I was sent a bunch of Black List scripts yesterday, and the first one I read really works: Terry Clyne‘s I Believe in America — an authentic-sounding, tightly written, 117-page saga of the making of The Godfather. It’s told mostly from the perspective of then-Paramount chief Robert Evans and secondarily the POVs of director Francis Coppola, senior Paramount production executive Peter Bart, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Ali McGraw, Mario Puzo, Gulf & Western’s Charles Bluhdorn, Diane Keaton, Sidney Korshak and just about everyone else who had anything significant to do with this landmark 1972 film. I began reading it on my iPhone when I was in Manhattan last night, and then I got on a Brooklyn-bound C train somewhere around page 35. I had finished it by the time I hit Nostrand Ave. I flew right through it. I was hooked from the get-go.

Clyne’s script (Darrell Easton is a pen name) is quite the demimonde of neurotic, obsessive Hollywood power players, and I’m telling you it feels as realistic and trustworthy in giving voice to these characters as The Godfather felt like a Real McCoy portrayal of an Italian-American crime family. We’ve all read accounts about the making of this American classic but it’s very satisfying to find them told so smoothly and believably in such a well-honed, fat-free screenplay.

I know Robert Evans personally (or used to know him back in the ’90s and early aughts) and Cline has totally nailed his manner, speaking style, way of thinking. Coppola sounds like Coppola, Pacino sounds like Pacino…everyone and everything sounds genuine and solid, and the story moves along in a way that feels throughly disciplined and engrossing.

I don’t get sick as a rule as I’m pretty much made of iron. Seriously. Once every couple of years I’ll catch a fever and be delirious on the couch for 36 or 48 hours, but that’s about it. Famous last words. A few weeks ago I began coping with a tickle-throat cough. I knew I should do something about it but I didn’t. Maladies always go away so I wasn’t worried, but this began to be different. I was about to hit a clinic before I left last Wednesday for my annual Christmas visit to New York/Connecticut (which I’m still in the middle of) but I kept putting it off. Over the last three or four days it’s gotten much worse. I’ve tried Dayquil and Robotussin and antihistamines…nothing. No fever yet, but it’s turned into some kind of chronic bronchial thing with a threat of pneumonia. An hour or two from now I’ll be visiting a local doctor and demanding antibiotics. Not good. It was so bad last night I couldn’t sleep.

In ’06 I passed along a story of drunken teenage vomiting during a long-ago weekend party at a New Jersey shore vacation home. It belonged to the parents of Barry, a nice-enough guy I knew and occasionally hung with during my mid-teen years when I lived in Westfield, New Jersey. A bunch of us had driven down there and partied without anyone’s parents knowing, especially Barry’s. No girls, no music to speak of — just a lot of beer and ale and vodka and everyone stumbling around.

There was something grotesque about the guys I was hanging with back then because somebody was always getting picked on. It was a kind of hazing ritual, the idea being to put someone’s feet to the fire and…what, see how they stood up? I never understood this damn game, but mockery, isolation and occasional de-pantsing (a gang of guys would literally hold a victim down and pull his pants off and leave him to walk home that way) were par for the course. It was a social standards peer-pressure thing with the group having decided the latest victim had been acting in a too different or too peculiar way, or had otherwise transgressed the fluctuating standards of Westfield cool. Almost no one was safe. You could be one of the de-pantsing brutes and then the next weekend you’d be “it.”

During this particular New Jersey weekend a big, dark-haired guy named Richard Harris had been chosen as the latest victim. He had thrown up on the floor of Barry’s beach home, and so he had to be punished. Much later that night (around 1 am) we found a dead mouse in a mouse trap, so we threw the corpse into a pot of boiling water and put it under the sheets of a bed Harris was sleeping in. He woke up five or ten seconds later and bellowed “get the fuck outta here!” A half-hour later we went outside and shifted Harris’s Chevrolet into neutral and pushed the car down the neighborhood street about three or four blocks. We were all sitting around the next morning and Harris walked in through the pantry door, glaring like a gladiator and saying “where’s my fucking car?”

From Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review of Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul: “There is no way in which the film (or a hundred films) could represent the breadth of the communal suffering in the [Auschwitz-Birkenau death] camp. All we can hope for is that the experience — the literal viewpoint — of a single witness can be added to the record. By homing in on Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), and on the range of response in his dark eyes, we are made so aware of the monstrosities around him that we do not need to have them spelled out. Bare dead bodies are glimpsed, often fleetingly, at the sides of the frame. The newcomers, who are told that hot soup and a shower await them, and who are then stripped and herded toward the gas chambers, with the help of the Sonderkommando, are seldom in focus, and the same is true of the corpses borne to the furnaces. This strikes me as merciful and right. The question is not one of taste but of imaginative modesty; to watch most feature films — as opposed to documentaries — about the Holocaust, even those as expert as Schindler’s List, is to be left with a lasting moral queasiness about the limits of dramatic reconstruction. Just because you can attempt a thorough depiction of a death camp doesn’t mean that you should; if your audience goes away convinced that it now knows what went on at Auschwitz, you’ve done something wrong. That is why I admire the judiciousness of Nemes. He gives us only shards.”

