An observation about producer Robert Evans, shared by production designer Richard Sylbert in Michael Daly‘s “The Making of The Cotton Club,” published by New York magazine on 5.7.84:

“It’s not the page views or the ad revenue for Jeff,” says his friend Sasha Stone. “Well, it is about those things, of course, but Jeff mainly has to be Jeff Wells. If he can’t be ‘Jeff Wells,’ he’s dead.  It’s ‘is Jeff Wells still in the Jeff Wells business?'”

Seriously — isn’t everybody more or less committed to their “act” after it fully takes shape and firms up somewhere in their 30s? Everybody wants the income they feel they deserve as well as the status and respect, but mainly they need to fly their pride flag on a daily basis and be a living embodiment of their brand, the real thing, the guy or gal who’s paid his or her dues and come this far…right here, dammit!

I think Toronto Star critic Peter Howell has hit on something here. Visually alluring, easy-to-digest film reviews for those who find reading more than two sentences in tandem to be a bit challenging, but who would probably be okay with reading a comic-strip review any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Seriously, I think this is an attractive way to go, at the very least as a special supplement to regular text-only reviews. Reactions?

Earlier today Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister reported that Fox is developing an event series (i.e., a miniseries based on a specific event or history, and is therefore close-ended) about the Cotton Club, the notorious Harlem hotspot that peaked in the ‘20s. Exec produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron and directed by Kenny Leon, the series’ chief writer and showrunner will be Ayanna Floyd.

The show is vaguely cursed, of course, because of the association with Francis Coppola and Robert Evans‘ The Cotton Club (’84) — one of the most scandal-plagued productions and notorious financial disasters in Hollywood history.

I saw this Orion release when it opened in December ’84. I seem to recall feeling mixed about it — not bad in parts but at the same time a film that never really lifted off the ground. I can tell you for sure that I never saw it a second time. Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane (“Hiya, chumps…welcome to Vera’s!”), Lonette McKee, Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Nicolas Cage. It ran 128 minutes, cost $58 million and earned $25,928,721.

It’s not available to stream, and there’s only one Cotton Club DVD (issued in 2001) left in the Amazon library.

But one good thing came out of The Cotton Club, and that was Michael Daly‘s “The Making of The Cotton Club,” a New York magazine article that ran 22 pages including art (pgs. 41 thru 63) and hit the stands on 5.7.84.

It was one of the most engrossing accounts of a troubled production I’ve ever read, and it still is. Dazzle and delusion, abrasive relationships, murder, tap dancing, pussy, cocaine, flim-flam, double talk, financial chicanery and Melissa Prophet. Excellent reporting, amusing, believable, tightly composed…pure dessert.

From Adam Gopnik’s 2.27 New Yorker essay, “Did The Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living In A Computer Simulation?”: “This wasn’t just a minor kerfuffle. This was a major malfunction. Trump cannot be President — forgetting all the bounds of ideology, no one vaguely like him has ever existed in the long list of Presidents, good, bad, and indifferent, no one remotely as oafish or as crude or as obviously unfit. People don’t say ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’ and get elected President. Can’t happen.

“In the same way, while there have been Oscar controversies before — tie votes and rejected trophies — never before has there been an occasion when the entirely wrong movie was given the award, the speeches delivered, and then another movie put in its place. That doesn’t happen. Ever.

“And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it.”

Gopnik’s hah-hah riff reminds me of Don Lemon’s March 2014 speculation if something supernatural may have happened to that missing Malaysian plane (i.e., flight MH 370)

Tilda Swinton is once again an eccentric villain in Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja, a lovable beast flick in the realm of Mighty Joe Young, Pete’s Dragon, E.T., et. al. Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Lily Collins, Steven Yeun and Giancarlo Esposito costar. Netflix will release Okja globally on 6.28 along with theatrical play in section venues.

“Like many other Asian directors who are into action wanks and slaughtering for the sake of slaughtering, the gifted Bong Joon-ho is queer for swords, knives, axes and bullets slicing into and/or shattering human bodies. It gets him off, and after a while it becomes a drag to have to sit through a longish high-concept epic by a guy who either can’t control himself or has no interest in trying.” — from 6.12.14 HE review of Snowpiercer.

“There’s no doubting that Bong Joon-ho is a Brian DePalma devotee in the same way that DePalma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the ’70s and ’80s,” I wrote on 5.17.09. “Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element — deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director’s film.” — posted on 5.29.14.

Netflix’s three-part docuseries Five Came Back (debuting on 3.31), adapted from Mark Harris’ same-titled 2014 book and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, is about how five big-time Hollywood directors — John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra and George Stevens — not only captured front-line World War II footage for notable documentaries, but were partially inspired or re-charged by their war experiences, certainly in terms of Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. The talking heads include Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo Del Toro, Paul Greengrass and Lawrence Kasdan with narration by Meryl Streep. No info on the total running time but it sounds like three hours or thereabouts.

A couple of my initial reactions to ex-con Gary Cole (#garyfromchicago), his fiance Vickie Vines and the six or seven other tourists whom Jimmy Kimmel steered into the Oscar telecast on Sunday night are roughly the same ones I’m feeling now. Plus I have a question or two about Gary’s prison term and his attorney, the Los Angeles-residing guitarist, recording artist and performer Karen Nash.

