A private sexual episode in the life of Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara — 54, married, two kids — was exposed yesterday by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters and Tatiana Siegel. And once the story gets around, Hollywood insiders will be gasping and fainting and using smelling salts to revive their colleagues.

So what sordid or otherwise disreputable behavior was Tsujihara guilty of? Had he sexually harassed an employee? Or used company funds to pay for the services of expensive prostitutes? Or been photographed with a leather-clad dominatrix in Las Vegas? None of these. Tsujihara — are you sitting down? — had a three-year affair with a young British actress named Charlotte Kirk.

And once the affair had been going for a year or two — this is where the story gets really, really bizarre — Kirk started to pester Tsujihara more and more about wanting him to help her land parts in movies and TV shows.

I for one am shocked that such a relationship could ever happen in the big-studio realm of present-day Hollywood. To the best of my knowledge no producer, director or studio chief in Hollywood history has ever used his (or her) power to initiate sexual activity with any actress or actor of any age. Yes, I’ve heard second-hand rumors about depravity of this sort, but I’ve never read about any hard proof until today.

Not to mention the notion that Kirk felt frustrated that her sexual relationship with Tsujihara wasn’t leading to enough career opportunity, and that she complained and demanded more than what she was getting, and that Brett Ratner and even attorney Marty Singer eventually stepped in to try and facilitate her demands…well, I’m just stunned.

Did Kirk — 21 when the affair began, now 26 — go to Masters and Siegel with the story? Did she self-pen an expose of this lascivious affair? No. In fact, she denied that anything even vaguely problematic or exploitive happened. Unfortunately Masters and Siegel have text messages that prove otherwise.

From Siegel and Masters’ story: “The three-year entanglement, revealed here for the first time, offers a window into a dark aspect of the entertainment industry, which regularly brings together attractive young women, eager if not desperate for a shot at stardom, and successful men who at times see these women as a perk of their wealth and power.”

Satan never sleeps!

Candid talk doesn’t get much blunter than in Andrew Goldman‘s q & a session with director Peter Bogdanovich (Vulture, 3.4.19). It’s the kind of interview that almost never happens — the kind in which the interview subject says exactly what he thinks. Exactly as in “fuck it, I don’t care.”

The hovering ghosts of Billy Wilder and Hugh Hefner have read the article and are shaking their heads in disapproval.

Bogdanovich, 79, is now living “in a modest ground-floor Toluca Lake apartment he shares with his ex-wife Louise Stratten and her mother, Nelly Hookstratten,” Goldman informs. “Bogdanovich is noticeably frail as he recovers from a fall he suffered while at a French film festival, where he collected a lifetime-­achievement award; he shattered his left femur.”

I’m very sorry for Bogdanovich’s misfortune — nothing cracked or broke after my fall in the Sierras, but I know what it feels like to have nagging pain as a companion.

By the way I’m feeling much better now. My back ribs still ache slightly but a lot less than before. I can walk around like a normal person now, and it doesn’t kill me to get up from the couch or my bed.

A new trailer for Alan Elliott‘s Amazing Grace popped earlier today. There were hopes late last year that the doc, technically directed by the late Sydney Pollack, might land a nomination for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar, but that didn’t happen. Neon plans to open it sometime during the first quarter. (I think.)

Filmed over two nights (Thursday, 1.13.72 and Friday, 1.14.72) inside L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (So. Broadway near 87th Place), Amazing Grace became an unfinished calamity when it became clear that director Sydney Pollack and his crew shot had captured 20 hours of footage without shooting clapper boards at the start of each take, which in the analog era made the footage impossible to synch in post.

Amazing Grace is just as spirit-lifting as the early-birds have been saying. Classic rhythmic bass-throbby gospel, churning and turning and cranking it up…”Oh, my…oh, yeah! Oh, my…oh, yeah!” (That might have been my own private chorus.) I’ve been listening to Franklin’s singing all my life, but to watch her improvise and embroider and work through a song top to bottom, little beads of sweat covering her face and neck, her concentration fierce and joyous — pure flight, pure emotion, pure reach-for-the-skies.

Franklin is supported by top-tier pros…maximum energy, discipline, coordination. The barrel-chested Rev. James Cleveland (who died at age 59 in 1991) at the piano. The Southern California Community Choir, led by Alexander Hamilton. And Franklin’s superb backup band — guitarist Cornell Dupree, bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Bernard Purdie, organist Ken Lupper, conga player Pancho Morales — is as good as it gets.

The bass-heavy soundtrack sounded analog-y. You could almost hear the tape hiss. It did wonderful things to my rib cage.

Oh, and there are two or three shots of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts clapping along from behind the back row. Exile on Main Street had been recorded at the time, but was yet to be released. Sticky Fingers had been in circulation for eight or nine months.

