Legendary Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back producer Gary Kurtz has passed from cancer at age 78. Condolences to friends, family, fans and colleagues. He was a realist, a great fellow, a true creative and a straight-shooter.

I was lucky enough to have met and interviewed Kurtz once, about 19 or 20 years ago. It was actually a tag-team interview with Film Threat‘s Chris Gore. It happened in a lobby of some Burbank office building. Kurtz had become one of my heroes after I read his disparaging comments about grand poobah George Lucas, whom he parted company with sometime after the release of Empire and before principal photography began on Return of the Jedi. Kurtz repeated these observations and more during our chat.

Wiki excerpt: “Kurtz claimed that after Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, Lucas became convinced that audiences no longer cared about the story and were simply there for thrills and entertainment, and began to deviate from the originally planned plotlines for Return of the Jedi, at which point Kurtz quit the series.

“Kurtz has also claimed that Lucas changed the emphasis from storytelling to prioritizing toy merchandising. In a 2010 interview for the L.A. Times, Kurtz revealed that he had become disillusioned with what he saw as the commercially-driven direction the franchise was taking, as well as the related changes that Lucas made to the plot of the third movie, which was originally much darker, and supposedly included the death of Han Solo.

“‘I could see where things were headed,’ Kurtz said. ‘The toy business began to drive the empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.'”

“‘Jedi’ Was A Metaphor for Corruption,” posted on 5.28.13:

“As all true Star Wars fans know, Jedi was a kind of tragedy as it strongly indicated to anyone who was halfway hip that Star Wars creator and Jedi producer George Lucas had sadly evolved into a shameless hack and that the Star Wars series was effectively over and would never again deliver the power, gravitas and coolness of The Empire Strikes Back.

When I went into a film just before 2 pm eastern, the news was that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. When the screening ended just after 4 pm the update was that any talk of departure was on hold until Rosenstein and President Trump meet on Thursday.

The prevailing theory is that the Rosenstein thing is basically a diversion — Trump-generated smoke to take everyone’s mind off of Brett Kavanaugh‘s early ’80s shenanigans. God, what an unruly mess.

N.Y. Times excerpt: “It is not known whether Trump might use the new turmoil at the Justice Department to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a onetime political ally who became the No. 1 target of Trump’s fury when Sessions recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation.

“Rosenstein’s departure would end what had been an often toxic relationship between Rosenstein and the president that at numerous times left Washington on edge about the potentially drastic consequences for the country if Mr. Trump terminated the deputy attorney general.

“In a Twitter rant in April about what he called the ‘Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation,’ Trump accused Rosenstein of being one of the most conflicted members of the Justice Department, asserting that the deputy attorney general was among those who were seeking evidence of a Trump-led conspiracy.”

Following last night’s publication of Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece about Deborah Ramirez‘s allegation about Brett Kavanaugh, a journalist wrote me the following: “Tonight might be a good time to remind people that after all these years, a second Woody Allen accuser has not come forward.”

I have an idea I’m going to enjoy Morgan Neville‘s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead a lot more than Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, which I had problems with. Just a feeling. I’ll be seeing it later this week. 98 minutes is a very good length for almost anything.

I saw The Front Runner (Columbia, 11.6) again last night. So well-ordered, smartly written, real-deal…a fastball you have to swing on.

Gary Hart, the would-be Democratic nominee for President in the spring of ’87 whose candidacy was destroyed by the press over a relatively harmless instance of marital infidelity, is so well nailed by Hugh Jackman. In fact the whole cast delivers — Vera Farmiga as Lee Hart, J. K. Simmons as Bill Dixon, Alfred Molina as Ben Bradlee, Sara Paxton as Donna Rice and particularly Mamoudou Athie as A.J. Parker, a diligent Washington Post reporter who covers the Hart campaign.

The Front Runner is about the fall of a flawed but basically decent fellow who was actually rather high-minded when it came to the separation between public and private life. It ends, for sure, on a note of resignation and solemnity. A good man is taken down because there is no private life for a political person and the cameras are everywhere. But 60 seconds after the film ended I was reading about the second sexual misconduct allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, and going “yes!…yes!”

