The first step in Donald Trump’s plan to deball and dilute Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice happened this morning when the House Intelligence Committee released its cherry-picked memo. Trump-approved and Devin Nunes-finessed, the memo alleges anti-Trump bias on the part of the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation.

The plan, of course, is to use this memo to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and thereafter replace him with some Trump flunky who will presumably block or get in the way of Mueller’s investigation in every imaginable way.

This is a strong-arm Mussolini move — fascistic bully-boy behavior. Obviously part of an established pattern of Trump getting rid of his perceived Justice Department enemies — Deputy director Andrew McCabe, former FBI director James Comey, United States Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

The gist of the memo is that the allegedly biased (i.e., critical of Trump) Christopher Steele report “formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page,” per a Washington Examiner summary.

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Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Santa Barbara late this afternoon, and then attended a big SBIFF tribute for The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe at the Arlington theatre — a 90-minute q & a with Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, the usual array of clips, and a presentation of the Cinema Vanguard award by The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone.

Huzzah for one of our most gifted and tenacious indie-level actors, a guy who’s been digging in and chugging along for 40 years now, and was lucky enough to enjoy a brilliant nine-year streak from ’85 to ’94 — the counterfeiter in William Friedkin‘s To Live and Die in L.A., Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone‘s Platoon, Jesus of Nazareth in The Last Temptation of Christ, FBI agent Alan Ward in Alan Parker‘s Mississippi Burning, a pissed-off paraplegic in Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, Bobby Peru in David Lynch‘s Wild At Heart, Jon LeTour in Paul Schrader‘s Light Sleeper, and John Clark in Phillip Noyce‘s Clear and Present Danger.

Dafoe often works with the strongest and most innovative directors around. I especially respected his performance as Pier Paolo Pasolini in Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini (’14). Sure, Dafoe appears in crap from time to time, but who doesn’t?

Earlier this month Dafoe’s Florida Project performance was an apparent lock for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but all of sudden Three Billboards‘ Sam Rockwell stole the heat with Golden Globe and Critics Choice wins, and now…who knows?

Dafoe spoke a bit about playing Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’s Gate, which recently finished shooting. He said it would be a more inward-looking, painter’s-eye study at Van Gogh’s struggle.

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Hollywood Elsewhere couldn’t attend the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s opening night screening of Emilio Estevez‘s The Public, but I’ll be there later today. Within a couple of hours. Probably. I think.

The Public costar Alec Baldwin.

Costar Jenna Malone.

Peter O’Toole portrayed Henry II of England twice, first in Becket (’64) and again in The Lion in Winter (’68). I own the Becket Bluray and have seen it nine or ten times, but I’ve sat through The Lion in Winter exactly once. Studiocanal’s Bluray restoration of Anthony Harvey‘s film popped in Europe in October 2016. Kino is releasing the same Bluray as a “50th anniversary celebration” on 3.13.18.

When Abraham Lincoln passed away on 4.15.65, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Since that moment any allusion to “the ages” has had a special apartness, a ring of dignity and reverence. Until two months ago, that is, when Vanity Fair‘s Yohana Desta called Get Out “a film for the ages.” Universal marketers seized on that quote PDQ and put it on a big fat billboard near the corner of Highland and Franklin. There’s no disputing Desta’s observation that Jordan Peele‘s horror-thriller “captured the zeitgeist,” but if the ghost of Edwin Stanton was somehow listening, he’d most likely be thinking “hmmmm.”

Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff was beaten up badly during a Morning Joe segment this morning. It was over an inference, first mentioned on Real Time with Bill Maher, that President Trump may have had a sexual relationship with a woman in his administration. Wolff told Maher that the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. Nobody knows anything, but as far as I can tell Wolff never hinted that the party in question might be U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, Haley has strongly denied the alleged inference, and Wolff got hammered this morning on Morning Joe (and was interrogated yesterday on TheSkimm) for vaguely or indirectly floating this notion. The bottom line, as one of the Skimm co-hosts said, is that this is the wrong thing to hint about during “a watershed moment for women, especially in the workplace.” Correct — Wolff should have let well enough alone.

It’s been 63 and 1/2 years since the debut of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window, and it’s still the greatest film about voyeurism. (Right?) For me the second best is Steven Soderbergh‘s sex, lies and videotape, followed by Michael Powell‘s Peeping Tom, Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation, Brian DePalma‘s Body Double.

There’s one more that I’ve mentioned a couple of times but has all but disappeared — Jeannot Szwarc and Michael Crichton‘s Extreme Close-Up (’73), which you can’t rent or stream or anything. (There was a VHS version available in the ’80s under a different title, Sex Through A Window.) Not a top-tier film, but a smart, intriguing, well-written one.

I’m trying to decide if I want to spend $6 bills to stream Aaron Harvey‘s The Neighbor. It’s obviously a B-level thing, but maybe. To me William Fichtner will always be Roger Van Zandt in Heat.

Old story: During an early ’70s visit to The Dick Cavett Show, Jack Klugman told a story about watching his wife try on different evening outfits in their living room. No underwear, he said, so every time she changed she was Venus di Milo. And she was near a large window. And Klugman thought to himself, he said, “Gee, I wish I was across the street with a pair of binoculars.”

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Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals, based on a 2012 Justin Torres novel, “is trippier and more affecting than Moonlight ever dreamed of. Adolescent queer stirrings aside, the analogy is not Moonlight but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes.” — from 1.22 HE Sundance review. The Orchard has acquiredWe, The Animals for theatrical distribution later this year.

A 1.31 N.Y. Times piece by “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley asks, “Why Didn’t Steven Spielberg Get an Oscar Nomination for The Post?” I thought that question had been answered earlier this month. In this space, I mean.

“In some views, the failure to gain much awards traction is an indicator of a shifting Oscars landscape,” Buckley writes, “where Moonlight, a small independent film with an all-black cast, won Best Picture over the white-on-white spectacle of La La Land.”

Bullshit — Moonlight eeked out a win because a sufficient number of Academy members wanted forgiveness or better yet erasure on the #OscarsSo White thing, which peaked in early ’16.

“In this awards season especially, one distinguished by underdog stories and diversity in Lady Bird, Get Out and other pictures, The Post felt out of place,” Buckley explains. “For all of its important messaging, it remains a very white, very upper-middle-class film.”

Lester Friedman, author of “Citizen Spielberg,” tells Buckley that ‘this isn’t the year for a middle-of-the-road Hollywood drama.'”

Or, as I said in a 1.13 post called “Oscar Bait Movie Is Over,” “Oscar-bait movies are regarded askance by younger industry types plus the new guild and Academy members. This is probably why Steven Spielberg‘s The Post never caught on. People smelled Oscar-bait calculation from the get-go, and they don’t like the mindset (an “important” story or theme done classy, aimed at 50-plus types, bucks-up stars and screenwriters) and the “game” of it all.

“The 45-and-unders looked at this well-written, respectably made prestige flick with two boomer superstars (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) and said, ‘Where is it written that we all have to stand up and salute traditional Oscar-bait movies like little toy soldiers every fucking November and December?'”

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