The MCU and D.C. superheroes are always presented as smirky, mild-mannered individualists — unpretentious, anti-corporate, egalitarian types with extraordinary powers, rock-hard bods and dry senses of humor. In a phrase, friends of the common man. I’m not saying they aren’t that or that the general superhero mythology is a mountain of bullshit, but just for the sake of argument or conjecture imagine that the superhero thing is all about authority, and that fans of superhero films are, in a sense, sheep or cattle. As in (a) “they love to eat that grass” and (b) “nothing makes them feel better than to obey by buying tickets.”

What’s the first requirement of any authoritarian figure? Obviously a widely accepted belief in his or her power and omnipotence. But the authoritarianism I’m speaking of isn’t a matter of this or that costumed brand monkey…Captain America, Batman, Mystique, Black Widow, Black Panther, etc. I’m speaking of the corporate authority wielded by the Marvel (Disney/Fox) and D.C. (Warner Bros.) guys. They’re only in it for the money, of course, but imagine if they also loved the power and control and had begun to get used to that extra-special warm feeling in their blood…that feeling of having built a super-empire and having convinced tens of millions worldwide to follow with a high degree of worship and obedience that would be the envy of any strongman dictator.

I’m not saying this is the case today, but imagine if it were. Because once you let this scenario into your head, everything becomes clear.

For decades my default definition of “taste” was one attributed to Francois Truffaut — “Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.” Which feels right as rain and a comfortable concept in this corner. If Hollywood Elsewhere is about anything, it’s about distastes. (And therefore about loving and worshipping things that don’t inspire pique or revulsion all the more.)

This morning I decided to add a supplement. It comes (or came rather) from London designer Christopher Gibbs, a renowned interior designer, antiques dealer and fashion maven who died two or three days ago at age 80.

Taste, Gibbs said, “is something you catch, like measles or religion.”

18 years ago Christopher Mason explained that Gibbs “is a leading proponent of that elusive brand of anti-decoration, high-bohemian taste favored by self-confident Englishmen, a look based on well-worn grandeur, disarming charm and unexpected contrasts.

“The magic is in the mix of masterpieces and oddities — like an assemblage of refined and wild-card house guests who mysteriously combine to create the ideal convivial country-house weekend. The allergy here is to the banal, not to dust.”

This aesthetic, which I’ve sworn by (or tried to swear by) for decades, is all but dead in this country, certainly among the flamboyantly wealthy. It’s been killed for the most part by the wannabe-Kardashian mentality that says everything has to look obnoxiously expensive and McMansiony, which is to say grand and over-sized and generally lacking in aroma and historic texure, which is to say clueless for the most part.

Gibbs: “I like things in their natural state — people especially. As life goes by, that’s what I admire: objects and people that are unmonkeyed with, that are themselves, not trying to be something else.”

The Times obit, written by Sam Roberts, reminds that Gibbs’ Cheyne Walk home in London “was borrowed by Michelangelo Antonioni for the party scene in his movie Blow-up (1966) and by Kenneth Anger to shoot the occult film Lucifer Rising (’72).

Gibbs also designed what he called the “earthly paradise” inhabited by the has-been rock star played by Mick Jagger in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s film Performance (’70). A similar aesthetic was used for the spacious vampire home occupied by Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive.

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In an 8.4 N.Y. Times profile of legendary talk-show host Dick Cavett, Alex Williams includes the following passage: “In a landscape rebuilt for clickable clips, unscripted moments seem increasingly rare. ‘If I were doing a show today,’ Mr. Cavett said, ‘it would not include a nice actress who’s so ‘excited’ about her new movie, and so ‘excited’ about her director, and so ‘excited’ about the costumes. ‘Excited’ is a word that could easily be stricken from the show business vocabulary.”

HE-posted on 1.9.14: “In the realm of press releases no word is more phony sounding than ‘excited.’ Whenever someone is hired by a company of any size they’re always, always ‘excited’ about a great opportunity; ditto their employers; ditto any creative or business person or senior management type embarking on any entrepreneurial, cooperative or corporate venture.

“‘Excited‘ is so ubiquitous it’s almost scary. Because people in the business world refuse, bizarrely, to use any other word. Like it’s some kind of code. It’s so commonly used you can pretty much count on the person using it being…I don’t want to say they’re a political zombie but they’re certainly looking to blend in. I’m serious — anyone who says ‘I am very excited about this opportunity’ in a press release can and should automatically be perceived as a joiner, a go-alonger, a Zelig, a drone.

“If you’ve seen the John Carpenter film They Live, you know what kind of person I’m talking about.”

14 years ago I was talking to a gifted, highly respected, somewhat bitter guy who was well acquainted with how big-studio Hollywood worked. The subject was John Moore‘s Flight of the Phoenix, a commercially unsuccesful, not-so-hot remake of Robert Aldrich’s same-titled 1965 original with Dennis Quaid in the James Stewart role.

What may have seemed like an overly angry assessment from “bitter guy” 14 years ago is now par for the course. The production wings of major film studios are largely staffed by soul-less zombies who instinctively flinch at the idea of adult-friendly drama. Marketing films to the empty-Coke-bottle crowd is all. Now we say “of course!” but back then (three and a half years before Iron Man and the eventual MCU/D.C. takeover) it was different. Back then paying $100 million for a movie of this calibre ($65 million to shoot it, $35 million to sell it) seemed exorbitant and wasteful. Back then there was still a belief in some corners about mainstream movies occasionally serving adults.

