It pains me once again to see Jon Voight, a guy I used to admire in the ’70s and even into the ’90s with his performances as Howard Cosell in Ali and FDR in Pearl Harbor, unpacking his rightie loon robe again by claiming President Obama is looking to weaken Israel, that the U.S. “has never been the same” since Obama’s election, and that negotiating with Iran over its nuclear agenda is like Neville Chamberlain negotiating with Adolf Hitler. Voight apparently supports Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu and the 47 Republicans who sent that mutinous letter to Iran’s leadership, and believes that…what, threatening to bomb Iran is the way to play it? “Deal-making is not a solution to what Israel faces,” Voight says, and yet he quotes Yitzhak “Bougie” Herzog, Netanyahu’s opponent in the upcoming Israeli election who, according to a 3.14 anti-Netanyahu piece in The Economist, “wants talks with the Palestinians and to heal ties with Mr. Obama.”

Update: I haven’t seen the sixth and final episode of Andrew Jarecki‘s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (it won’t air until 8:00 pm Pacific) but a Deadline report states that during the episode Durst “is heard on tape admitting he ‘killed ‘em all, of course'” — an apparent reference to his long-missing wife Kathie Durst, who disappeared in 1982, as well as Durst’s longtime friend and ally Susan Berman who was found shot to death in December 2000, in addition to Morris Black, whom Durst admitting killing in a Galveston murder trial. Variety‘s Brian Lowry reports that Durst “appears to confess while talking to himself, [speaking] into an open microphone while in the bathroom, after having been confronted with damaging evidence. ‘There it is…you’re caught,’ he mutters a bit later. ‘What a disaster.'”

New York real-estate heir Robert Durst, long suspected of the murder of his late wife, Kathie Durst, in 1982 and now being actively prosecuted by Los Angeles authorities for the 2000 murder of Susan Berman, who was found shot in her Benedict Canyon home.

Anonymously sent letter to “Beverley” Hills PD, postmarked 12/23/00 or the day California officials believe that the shooting of Susan Berman occurred.

1999 letter written to Susan Berman by longtime friend Robert Durst.

Art posted by Buzzfeed.

Posted earlier: If you’ve seen the five aired episodes of Andrew Jarecki‘s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, as I have, wild horses couldn’t keep you from watching tonight’s finale. Partly because the series has been quite riveting but mainly because it became apparent during last Sunday’s episode that Jarecki had obtained conclusive proof that Durst, the wealthy 71 year-old son of the late New York real estate mogul Seymour Durst and long suspected of the 1982 murder of his wife Kathie, is the author of an anonymous cryptic note sent to the Beverly Hills police department on 12.23.00, alerting them to the presence of a “CADAVER” at the Benedict Canyon home of the late Susan Berman, a friend of Durst’s who was probably killed the same day.

The “whoa!” element is not that the word Beverly was mis-spelled “BEVERLEY” on the 12.23.00 envelope, but that the same mis-spelling appears on a letter Durst sent to Berman in 1999.

James D. Cooper‘s Lambert & Stamp was irrefutably one of the top eight films I saw at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Yes, the one that happened fourteen months ago. It played again at the Sundance London Festival a few weeks later, and then it was vaya con dios for about a year. Now it’s finally back and opening commercially on 4.3. The guys behind The Who — a good yarn, punchy…H.G. Wells‘ The Time Machine. And yet it’s partly another tale about a rock-music guy (in this case Kit Lambert) who got lost in a louche lifestyle and succumbed to drugs at a relatively young age (45).

With Alex Gibney‘s two-part, four-hour Frank Sinatra doc airing on HBO 20 days hence, I found myself googling a bunch of Sinatra material. And somewhere along the way I came upon his will, which was finalized in 1991. A friend with some first-hand experience with wills tells me that Sinatra’s is the best she’s ever read. So here it is. If you’ve nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon (apart from getting some exercise, reading a great book, riding a bicycle on the beach or savoring some Indian food), have at it.

“I, FRANCIS ALBERT SINATRA, also known as FRANK SINATRA, declare this to be my Will and revoke all former Wills and Codicils. I am a resident of Riverside County, California.

CLAUSE FIRST: Marital Status And Family.

I am married to BARBARA SINATRA, who in this Will is referred to as “my Wife.” I was formerly married to NANCY BARBATO SINATRA, to AVA GARDNER SINATRA, and to MIA FARROW SINATRA, and each of said marriages were subsequently dissolved. I have three children, all of whom are the issue of my marriage to NANCY BARBATO SINATRA: NANCY SINATRA LAMBERT, FRANCIS WAYNE SINATRA, and CHRISTINA SINATRA. All of the above-named children are adults. I have never had any other children.

