Producer pally to HE: “We all know that Sundance has changed. The exciting, culture-defining current and buoyancy are long gone. I used to enjoy Sundance despite its rigors. But that was another time.

“Attacking Sundance in your column for the umpteenth time not only isn’t going to make any big difference, and at some point what it will do is finally exhaust your readers so much that they will turn away, stop reading, and leave.

“You’ve made your point. Now stop. Just cover what you think is relevant and stop attacking the festival. Remember that no matter what the festival may represent today” — i.e., the spirit of HUAC of the late ’40s and early ’50s, except persecuting white guys instead of commies — “there are filmmakers there who have worked for years and given up much to fulfill their dream of getting their film made and seen there, and they should at least should be appreciated.”

From Michael Fleming’s Deadline column, posted at 9:28 am today: “The 2020 Sundance Film Festival gets underway today, and it has been the toughest market to handicap in a good long time.

“Conversations with buyers and sellers point to a lack of obvious star power in the slate of pictures available for acquisition. It could well be a quiet market, meaning that the sums could be modest with dealmaking for most films lingering beyond the festival.”

Translation: Who wants to pay serious money for feminist slash POC slash LGBTQ wokester films that will stream and quicken no pulses and then vaporize?

Distribution chief quoted by Fleming: “All of us used to come to Sundance making bids that were based on estimates of what a movie might gross, and how much money it would cost to market it, and wins and losses were determined by subtracting purchase price. Now, it’s impossible to grade these films that are acquired by the streamers, because box-office is about the least important metric. It has become very difficult to compete when one of them really wants a film.”

According to Jill Chamberlain, author of “The Nutshell Technique: Crack the Secret of Successful Screenwriting“, Casablanca could have been a slightly better film if Humphrey Bogart‘s Richard Blaine had been more emotionally demonstrative.

Blaine, she says, is a little too taciturn and reserved, and that “a lot of modern audiences, particularly younger people, don’t even get what happened. Younger people don’t get it because he has such a tough outer shell.”

[Partial paraphrasing]: “Jimmy Stewart would have let us see the hurt. We need to feel [Blaine’s] inner struggle…he doesn’t articulate that, the dilemma he has, the weight of the world’s fate on his shoulders…we don’t see what’s going on behind the mask…we have to read between the lines quite a bit. Bogart won’t let us feel his pain.”

Earth to Chamberlain: It’s precisely because Blaine’s true feelings are buried under a crusty and cynical shell that the character is so memorable. The whole film would collapse if Blaine were to weep and quake with pain a la George Bailey on the snow-covered bridge in It’s A Wonderful Life.

Does Chamberlain believe that the finale of Only Angels Have Wings would have been more satisfying if Cary Grant‘s character had unloaded emotionally like Tom Cruise does at the end of Jerry Maguire? I wonder.

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Brad Pitt coronation night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival…a real movie star comes to town, and the waters part. Oh, to touch the hem of the robe! To be close, to witness, to savor the aroma! The Gilbert & Sullivan ring of it all…the Major Miraculous Magnificent Maltin Modern Master Award! Every last Arlington seat filled. The longest lines, the loudest cheers and squeals.

Brad was loose, casual, obliging…a modest and self-effacing Lancelot. Interviewer Leonard Maltin didn’t elicit a single opinion from the 56 year-old actor, producer and Oscar nominee. The questions were mostly trite, fawning and obsequious (“How was working with so-and-so? How did you find your character? Did you attend the Oscar ceremony that year? How did you get to be such a wonderful movie star?”). And Pitt played along at every turn.

Pitt said he “made a few enemies” during the making of Moneyball — Steven Soderbergh and who else? He really admires Robert Redford‘s subtle acting, and recalled that during the making of A River Runs Through It Redford told him to “never exhale” when the cameras are rolling “because you’re letting all the energy out…you’re letting it escape.”

Interviewer-author Leonard Matlin, Brad Pitt at finale of last night’s event.

HE declaration: I’ll aways be in awe of Pitt’s wonderfully layered Billy Bean performance. Relaxed and anxious at the same time, and also mysterious on a certain level. He’ll probably never top it. Second favorite all-time performance: The couch stoner in True Romance.

Pitt said he turned down the Neo role in The Matrix — “I took the red pill.” (Was that before or after Will Smith passed on it?) His verbally indecipherable Irishman in Snatch was deliberate as far as director Guy Ritchie was concerned — audiences not being able to understand most of what he said was part of the deal.