Here’s how “bitter guy” described the Flight of the Phoenix back-story:

“It was going to be Deliverance in the Gobi desert. The script was about character with everyone slowly going insane as the days went on, and when the new plane was built the pilot [Quaid’s role] is reluctant to fly it because the desert crash was his fault and his confidence is shot.

“And he couldn’t be Mel Gibson. If it was Gibson you’d want to see him do it. You’d be waiting for that.

“Then the studio said they wanted the Bedouins to come back and attack the plane at the last minute, just as they were trying to lift off. But hold on. If the baddy Bedouins are close enough to regroup and gather their forces they must be within shouting distance of some kind of half-civilized outpost, so why don’t the survivors just walk to wherever that is? That didn’t get through. The studio didn’t care about that.

“It was the first movie I ever worked on in which notes on the script were sent along by the head of marketing. Mainly because suddenly the movie was costing $60 to $65 million dollars. The average movie costs $65 million, and then it’s $35 million to open it.

“This business has become so wag-the-dog, so marketing driven. And with $65 million being spent no one can look like they’re really hurt or dying, no one can lose their minds, there can’t be any swearing, and no heavy character stuff.

“There was another stranded-in-the-desert thing called The King is Alive. It was a Dogma movie, didn’t cost anything, same basic deal, people stranded in the wilderness. But on a stripped-down budgetary level. Hollywood doesn’t know how to make a film like that. They don’t want to know, I mean.

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Posted on 12.28.04: There’s a scene in Titanic when Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson — an independent-minded, self-starting, vaguely bumpkinish guy who lives by his own rules — sits down with a bunch of white-tie swells in the first-class dining room. Jack’s a little intimidated at first, but he stands his ground by being himself and explaining a personal philosophy that’s hard to disagree with, which is to always “make it count.”

It’s not a great scene, but a moderately satisfying one. It instills respect for Jack, and at the same time lends a certain warmth by saying that even the blue-bloods can relax and laugh at themselves and show respect for a guy who can look them in the eye.

There’s a scene in The Aviator when DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes — vaguely bumpkinish, independent-minded, self-starting, living by his own rules — sits down with a bunch of Connecticut swells, or more preicsely the family of his girlfriend, actress Katharine Hepburn.

Howard’s a little intimidated at first, but the Hepburns are absurdly rude and snooty to him, which leads to his getting testy and then a bit rude himself.

“We don’t care about money here, Mr. Hughes,” says Mrs. Hepburn.

“That’s because you have it,” Howard answers.

“Would you repeat that?”

“You don’t care about money because you have it,” he says again. “And you’ve always had it. My father was dirt poor when I was born…”

“Back in torrid Houston, this would be?” asks Mrs. Hepburn.

“Oh, shut up,” snaps Howard.

“Howard!” Kate exclaims.

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“Trump calls the media the enemy of the people, except for Fox News…they’re so far up Trump’s ass they’re the enema of the people.”

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Thank God we have TMZ and Indiewire to slap Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg around when they step out of line on blackface matters and whatnot.

Last night Rogen apologized for the use of blackface on the set of the upcoming comedy Good Boys, which Rogen and Goldberg are producing. The brouhaha started after set photos showed a stand-in for 11-year-old Keith L. Williams wearing makeup to darken his skin color.

“I should start by saying this shouldn’t have happened, and I’m terribly sorry it did,” Rogen said. “I won’t give excuses for why it happened. I’ll just say that as soon I was made aware of it, I ensured we put an end to it — and I give my word that on any project my team and I are involved in, we will take every precaution to make sure something similar does not take place again.”

Both the stand-in and Williams are African-American.

Good Universe, the production company behind Good Boys, told TMZ that the makeup was used to match the stand-in’s lighter skin tone, and that it’s “not uncommon for lighting purposes to match actors’ skin tones.” They used make-up on a stand-in, in other words, to make his skin color match the lead actor’s. It was nothing that would be filmed or used in the film — it was just for reference.

Indiewire‘s Zack Sharf asked three cinematographers about the incident, and were told that the practice of blackface for the sake of darkening shadow was “unorthodox.” How glad are we that Indiewire stepped in before this thing got out of hand…right? Indiewire has a sworn duty, after all, to police filmmakers and how they make their films. We should thank this intrepid news site for having the moxie to step into this situation and straighten these bitches out.

James Caan‘s facial expression between the 17- and 21-second mark tells you a lot about who John Wayne was. “Gimme that look you give me,” etc. Twelve-year-old kids, seeing who could screw up who, etc.

I tried to watch El Dorado once and I couldn’t stay with it. Feels lazy, phony. Everyone looks and behaves like actors saying lines, and all the supporting players and extras are dressed like they just came out of Nudie’s. Hawks phoned this one in. One of two remakes of his own Rio Bravo, the other being Rio Lobo. I respect Rio Bravo but have never believed it. No one ever has. Jean-Luc Godard gave carte blanche praise to Rio Bravo way back when, and he’s never answered for that. I’m more of a High Noon type of guy.

The trailer for Forever, an original Amazon series from Parks and Recreation collaborators Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard, is obviously inspired by David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet — i.e., suggestions of soul-stifling boredom and perversity lying beneath the banality. Eight half-hour episodes or something close to three and half hours all told. Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen‘s marriage encounters darkness and depravity on a ski trip. Costarring Catherine Keener (Get Out), Noah Robbins (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), and Kym Whitley (Master of None). Premiering on Friday, 9.14.