Mentioning Randy Newman‘s “Rednecks” is pretty much verboten these days because the lyrics repeatedly use the “n” word. But it’s worth recalling that the song, released on a 1974 Newman album called “Good Old Boys,” was inspired by an incident that happened on the Dick Cavett Show on 12.18.70.

A 12.19.70 N.Y. Times story reported that Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia “walked out of a taping of the Dick Cavett Show in a huff last night after demanding that the host of the program apologize for a remark about Mr. Maddox’s white supporters.

“Mr. Cavett was paraphrasing a question asked during a break in the show by Jim Brown, the black actor, who wanted to know if Governor Maddox had ‘any trouble with the white bigots because of all the things you did for blacks.’ On the air, Mr. Cavett substituted ‘admirers’ for ‘bigots.’ The Governor, saying the implication was that his supporters were bigots, demanded an apology.

“’If I called any of your admirers bigots who are not bigots, I apologize,’ Mr. Cavett said.

“Mr. Maddox rose and, after another exchange, left the stage with 10 minutes of the program remaining.”

Newman’s lyrics changed things around somewhat:

“Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show” — check.
“With some smart-ass New York Jew” — Cavett is a witty Midwestern gentile with a dry sense of humor.
“And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox” — Cavett never explicitly laughed at Maddox.
“And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too” — true.

You may have read some dour assessments of J.C. Chandor‘s Triple Frontier (Netflix, opening today — streaming as of 3.13), a moralistic heist-gone-wrong adventure thriller. But it’s no wipeout.

It’s definitely a better-than-decent sit, and is certainly worth catching for the second half, or for the section that deals with how to escape with ill-gotten loot on the backs of donkeys, chopping your way through heavy jungle and over and down the Andes mountains.

The first half deals with five 40ish special forces veterans (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal) deciding to rip off the fortress home of a South American drug dealer, and the second half is about trying to get away with it and not doing so well in this regard, and being forced to abandon more and more dough as the escape progresses.

The second half is about what happens when you’re carried away by greed and you forsake common sense. It’s more or less John Huston‘s Treasure of Sierra Madre meets William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer meets Eric von Stroheim‘s Greed.

I was into Triple Frontier during the first half, but not exactly gripped by it. We aren’t told very much about the five ex-commandos (Affleck’s character is sketched out to some extent — he’s fat, financially strapped, has an alienated daughter) and the general feeling is that the film is a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. Or, you know, more into treading water than actually swimming.

There isn’t enough texture, the heist isn’t planned with enough detail, there aren’t enough hindrances or security guards…it’s all kind of rushed along.

The key moment is when they discover that the drug lord has much, much more cash socked away in his jungle abode than expected. $250 million or something like that. If these guys could get away with $10 million each they’d obviously be doing just fine. Hell, they could make off with $20 million each. But no — cash-strapped Affleck suddenly wants a Kardashian-sized bank account. He not only loses his mind — let’s take it all, look at this, we’re loaded beyond our wildest dreams! — but everyone else falls in line.

The problem is that Issac has arranged for a large Russian-made chopper to take them over the Andes, but all that extra dough (bags and bags of it) weighs a hell of a lot, and they find out too late that the helicopter can’t manage to clear the 11,000-foot Andes peaks with all that weight. The chopper goes down, and then, finally, Triple Frontier gets interesting.

HE commenters were complaining two or three days ago that I’d erred by openly guessing that not all of the five make it out alive. Which is, in fact, true. I’m not going to say how many get away clean, but a typical action melodrama of this type would kill off at least two characters if not three. Suffice that Triple Frontier is atypical.

Affleck is so heavy in this film he’s almost Harvey Weinstein. All that bulk plus thatches of gray hair…you’re seriously wondering if his heart can take the strain and stress. Affleck is almost double the size he was in Gone Girl.

I was nonetheless favorably impressed by Triple Frontier. All in all it’s a solid B plus. And that ain’t hay.

Half-narrative re-enactment and half-documentary, Framing John Delorean wouldn’t work if Alec Baldwin (his gray-haired wig is roughly similar to the corn-yellow Trump wig he wears on SNL) didn’t closely resemble the late automotive tycoon who went down in flames. Oddly, curiously, Baldwin does resemble the Real McCoy, partly because he looks slimmer than his usual self. Directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, Framing John Delorean will premiere at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival before playing select venues on 6.7. We all recall the tale — the DeLorean Motor Company amassing a crushing debt of $175 million, unable to pay creditors, nobody wanting to buy the car because it cost $25K, DeLorean attempting a cocaine deal that might get him out of debt but being stung by the FBI, the Delorean “starring” in Back To The Future, etc.

In the late summer of 1982 I attended a Bobby Zarem press party for Kirk Douglas at Elaine’s. Douglas was around 65 at the time, and about as gamey and blunt-spoken as they come. We talked about Paths of Glory, which Douglas was naturally proud of, and his sometimes contentious relationship with director Stanley Kubrick, who had also directed Douglas in Spartacus. Douglas respected Kubrick immensely, but that day he called him “Stanley the prick,” in part because Kubrick had been ready and willing, Douglas said, to snag screenplay credit for Spartacus, even though it had been written, of course, by the then-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. Douglas was incensed that Kubrick would even suggest such a remedy, but he did.