HE questions if I’d been in Maltin’s seat: (a) Do you agree that Hollywood actors have to lead the fight against the wearing of “whitesides” and gold-toe socks, or are you non-committal on that front?; (b) Whom do you like among the Democrats running right now, and why? (c) What are the most interesting attitudinal differences between your generation and that of your kids?; (d) What are the three performances you’re proudest of? (e) Which performance, if any, would you like people to forget about, or at least put into a sealed box?; (f) What’s changed since you embraced sobriety, and what’s your craziest drinking-days story?; (g) Do you still get ripped or have you left that behind also?; (h) You’ve met or worked with just about everyone in the industry — who in your judgment is the most under-appreciated or the least understood?; (i) Have you ever sampled any of Harrison Ford‘s cooking? (j) What is your favorite exotic getaway spot, and why?; (k) What kind of motorcycle do you own, and do you have a problem with the term “rumblehog” when it comes to describing large European-style scooters with leather saddlebags and carrying cases?; (l) What are your favorite comfort-blanket movies?; (m) Two or three of your favorite albums or recording artists?; (n) You’ve said you value the idea of speaking dialogue in a clear and easily understood way — what’s your opinion of actresses who lean on vocal fry, uptalk and sexy baby voices?

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If you know anything about Martin Scorsese, you know that guilty Catholicism and anxious conversations with God are always embedded somewhere in the fabric of his films, going all the way back to Mean Streets and up through Silence and The Irishman. You also know that The Irishman is basically a 209-minute church service in a cavernous cathedral, and that it’s basically about Marty considering the mortal coil and looking to come to terms with who he is and where he came from, and particularly his decades of immersion in the gangster realm.

For The Irishman is the great, grand finale in the serial Scorsese crime saga that began 47 or 48 years ago — Mean Streets (young Little Italy hustlers), Goodfellas (Queens mob guys in their 30s and 40s), Casino (middle-aged Vegas guys funded by Kansas City mob), The Departed (Boston bad guys) and The Wolf of Wall Street (flamboyant white-collar sharks).** And now the last testament.

The Irishman is about karma and regret and dubiously going through life with your head down and not letting any airy-fairy or side-door considerations get in the way. It’s also about “the hour is nigh” as well as “good God, what have I done?” Who out there (and I’m talking to you, Academy members) hasn’t considered that question while lying in bed at 3:30 am and staring at the ceiling?

SPECIAL HE ADVERTORIAL:

Can we just blurt it out? The Irishman is Marty’s acknowledgment-of-death film. An acceptance of the inevitable mixed with currents of regret and trepidation. The New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane said it several weeks ago — it’s “Wild Strawberries with handguns.”

Which is why some Millennials and GenZ types don’t feel as reverential toward The Irishman as 40-and-up viewers. Because many of them have this notion that the cloaked visitor is so far away that they might as well be immortal. Why not, right? I remember that attitude.

Scorsese is surely our greatest and most nominated director, yet he’s only won a single Oscar and ironically for a film he made with dexterity and efficiency but which he regarded at the time as a generic exercise — The Departed. The Irishman, by contrast, is Marty through and through…DNA, fingerprints, history, obsessions, personality.

Plus The Irishman contains 11 or 12 master-class performances. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Stephen Graham, Marin Ireland and the nearly wordless Anna Paquin are the stuff of instant relish and extra-level pulverizing. Not to mention Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Kathrine Narducci, Domenick Lombardozzi as “Fat Tony” Salerno, Sebastian Maniscalco as “Crazy Joe” Gallo, etc. Everyone in this film is perfect. The awareness that you’re watching actors giving performances goes right out the window almost immediately. You’re just there and so are they. And then it’s all one thing.

Movie Godz to Academy members: We understand that no one is perfect and that you all have a lot on your minds, and that many of you observe the age-old habit of raising your damp finger to the wind before voting for Best Picture. You’d like to vote for what you sincerely regard as 2019’s Best Film, but at the same time you don’t want to stand alone. We get it. We’ve been there.

But of course, you won’t be standing alone if you vote for The Irishman. You’ll be with us, the fathers of the realm. Along with the ghost of Howard Hawks, who knew a thing or two about what made good mustard and what didn’t.

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