In my 4.1 review of Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), I called it “quite the loving valentine…a doc that is always looking to show understanding and affection…no judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away.” The reason for this, of course, is that the doc, which is expertly done and quite moving for the most part, had to go through Tina Sinatra and Frank Sinatra, Jr., who are the gatekeepers. “Rat Pack Confidential” author Shawn Levy commented the other day that “I’m sure Gibney had a very fine line to walk [with Tina and Frank, Jr.] and equally sure that the final product was gone over with extreme care.”

With that in mind, here’s a portion of a q & a between Gibney and Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir:

O’Hehir: “It’s probably not fair to say you go soft. But there are a lot of other narrative approaches one could make to this guy, looking at his history with women, his history with the Mob and the Kennedys, his relationship with race and politics, his switch from the left to the Reagan right, all of that. I completely agree that he’s the greatest popular singer of his period, a guy who blended the jazz and pop traditions like nobody else, an iconic American and an iconic performer. But while your film certainly brings up the darker stuff, you don’t dwell on it.”

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Just over five months ago a N.Y. Times story by Maureen Carvajal announced that a full-length version of Orson Welles‘ never-completed The Other Side of The Wind, which was shot in fits and starts from the early to mid ’70s, would be assembled and screened in May 2015. Carvajal wrote that the producers, particularly Royal Road Entertainment’s Filip Jan Rymsza and even more particularly Welles’ friend and colleague Peter Bogdanovich, who told Carvajal that he’d assumed the responsibility of cutting together the final version, “aim to have it ready for a screening in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth.”

In a 10.29 HE interview I was told by original Wind producer and Welles biogrqpher Joseph McBride that the film might also screen at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off next month.

Well, both scenarios are out the window, McBride now says. The Other Side of the Wind might screen somewhere later this year (Telluride? New York Film Festival?) but forget May 6th and forget Cannes.

“Post-production work on The Other Side of the Wind is underway in France,” McBride told me this morning. “But it won’t be ready in time for this year’s Cannes Film Festival” — a statement that obviously includes Welles’ 100th birthday, which is about five weeks away. “I never thought it could be finished that quickly. A considerable amount of editing and sound work still needs to be done. There are eighteen hours of negative. Welles edited 41 minutes of scenes [before he died]. As Welles used to say, ‘We will sell no wine before its time.'”

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This isn’t just another lifestyle post as it was taken (in early August of 2012) in Monument Valley, which of course was a default scenic backdrop of almost all John Ford westerns from Stagecoach (’39) through Cheyenne Autumn (’64). I was just thinking as I re-watched this how badly I felt for my poor wheezing horse, humping it over those rocky uphill trails with my not-exactly-feathery ass on his back. Here’s that Firetree Inn story again, the one about the hosts with the bizarre personalities.

I’m really going to miss the general spirit, personality and vibe of Barack and Michelle Obama. They are the Kennedys of our era, and the idea of an older, grayer, Lyndon B. Johnson-type administration succeeding them…bummer. I’ll always love Bill Clinton, but I’m really, really not looking forward to eight years of that testy, snippy-mannered, baggy-eyed hag Hillary Clinton. I’ll have no alternative but to vote for her in 2016, of course, as she’ll be the only sane alternative to Jeb Bush or whatever ass-clown the Republicans nominate. But I don’t like her. Never have, never will. The only way I can handle the idea is to tell myself to grow up and forget about having a hip, likable, glamorous President and accept the notion of Clinton as the US of A’s Angela Merkel. I want Elizabeth Warren…please.

“It is a good deal,” President Barack Obama said on Thursday, after the framework of an agreement to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb was announced. If it is good — and that will depend on getting the final settlement done and signed between now and June — it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity. And Republicans in Congress will have failed to thwart it because they embraced [those temptations].

“The G.O.P. did everything that it could to scuttle this deal. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader that will go down in the annals of diplomatic sabotage, and made it harder for American negotiators to demand a deal that the White House itself would find acceptable. They did so even though their ostensible goal—keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power—was the same as the President’s.