Kirk Douglas, Stanley Kubrick on the set of Paths of Glory.

Who could be pretentious enough to wear this overcoat? The collar is ridiculous.

Anyone who willingly visits a “crazy nine-day festival that only happens every ninety years” and in which the members all wear white and beatific expressions…anyone who joins this kind of eccentric community deserves every weird thing that happens to them and then some. It’s obviously not Burning Man, and probably involves slicing people open and making them scream. Wicker Man plus. If Ari Aster (Hereditary) wasn’t the director I’d take a pass. Costarring Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper, Liv Mjones and Isabelle Grill.

The Triple Frontier review embargo goes up tomorrow morning, and I’m telling you right now that the film doesn’t really get good until the second half, and that’s when things start to go bad for the five commandos. “Eeeeeeee!,” somebody just screamed. “No spoilers until we’ve had a chance to see it! In fact, you’ve already spoiled it by saying things go badly during the second half…say nothing further…eeeeeeeee!” But there’s nothing to write about without discussing the second half, which I would call the Treasure of the Sierra Madre portion. So the hell with it — I’m just gonna post away and may the chips fall, etc. I just tried to use the standard spoiler html coding, and for some reason it doesn’t work.

“Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that’s crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine?

“Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter-pilot-turned-Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can’t control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We’ve just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and the directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.

“Just to be completely, unerringly, let’s-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence.

“Superheroes are defined by their limitations — Superman’s Kryptonite, Batman’s mortality — but Captain Marvel is just an invincible bore. The screenplay by Boden, Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with a story by the three of them plus Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve, presents us with Brie Larson’s Carol being amazingly strong and resilient at the beginning, middle, and end. This isn’t an arc, it’s a straight line.” — from “Captain Mary Sue,” by Kyle Smith.

I am sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. I am sick sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. I am sick sick sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. Because they’re mostly the same flim-flam — the same synthetic, force-fed oatmeal.

I nonetheless saw a very sizable portion of Captain Marvel last night, and because I submitted for a full 80 minutes I think I deserve a pat on the back. Just as Yeshua of Nazareth so loved the human race that he submitted to their doubts and tortures and finally death on the cross, I sat through Captain Marvel out of dumb allegiance and devotion to the potential of movies to deliver something profound or thrilling or extra in some regard.

“Captain Marvel starts out awfully damn busy and time-shifty and flash-cutty,” I wrote last night, “teeming with characters who quip and deceive and spin riddles with the same dry-ironic, less-than-fully-invested tone that ALL superhero characters and villains have always trafficked in, and at the same time switching allegiances and adopting new identities and shape-shifting with ferocious conviction…where was I? Oh, yes, the subject of Captain Marvel vs. Hollywood Elsewhere.

“It finally settles down by going back to Los Angeles of 1995 (Blockbuster, Radio Shack) as Brie Larson‘s Carol Danvers teams up with a nicely CG youthified Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (looking 36 or 37, smooth complexion, thinner, full head of hair)…at the same time Larson also runs into a grinning Stan Lee on a bus.

“80 minutes into this Deja Vu on top of another Deja Vu, a feeling of profound spiritual fatigue came over me…a voice that began to repeat over and over, ‘You have sat through this tightly sprung, time-trippy, CG-reliant action film before…well. a close relative of it with slightly less emphasis on progressive feminist attitude..it was called T2 and you saw it with your kids in Santa Monica back in ’91, except James Cameron did a better job with the script.”

This morning I am much more on the side of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy than Variety‘s Owen Glieberman. McCarthy was basically bored while Gleiberman emerged in a respectful and even enthused frame of mind.

HE to Gleiberman: “The origin story as head game”? “Like someone trapped in a matrix,” Larson’s Danvers is “shaking off the dream of who she is in order to locate the superwoman she could be”?

Is the ability to enjoy superhero origin flicks some kind of hard-wired genetic thing? Were you into Marvel or D.C. comic books as a kid? I read comic books when I was nine, ten, eleven. I can remember my grandfather saying to my father, “It’s fascinating how they read these things…what do they see in them?” But then an amazing, life-transforming thing happened. I discovered movies and said to myself, “Wait…these are much better diversions!”

Every so often I’ll be posting a short, catch-as-catch-can video on HE plus instead of the usual 350-word post. The first one is after the jump. Today I had nothing to share except for (a) a slight feeling of trepidation about Captain Marvel, which will screen at the Arclight an hour from now, and (b) a concern about how to honestly review Triple Frontier (which I saw Sunday night but can’t post about until early Wednesday morning) without getting into spoiler territory.

I also have to figure a way to light myself without my glasses giving off that intense reflective glare. Video essays of this type are all about lighting — having something to say helps also.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]