What a shame that a ripped piece of cardboard who refuses to star in half-decent films has been named by Variety as the closet thing Hollywood has these days to a Seriously Bankable Star.

Roughly speaking Dwayne Johnson is doing the same kind of top-dollar, macho-action-star thing that Kirk Douglas consolidated in the ’50s, Steve McQueen delivered in the ’60s and early ’70s, Sylvester Stallone dealt in the late ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, Arnold Schwarzenegger monetized in the ’80s and ’90s, Vin Diesel tried and failed to do as a stand-alone (until the Fast & Furious franchise took off), Robert Downey, Jr. began to do with Iron Man in ’08 and which Bruce Willis did in the early ’90s and is still half-doing today.

Except Johnson is no Douglas or McQueen (please!), and he represents an evolutionary step down by the standards of Stallone, Willis, Downey and Schwarzenegger, who actually made good films in their prime years. Johnson makes big, dopey, adolescent wank-offs, and then raises his fist and goes “yeaahhh!”

On top of which he seems less than hardcore when it comes to political principles and launching (don’t laugh) a possible Presidential run.

Last December Johnson told Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister that he cares “deeply about our country, and about our people…decency matters and being a decent human being matters, and character matters, and leadership matters.”

And yet Johnson said that a 2024 run “would be the realistic consideration” because he has more movies and more millions to make before he tries to restore big-government decency and character. “Realistically, as we go into 2018, when you look at my slate as we’re developing and shooting into 2019 and 2020,” Johnson says, “[and] the slate goes deep into 2021, so it feels like the realistic consideration would be 2024.”

I’m not misinterpreting or misquoting in the slightest way here. Johnson really told Wagmeister that while he has serious arguments with Trump and that he’s giving serious thought to running because he cares about the U.S. and wants to restore a climate of decency and character, he can’t see running in ’20 because of existing commitments to make and produce a few more films.

A debate about blacklisting arose yesterday in a thread about the passing of R. Lee Ermey. Ermey claimed a few years back that he’d been blackballed by Hollywood for expressing some rightwing, anti-Obama beliefs during a Toys for Tots rally in December 2010. He apologized the following month but allegedly endured some professional turn-downs regardless. I posted two or three thoughts about blacklisting and karma and whatnot, which received some pushback. For clarity’s sake here they are again:

1. The Right wrote the book on political blacklisting in the late ’40s and especially the ’50s. So much so that they kinda “own” blacklisting in perpetuity, as they put many good people of conscience and principle through considerable misery, and thereby earned a good amount of poison karma for themselves, and so any blacklisting that comes back at their descendants is just too effing bad. Blacklisting is a bad thing, but they can’t deny the discriminatory karma that’s in their blood. If you hatch ugly eggs, you can’t complain when the chickens come home to roost, even if it’s a half-century or more later.

2. Speaking for myself I’d never be in favor of denying anyone work if they’re good at their job or craft or even if they’re less than talented — no blacklisting under any circumstances! Jon Voight‘s views may be reprehensible, but he’s a first-rate actor and should never be shit-canned because he said some appalling things about Barack Obama. Good creative ferment is all that matters.

3. But given the UNDENIABLE FACT that the Right created and implemented the toxic blacklisting of certain Hollywood persons on the Left during the late ’40s and ’50s, and because the evil karma serum has been generationally passed down through blood and genetics, Righties have NO LEG TO STAND ON if they want to cry foul. They can’t. If they run into any anti-Right blacklisting or discrimination they’ll have to TAKE IT and LIKE IT because their souls are stained. Because their grandfathers brought horror and hell into the lives of many good and principled directors, screenwriters and actors back in the day. Somewhere in heaven Dalton Trumbo, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson are listening and noting the irony.

4. Once again, blacklisting is a lousy thing to even consider, much less implement, but Righties have no ethical leg to stand on IF and WHEN political blackballing were to rear its ugly head in their backyards. In a serial or generational sense they own it, their grandfathers wrote the book and they have to take the karma like men.

I’m about to receive scripts for Backseat, First Man, Bohemian Rhapsody, Beautiful Boy, Old Man And The Gun, Boy Erased and The Sisters Brothers. I’m asking again for Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood script. By the way: I’ll be personally delighted if QT goes with a historical fantasia ending a la Inglorious Basterds, in which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi high command were burnt to death inside a Parisian movie theatre. I’m imagining Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt‘s characters, a struggling actor and a stunt man who live near Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski‘s home at 10050 Cielo Drive, saving Tate and her pals from the brutal knives of the Manson gang, maybe by drilling the would-be hippie murderers with hot lead or maybe in some other way.

R. Lee Ermey, the ex-Marine who became a well-employed actor after playing the loud-mouthed Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket, has bought the farm. He was only 74, but he was a right-winger who hated Obama and said some fairly awful things, and as a result had trouble getting hired by liberal Hollywood over the last few years. (Or so I’ve read.) I was about to say “Tough shit, twinkletoes!” but then I thought, “Naah, ease up and back off….don’t do a Bob Clark.”

The Hartman yellathon is Ermey’s masterpiece. (I would actually call it a comic masterpiece.) He was good but only sufficiently so in his other acting roles. He had plenty of work over the 33-year period that followed Full Metal Jacket, or from ’87 until Ermey put his foot in his mouth and skull-fucked himself in 2010.

Italian director Vittorio Taviani has died at age 88. He and his younger brother Paolo co-directed over 20 noteworthy Italian films. The Tavianis, who began churning them out in the ’50s, were probably the most celebrated directing brothers of the Italian cinema realm.