The first-anywhere screening of Luke Meyer‘s Breaking a Monster just concluded at South by Southwest. It’s a decently assembled success-story doc about Unlocking The Truth, an African-American classic metal trio who were 12 and 13 when the footage was shot a year or so ago. It’s about how they built upon the novelty of “black kids playing metal” along with some serious YouTube popularity by joining forces with veteran music manager Alan Sacks. It takes the band forever to crank out a catchy, listenable song but they finally do, and eventually they land a $1.8 million record deal with Sony Music.

My initial reaction: “Basically meh, yeah, not bad, so-so but not enough information. The whole thing about Unlocking The Truth is the novelty (black teens doing metal) and the Times Square YouTube trending and people around them (especially Sacks) getting ahead of themselves in thinking ‘wow, these guys are unusual…and really young!…and sellable!” I’ve never been a metal fan. Ever. And I kept asking myself ‘okay, but where’s the beef when you get past the novelty? Where’s the song or songs that people are looking for?’ Isn’t that what makes a band successful? The songs they write and sing and the way they’re recorded/performed? Or am I missing something?

I can’t overstate how jolting and invigorating and even ground-shifting Ondi Timoner‘s Brand: A Second Coming plays, especially during the second viewing and especially when it hits the 40-minute mark, which is when the story of Brand’s social-political awakening kicks in. It’s a brilliant, go-for-it thing that not only portrays and engages with a brilliant artist-provocateur but matches his temperament and picks up the flag. Superb photography by Timoner (especially loved the occasional punctuation of grainy 8mm) and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko. The doc constantly pops, riffs and punches over its nearly two-hour running time. Magnificent graphics and editing, and a perfect ending.

What’s significant is that the lives of Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X, whom Brand identifies with and admires, had a similar dramatic arc in that they finally “became” after floundering around — Che as a son of Argentine privelege, Jesus as a stay-at-home carpenter until he was 30, Malcolm X as a pimp and an incarcerated con until he was awakened by Elijah Muhammed, etc. Similarly Brand became truly interesting and transcendent when he stopped projecting like a hyper, swaggering, shag-crazy narcissist and became a “champagne socialist” revolutionary and began saying “look at what’s wrong here”…that‘s when he became a lightning bolt.

From Variety‘s Dennis Harvey: “Brand might look like a dissolute rock star, but take away the expletives and jokes and it’s clear that what he says is eagerly dismissed in some quarters precisely because he’s smart and provocative, and reaches a large audience with a message that is off-the-charts liberal by current standards. The reasons he gives for being fed up with the status quo are very persuasive — and delivered in such a way that they reach people who’d be bored stiff by any standard political sermonizing.”

From The Guardian‘s Alex Needham: “It’s Brand’s journey from comic to activist which is the meat of Timoner’s story: what happens when drugs, sex, fame and wealth all fail to thrill and a charismatic man decides to make the almost unprecedented transition from comic to guru. Even if you’re cynical about Brand’s motives or just think that he’s a bit of berk, the film convinces you of the almost alarming sincerity of his political mission — not least because his mother reveals that as a child Brand claimed that he was indeed the second coming.”

Harvey again: “Such self-comparisons might seem odious on the surface, and indeed they are quite odious to those who’d prefer to dismiss Brand’s concerns because they hail from an English comedian, ex-drug addict and former Mr. Katy Perry. But Brand’s motormouth eloquence and sharp if often gleefully rude intelligence certainly qualify him as much to talk about corporate greed, economic equality, climate change and other pressing issues as many professional pundits whose often dubious legitimacy is seldom questioned.”

Three years ago I posted a wish piece about finding some way to post Live Skype video feeds of my sundry activities on Hollywood Elsewhere. The idea was that an HE/Skype icon on the side could be clicked on and transformed into an expanded video screen when a flashing red light indicates activity. The idea died when it became apparent that Skype protocols didn’t allow for this, but now it’s back and crackling with live Twitter video feeds being offered by Meerkat and down the road by the Twitter-aligned Periscope.

Yesterday Twitter “kneecapped” Meerkat by preventing the importing of a user’s Twitter follower lists (i.e., the social graph), but the potential feeding of live video to unlimited thousands by a single feeder is a firm reality. There surely must be some way to adapt Meerkat’s or Periscope’s skill sets to generate Hollywood Elsewhere video from my iPhone at the touch of a button and have it appear on the site. Live events happening at the Cannes Film Festival, say. Or during a sojourn in Rome or Paris or Prague or wherever.

