Given the widespread loathing and the massive flop rejection of Madame Web, Dakota Johnson naturally has to distance herself from it (“who, me?) and more or less throw the carcass under the bus. Hence her chat with Bustle‘s Charlotte Owen (3.5.24):

“[Making Madame Web] was definitely an experience for me. I had never done anything like it before. I probably will never do anything like it again, because I don’t make sense in that world.” [Translation: ‘Nobody believed I was supergirl material….I look too passive or spacey or something.”]

“And I know that now. But sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’ But it was a real learning experience, and of course it’s not nice to be a part of something that’s ripped to shreds, but I can’t say that I don’t understand.

“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made — and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out — decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee. Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms.

“My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.”

A Gone With The Wind quartet (Olivia De Havilland, David O. Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier) during the 12th Academy Awards ceremony, held on the evening of Thursday, 2.29.40 (why a Thursday?) at the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove.

This can’t be the only decent color photo, but right now all I can find are unexceptional, run-of-the-mill black-and-white shots.

Passed along seven years ago by HE commenter “Stewart Klein“:

Posted on 11.27.14: Producer and former Paramount Pictures president Frank Yablans, who presided over that studio during its early-to-middle”70s golden period (The Godfather, Serpico, Paper Moon, Chinatown, The Godfather, Part II, Murder on the Orient Express) and then served as vice-chairman and COO of MGM/United Artists under Kirk Kerkorian, died earlier today at age 79.

Unlike his slightly older, still-living brother Irwin, a producer of second-tier “product” who was Billy Carter to Frank’s Jimmy Carter, the younger Yablans believed in class and quality. Alas, like almost every other producer, his record was hit-and-miss.

Frank produced Silver Streak (good comedy), The Other Side of Midnight (glitzy garbage), The Fury (second-tier DePalma), The Star Chamber (Peter Hyams crap) and Congo (crap).

Yablans also produced and co-penned screenplays for North Dallas Forty (a very good football film) and Mommie Dearest (classic, hilarious, over-the-top kitsch).

“My Neighbor Frank Yablans,” posted by Medium‘s Loren Kantor on 12.26.23.

Posted on 1.16.17 — slightly more than seven years ago:

HE commenter Bobby Peru has attempted a takedown of Frank Perry‘s Mommie Dearest, calling it a “florid embrassment” that uses “cheap, tacky artifice to generate cartoonish shocks” and “unintentional comedy.”

That’s been the prevailing rant against this film for decades, and it’s just as wrong today as it was 35 years ago. I explained what it actually is as concisely as I knew how.

“Mommie Dearest is maudlin soap-opera realism,” I replied, “overbaked but winkingly so, everyone in on the joke and yet taking it ‘seriously,’ and at the same time a melodrama that’s occasionally intensified and heightened to the level of Kabuki theatre.

“The comedy is not ‘unintentional,’ but at the same time it’s not really a ‘comedy’ — it’s a kind of hyper-realism with a campy edge.”

“If director Frank Perry had modulated Dunaway’s performance, some of the great lines — ‘No wire hangers EVER!,’ ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas!’ — wouldn’t have worked so well. Those lines are the stuff of Hollywood legend, right up there with Bette Davis saying “what a dump!” and Vivien Leigh saying “I’ll never by hungry again.”

Peru: “This post is quite amusing for a number of reasons, but I concur Dunaway is a legend for her finite run of the above mentioned films, which will go down in film history. However, to call Mommie Dearest ‘that great Frank Perry film’ is, at the least, oxymoronic, and at most a wild, almost unbelievable overstatement, especially coming from a ‘film Catholic’ like you, Jeff; the Movie Godz do not approve. Even Dunaway knows what a POS that florid embarrassment is; after years of rudely dismissing any journalist who would dare to even breathe the title, she finally discussed recently and blamed Perry for ruining her career by not working to ‘direct’ her performance, thereby leaving it unmodulated and Dunaway herself twisting in the wind (as if great, Oscar-winning actors can’t self-direct at least to a modicum).

“The movie is camp junk for a reason — because it is cheap, tacky artifice with one agenda, which is to generate cartoonish shocks. This has not stopped me and millions from enjoying it as such, but ‘great’ it most certainly is not unless you are referring to unintentional comedy.

“As for Dunaway herself, the Crawford turn bolstered by decades of diva behavior (my friend is her neighbor and has told many a story) well past her glory years has also contributed to why her career went to the toilet; too many grandiose notions about herself and a history of making lives difficult onset. I’ve heard first-hand stories of her dismissing acting students while auditing classes (‘They’re staring at me’) to parading up and down the aisle of a coach flight — get this — reading a script aloud. She is a major nut, great as she was.”

One of the most horrifying Orwellian wokethink images mine eyes have ever beheld…I’m serious, I was there and I fucking snapped this photo…a N.Y. Times video ad inside the Washington, D.C metro, which first appeared in February ’22. Only two years ago, and one reason why Biden has reason to fear the wrath of the electorate.

From The New York Times…even Maureen Dowd wants him to quit.

Welcome to episode #2 of “The Misfits” as HE’s Jeffrey Wells welcomes this weekend’s hotshot guests — Wilson Morales, editor and founder of Blackfiklmandtv, and comedy writer, former Fox News movie guy and “Talking Movies” cohost Bill McCuddy.

Topics include (a) the last and final Oscar predictions (we’re all very glad the season will be over after next Sunday night, 3.10), (b) reactions to Dune: Part Two, and (c) speculations about five or six March releases. Again, the link.

Click through to HE’s Substack page to watch, and please be good people by becoming paid subscribers next week and down the road.

I had a few chats with Dennis Wilson back in the mid ’70s, and one of those times we briefly discussed Monte Hellman‘s Two Lane Blacktop (’71). And I can tell you that Wilson wasn’t a fan. I can’t recite an exact Wilson quote as it happened too long ago, but his basic opinion was that Hellman had missed the potential…that he didn’t really understand what the film was about or didn’t appreciate the glory of high-octane engines….something like that. Wilson felt he understood the fast-car aesthetic better than Hellman, and that he understood more fully what it should have been about.