…about Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis possibly not being ready for Cannes?

This is real:

“And the real gap is the diploma divide, and the real future of the Democratic party and maybe democracy [itself] depends on Democrats figuring that out.”

Guardian “Explainer”, posted an hour ago: In a personal message issued on Friday evening, Kate Middleton (the Princess of Wales) said that following “major abdominal surgery” last January, tests found that cancer had been present. Which, of course, doesn’t necessarily spell doom.

However, the Guardian report also states that “Kensington Palace [has] said it would not be sharing any further medical information about the form or stage of cancer that was discovered.”

Middleton is only 42.

Steam hisses out of my forehead every time I see a Zoomer casually strolling around in baggy flared pants with the cuffs an inch or so above the ankle. There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between today’s 20something fashion slaves and the Hebrew slaves who built the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Two weeks ago I hit the roof when N.Y. Times fashion maven Jonathan Weiner wrote that “skinny jeans are the new dad jeans.” I wear slim (i.e., not skinny) jeans but I saw red regardless.

…as Michael Corleone prepares to add vocal accompaniment. That’s Hyman Roth, of course, sitting 10 or 12 feet away, reading a lunch menu.

I know the uh-oh feeling. As in “uh-oh, am I stuck in cement or is this just, like, a phase?”

@producerpatrick So many entertainment workers are suffering right now. Hollywood isn’t all glitz & glamor, it’s thousands of tv & film professionals who are out of work and facing desperate situations. Sounding the Alarm @Karen Bass for L.A. Mayor @Gavin Newsom ♬ original sound – Producer Patrick

The less afraid you are, the less intimidated you are, and the better you are. Same deal with writing.

“I didn’t have a lot of experience under my feet”…got it. The expression is “under my belt” but whatever.

Before I took my first tentative stabs at small-time Hollywood journalism in ’77 and ’78, I was a timid, floundering wannabe…a “secret genius” living in Santa Monica, suffering from occasional nightmares and wondering where and what the hell.

Right around that time or more precisely in December of ’74, I was an audience member during a taping of Both Sides Now, a short-lived, Los Angeles-based impromptu debate show that was co-hosted by the conservative-minded George Putnam and the iconcoclastic Mort Sahl.

Sahl, whom I finally met and chatted with at the Beverly Glen shopping area in ’02, had been one of my all-time favorite comedians. He broke ground for an entire generation of hip, social-critique comics who began to punch through in the ’70s and ’80s (George Carlin, Bill Maher, etc.).

The Both Sides Now guest that night was screenwriter Robert Kaufman (Getting Straight, Love At First Bite). Kaufman’s latest screenwriting effort, the Richard Rush-directed Freebie and the Bean, had just opened that month. I wasn’t a fan of the chaotic action-comedy tone and so when the q & a portion began I stood up and expressed this opinion. Kaufman pushed back rather curtly, initially by calling me inarticulate.

The irony is that in early October of ‘82 Kaufman and Ted Kotcheff, who was then doing press interviews (or who had recently done them) for First Blood…I met Kaufman and Kotcheff at Joe Allen one night, and they were giving me a big rundown on the convoluted pre-production and production experience of Tootsie.

Kaufman had been one of the Tootsie writers (along with Don McGuire, Murray Schisgal, Elaine May, director Dick Richards) and the stories were fairly wild, or certainly seemed that way at the time. The anecdotes were hilarious…a window into a flavorful and frenzied development process.

In my subsequent, highly entertaining discussions with Kaufman about Tootsie I naturally never raised the eight-year-old topic of our mild little Freebie and the Bean contretemps…a mere blip on Kaufman’s mid ‘70s radar screen.

“It Wasn’t A Comedy,” posted on 4.21.20: In the late fall of ’82 I wrote a big, laborious piece for The Film Journal (which I was managing editor of) about the making of Tootsie and particularly the then-astounding notion that a present-day New York comedy about an actor who can’t get a job could cost $21 million, which at the time was way above the norm.

I talked to several creative participants about it, including cowriters Robert Kaufman, Murray Schisgal and director Sydney Pollack. At at the end of the writing process I was fairly sick of the whole saga.

But I never heard this particular story from Dustin Hoffman before today.

The one Tootsie element I didn’t care for (no offense) was Dave Grusin‘s music. Too peppy, too coy, too cute-sounding, And I wasn’t a huge fan of Teri Garr‘s performance. But I loved the supporting turns by Pollack (as Hoffman’s agent), Charles Durning, Jessica Lange, Doris Belack, Bill Murray and Dabney Coleman.

Tomorrow (Friday, 3.22) is a “roaming around Manhattan and catching movies” day, and attraction #1 is Claude Sautet‘s Classe tous risques, which roughly translates as “risk everywhere you turn”. The trailer makes me feel as if I’ve already seen it. Lino Ventura (born in 1919, nudging 40 when the film was shot) stars with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Sandra Milo supporting. Boilerplate: “A French career criminal on the run with his family returns to Paris with help from a new criminal acquaintance and confronts the members of his old gang.”

When’s the last time Hollywood delivered a sequel to a film made 37 years prior?

From Screen Daily‘s “Cannes 2024: What’s in the running?” (3.21.24), co-written by Mona Tabbara, Jeremy Kay, Elisebet Cabeza, Emilio Mayorga and Rebecca Leffler:

The filming of Megalopolis began in November 2022 and concluded in March 2023.