The main difference, of course, is that Hart was merely busted for catting around (i.e., using his power and celebrity to score) while Kavanaugh is being drilled for having twice acted in an abusive and contemptible way with young women while drunk.

(Last night an additional Kavanaugh allegation came from Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti, who wrote that he is “aware of significant evidence” that Kavanaugh participated in multiple gang rapes while in high school.”)

I love Reitman’s decision to play it chaste in a scene between Jackman and an unseen Paxton aboard the Monkey Business, showing only Jackman as he smiles and flirts. Throughout The Front Runner the viewer is kept at arm’s length, and is never shown anything the least bit titillating. I naturally assumed that the famous color snap of Hart and Rice (with Rice sitting on his lap) would be seen at some point, but it never appears, primarily because the film ends right after Hart collapses his candidacy, and the photo didn’t surface until a week or two later.

I took Jett and Cait to last night’s screening. They’re both around 30, and until last night had never heard of Gary Hart and his campaign calamity.

This morning I participated in a Front Runner breakfast schmoozer at the Crosby Street hotel. Reitman, Jackman, Simmons, Paxton and Athie attended.

Someone please explain how Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court nomination will survive Deborah Ramirez’s sexual misconduct allegation, which is contained in a just-published New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer.

Ramirez is claiming that during a drunken Yale party in ’83, or roughly a year after the Christine Blasey Ford incident when the 17 year-old Kavanaigh was in prep school, the future Supreme Court nominee unzipped and thrust his gross animal member in her face. Ramirez admits to being drunk herself when this incident allegedly happened, but c’mon.

Kavanaugh’s nomination was already on the ropes due to Ford’s claim of sexual-assault in ’82, but add the Ramirez allegation and his chances of serving as a Supreme Court justice seem pretty close to nil. How does he wiggle out of this?

What other interesting lead performances in high-profile films were based on either a previous performance or a well-known, real-life personality? All I can think of are (a) Albert Finney‘s Daddy Warbucks in John Huston‘s Annie (’82), which was partly based upon Huston’s manner and speaking style; (b) Peter Sellers‘ Claire Quilty in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (’62), which obviously adopted Kubrick’s Bronx-taxi-driver patois; and (c) Tony Curtis‘s “Junior”, the fake Shell Oil heir who romances Marilyn Monroe‘s “Sugar” in Some Like It Hot, and all the while doing a broad imitation of Cary Grant.

Is it fair to report that Michael Moore‘s Fahrenheit 11/9 opened soft this weekend? Revenue from 1719 situations came to $3,101,000, for an average of $1804 per screen. That’s not too bad, especially for a documentary, but it’s hardly gangbusters. Yes, the first-weekend tally was higher than any documentary earned this year. But let’s face it: Moore’s rock-the-world blockbuster days are probably behind him.

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Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers (Annapurna, 9.21) “is a grimy, gunky wad of episodic, half-comedic western nihilism — aimless, wandering, constant gunplay and fuck-all violence at nearly every turn. It ambles and shuffles along in a loose, tension-free way that tests your patience and has you begging for a conclusion at the one-hour mark. Unfortunately you have to sit there for another full hour.\

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Everyone in the civilized world will be watching the cross-examining by Republican senators of Christine Blasey Ford next Thursday. And it won’t be pretty — let’s face it. On one hand the process allows for questioning by in-the-tank contrarians. On the other hand it is fair to ask for details and substantiation, etc. But the ugliness will be rank. It will almost certainly make a lot of people furious. And it’ll probably tip things even more in the direction of Democratic candidates a few weeks hence.

What bothers me is what those Florida women said the other day. They’d all bought into the “they were just teenagers, louche behavior is par for the course” rationale. Who are these women? What kind of course upbringing did they get from their families? Did they really witness an occasional case of attempted rape when they were in their teens, enough so that they regard this kind of thing as par for the course?

Go to the 36-second mark in this scene from Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ, and particularly the moment when Willem Dafoe, sitting on the edge of a rocky cliff, says “I know what God wants…he wants to push me over!” As he says this the camera lunges over the edge and gazes at the rubble below.

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