Just Like That, Brad Grey Is Gone

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A couple of months ago (March 14th) I ran into Brad Grey at the Wilshire Screening Room. I was there for my second viewing of Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation.

“Have you seen it?” I asked Grey. He shrugged, shook his head. “You should! It’s brilliant. You know Mungiu…Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days?” Another 20 or 30 seconds of chit-chat and “see ya.” I liked Grey as far as it went. I felt I could talk freely with him. We had spoken at a Paramount lot gathering a few weeks earlier, and again at a pre-Golden Globes party at the Chateau Marmont. He was fairly open and candid at the former event, at least as far as his position (he was still running Paramount) allowed.

And now he’s gone. Cancer. Jesus, he didn’t look ill or anything. A slap to the system. Heartfelt condolences to his family, friends and former colleagues. This came out of nowhere.

Straight from Variety: “Brad Grey, the former Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO, died on Sunday night of cancer. He was 59. His family issued a statement on Monday morning, Los Angeles time:

“Brad passed away yesterday evening at his home in Holmby Hills, his family by his side. The cause of death was cancer. He was 59 years old.

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Never Let The Audience Think About Budget

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Two scenes dissipate John Frankenheimer‘s Seven Days in May (’64), an otherwise gripping thriller about an attempted military takeover of the U.S. One of them is fairly ludicrous in its action plotting, and both take your attention away from the story by suggesting that the film was made for a modest sum — something an audience should never be allowed to contemplate.


(l. to r.) George Macready, Edmond O’Brien and Fredric March in a second-act scene from John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May.

#1: President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) and a team of anti-conspiracy allies are watching filmed footage of two Pentagon higher-ups (including John Larkin‘s Col. Broderick, a close confidante of Burt Lancaster‘s General James Mattoon Scott) spying on the President’s vacation home from a rowboat. Someone notes that the conspirators must be small in number or else why would Broderick, a Pentagon bigwig, be engaged in routine surveillance work? And it hits you that this whole menacing conspiracy is a small-scale affair. Just six or seven middle-aged men on either side, playing for opposing teams. The film needed a scene or two demonstrating the overwhelming military power that the bad guys had at the ready. Jets, tanks, warships, armed battalions.

#2: A nighttime scene at a secret New Mexico air base (“Site Y”) being used by the bad guys shows Colonel William Henderson (Andrew Duggan) escaping with Senator Ray Clark (Edmond O’Brien) in an open-top military tank. Henderson rifle-butts a soldier and guns the tank over a sand dune and into the night. And nobody chases after them? Site Y security chiefs presumably have all kinds of jeeps and helicopters at their disposal, and they can’t catch a tank driving through the desert at 35 or 40 mph? Broderick and O’Brien should’ve escaped in a chopper. That I would half-buy.

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Jean-Luc Godard In Love

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I was too distracted to watch when this French teaser for Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable, which will debut at the Cannes Film Festival, appeared online last month. Set in the mid ’60s, the film is about a love affair between legendary nouvelle vague director Jean-Luc Godard and Au Hasard Balthazar and Weekend star Anne Wiazemsky. But what gets me here is Louis Garrel‘s channeling of Godard, particularly the low-key insouciance.

The film, which Godard has allegedly described as “a stupid idea”, is based on Wiazemsky’s writings about her Godard relationship, which began when she was in her late teens. Born in 1930, Godard was 17 years older than Wiazemsky. He wound up casting her in La Chinoise (’67), Weekend (’67) and One Plus One (’68). They were married between ’67 and ’79.

It’s been reported that Wiazemsky was 17 when her affair with Godard began. I’m figuring more like 19. She was born in ’47, and was 18 when Au Hasard, Balthazar (released on 5.25.66) was shot in the summer or fall of ’65. In her book “Jeune Fille” Wiazemsky wrote that Bresson was obsessed with her and never let her out of her sight, so it seems unlikely that Godard was circling her then. The timetable indicates that the Godard coupling began in late ’65 or ’66.

26 year-old Stacy Martin, whose last high-profile role was in Part One of Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, plays Wiazemsky. Berenice Bejo (The Artist) costars.

Iconic Image

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This is a catchy illustration, but why is Attorney General Jeff Sessions dragging James Comey off the plane with pilot Donald Trump looking on? All Sessions did was rubber-stamp Comey’s dismissal when Trump asked for a written rationale. Sessions was just the puppet, the stooge. Trump was the dragger.

Passing of Powers Boothe

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The ghost of Powers Boothe is reading Lawrence Yee’s Variety obit and quietly seething. For Yee’s opening sentence describes Boothe as “a character actor.” Not “the renowned, ruggedly handsome, Emmy Award-winning actor known for his gruff, steely machismo” but “a” character actor. What Yee means is that Boothe’s peak period in the early to mid ’80s doesn’t mean that much, at least to him. But it does, or did, to those who were around and alert during the early Reagan years.

When Tom Cruise dies do you think Variety will describe him as “an” actor? The indignity! For once upon a time Powers Boothe was a brand, a force and a presence that was valued by top-rank directors.

His performance as demonic cult leader Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones was easily the best thing Boothe ever did. Boothe won an Emmy for best lead actor in a limited series. The four-hour, two-part TV movie aired on CBS in April 1980. I haven’t rewatched it since but I would right now if it was streaming, but it’s only on DVD.

