Three observations about Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us (Netflix, 5.31).

One, the biggest dramatic problem in this five-part dramatic reenactment of the 1989 Central Park Jogger case, which I wrote about when it was first announced 19 months ago, is the bizarre police confessions by the five alleged (and later exonerated) assailants despite being with parents and/or guardians. How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Two, one of the ogres behind these “forced” confessions was Linda Fairstein, head of the Manhattan district attorney’s sex-crimes unit from ’76 to ’02, and whose office supervised the 1990 prosecution of the Central Park Jogger case. Wiki excerpt: In a settlement lawsuit it was claimed that Fairstein, with the assistance of the detectives at the 20th precinct, coerced false confessions from the five arrested teenagers following 30 straight hours of interrogation and intimidation.”

Three, who plays Fairstein in DuVernay’s re-telling? None other than Felicity Huffman, fresh off her involvement in the recent college entrance-exam cheating scandal.

Last night I dreamt I was a salaried magazine columnist, and at the end of the dream I was laid off and given a lousy $5K severance package. As in real life, a horrible feeling descended — so horrible that I woke up. It reminded me, naturally, that life can be unfair and even brutal at times, and how organizations never say why you’re being let go. They just announce the bad news, Up in The Air-style, and ask you to collect your things and be out by the end of the day. All you can say to yourself is “why me? What brought this on?” As always, office politics and attitudes are often to blame.

I realized late this morning that my shitty-severance-package dream may have been inspired by a very gloomy Vanity Fair article I read yesterday — a piece called “‘You Will Lose Everything’: Inside The Media’s #MeToo Blacklist.”

Written by Diana Falzone, the piece basically reports that women who’ve filed sexual harassment lawsuits aren’t getting hired because they’ve been more or less blacklisted — branded as prickly and/or troublesome and too risky to bring aboard. The subhead reads, “Former television hosts and network personalities say they are persona non grata after settling high-profile lawsuits against serial sexual harassers. Is blacklisting the next legal battleground?”

This is really, really wrong. Women who were hassled or assaulted in a job environment obviously didn’t instigate the difficulty — they just wanted it to stop, and presumably sued to make a general point or get some justified payback or to possibly make things better for other sexual harassment victims. But now they’re being doubly victimized.

“There is no official blacklist,” Falzone writes. “And yet, multiple women, all of whom have settled high-profile lawsuits against serial sexual harassers, told me they struggled to continue their careers in media after defending themselves.”

Legendary director and #MeToo ogre Roman Polanski, 85, is suing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over for having taken away his membership last May without following proper protocol — i.e., doing it too quickly and suddenly, not giving him a chance to defend himself.

In the same motivational vein of Amazon’s refusal to distribute Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York (a decision which is also being litigated), the Academy’s board of governors booted Polanski and Bill Cosby on the same day as a sympatico gesture to the #MeToo movement. Months earlier the Academy ejected Harvey Weinstein.

RoPo attorney Harland Braun to Variety: “We are litigating the fairness of their procedure. They threw him out without warning and without giving him a chance to respond. There was not even any notice of why. After 40 years, on the same day as [Bill] Cosby. Give me a break.”

Academy to Variety: “The procedures taken to expel Mr. Polanski were fair and reasonable. The Academy stands behind its decision as appropriate,” a spokesperson said.

In a brief interview with USA Today‘s Brian Truitt, Quentin Tarantino riffs on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), the lead characters in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (Sony, 7.26).

In so doing Tarantino (a) gives props to HE’s theory that Dalton is largely based upon Burt Reynolds circa 1969 (and not so much Clint Eastwood) and (b) hints that the “deadly” Booth will violently settle some business, most likely during the third act.

According to Tarantino, Dalton is “a man full of inner turmoil and self-pity for not being in a better position, career-wise. But as is Rick’s way, he blames everybody but himself.”

That’s Reynolds, all right. He belly-ached a lot in the late ’60s about how he couldn’t break into A-level features, and then, when he was a big shot, about how he couldn’t land leads in prestige-level, Oscar-calibre films. Eastwood sure as hell wasn’t complaining in the late ’60s. In ’68 and ’69 he was building his brand with Hang ‘Em High, Coogan’s Bluff, Where Eagles Dare and Paint Your Wagon.

Somewhat curiously, Tarantino describes Booth as an “indestructible World War II hero” and one of the “deadliest guys alive” who “could kill you with a spoon, a piece of paper, or a business card. Consequently, he is a rather Zen dude who is troubled by very little.”

