Posted by yours truly 22 years ago: “There’s this better-than-pretty-good film about wealthy jaded Hollywood types called Play It As It Lays, and no under-40 person reading this column has heard of it, much less seen it.

“The director was the once-very-hot Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Rancho Deluxe, Mommie Dearest), and it was based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name, which Ben Stein once called ‘the best novel about Hollywood ever.’

“The stars were Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins (playing a cynical gay producer and giving the second-best performance of his life, after Psycho‘s Norman Bates), Adam Roarke (best thing he ever did), Tammy Grimes, Ruth Ford and several others you’ve probably never heard of.

“It stood out, as I recall, for its unusually dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls in the employ of the film industry, and for Perry’s fragmented, back-and-forth cutting that was not only in keeping with the style in which Didion’s book was written, but with the randomness of thoughts flicking around inside the head of its main character, Maria Wyeth (Weld).

“It was gloomy, ambitious, ‘different’ (even by unconventional ’70s standards), and Persona-like. It had a chilly, almost spooky fascination with downer attitudes among the moneyed elite. Some of the big gun critics bashed it, but others were admiring and spoke of Oscar-level achievement.

For many, many years there’s been no Bluray or DVD of Play It As It Lays, which opened 52 and 1/2 years ago (10.19.72 or two weeks before Richard Nixon‘s landslide re-election). 15 or 20 years ago it briefly played on the Sundance Channel; a decade ago it screened at the Hollywood Blvd. American Cinematheque, and then at the AC’s Los Feliz theatre three or four years ago.

And now…deliverance! A restored 4K DCP of this brilliant, all-but-forgotten film is currently showing at Manhattan’s Film Forum. (The final day is Thursday, 3.20.) Play it As It Lays wouldn’t have been restored if the rights hadn’t been cleared for a Bluray and streaming. I read somewhere that Indicator has the British Bluray home video rights.

One way or another Perry’s film will be commercially available to home viewers before long. After decades upon decades of absence.

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A first-peek screening of Jessica Palud‘s Being Maria (Kino Lorber), a drama about the making of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango in Paris (’72), is happening at the Walter Reade theatre on Saturday, 3.15, under the banner of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Being Maria will open commercially on Thursday, 3.20, at the Quad Cinema. Palud and Matt Dillon, who portrays Marlon Brando in the film, will show up at the Quad that day and on Friday, 3.21, for a post-screening q & a.

I intend to be there and ask questions about the truthfulness of Being Maria, as it portrays the filming of Last Tango‘s simulated anal-rape scene in a way that sharply differs from an account circulated by Bertolucci, to wit: “Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her” — i.e., the acting out of an anal rape scene in which Brando pretends to violate Schneider. “That is false!”

Jordan Ruimy caught an out-of-competition Cannes screening of Being Maria on 5.21.24. He emerged with a view that the film is #MeToo propaganda. Ruimy said that Palud’s film “pretends that the rape scene was unscripted [when in fact it was]. What the film suggests is that Brando and Bertolucci were unsatisfied by a take and plotted to add the rape scene without Schneider knowing it [in advance].”

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Hah-hah!…exhibition source to The Hollywoood Reporter‘s James Hibberd and Pamela McClintock, posted on 3.12.25:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that today’s America will pay no price, bear no burden, incur no hardship, and will abandon any friends and cuddle up to any foes in order to assure the Trump administration’s political survival — even if it means the abandonment of liberty wherever that be profitable or convenient for us.

“And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for President Trump. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but how much you are ready to pay for America to defend your freedom from Russia or China.”

— from Thomas L. Friedman’s “You Cannot Run a Country This Way,” posted on 3.11, 7 pm.

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Bennett Miller‘s Capote cost $7 million to make, and earned just shy of $50 million worldwide. I’d forgotten that. It made $28,750,530 domestic, $21,173,549 overseas for an exact total of $49,924,079.

I was visiting Miller’s lower Manhattan loft apartment around the same time, maybe a few weeks hence…I forget exactly when. But I distinctly recall Bennett showing me some original Richard Avdeon contact sheet photos of Truman Capote, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, and for whatever reason Bennett happened to call Phillip Seymour Hoffman about something, and as he was saying goodbye he called him “Philly.”