Live-video interviews during a hotel press junket, live video chit-chat, live-video of Cannes press conferences, live-video of La Pizza dinners with the Cannes regulars, live GoPro video from a motorcycle jaunt around lower Manhattan or Vietnam, etc.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted an interview (and accompanying audio q & a) with ’50s teen heartthrob Tab Hunter, whose closeted-in-Hollywood tale is told in Jeffrey Schwarz‘s Tab Hunter Confidential, which is screening at South by Southwest (a.k.a., “South By”). Hunter, 83, has never sounded to me like a layered or complex fellow, but he seems happy, settled. He lived an amazing life, certainly during his mid-to-late ’50s heyday. The doc is basically a visual accompaniment to “Tab Hunter Confidential,” an ’06 tell-all written when Hunter heard about the then-imminent publishing of Robert Hofler‘s “The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Wilson.” Wilson was a gay Svengali who spotted, brought along and managed the biggest closeted hunks of the ’50s and early ’60s, including Hudson and Hunter. Wilson’s first move was always “butching” these guys up with studly-sounding screen names — i.e., Arthur Gelien/Tab Hunter, Roy Scherer/Rock Hudson, Robert Mosely/Guy Madison, Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr./Ty Hardin, etc. No Wilson client was actually given the name “Ben Dover.”

Last night Jamie Foxx told Power105 FM’s Angie Martinez that the Mike Tyson biopic that was announced last summer, in which Foxx will play the former heavyweight champion in a film written by Terrence Winter (Wolf of Wall Street), will be directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. “I just went in with Paramount with Mike Tyson,” Foxx told Martinez. “So I’m going to do the Mike Tyson story. Listen, to be in the same room pitching Mike Tyson to Paramount…Mike Tyson is on one side, I’m on the other side ‘doing’ Tyson at the same time. And Martin Scorsese at the helm. This will be the first boxing movie that Scorsese has done since Raging Bull.” Foxx’s manager Rick Yorn will produce. Scorsese is currently directing Silence in Taiwan.

During press interviews for Jules et Jim, which opened in the U.S. in May 1962, director Francois Truffaut realized after discussing Alfred Hitchcock with the top U.S. critics that he was not taken seriously. Truffaut wrote Hitchcock to propose a series of in-depth interviews that would cover Hitchcock’s entire career, film by film. The transcripts would eventually become “Hitchcock/Truffaut.”

Truffaut ended his letter to Hitchcock with the following: “If, overnight, the cinema had to do without its soundtrack and become once again a silent art, then many directors would be forced into unemployment, but among the survivors there would be Alfred Hitchcock, and everyone would realize at last that he is the greatest film director in the world.”

So Robert Downey, Jr. decided to pay for the kid’s bionic arm, right? Or is he just publicizing it? Either way it was bequeathed “at no cost to the family.” Downey says the bionic 3D printed arm is “affordable.” It’s from Albert Manero, the founder of Limbitless. A 3.13 Washington Post story by Leah Polakoff says the arm is 3-D printed on a Stratasys printer, [and] takes approximately 40 to 50 hours to manufacture. The average prosthetic limb costs around $40 K, but Manero’s “Iron Man” arm cost less than $350 in materials not counting labor, research and development time.

Last Tuesday I spoke with Ondi Timoner, director of Brand: A Second Coming, a fascinating, motor-mouthed portrait of actor-comedian-social activist Russell Brand. It will open Austin’s South by Southwest film festival this evening. Timoner’s doc (partly shot by HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko) is one of the most unusual and impressive documentary portraits of a famous person I’ve ever seen because of…well, its eagerness to step out of the standard function of a documentary and take the proverbial ride. It’s a film that transcends itself and becomes something else by embracing the attitude and temperament of its subject. Just as Brand has begun moving the focus of his life beyond fame and wealth and the lowest form of humor (i.e., simply making people laugh), Brand: A Second Coming is about seeing and transcending and turning a page. It’s about breaking out of the Wachowski’s Matrix by way of comic irreverence, manic energy and a massive ego.

Ondi Timoner, director of Brand: A Second Coming.

Russell Brand

Brand is partly advocating a kind of Iceland-styled social revolution by way of consciousness raising and neighborhood organizing and more compassion for drug addicts and fierce resistance to most of the goals and systems of 1% corporate dominance, and partly calling for the debunking of conservative myths about individual fulfillment through the acquisition of power, money, sex, property, etc. Brand is rich so who’s he to talk, right? His response is to swear over and over that he’s been to the very top and gotten drunk on luxury and debauch and that none of the spoils are particularly fulfilling. He genuinely sees himself as a kind of change agent in the vague tradition of Malcolm X, Jesus of Nazareth, Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara. I realize this will rub some the wrong way, but what’s wrong with choosing these fellows as heroes and wanting to follow in their path? Brand’s obviously an eccentric, but he has the aura of a guy who’s really seen through the bullshit.

Born in June 1975, Brand first gained fame as a nervy, drug-addicted stand-up comedian, award-show m.c. and televized provocateur. He became sober in ’04 and got into transcendental meditation but continued to provoke and challenge and piss people off. His first big American-fame injection came, of course, from starring roles in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him To The Greek and Arthur. But gradually the focus of his comedy became more and more political, and Timoner’s film comes alive when this phase, which kicked in sometime around 2012, takes over. We’re speaking of a phase in which Brand has more or less forsaken narcissism in and of itself (well, mostly) and has resolved to be, as he explained during a relatively recent q & a, “the people’s narcissist.”