Okay, but how and why would an indestructible killing machine figure into a film that’s allegedly focused on hippy-dippy, head-in-the-clouds, peace-and-love-beads Hollywood? Why bring up killing at all when the 1969 Hollywood milieu was all about getting high and flashing the peace sign and reading passages from the Bhagavad Gita? Exactly — at a crucial moment Cliff will somehow go up against some folks who need to be corrected or otherwise interfered with — i.e., the Manson family.

“Poor Richard M. Nixon was almost certain to be impeached, and removed from office, after the infamous ‘smoking gun’ tape came out. On that tape, the president is heard directing his chief of staff to get the CIA director, Richard Helms, to tell the FBI ‘don’t go any further into this case’ — Watergate — for national security reasons. That order never went anywhere, because Helms ignored it.

“Other than that, Nixon was mostly passive — at least compared with Trump. For the most part, the Watergate tapes showed that Nixon had ‘acquiesced in the cover-up’ after the fact. Nixon had no advance knowledge of the break-in. His aides were the driving force behind the obstruction.

“Trump, on the other hand, was a one-man show. His aides tried to stop him, according to Mueller: ‘The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.’

“The investigation that Trump tried to interfere with here, to protect his own personal interests, was in significant part an investigation of how a hostile foreign power interfered with our democracy. If that’s not putting personal interests above a presidential duty to the nation, nothing is.

“White House counsel John Dean famously told Nixon that there was a cancer within the presidency and that it was growing. What the Mueller report disturbingly shows, with crystal clarity, is that today there is a cancer in the presidency: President Donald J. Trump.

“Congress now bears the solemn constitutional duty to excise that cancer without delay.” — from “Trump is a cancer on the presidency. Congress should remove him,” a 4.18 Washington Post op-ed by George Conway.

Shorter Halston: 35 years ago, haute couture fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick self-destructed when he cut a billion-dollar deal with J.C. Penney to sell a downmarket line — Halston III. Upscale retailers were appalled; Bergdorf Goodman dropped Halston like a bad habit. And yet other designers eventually followed suit and didn’t suffer the same consequences.

Real-Life Lesson: Don’t be too much of a nervy pathfinder. Wait for someone else to do the revolutionary thing, wait for the results, assess the odds and then rush in when the coast is clear.

A little after 8 pm last night Tatyana and I visited West Hollywood’s The Pleasure Chest. I know — right away you’re going “uh-oh, wait a minute”…right? Well, a lot of people go there for this and that, and I’m just average common too, I’m just like him and the same as you.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Three and a half years ago I reported that Anonymous Content’s Michael Sugar had tossed me a little tidbit during a Spotlight lunch at Craig’s: Within a year or so an “Academy app” will surface that will allow Academy members to watch all the films in awards contention in high-def, but one that will also be configured so that recording content will be impossible. No more DVDs, no video links…all of that trash-canned.”

But the “Academy app” thing never happened. A few weeks later I asked then-Academy honcho Cheryl Boone Isaacs whether the “Academy app” was in fact being developed. She didn’t deny that some kind of streaming option was being looked at, but indicated it wouldn’t happen for a while.

Now something similar is afoot. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Rebecca Keegan and Scott Feinberg are reporting that the Academy “is developing a streaming service of its own that would enable distributors to stream their own Best Picture Oscar hopefuls to voters,” but at a cost of $10K to $15K per film.

“The matter was the hot topic of discussion at an April 11 meeting at Academy headquarters,” THR reports. In attendance were “several dozen publicists who work on Oscar campaigns each year, including top awards strategists Tony Angellotti (Universal/Pixar); Justin Balsamo (Focus Features); Kira Feola (Disney); Laura Kim, Melody Korenbrot (Sony Classics); Leanne McClaflin (Amazon); Russell Nelson (Paramount); Danni Pearlberg (Sony); Michele Robertson, Cynthia Swartz, Lisa Taback (Netflix); Jason Wilk (Bleecker Street); and Lea Yardum.”

I’m seriously thinking about submitting a proposal for a book titled “Aspect Ratio Wars: The Epic Home-Video Battle Between Hollywood Elsewhere and 1.85 Fascism, and How The Good Guys Lost Despite The Support of the Movie Godz.” The hero (fighting for the concept of boxiness, oxygen and visual breathing room vs. dogmatic 1.85 claustrophobia) would be yours truly, fighting alone and standing alone against the Bob Furmanek-led mob. It’s a crazy, nonsensical story but it happened, and God knows how many classic films were cleavered and partly ruined as as result.