I loved the idea of a distinguished hotshot actor being called Philly, and so I used it myself a few weeks later. I knew it was inappropriate to project an attitude of informal affection with a guy I didn’t know at all first-hand, but I couldn’t resist. I was immediately bitch-slapped, reprimanded, challenged, castigated, stomach-punched, dumped on, stabbed, karate-chopped, slashed and burned….”How dare you call him that? Who the hell do you think you are, some kind of insider?…soak yourself with gasoline and light yourself on fire!”

HE review, posted three or four weeks before the 9.30.05 opening: “I’m taken with Capote partly because it’s about a writer (Truman Capote) and the sometimes horrendously difficult process that goes into creating a first-rate piece of writing, and especially the various seductions and deceptions that all writers need to administer with skill and finesse to get a source to really cough up.

“And it’s about how this gamesmanship sometimes leads to emotional conflict and self-doubt and yet, when it pays off, a sense of tremendous satisfaction and even tranquility. I’ve been down this road, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

“I’m also convinced that Capote is exceptional on its own terms. It’s one of the two or three best films of the year so far — entertaining and also fascinating, quiet and low-key but never boring and frequently riveting, economical but fully stated, and wonderfully confident and relaxed in its own skin.

“And it delivers, in Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Capote, one of the most affecting emotional rides I’ve taken in this or any other year…a ride that’s full of undercurrents and feelings that are almost always in conflict (and which reveal conflict within Capote-the-character), and is about hurting this way and also that way and how these different woundings combine in Truman Capote to form a kind of perfect emotional storm.

“It’s finally about a writer initially playing the game but eventually the game turning around and playing him.

“Hoffman is right at the top of my list right now — he’s the guy to beat in the Best Actor category. Anyone who’s seen Capote and says he’s not in this position is averse to calling a spade a spade.

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In Wilton high school there was this luminous, unstable, occasionally excitable Irish blonde named Sally Jo Quinn, whom I had a thing for. Short, slender, magnificent blue eyes, straight blonde hair, smallish feet, slender hands with chewed nails.

No dad at home; just her single mom who worked as an administrative something-or-other at the high school. I can’t recall if the parents had divorced or if the father had died or what.

I never quite closed the deal with Sally but she definitely liked or was drawn to me. I realized her feelings were strong when I ran into her at a summer party. We’d both been drinking but Sally was a little more bombed than I, and as soon as I saw her I didn’t try to chat her up or otherwise occupy her sphere — the opposite, in fact. I played it casual, blase, laid-back. Which infuriated her.

So she ran up to me, shouted my name and slapped me hard. I took it like Lee Marvin did when Angie Dickinson started whacking him in that scene from Point Blank. Sally became even more agitated. “Jeff!” and another hard slap. Wash, rinse, repeat…she slapped me at least three times, maybe four.

“This is good,” I was saying to myself. “She wouldn’t be hitting me if she was indifferent.” I stuck to my low-key Marvin.

Sally had several concurrent boyfriends at the time. I was fourth in line, I gradually learned. (Or was I fifth?) The others included a football jock (since deceased), a wealthy man’s son from Ridgefield (died from a drug overdose) and a local cop in his mid to late 20s. I was strictly backup. Scraps, leftovers. For someone already beset with low self-esteem, this situation fit perfectly.

I’m not saying all high-school girls are fickle and flighty, but a lot of them are. Or they were, at least, when I was an awkward, insecure WASP schlemiel.

Flash forward to the mid ’80s, when I had a brief thing with an extremely dishy lady who was dealing with an unstable ex. So unstable, in fact, that when I visited her one night he called up and came over and rang the bell (she told me to ignore him) and then started pacing back and forth on the front lawn, calling out to her and talking to himself and generally creating a neighborhood spectacle.

Girls sometimes choose badly, some guys can’t handle rejection, and sometimes you have to put up your dukes.

It did occur to me as this psychodrama was unfolding, of course, that anyone with a looney-tunes ex might be a little screwy themselves, or might be a little dishonest or manipulative or flaky. You are who you go out with.

This ex-boyfriend episode wasn’t enough to put me off (she was beautiful and curvaceous and breathtaking in bed), but it did give me pause. I know that if she’d had two ex-boyfriends knocking on the door I would have said “wow, this is really weird” and “something isn’t right.” And if she’d had three guys pleading for forgiveness and restitution I would have said “okay, she obviously likes guys fighting for her affections” and taken a hike.