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In a British Esquire interview with Miranda Collinge, Mad Max: Fury Road star Tom Hardy says he has “between four and 20 lines” of dialogue in George Miller’s film. (Why not just call it 12 lines?) Either way I love it. Hardy also states that he’s “contracted” for three more Mad Max films, presuming that Fury Road kicks ass commercially and critically. He’s seen Fury Road, of course, and calls it “fucking unbelievable,” but what’s he gonna say? “I’ve never been more excited and out of my comfort zone,” Hardy states.

HE to Hardy, Miller, WB: Four is too many. Just make a nice trilogy and be done with it. Calm down, exhale, don’t be greedy.

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Here’s a clip from Dick Cavett’s Vietnam (PBS, 4.27. 10 pm), a 60-minute doc by John Scheinfeld. It blends a brief overview of the Vietnam War, discussions of that quagmire by guests on The Dick Cavett Show (John Kerry, Warren Beatty, I.F. Stone, Sen. Barry Goldwater, Daniel Ellsberg, Woody Allen, Jane Fonda, Vietnam veteran John Mueller, Sen. Wayne Morse, etc.) and some present-day hindsight from Cavett, Gen. Wesley Clark and historians Timothy Naftali and Fredric Logevall. It’s stirring, angering, well-ordered time travel — brings it all back. I only wish PBS had commissioned a two-hour show.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Sony Pictures has acquired The Wells Initiative, a pitch for a sci-fi/action adventure in which Jeffrey Wells, owner and author of Hollywood Elsewhere, actually experiences the events, screenings, mood swings, wifi failures and occasional thought-quakes that turn up in his daily column. The pitch, Fleming reports, is by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton, authors of Winter’s Knight, the Viking-mythology-tinged origin story of St. Nick and Christmas. The Wells Initiative will be produced by Trigger Street’s Dana Brunetti and Carter Swan. Seriously…this would be just as interesting if not more so than the actual Wells Initiative, which is about H.G. Wells. A reality show at the very least.

As degraded as film culture was when this SCTV bit was shot, it’s gotten much worse since. The idea behind this skit, remember, was not to appeal to film elites but to average Frito-eating, beer-drinking Joes, and yet SCTV producers decided that the name Michelangelo Antonioni as well as the films Zabriskie Point and Blow-Up would resonate with a fair-sized portion of the viewers. How likely is it that an SNL skit today would reference a director of arty-farty VOD films that only semi-serious, half-educated cinephiles have even heard of?

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A fair number of famous, super-gifted 20th Century musicians have managed (or did manage) to age into their 40s and 50s and even beyond — Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, James Brown, Sting, etc. But to go by many Hollywood biopics the majority of them died young from drugs and alcohol abuse. Or certainly before their time. Or suddenly and tragically. Amy Winehouse, Hank Williams, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Contrane, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Edith Piaf, Bix Beiderbecke. Same damn story every time — they grew up hard, found fame with their great gift, burned brightly for a relatively brief time and then keeled over. Where would the American musical biopic be without booze and drugs? Without a pot to piss in, that’s where.

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When a big, stupid, assaultive franchise flick is about to open and break the box-office, as is the case with James Wan‘s Furious 7, most critics play it smart by “reviewing” with a light touch. Like smirking bullfighters, they toy with the beast rather than plunge a lance. “What’s the point of actually taking this one on?,” they seem to be saying. “A pan will just make me and my newspaper or website look old-fogeyish and out of touch with the megaplexers. What the hell…I’ll just ironically admire it and flick my frilly handerchief and make gentle sport of my real feelings.

“And what perverse fun it is, when you think about it, to give a pass to a corporate muscle-car movie that is totally and in fact purposefully opposed to the organic, real-world excitement of a classic fast-car flick like Bullitt or Gone in Sixty Seconds or Drive. The truth is that I don’t like real fast-car movies any more than James Wan does. So I’ll just tee-hee my way through the writing of this piffle of a review and then take a nice lunch…hey!”

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