Yesterday afternoon I went over to the NY1 offices (9th and 15th, above the Chelsea Market complex) for a podcast chat with the Sitting Around Talking Movies guys — Neil Rosen, Bill McCuddy, Bill Bregoli and Mike Sargent. The only problem was that the directions McCuddy gave me were wildly imprecise, and nobody on the ground floor had clue #1 which elevator I should take. I was about to shine it when McCuddy showed up and escorted me upstairs. We kicked around David O. Russell‘s Joy, Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant and Will Smith‘s Concussion. Thanks to Neil and Bill for inviting me — let’s do it again.

Two days ago a Daily Mail piece reported that while Harrison Ford could make up to $34 million for playing Han Solo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (i.e., $25 million plus a sliver of the film’s gross earnings after it passes $1 billion in ticket sales), Daisy Ridley and John Boyega were paid a flat fee of $450,000. Carrie Fisher pocketed around $1.5 million. Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams was reportedly paid $5 million plus a 2% share of gross earnings. The worldwide grosses of The Force Awakens are expected to pass $2 billion.

The same day Variety‘s Justin Kroll reported that the fees were somewhat less. He stated, however, that Ford was paid over 50 times more than Ridley and Boyega, whose fees were between $100K and $300K. Ford’s paycheck was somewhere between $10 and $20 million, Kroll reported, but probably closer to $15 million if not higher.

This Rumors-inspired album jacket is by London-based HMV employee Steven Lear, who is otherwise known for WhyTheLongPlayFace? on Facebook and Instagram. It was highlighted by Ryan Steadman in a 12.22 Observer piece.

“It is not for that reason, however, that I salute your courage in going to see The Force Awakens. Something more urgent than metaphysics is at issue, namely this: paying to watch a new Star Wars movie, in the wake of its predecessors — The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith — is like returning to a restaurant that gave you severe food poisoning on your last three visits. So, be of good cheer. The Force Awakens will neither nourish nor sate, but it is palatable and fresh, and it won’t lay you low for days to come. Worshippers of the older films will have every right to feel cosseted and spoiled. [And] heretics and infidels, like myself, will be gratified to have avoided a more parlous fate. Please forgive us if we snort into our sodas when Han Solo remarks, ‘The Dark Side, the Jedi — it’s true. All of it.’ Actually, Han, it’s not. It’s baloney. But the Force is with us forever, whether we like it or not.” — from Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review.

Paramount will release Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some on 4.15.16 after its South by Southwest debut a month earlier. A “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, the ’80s-era pic revolves around a group of college baseball players — Blake Jenner (Glee), Wyatt Russell, Zoey Deutch, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman, Glen Powell, Ernest James, et. al. And the gut reaction is…?

I understand why the Broadcast Film Critics Association has added Star Wars: The Force Awakens to its roster of Best Picture nominees. A lot of members got a pleasurable bounce from it (as have many others) and they felt enormously relieved that it’s better than the prequels and they’re figuring that perhaps a sizable percentage of Star Wars fans will now tune into the 21st annual Critics’ Choice Awards show (1.17.16 at 8 pm eastern on A&E, Lifetime and LMN). No real harm in this, I suppose. Just a nice ceremonial gesture.

The official release states that Force Awakens “was not screened for BFCA voters in time for the initial nominations balloting, but after members of the nation’s largest film critics group saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens last week it was decided to hold a special referendum yesterday to determine if it would have been nominated if the BFCA membership had been able to consider it.

This TV spot has been named “bear attack.” We know why the Fox ad guys called it this. They’re playing with the nonsensical Matt Drudge bear rape thing. Which is arguably the biggest selling hook this film has, apart from the fact that, you know, it’s a drop-dead masterpiece.

The Hateful Eight‘s approval ratings (86% on Rotten Tomatoe, 82% on Metacritic) are an unfortunate portrait of the effete, perverse tastes of too many film critics. I’m a hard-working, subway-riding, clear-light guy who enjoys an occasional slice of pizza when I visit New York, and I absolutely worship the idea of reviving Ultra Panavision 70. But I’m telling you that anyone who totally creams over this film without at least including a reservation or two is just not being honest. The first two thirds of The Hateful Eight are fairly tasty and acceptable, but that final third…wow.

From Matt Zoller Seitz‘s Hateful Eight review, posted on 12.22: “Eight feels half-assed, but it carries itself like another masterpiece, swaggering and stubbing its toe and then swaggering some more. It has superb photography, music, set design and performances (particularly by Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Samuel L. Jackson), but no fervor, no framework, no justification for its nonstop insults, provocations and atrocities. It has a bully’s mentality. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that, deep down, Quentin Tarantino believes in nothing but sensation, and that he’s spent the last decade or so stridently and publicly identifying with oppressed groups so that he can get a gold star for making the kinds of films he’d be making anyway, if those meddling social justice types weren’t all up in his grill about responsibility.

“In the end, The Hateful Eight is less reminiscent of any single Western than of a certain episode of Seinfeld — the one where Bryan Cranston plays a gentile dentist who makes Jewish jokes but insists it’s okay because he’s converted. ‘I have a suspicion,’ Seinfeld says, ‘that he’s converted to Judaism just for the jokes.'”