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Stanley Jaffe (7.31.40 – 3.10.25) was a wise, insightful, widely respected, old-school smoothie who knew the film business backward and forward and all the players in town…a good man who dwelled in the quiet corridors of power for several decades.

As a producer Jaffe enjoyed a peak streak between the late ’60s and early ’90s. His proudest producing achievements were Goodbye, Columbus, Bad Company, The Bad News Bears, Kramer vs. Kramer, Taps, Racing with the Moon, Fatal Attraction, The Accused and Black Rain.

Jaffe directed one film, Without A Trace (’83), a drama based on the Etan Patz case.

Tasteful, occasionally tempestuous, go-getter creative producers like Jaffe, Sherry Lansing (Jaffe’s onetime partner), Jerome Hellman, John Calley, Ned Tanen, Robert Evans, Frank Yablans, Richard Sylbert (primarily an esteemed production designer who briefly served as Paramount’s head of production between ‘75 and ‘78), Mike Medavoy, Dan Melnick, Arthur Krim, Walter Mirisch, Tom Pollock, Brian Grazer…an elite yesteryear community who cared about movies like good Catholics…many have left the realm and a few are still with us, but their way of thinking and operating and paying proper respect has been on the downslope for quite some time now. I love/loved all these guys.

Please begin watching this interview between Jaffe and Hawk Koch at the 1:09 mark…pay attention to Hawk’s Fort Yuma story, which begins around 6:30.

..is that an Oscar-winning male guest star will pop up in episode #5 (five days hence) of The White Lotus. I have to respect the embargo, but 12 days ago Reddit’s “Angielincoln” speculated about the guest star’s identity, and I can at least say that it’s not Matthew McConaughey or Adrien “blather on for six minutes” Brody. I’d better leave it there.

In a perfect HE-world, Disney’s Snow White — an anti-traditionalist rendering of the classic fairy tale as well as a militant, storm-the-barricades show aimed at progressive women of all ages — would become an instant tank upon opening Friday, 10.21.

Alas, it’s tracking to earn around $53 million during its first three days — a disappointing tally but hardly the measure of a flop.

Then again the film cost more than $200 million plus the marketing spend will add to that figure significantly, so even if Snow White triples its first weekend earnings…aahh, let’s just wait. Whatever happens, happens.

The fact that Disney is turning down the red-carpet hoopla obviously indicates a certain squeamishness about the general, across-the-board reception.

The script was written by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson.

We are all wicked witches when it comes to Snow Woke…we want this misbegotten film to eat the poisoned apple and collapse into a coma.

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Early Monday (3.10) HE posted a roster of 43 stand-out films due for release between now and 12.31.25. In the late afternoon Sasha Stone and I discussed the apparent ins and outs of the 43. Here’s the 2025 Movie Preview Page.

Hottest of the hotties: Joseph Kosinski‘s F1, Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another, Scott Cooper‘s Deliver Me from Nowhere, Darren Aronofsky‘s Caught Stealing, Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt, Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme, Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest, Ari Aster‘s Eddington, Paul Greengrass‘s The Lost Bus, John M. Chu‘s Wicked: For Good, Julian Schnabel‘s In The Hand of Dante, Jonah Hill‘s Outcome, Michel Franco‘s Dreams, Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride!, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare…what is that, 17?

After several weeks of horrid, miserable, bone-chilling cold, it’s wonderful to suddenly feel the coming of spring. Temps were in the mid 60s today. Daylight savings (i.e, more daylight) has done wonders for my general outlook. Could it be that a benevolent God, perhaps even a kindly and gracious one, is watching over me?

I think not. Timothy Ratliff’s life is totally miserable and collapsing…the FBI is after him, his assets are being seized, he’s swallowing pills and slurping booze…the indications that he’s on the verge of commiting suicide are so numerous and relentless that I’m convinced he won’t go down the hole.

The White Lotus character who’s in actual serious trouble is Natasha Rothwell‘s Belinda Lindsey, the chubby spa manager who’s threatened Jon Gries‘ “Gary” character by telling him she’s fairly certain they’ve met before.