I could write this book in a month because it’s already been written in Hollywood Elsewhere portions. I would just have to refine and rephrase. The problem is that it would only sell about 1500 copies, as the number of people in the world who give a shit about aspect ratios probably doesn’t amount to more than four or five thousand, if that. I’m not even sure it would sell that much. But someone has to stand up and tell the truth about how Furmanek and his acolytes managed to convince home-video distributors to lop off God knows how many thousands of acres of visual material from God knows how many ’50s and ’60s films on Bluray.

Comment from “Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy“, originally posted on 7.17.12:

Jeffrey Wells grabs Roman Polanski by the shoulders and draws him close.

WELLS: I’m gonna ask you one more time, kitty cat — what’s the aspect ratio of Rosemary’s Baby?

POLANSKI (flatly): 1.85.

Wells strikes Polanski across the face, hard. He’s got his attention now.

WELLS: Stop lying to me, ya little fucker! What’s the aspect ratio?

POLANSKI: 1.66.

Notre Dame’s rector has said that the devastated cathedral “will be closed for five to six years.” Until 2024 or 2025. ($1 billion has been raised for the reconstruction.) You’ll notice that authorities have entirely blocked off Ile de la Cite. They can’t keep that rule in place for very long. Think of all the tourist joints (cafes, restaurants, souvenir sellers, gelato vendors) that are losing income as we speak.

I’ve stood and stared many times at this hallowed Paris monument over the last 40 years. My father visited me and my then-girlfriend Sophie in Paris in the summer of ’76. Notre Dame was black and sooty at the time, and my father’s first comment when he first laid eyes was “that’s it?” In January ’87 I climbed the winding, claustrophobia-inducing stairs inside one of the grand towers. The kids did the same when we visited in early ’00. My ex Maggie and I were married at St. Julien le Pauvre (the oldest church in Paris), just across the Seine. We stayed at Hotel Esmeralda. I also attended a Sunday mass sometime in the early aughts, and I’ll never forget that smoky incense aroma and the way an older French guy sitting next to me sang “aaahh-mehhn.”

I’ve spent the last 90 minutes “reading” (i.e., skimming through summaries of) the just-released Mueller Report, and I can’t do this all day. Not if I want to bang out my usual quota. But the special counsel’s carefully qualified conclusion that President Trump didn’t precisely or definitively collude or conspire with Russian operatives, or at least that there’s insufficient evidence to prove same, appears to be valid, if you want to be super-careful and extra-tippy-toe about it.

But Trump sure as hell obstructed justice here and there (what do you call firing James Comey over “this Russia thing“? serving justice?) and throw the fog and flim-flam around. He refused to be interviewed by Mueller’s team — what does that tell you?

The report certainly portrays Trump as peripherally dirty as hell in these myriad matters, and, if you ask me, as the same unruly, sociopathic, somewhat desperate conniver and opportunist whom we’ve all come to know a little better over the last three-plus years.

It certainly doesn’t gloss over the fact that his already-indicted or convicted minions aren’t literally covered in raw sewage or that Trump isn’t an extremely brutish, id-propelled, temperamentally undisciplined, craven, under-informed, financially unstable boss of a New York crime family. In the eyes of God, history and likely 2020 voters he’s almost certainly, in fact, royally fucked. Not to mention what Southern District of New York prosecutors will do after he leaves office.

I’m puzzled by a reported possibility that the report doesn’t look all that deeply or comprehensively at Trump empire finances, as most of what has happened over the last four, five or six years, Russia-wise, has been about money. Trump ran for the Presidency to boost his brand, after all — that was the basic plan all along. Defeating Hillary was an “uh-oh, what do we do now?” moment.

Here’s the report. It’s going to take a while to sift through everything. Please post any comments, conclusions, curious insights or special uncoverings.

“FIFOG (Festival Internationale du Film Oriental de Geneve) runs from 4.29 through 5.5, but who uses the ‘o’ word these days? The last time was when Paul Schrader used it in a late March Facebook post (“I’ve written or directed films with a black lead, an oriental lead, a female lead,” etc.) Before that was during a viewing of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?.” — posted on 4.11.19.