One, the inability of Gary and the tourists to absorb the immediacy and totality of the moment without taking cell-phone videos was pathetic. The instant I saw these guys with their phones and their shuffling gait and glazed-eye expressions, I muttered to myself, “Jesus, these aren’t people — they’re tools holding phone cameras.”

Two, Gary’s response to Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel‘s explanation that he didn’t need to capture the event on his iPhone because it was being captured by regular video — “But I want to! I want to!” — told us he’s no Rhodes scholar. And that black hoodie sweatshirt, the baseball cap and the baggy-ass shorts…c’mon!

Three, are you going to tell me that Ryan Gosling, Mahershala Ali, Denzel Washington or Meryl Streep wouldn’t bolt in the opposite direction if they happened to run into Gary and Vickie on the street? I would, I can tell you, because Gary and Vickie are just the types to come up and say “yo…you him, right? That guy in Pulp Fiction…you know, that scene with the watch?”

Four, the backstory about Gary’s 20-year incarceration is a little shaky. Nancy Dillon‘s 2.28 N.Y. Daily News story says he “served 20 years for multiple felonies” but a post on Nash’s Facebook page says Gary “got a life sentence for stealing perfume in 1997.” Plus she spells his fiance’s name “Vicky” while Dillon spells it “Vickie.” Get it straight!

About ten days ago a guy told me that Kong: Skull Island (Warner Bros., 3.10) “ain’t yer mama’s Kong.” So I got in touch with a guy who’s had a certain level of involvement with Jordan Vogt-Roberts‘ film and asked if one could apply the term “comedic.” His reply: “I don’t believe ‘comedy’ would apply but comedic beats, definitely.” Great distinction! Wells to HE Community: Name a few well-respected films that no one would describe as “comedic” but which definitely have funny “beats.” Example: Karel Reisz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain (’78), especially when it came to Richard Masur and Ray Sharkey‘s characters.

A just-posted N.Y. Times story by David Gelles and Sapna Maheshwari reports that PricewaterhouseCooper’s Brian Cullinan was the guy who fucked up by giving Warren Beatty the wrong envelope — not the one containing the winner of the Best Picture Oscar but the winner of the already presented Best Actress Oscar — i.e., La La Land‘s Emma Stone.

PricewaterhouseCooper’s Brian Cullinan (l.) and Martha L. Ruiz (r.)

Here’s how the story lays it out: “Two identical sets of sealed envelopes are stationed on either side of the stage. The two PricewaterhouseCoopers partners who oversee the voting process, Martha L. Ruiz and Brian Cullinan, each have a briefcase with a complete set of the envelopes.

“The envelope for Best Actress, the penultimate award of the night, came from one side of the stage. After Emma Stone accepted that honor, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty came out to present Best Picture award. But they were handed an envelope from the other side of the stage, where the other best actress envelope was still unopened.

“And Mr. Cullinan, who handed Mr. Beatty the envelope, clearly picked the wrong one.

“After Mr. Cullinan and Ms. Ruiz realized that the wrong winner had been announced, they notified the stage manager, which set in motion a chaotic scene watched by the celebrity crowd in attendance and tens of millions of viewers on television.

“Yet it still took more than two minutes between Ms. Dunaway announcing ‘La La Land‘ as Best Picture and an announcement from the La La Land producers that Moonlight was in fact the winner.”

But what happened really? Two movies got to take bows for having won Best Picture, the La La Land guys behaved really graciously, the whole world is talking a lot more about La La Land and Moonlight right now that if the mistake had never happened, and those who haven’t yet seen Moonlight and La La Land are damn sure going to see them now, either in theatres on via streaming. So it all kinda worked out in a good way.

So please don’t fire Cullinan — he fucked up, sure, but he also made everyone look good in a roundabout way. Be kind, be merciful, let him skate.

The following Gurus of Gold & Gold Derby know-it-alls were predicting a Denzel Washington win for Best Actor last night: GD‘s Tom O’Neil, Entertainment Weekly‘s Chris Rosen, NPR’s Eric Deggans, Vox‘s Gregg Ellwood, Today‘s Dave Karger, L.A. Times Mark Olsen, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Rogerebert.com’s Susan Wloszczyna, L.A. Times‘ guy Glenn Whipp, Entertainment Weekly‘s Nicole Sperling, Yahoo Movies‘ Kevin Polowy, Hollywood Life‘s Bonnie Fuller, USA Today‘s Brian Truitt, Vanity Fair‘s Michael Hogan, Weekend Warrior‘s Ed Douglas, Fandango‘s Erik Davis, Fox News’ Tariq Khan, Rotten Tomatoes‘ Matt Atchity and Variety‘s Tim Gray. They were all DEAD-ASS WRONG because they believed that Denzel’s SAG win was the end-all and be-all. I hung tough with Casey through thick and thin, and look where we are today. Fuck being a fortune-teller — choose your favorites, stick to your guns and come what may.

A seemingly perturbed Denzel Washington during Casey Affleck’s acceptance speech after winning the Best Actor Oscar.