupation, etc.

Every day I wake up and ask myself why there isn’t a much larger groundswell of Democratic and independent voter support for Mayor Pete. He’s so obviously the best and the brightest, the most mature, the most gifted, the most eloquent, the best educated, most sensible and practical-minded candidate among the pack. And among the most principled.

JFK, RFK, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama…Mayor Pete has the same natural charisma, the same aura of destiny. Yes, Beto O’Rourke had that mojo earlier this year, but he somehow hand-gestured, Vanity Fair-ed, dentist-video’ed, table-topped and apologized his way out of that. Maybe he’ll find his way back but right now and for the foreseeable future Mayor Pete is unquestionably “the guy.”

Did anyone really care about JFK’s private sexual life? Or Bill Clinton‘s? Or, God forbid, Donald Trump‘s? In my mind Mayor Pete is the only guy…the only Democratic candidate about whom the only conceivable response is “yes, of course!…please!”

And he’s totally right about Avuncular Joe, who is nothing if not an old-guard symbol and defender of the system…of the moderately liberal, business-as-usual way of operating…who is nothing if not more of the same…a Washington, D.C. insider who believes that his Republican pallies will regain their sanity and change their tune if he beats Trump…who wants to adopt a middle-ground approach to climate change.

Tattoo this phrase on your brain: “The riskiest thing we could do is try too hard to play it safe.”

This may sound harsh, but in my mind the idea of Trump being re-elected is only slightly more depressing than the idea of Biden replacing him.

Imagine an alternate universe in which Jared Kushner had the agency and the character to answer the questions posed by AXIOS’s Jonathan Swan with absolute honesty. Instead of the laughably deceitful responses that Kushner gave to Swan, especially about whether he had ever seen Donald Trump do or say anything racist.

Kushner doesn’t have genuine candor in him, but in another world he could have said, “Of course my father-in-law is a racist. A racist and — let’s be frank — a rank, salivating sociopath. You’re asking me to confirm what has been fairly obvious for decades, and patently obvious since he became an Obama birther a decade ago?

“White men of my father-in-law’s generation, particularly those raised in the working-class cultures of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island of the ’50s and ’60s, have racism in their bones. Listen to Travis Bickle‘s narration in Taxi Driver. Listen to that psychotic character played by Martin Scorsese in the back seat of Bickle’s cab when they’re looking up at that windowshade with the silhouettes. That kind of thinking was all over the place when my father-in-law was young. Hell, it was all over the place 30 years ago when he called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five. 20th Century New York City was throbbing with racism.

“Things are obviously different now in the blue cities and suburbs, but my father-in-law is nothing if not avaricious and opportunistic and practical-minded, and his main base of support consists of rural lowbrows and none-too-brights. Remember that woman in the red-T-shirt who told John McCain during the ’08 campaign that she thought Obama was an Arab? His core supporters are the dregs of society who want him to push back against the ‘other’, the non-white invaders, the immigrants, the multiculturals.

“C’mon, Jonathan…who is my father-in-law if not the Last Angry White Guy who’s stamping his feet and saying ‘no, no, no’ to the cultural and economic changes that the blues have embraced and run with over the last half-century and especially the last 20 or 25 years?

“The boomer-aged, Fox News-watching rurals see their white heritage…everything that this country used to be from the late ’40s to the early ’90s or thereabouts…they can feel it all slipping away. This and that old-fashioned notion of job security and homogenous communities…all that good-old-America stuff that Michael Moore has spoken of when describing the Michigan he knew as a kid.

“And my father-in-law’s only chance of electoral support is to appeal to these sad people. You can look at me cross-eyed and say you don’t approve, but that’s the cultural and mathematical reality.

“These slow-boaters — some call them bumblefucks — don’t care if my father-in-law is a fiendish autocrat and a submental sociopath. They don’t give a damn if he’s an American Mussolini. They just want him to protect their communities, save their bloodlines, and try and preserve at least a semblance of the America they once knew.”

Yesterday HE commenter “Jax” wrote the following assessment of Booksmart: “Just saw this. Breaking news: IT’S NOT THAT FUNNY. Sarcasm and snark [which] all the new comedies have, but no real wit, and no real dramatic tension between the leads until the end. The scene with the dolls was GREAT, but you can’t make a movie out of that.

“Plus the film is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s been talked up on the chat shows as a great coming-of-age comedy a la American Graffiti or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Actually it’s a crypto lesbian comedy with a semi-hot lovemaking scene (with a gross joke) and a strong feeling for the sisterhood of two young women. Not what the audience signed up for.”

I’m sorry but the instant that I read “crypto lesbian comedy” I had to admit that this label is somewhat on-target, at least when you compare the actual content of Booksmart vs. how it’s been sold.

I happened to enjoy Booksmart for what it is (partly because it seems to be reflecting late-teen mores and attitudes among GenZ types in big-city cultures) but I also refrained from describing it as a semi-lesbian thing, as did almost every other critic in the world.

Because anything more than a cursory mention of a gay current can lead to wokester-wolf-pack suspicions of vague homophobia, so the smart thing is to discreetly allude to a film’s sexual atmosphere without saying “this is what it is”.