The last Taviani film I saw was Ceasar Must Die, about some prisoners putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. My favorite Taviani flick was Good Morning, Babylon (’87), about two Italian immigrant brothers (Vincent Spano, Joaquim de Almeida) who get hired as set designers for D.W. Griffith‘s Intolerance. It always seemed that their most popular film was Night of the Shooting Stars (’82).

For what it’s worth, the very first film I reviewed for any Manhattan publication was Vittorio and Paolo’s Padre Padrone. I seem to recall reviewing it sometime in early ’78 (i.e., when it opened commercially) for the Chelsea Clinton News. I was a mediocre writer back then. My prose was on the turgid, overworked side. I knew it and so did my editors. It was agony when I would try to write anything. It would take hours to write a single decent paragraph. It was like digging ditches.

Halfway through last January’s Sundance Film Festival (i.e., “socialist summer camp in the snow”), I mentioned that “the only films I’ve felt truly touched and levitated by are three highly intelligent, smoothly assembled but fairly conventional documentaries — Susan Lacy‘s Jane Fonda in Five Acts, Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind and especially Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54.”

I was also mostly down with Amy Scott‘s Hal, a 90-minute portrait of iconoclastic ’70s director Hal Ashby. On 1.22 I called it “exhilarating, colorful and not, if you’re going to be honest (as Nick Dawson‘s “Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel” was and is), altogether tidy or pretty…Scott’s film isn’t hagiography, but my sense is that roughly 90% is a touching, fascinating, no-holds-barred, this-is-who-he-really-was portrait and the other 10% is a little blowjobby here and there.”

Calling a documentary “fairly conventional” is not a putdown, but an acknowledgment that it plays by the certain structural and stylistic rules (pacing, exposition, careful editing of talking-head commentary, scoring, articulation of themes, technical polish) that hundreds of docs have adhered to in years and decades past.

These four docs — Fonda, Ashby, Williams, Studio 54 — know their subjects well and how to tell their stories in exactly the right way. As the closing credits roll the viewer knows he/she has eaten a professionally prepared, nutritional, fat-free meal.

So when will they stream? I called and searched around and one of them, it seems, haven’t been acquired — Tyrnauer’s Studio 54 film, which is repped by Altimeter Films.

Zenovich’s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, produced in association with Alex Gibney‘s Jigsaw Prods., will be in theatres and then on HBO starting in July.

The Ashby doc has been picked up by Oscilloscope, but no release date has been announced, or at least not to my knowledge.

Comey: “Really weird…it was almost an out-of-body experience for me…I was floating above myself, looking down, saying you’re sitting here briefing an incoming President of the United States about prostitutes in Moscow…I never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013…it’s possible, but I don’t know.”

Trump said at the time, “If there’s even a 1% chance my wife thinks that’s true…” That train has left the station, boss!

The 20/20 chat between Comey and Stuffin’ Envelopes, taped last Monday in Comey’s Virginia home, airs tonight at 10 pm eastern.

I’ve watched this King Kong-vs.-Tyrannosaurus Rex duke-out dozens of times, and despite the primitive VFX (it was shot 86 years ago) it gets me every time. All hail Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Willis O’Brien. Skillfully choreographed, nicely cut, just-right sound effects, completely credible.

By the same token I despise Peter Jackson’s ridiculous re-imagining and re-casting of this classic scene. Typical Jackson calculation: If Kong fighting a T-Rex was thrilling in the original, let’s have him fight three T-Rexes in our version…it’ll be three times as good! Jackson has never known from restraint. Everything that happens in this detestable scene is a cliffhanger moment, every potential threat pushed to the limit before the last-second avoidance or rescue. Jackson constructs every action scene in his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies the same way…oh, God…almost…aagghh!…whew, that was close!

Just watch this — mildly hilarious:

As much as I hate even thinking about Avengers: Infinity War (Disney, 4.27), much less the idea of retro-injecting the Marvel serum into the mid ’90s, these casting decisions are fairly spot-on. I’m figuring it was cast in early to mid ’94, began shooting in late ’94 and was given a wide release in the fall of ’95. Then again things were a lot different 23 or 24 years ago. The gamer and comic-book-reading generation hadn’t begun to take over Hollywood and the first stirrings of hunger for superhero fables weren’t really being felt until after 9.11.01, and more like ’03 or ’04.

All my life I’ve regarded John Huston (1906-1987) as quite the fellow, and now at long last I’m reading his autobiography, which was first published in 1980. A 1994 trade paperback version was just delivered by Amazon.

Huston was first and foremost a lion, and not incidentally a director of above-average and sometimes brilliant films for over 45 years in a row.

The ones he made during his first decade are unassailable — The Maltese Falcon, Across The Pacific, Let There Be Light, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage and The African Queen. Huston’s early to mid ’50s output was pretty formidable also — Moulin Rouge, Beat The Devil, Moby Dick and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.

For the next 30 years Huston’s films were in and out, but at least they included The Unforgiven, The Misfits, The Kremlin Letter, Fat City, The MacKintosh Man, The Man Who Would Be King, Under The Volcano, Prizzi’s Honor and The Dead.

From David Thomson‘s “New Biograhical Dictionary of Film”: “Huston was…the movie director who told manly, energetic stories, and [who] liked to end them on a wry chuckle. He was himself a writer, a painter, a boxer, a horseman, a wanderer, a gambler, an adventurer and a womanizer.

“More than most he relished the game of getting a movie set up and the gamble of out-daring and intimidating the studios. His best pictures reflect those tastes and that attitude and had an expansive, airy readiness for ironic endings, fatal bad luck, and the laughter that knows men are born to fail.”