Yesterday was a big Front Runner day at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Director-cowriter Jason Reitman and Best Actor contender Hugh Jackman were given the full media-glow, red-carpet treatment, and took bows before last night’s screening. But for me the most interesting moment happened during an afternoon discussion with Reitman in front of an audience of SCAD students.

The Front Runner (Sony, 11.6) is about the tragic saga of former Colorado Senator and 1988 Presidential candidate Gary Hart (Jackman), a decent, thoughtful, fairly brilliant politician who occasionally catted around and who made a really big mistake in the matter of Donna Rice. But what Hart did was almost nothing, of course, compared to the daily obscenities of Donald Trump.

And so, Reitman said, The Front Runner “becomes a really compelling story in 2018, when we are trying to figure out for ourselves, all the time, what kind of flaws are we willing to put up with in our leaders? [Because we now have] the most flawed leader imaginable, right? He’s completely indecent.”

Almost no one in the audience (i.e., mostly SCAD students) knew who Hart was or about the fuck-up that killed his Presidential campaign — an episode that was partly about Hart’s nature or character, but more profoundly about a moment in our history when political reporting suddenly became tabloidy, which is to say personally invasive, distracting and gutter-level.

Hollywood Elsewhere believes that occasionally putting the high, hard one to this or that willing recipient has nothing to do, in and of itself, with being a good or bad Senator, Congressperson or President.

Towards the end of the discussion I asked Reitman if he would have used James Fallows‘ recently reported story about Lee Atwater as a plot thread in The Front Runner, had he known about it early enough.

Atwater was a Republican operative who reportedly made a deathbed confessession about having “set Hart up” with the whole Monkey Business episode.

Reitman said that the confession wasn’t really central to The Front Runner — that it was more of an interesting Atwater anecdote than anything else. Here’s an mp3 of Reitman’s whole response to my question.

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A producer who was peripherally involved in the development of an early version of the First Blood screenplay, written by Michael Kozoll, has passed along the following story about a conference between Kozoll and First Blood exec producers Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar.

“Kozoll was in his first meeting with the producers after delivering his first draft. As is pretty standard, they were going through it page by page. They had gotten to a climactic moment in the script in which Rambo was surrounded, cops and guns on all sides, ready to slaughter him.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

All real men accept the idea of occasionally pouring hot tap water into a cup filled with Starbucks instant coffee, and being more or less okay with that. I know this sounds like a bit but I’m serious. Sometimes you have to suck it in and say “okay, not perfect but good enough.”

If you’re one of those prissy guys who insists on putting on the hush puppies and going down to the hotel restaurant and asking for a pot of steaming hot water on a tray along with a nice cup, saucer, spoon and cloth napkin…if you insist on all the proper trimmings then you’re probably too metrosexual, or in this context not really a man. Certainly not by the Hollywood Elsewhere definition of that term.

Yes, I’ve described myself as confidently metrosexual in the past but it’s actually more of a mixture of this plus the usual samurai poet warrior thing plus the spirit of Lee Marvin in the mid’ 60s, particularly the guy he played in The Professionals and not so much “Walker” in Point Blank.

Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Savannah yesterday afternoon around 5:15 pm. Mellow greetings and yukey-dukey to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, which is again hosting in fine style. Straight shuttle to the Brice Hotel and then to the big opening-night screening of Roma and…well, not to the after-party because I began to feel whipped a little after ten. But Sunday beckons. It’s warmish down here (70s, sunny) and a lot nicer than New York-era weather, I can tell you.

Sidenote: I was disappointed to see that Parker’s Urban Market on Abercorn, which used to be a kind of cultured-Southern-atmosphere store that mixed food and clothing and odd bric-a-brac, has been shorn of the funky and transformed into an aggressively upmarket 21st Century gas station-slash-gourmet deli. Thoughts of some management asshole a few months ago: “This place is too Savannah-like…too reflective of local history and culture…we need to turn it into a deluxe rest stop you might find off the Garden State Parkway in central New Jersey….aahh, that’s MUCH better!”

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Last night the belles of Roma, Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira, were honored at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Opening-night screening, big media deluge, q & a with Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, general hoo-hah.

I ran into Yalitza and Marina yesterday afternoon in the lobby of Savannah’s Brice Hotel, where the festival organizers have graciously installed me for something like the fourth of fifth time.

(l. to r.) Roma costars Marina de Tavira, Yalitza Aparicio, Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg during last night’s post-screening q & a.

Marina is the beating, persistent, never-say-die heart of Roma. She generates this and more without once resorting to “acting” or “selling”, and because of this and other subtle reasons she easily warrants a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

Yalitza’s performance, which is Bresson-like in that she’s not a trained actress and is playing a kind of wordless, silent saint in the spiritual vein of Au hasard, Balthazar, is also stirring the Best Actress conversation pot.

From “Roma Mama,” posted on 9.11.18: “During last night’s post-premiere Roma party I spoke to Marina de Tavira, the prominent Mexico City-based stage and screen actress who plays Sofia, the spirited if frustrated mother of the family that that Alfonso Cuaron‘s ’70s-era drama is focused upon.

“Marina has played the female lead in a Mexico City stage production of Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal, she told me, and is currently preparing to star in a local stage production of David Hare‘s Skylight, which I saw performed in Manhattan three years ago with Carey Mulligan.