Boothe’s movie heyday boiled down to three films that followed Guyana Tragedy — Walter Hill‘s Southern Comfort (’81), John Milius‘s Red Dawn (’84) and John Boorman‘s The Emerald Forest (’85). For a while it seemed as if the Texas-born, conservative-leaning actor might become an Eastwood-like figure. Or at least a regular leading guy.

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Misinterpreting Steely Dan

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While I always respected Steely Dan‘s music (catchy hooks, jazzy instrumentation), I never really listened to their lyrics. Okay, I would half-listen, catching a line or a thought here and there, but mostly I succumbed to the complex, swoony melodies. Which is why for many years I had it my mind that the title of “Bodhisattva” was “Wadi Safra.” I just felt better about the latter, mainly because it was one of the desert locations shown and referred to in Lawrence of Arabia.

I may have glanced at the Countdown to Ecstasy liner notes and noted a song called “Bodhisattva”, but my feelings of kinship with Lawrence of Arabia overpowered anything Donald Fagen or Walter Becker had in mind. Particularly any notions of “a person who’s able to reach nirvana but delays out of compassion for fellow suffering beings.” And I’m speaking as someone who was once pretty well versed in nirvana terminology, thanks in part to the groundbreaking example of Cary Grant.

Had He Lived, John Lennon Would’ve Said “Uhm, Thanks But No Thanks”

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Paul McCartney‘s cameo in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Disney, 5.26) is, of course, a laughy, jape-y thing. Keeps his hand in, energizes the brand, gooses revenues for his concerts and albums. And yes, Keith Richards did the same thing two or three Pirate flicks ago. But it still feels…what, icky? Ill-considered? However hip Macca may have seemed before, he seems less hip now. Perhaps not the worst thing to happen to his cinematic rep since Magical Mystery Tour, but unwise.

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Google Chrome Image Issue Vaporized

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Until a couple of days ago certain Hollywood Elsewhere images (i.e., not slider images or YouTube captures but within-the-column jpegs) weren’t showing up on smart-phone Google Chrome browsers. And yet Safari was fine. Odd. It took a lot of work but HE’s WordPress guy Dominic Eardley finally solved the problem. Sasha Stone was also part of the fix (it’s been hard to keep track of who’s exactly doing what), but last weekend she was driving cross-country to pick up her daughter at NYU so she wasn’t able to focus as much. Great work, thanks much.

Legacy of Enlightenment

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The new received wisdom is that Cary Grant was the ultimate Captain Trips — the guy who inspired Timothy Leary to look into LSD, and in so doing became a prime influencer and seminal counter-culture figure. Not actually but, you know, in a roundabout, cosmic-linkage, one-thing-leads-to-the-next-thing way.

“Turn off your mind, relax and float upstream…it is not dying, it is being”…that’s Cary! Okay, I might be pushing the connection a bit, but if you’ve ever been “experienced”, you wouldn’t be far off the mark to regard Cary Grant as your brother, your father…the guy holding your hand.

Sounds far-fetched, right? But a Xan Brooks Guardian piece about Mark Kidel‘s Becoming Cary Grant, which will screen at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival, more or less makes that claim.

Brooks describes the doc, which he’s apparently seen, as an exploration of “Grant’s adventures in psychedelia.” The doc reports that the famously debonair actor dropped LSD 100 times between 1958 and 1961. Wade into that. Not 10, 20 or 50 but 100 sessions.

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“Infamous Dinner” Tape

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From Nicholas Kristof’s 5.13 N.Y. Times column, “Is President Trump Obstructing Justice?”

“In short, Trump challenges the legitimacy of checks on his governance, bullies critics and obfuscates everything. Trump reminds me less of past American presidents than of the ‘big men’ rulers I covered in Asia and Africa, who saw laws simply as instruments with which to punish rivals.

“It’s reported that Trump sought a pledge of loyalty from Comey. That is what kings seek; the failure to provide one got Thomas More beheaded. But in a nation of laws, we must be loyal to laws, norms and institutions, not to a passing autocrat.

“Trump acknowledges that he was frustrated by the Russia investigation and that it was a factor in firing Comey. This may not meet the legal test for obstruction of justice, but step back and you see that Trump’s entire pattern of behavior is obstruction of the rule of law and democratic norms.”

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More Cannes Spitballing

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Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn (who’s now in Paris, staying in some baroque Left Bank hotel that hangs animal portraits on the walls) discuss the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Things start three days from now (i.e., Wednesday, 5.17). Almost every Paris-based journalist and layover will be on Tuesday’s 7:19 am train from Gare de Lyon. I’m terrified about sleeping through and missing it.

Thompson compares staying “with a bunch of guys” in Indiewire‘s Cannes crash pad to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There’s a mention of Tuesday’s La Pizza gathering. They’re hot for Michael Haneke‘s Happy End and Todd Haynes‘ Wonderstruck, but who isn’t? They sound excited but, in my view, not excited enough about Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless. Thompson is hearing “good things” about Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Redoubtable, the ’60s-era Jean Luc Godard love story. They discuss the festival’s decision to turn a cold shoulder to Netflix movies starting next year. They mention the incessant partying, drinking and hobnobbing, but the only thing that matters during the Cannes Film Festival is the filing.

Things get interesting when Kohn trashes Naomi Kawase, noting that “the only time you ever hear about her” is during the festival, “which is a little peculiar.” And then Thompson, stepping out of her amiable safe zone, dismisses Taylor Sheridan‘s Wild River, which is playing under Un Certain Regard, in part because it’s “the only Weinstein film” and is “opening in August.”

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