Go to any wealthy or plain old middle-class bedroom community and you’ll never, ever see junker cars from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s parked on residential streets. But there are all kinds of decades-old beaters in laid-back, nestled-away Ojai, which is a hugely expensive place to live and quiet as fuck — you can hear a pin drop on Main Street.

…I’d want it be over as quickly as possible. So I’d choose a single, ruthless, chomp-and-gulp from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I certainly wouldn’t want to get pecked to death by a Pterodactyl.

Posted on 6.6.18:

…Netflix execs would have Karla Sofia Gascon meet with an “accident” of some kind…just like Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale goes down in a hail of bullets after Robert Duvall‘s Frank Hackett and Faye Dunaway‘s Diana Christianson decide they have no other choice.

Paddy Chayefsky cooked it up, and then Sidney Lumet shot and cut it with all the necessary skills.

Is it fair to say that mainstream media types are being a bit ageist in their reportings and commentaries about Elon Musk‘s young guns, otherwise known as the six DOGE hotshots?

Mainstream mantra: “What the fuck is this?…they’re too young, too brash…what do they know?…this is crazy!”

The subhead of this article is “All The Young Dudes.”

Posted three days ago (2.2.25) by Wired‘s Vittoria Elliot, Dhruv Mehrotra, Zoë Schiffer and Tim Marchman:

Six young dudes, all in or certainly adjacent to their early 20s, are key players in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, “tasked by executive order” with “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

These brazen engineers, every one a gunslinger and all of them absolute government virgins, have basically been given the keys to the inner workings and wirings of the federal kingdom.

The hotshots are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger and Ethan Shaotran.

Even before my movie journalism career launched in the late ‘70s, I always considered it vital to see films that had seriously impacted the culture, even if the general consensus was that they were shit.

So it means something, I think, that I never had the slightest interest in catching Disney’s Freaky Friday, a popular but allegedly pedestrian mother-daughter body-swap comedy, when it opened 22 years ago.

I regard women-friendly films of this type as cotton candy at best, and the costarring of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis seemed, in this context, like a formidable warning if not a flat-out repellent.

I therefore regard a 2.3.25 report that Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who was killed on 1.29.25 when the Blackhawk helicopter she was co-piloting collided with an American Eagle commercial jet and caused the deaths of 64 passengers…reading that Lobach was a fanatical, repeat-watch fan of Freaky Friday is vaguely disappointing at the least, and kind of alienating, truth be told.

The 28-year-old Lobach was six or seven when Freaky Friday opened on 8.4.03. But her family kept re-watching it over and over and over, she later wrote. There’s no accounting for taste in films, needless to add.

…it means the guy in question is almost certainly putting it to the woman in question. He’s at least giving it serious thought.

This Jon Voight-Raquel Welch pic was, I believe, snapped just before the 1975 Oscar ceremony. (Or just after.) Voight’s daughter, Angelina Jolie, who lives to hate and hold grudges, was born three months later (6.4.75).

“Whadaya think of this boner I’ve got here?” — Voight in Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis (‘24).

“Am I a drug-dealer of color? Are we in Inglewood?” — Eric Stoltz to John Travolta in Pulp Fiction (‘94).

Call it vague or paranoid or alarmingly perceptive, but last night I listened to a futuristic nightmare AI scenario. I texted the doomsayer this morning, shared a few thoughts:

“I can’t stop thinking about your gloomy robot forecast.

“Not just AI’s current, ongoing mimicry of most forms of Hollywood ‘creativity’, but its eventual, inevitable conquering…the swallowing of organic Hollywood culture as many of us know it or certainly have known it over the last half-century, and within 20 or 25 years.

“Sutton will turn 29 in 2050, and she’ll be right in the thick of it.

“Right now AI is merely working its way into things by mimicry and flattery, but give it time.

“When did this scenario occur to you? When you first contemplated the implications of HAL nine-triple-zero in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or did the light switch on more recently?

“If it’s a natural conclusion based on experience, have you written any of it down? Even fragments would be great. Last night you seemed to have the diagnosis down cold. You’ve been thinking and refining.

“From Aeschylus and Euripides in 450 to 500 B.C. to as recently as 2015 or 2020, there was only one kind of dramatic writing and crafting — a natural, organic, brain-to-hands-and-fingers process drawn from the rigors of daily life, refined through compression and struggle.

“2500 years of dramatic process and storytelling, and now, human-fallibility-wise, that’s coming to an end.

“I also liked your take on the next seismic shift in filmmaking coming from TikTokers. They’ll be working ‘with’ AI, of course, but indifferently or obliviously or what?

“Do you know any slightly younger creatives who have shared observations along these lines?”

You’d never guess from the Wiki definition, but papaverine is said to be a phenomenal asset as far as attaining flagpole or baseball-bat arousal is concerned.

A friend told me about it last night, and slipped me a couple of doses today at lunch hour. I’ll report back sometime this evening. Prescription only.

It feels so utterly blissful to be back in balmy West Hollywood. Light jacket and scarf weather…good for the soul. I’m feeling the unmistakable eternity of it all…open hearts, perfect grub, good vibrations. Tonight we had dinner with friends at La Bettola de Terroni (225 Larchmont).

I’m thinking about writing a Hollywood book about the deranged and hysterical media war against Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (‘18), but also about something bigger and broader — how the Green Book maelstrom launched the not-fully-concluded era of the woke baddie-waddies —- the censorious, ultra-sensitive identity fanatics who all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to 2024).