Which is why you’ll never read the term “crypto lesbian comedy” or anything like that from anyone who writes for Indiewire, the official journal of wokester politics and attitudes.

The marketing of Booksmart, in short, played the old “hide the ball” game — selling it as an edgy, whipsmart teen odyssey (which I for one bought into, having said it was “as fulfilling and well-honed as a 21st Century high-school farewell thing could reasonably be”) when in fact it’s a little gayer than what anyone has officially copped to.

Another thing we’re not allowed to mention these days is the fact that the LGBTQ community reps 4.5% of the U.S. population. Add your enlightened urban/suburban liberals and wokesters and the core allegiance factor is still on the marginal side.

Name some other significant “hide the ball” marketing campaigns, whether or not they resulted in a film’s commercial success.

Race-track flicks are naturally about serious pro-level drivers and their vehicles. (Renegade fast-car movies are a different breed.) The most enjoyably immersive race-track flicks, in this order: Claude Lelouch‘s Rendezvous (not shot on a track but all the more thrilling for that), John Sturges and Steve McQueen‘s Le Mans (the failure of which marked the end of McQueen’s superstar phase), Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero, John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix, James Goldstone‘s Winning, Tony Scott‘s Days of Thunder, Ron Howard‘s Rush, the Fred Astaire race-car sequence in On The Beach.

Last weekend Joe and Jane Popcorn stood eyeball-to-eyeball with Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures and said the following: “You can’t keep Monsterverse-ing us with the same old Godzilla crap and expect lines around the block. We’re not going to sit for this stuff endlessly, on top of which your new Godzilla is at least a couple of tons heavier than the five-year-old Gareth Edwards version…the first flat-out obese monster in the history of motion pictures. We’re fat enough on our own, bruhs — we’d rather not be reminded of the obesity epidemic when we go to the movies.”

Yes, I’m kidding. Mostly. But Godzilla: King of the Monsters did under-perform last weekend.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “Godzilla: King of the Monsters didn’t have a roar quite as deafening as its franchise predecessors. The third entry in Warner Bros. and Legendary’s MonsterVerse opened with a middling $49 million at the domestic box office, a start well below 2014’s Godzilla ($93 million) and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island ($61 million).

“Like its series brethren, Godzilla’s umpteenth return to the big screen had a more promising start overseas, where it debuted with $130 million. Even so, that’s a potentially problematic drop in ticket sales for a movie that cost roughly $200 million to make. It also likely required a marketing spend in excess of $100 million.

This is a mildly cruddy kinescope of a 4.8.55 Person to Person segment in which the 47-year-old Edward R. Murrow interviewed Marilyn Monroe, who was then 28. She was staying at the Connecticut home of celebrity photographer and producer Milton Greene, who had photographed her many times and with whom she had formed a production company. Monroe’s appearance (along with Greene’s wife Amy) begins at 3:30.

Even though she’s “acting” (as anyone sitting for an on-camera interview would do) and particularly the inaccurate but well-known part of the less-than-robustly-intellectual blonde who nonetheless tries like hell, there’s something emotionally devastating about Monroe’s eyes, personality, manner, looks…the whole package.

Yes, this observation has been shared tens of millions of times but something extra is going on in this interview, I swear. Very political and practiced and polite, a sly sense of humor, but the delicate sensitivity and especially the vulnerability…God. The way she occasionally takes a beat to collect her thoughts, and sometimes speaks slowly and cautiously, drawing on a sufficient but less-than-vast vocabulary. Try not to succumb.

Wiki excerpt: “Greene’s work with Monroe (whom he first shot for a layout for Look in 1953) changed the course of his career. The two struck up a friendship and, when Monroe left Los Angeles to study acting with Lee Strasberg in New York City, she stayed with Greene, his wife Amy and young son Joshua in Connecticut. Together with Greene, Monroe formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, a production company in an effort to gain control of her career. Greene would go on to produce Bus Stop (’56) and The Prince and the Showgirl (’57).

“Monroe and Greene’s friendship ended after the production of The Prince and the Showgirl, and [then] Monroe fired Greene.”

In yesterday’s thread about Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us, “Mr. F” said something that I regarded as borderline astonishing. “Now matter how often I see it,” he said, “I remain amazed at Wells’ ability to criticize a character or person for acting differently than he would.”

Mr. F was apparently serious. He was saying that the correct way to watch a drama is to immerse yourself in the basics (story, character, milieu, tone) but without drawing upon your own life experience for perspective or judgment.

Maintain a strict distance, Mr. F was saying. By all means submit to whatever the characters are going through, all the while considering their various motives, dreams, delusions and appetites. But do so impersonally. You’ll only muck things up if you merge the story with your own saga or knowledge of how life works. Turn off your mind, forget what you know, dumb yourself down.

Let me explain something very clearly: I’ve always put myself into the narrative and especially the shoes of various characters, and I always ask myself “is this how I’d play my cards?” Or “is this how I’d react?” If not, I say “what then are their motives for acting in a way that I don’t agree with? Why would they behave in a way that seems a little outside my realm or which doesn’t seem to make basic sense?”