With the winds currently shifting and woke mentalism beating a retreat like Napoleon out of Russia, it’s now okay, I’m thinking, to write a book that recounts an honest history about how extreme progressive scolds tried like hell to murder one of the gentlest and most unassuming stories (and a fact-based one at that) about racial reckonings and journeys of self-discovery ever created within the Hollywood realm, and yet how the pissheads couldn’t quite deliver the death blow.

A book (which Sasha Stone was going to co-write with me…now she feels that we’re too far apart on the Trump factor) about how the uglies tried to bludgeon a good, modest little film…how they did everything they could to kill its chances in the Oscar race, and how they wound up failing…tough shit, assholes!

A book about a now-seven-year-old film that didn’t mine as much as gently explore a relatively dark and indecent era in American culture as far as the racial divide was concerned, and yet a film that played its cards just so…deftly, I mean…a film that fair-minded movie lovers fell for and which wound up snagging a Best Picture Oscar.

I’m talking about a film that made Manohla Dargis, Spike Lee, Inkoo Kang, Richard Brody, David Ehrlich and a whole army of progressive haters see red…a movie that led to a thousand cursings and spit-takes.

I’m thinking of a book would examine on a deep-dish, inside-the-beltway basis the blow-by-blow wokester campaign to disembowel Green Book, starting with the big ecstatic debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2018 and ending with Peter Farrelly’s film taking the Best Picture Oscar on 2.24.19, not to mention Mahershala Ali snagging Best Supporting Actor (traitor!).

Augmented, of course, by the usual backstory and perspective reporting — (a) a history of previous takedown campaigns, (b) the eruption of pernicious wokeism itself in ’16 or 17 or thereabouts, (c) a history of the actual 1962 Green Book road trip, (d) a history of the Green Book project. and the various participants, how it all came together, the initial marketing, how the woke resistance formulated, and so on…whizzing bullet by whizzing bullet, grenade by grenade,

I’ve already written a good portion of this saga in Hollywood Elsewhere…I must have tapped out 10 or 12 adversarial columns at the very least.

And yet the hysteria that swirled around Green Book during the last four months of 2018 and the first two months of ‘19 is not a story many people know. [Sasha wrote the next three or four paragraphs.] You’d have to be on the inside of the insular bubble that the Oscars and Hollywood have become….a political climate that began with the emergence of this warm-hearted, crowd-pleasing flick about friendship and tolerance, and yet ironically resulted in one of the screenwriters being banned from the ceremony, the film’s director persecuted on phony sexual assault charges, one of the actors called a racist and a general upending of the way the Academy votes on Best Picture.

The shock of the 2016 Donald Trump election sent Hollywood reeling, but the combination of rising activism and woke ideology collided with old-fashioned storytelling to create a firestorm that the film awards industry still hasn’t recovered from.

The trouble began to brew the year after Trump won the presidency, when La La Land was deemed “racist” and lost to Moonlight. It intensified the following year when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was knocked out of completion because it, too, was deemed “racist.”

Green Book was the film that ignited a guerilla movement of woke scolding, instruction, obstruction and correction. 

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

Given the corrosive reputations of Donald J. Trump and his onetime mentor Roy Cohn, who died from AIDS in the mid ’80s, you might expect some kind of wicked hit job from Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice.

And you’d be…well, partly wrong.

The film leans heavily on the factual record, and so Trump and Cohn don’t exactly come off as honorable or admirable at the end of the day, but they aren’t portrayed as total scumbags either.

Which is a bit surprising. It’s even affecting.

During the first half of The Apprentice Sebastian Stan‘s Trump comes off, believe it or not, like a relatively sympathetic ’70s lad from Queens — a bit naive and unsteady, hungry for fame and fortune, a hard-charging comer trying to learn the ropes and make something of himself as best he can.

Trumpistan gradually succumbs to a kind of cynical, brusque egotism before morphing into out-and-out venality, but in the early stages Stan allows you to actually feel a little something for the guy.

Ditto Jeremy Strong‘s Cohn, who is unmistakably avaricious and reptilian during The Apprentice‘s first half, but gradually registers as half-human when Part Two kicks in.

With Trump having essentially decided to throw personal loyalty to the winds after learning that Cohn is sick with AIDS, the frail, soft-spoken Cohn emerges as a more or less tragic figure — you actually feel a shred of sympathy.

Which is quite a feat considering who and what Cohn actually was.

And here’s another rooting factor, although it may sound a bit hard-edged:

Above and beyond the obvious quality of their Oscar-nominated performances, Stan (now preparing to shoot Fjord for Romanian helmer Cristian Mingiu) and Strong are the only Oscar nominees associated with a thumbs-down message about the real Donald Trump. Today’s version, I mean.

Until recently Emilia Perez star and Best Actress Oscar nominee Karla Sofia Gascon stood to benefit the most from anti-orange sentiment. Several weeks ago THR‘s Scott Feinberg speculated that a vote for the transitioned Gascon could be interpreted as an extended middle finger aimed at you-know-who.

But right now the general consensus is that Gascon’s campaign has self-destructed with those years-old racist tweets, and so at the risk of sounding a bit mercenary, it can be argued that Stan and Strong are now the only viable symbols of anti-Trump industry fervor.

Do I believe that acting Oscars should be bestowed with this kind of political motive? No, I don’t — my feelings about Oscars are too romantic and deep-rooted to allow for this kind of thinking or symbology. But many AMPAS members, I gather, are itching to send a message to MAGA nation. Who am I to say they’re wrong?