I’ve been watching films, plays and TV dramas this way for decades…hell, since I was seven or eight years old. I have an idea that tens of millions of others do the same.

Going back to the eras of Aeschylus, Agathon and Sophocles the basic task of drama has always been to merge the proverbial audience member with the experience, mindset and emotional leanings of the lead character[s]. The idea has always been to “walk a mile in these characters’ shoes, and once you’ve gotten to know them decide for yourself if he/she is living her life sensibly or radically or dangerously or brilliantly or something in between.”

If you don’t use your own life experience to assess the wisdom or bravery of a given character, to determine whether he/she is acting foolishly or clumsily or with enviable political skills…if you’re not bringing what you know into a narrative and making assessments of various characters based on what you’d do or wouldn’t do if you were in their shoes…if you’re not engaging with a drama as a human being with memories, emotions and regrets of your own then what the hell are you doing?

Mr. F. feels that the best way to watch a film is to adopt the mentality of a cupcake or a toaster or a chunk of mozzarella cheese.

Mr. F quote: “It’s a mistake if you’re evaluating character choices based on what you would do, assuming it’s clear from the narrative why they’re doing what they’re doing…it’s just empathy.”

HE to Mr. F: You can’t have empathy without feelings of allegiance or identification or at least understanding. You have to be persuaded to emotionally join this or that character’s team, even if they may not the nicest people you’re ever met. Failing that you have to be persuaded that a character’s reasons for doing what he/she does at least makes sense to them. That’s almost always what you get when the screenplay is first-rate.

Sasha Stone quote: “You can’t put yourself in their shoes. You just can’t. Not possible.”

She meant the unjustly prosecuted and jailed Central Park Five. My suburban whitebread experience, Sasha was saying, makes me incapable of understanding anything about these guys — what they were about or what was driving them onward or whatever. They might as well be microbes from the Planet Jupiter, Sasha basically meant.

Well, bullshit to that. The screenplay and the acting in When They See Us happen to be good enough to allow me to relate, to discover parallels between what these poor guys went through and my own experiences and understandings. This is what makes a film good. Either you build bridges between the audience and the characters or you don’t.

Two days ago Indiewire‘s Tom Brueggeman posted a pep-rally piece called “7 Reasons Why Booksmart May Turn Out to Be a Box-Office Hit.” Part of the idea was that after last weekend’s underwhelming opening on 25905 screens (a three-day and four-day tally of $6,933,620 and $8,701,363, respectively) that Booksmart might rally its way to $15 million by tonight.

“A typical studio film with a second weekend like this would soon disappear,” Brueggeman reasoned, “but [Booksmart] should have longer legs based on strong word of mouth. So $25 million looks like a plausible final result.”

I can’t find any Booksmart box-office figures for Saturday, 6.1. It’s now 3:45 am in Los Angeles or 12:45 pm in Paris. Monday morning update: Booksmart wound up doing $3,328,648 over the weekend, which repped a -52% drop from last weekend. It now stands at $14,366,831. As it will lose tons of theatres next weekend, it’ll be lucky to hit $20M at the end of the day.

Yesterday Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro reported that Olivia Wilde‘s indie comedy was “having a solid hold in weekend 2″ with “$4M [earned] as of this point in time, or -42% [from last weekend] for a running total of $15M.”

On the other hand Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson reported that Booksmart was looking at a likely $3.7 million (-47%) weekend. That’ll give Annapurna and United Artist Releasing’s acclaimed teen comedy a mediocre $14.74 million ten-day total. Yes, this will be a cult favorite in the years to come, but the deluge of online ink afforded to this one didn’t move the needle one bit. It rarely does.”

Two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters was the absolute best — no side-stepping, said what she felt, straight-from-the-gut candor at all times. And I’m not just saying this because I ran into her a few times and liked her from the get-go. Always an artist first and a diplomat second. Smarts, steel, liberal-progressive views, etc.

Winters knew Marilyn Monroe pretty well, roomed with her for about a year between 1947 and ’48. For decades after Monroe’s passing Winters was repeatedly asked about her, and offered pretty much the same recollections.

Monroe began to enjoy life a bit in the late ’40s, Winters said, and had a genuinely thrilling and abundant life in the ’50s, but not so much in the early ’60s. Monroe wasn’t well educated but was highly intelligent and constantly reading. Totally into older-guy father figures. No family, no support group, suspicious of most would-be friends or acquaintances. Key quote: “If she’d been a little dumber, she would’ve been happier.”

Monroe began to slip into an increasingly troubled place when she hit her mid 30s, which, back in the day, was when actresses needed to begin thinking about transitioning into character roles and/or playing mothers, or so Winters believed. But in the early ’60s the big studios didn’t want Monroe as a character actress — they wanted her to go on being a 25-year-old blonde sexpot forever. (When Winters signed to play a 40ish old-school motherly type in The Diary of Anne Frank, for which she later won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, director George Stevens told her that “because of this role you’ll be able to work for the rest of your life.”)

Winters believed that Monroe’s August 1962 death from a sleeping-pill overdose was most likely an accident, and that she’d just forgotten how many she’d taken earlier. “I’ve done that,” Winters said.