Radius-TWC and Tom Freston hosted a Monday night gathering for Morgan Neville‘s 20 Feet From Stardom, a likely nominee for Best Documentary Feature. I’ve loved it all year — here’s my initial rave out of last January’s Sundance Film Festival. The party happened at the Polo Private Dining Room at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Neville was there along with costars Merry Clayton and Lisa Fischer, among others. Everyone performed. A smattering of critics and Oscar bloggers were there — Hammond, Karger, Thompson, myself. Here’s a video of Clayton’s big number. I laid down on the floor and held the camera as steadily as I could.

Last night the Aero screened a digitally restored, very slightly expanded version of Michael Mann‘s Thief (’81). Mann showed up for a post-screening q & a. I’m presuming we were shown a DCP. It looked and sounded exquisite. The sound was full and rich and fully audible to the deafest guy in the room. Mighty Joe Young, that Tangerine Dream score. The Bluray streets about a month from now.

This low-rent compilation video of Eastern European car crashes is cooler and funnier (I laughed out loud three or four times) than all of the Justin Lin car stunts in all of the Fast and the Furious flicks put together plus Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Gone In 60 Seconds remake. I love this stuff. Nothing beats reality when it comes to car crashes.

I’ve been sent a copy of Richard Corinder‘s The Shark is Not Working, a Black List script about 28 year-old Steven Spielberg going through hell to make Jaws in ’74 and ’75. I’ve skimmed through about half of it. It’s funny, smart, very well-written, entertaining. But I mainly like it because it simultaneously (a) makes fun of Spielberg for being a talented but shallow popcorn shoveller, and (b) admires and sympathizes with the poor guy for managing to survive a hellish production experience. The big breakthrough happens when Spielberg hits on the idea of (a) barely showing the shark and (b) deciding to rely on John Williams‘ creepy music to excite the audience’s imagination.

A fond but not entirely reverent remembrance of Peter O’Toole by Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy is worth a read. O’Toole wrote two books about his life before he made it big-time — Loitering With Intent: The Child and Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice. McCarthy laments that O’Toole never wrote about his career from Lawrence of Arabia onward.

Everyone wrote yesterday that O’Toole was unfairly robbed of a Best Actor Oscar for his T.E. Lawrence portrayal. But the real robbery happened in April ’65 when his career-peak performance as Henry II in Becket lost to Rex Harrison‘s Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. That’s the Academy for you.

McCarthy saw O’Toole play Professor Higgins, badly, in a 1987 London stage presentation of Pygmalion. I saw O’Toole in that reviled Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980. It was slow and turgid and altogether horrid, and the audience all but booed at the curtain call. The look on O’Toole’s face at that moment was ghastly in itself. I felt sorry for him. I wanted to comfort him on some level. All such thoughts went out the window when I interviewed O’Toole in his Hampstead Heath home two or three days later.

A few slow-on-the-pickup types expressed shock or surprise at yesterday’s Joan Fontaine riff, particularly about how I could never imagine her in a heterosexual context. I was merely saying that I never felt much in the way of animal passion, that’s all. If anything, I said, Fontaine always struck me as vaguely dykey in a kind of old-time closeted sense. I know she was straight — I was talking about what she radiated on-screen. A critic friend wrote a half-hour ago and called this impression “interesting.” He added that “aside from pointing out that [Fontaine] was married four times, I would just add that a witty gay gentleman friend of mine used to squire her around a lot — to the Oscars, etc. — and always said she had the foulest mouth in town and the dirtiest stories about everyone. Caustic, often very funny, sometimes catty to the point of unpleasantness. A female curmudgeon. And hated her sister to her dying day.”

The only two 2013 BlackList scripts that I can at least guess about content-wise are (a) Richard Corinder‘s The Shark is Not Working and Nick Creature and Michael Sweeney‘s The Mayor of Shark City, both about the making of Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws, and (b) Stephany Folsom‘s 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon, which expands on the urban legend (mentioned in Room 237) that Stanley Kubrick was hired by NASA to stage and shoot a fake moon landing in the wake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If anyone has PDFs of these or any other noteworthy Black List screenplays, please send. Here’s an analysis of the whole list.

Produced by, partially written by and co-starring Jonah Hill, 22 Jump Street opens on 6.13.14. I was down with the tone and shape of 21 Jump Street (except for the generic action ending) so this’ll probably be okay. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are directing again. Hill co-penned the story that Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel’s script is based on.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) has announced the nominees for the 19th Annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, and the leaders are 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle with 13 nominations each. To more than a casual extent the BFCA has tended to reflect or predict Academy sentiments (they were the first to signal last year’s Argo rebound) so this is a huge shot in the arm for both films, not to mention the absolute ignominious end for Saving Mr. Banks as a credible Best Picture contender. Pay up, Scott Feinberg!

Gravity did pretty well also with ten nominations, but it’s been downgraded to runner-up status. At this stage of the game it can be fairly said without prejudice or rancor that while Gravity has a clear following, it’s no longer the Big Kahuna of Best Picture contenders. The picture has changed. Right now it’s the masterful Slave vs. the widely admired and enjoyed Hustle. No softies! This is a good thing.

The Wolf of Wall Street, Her, Captain Phillips and Nebraska received six nominations. Inside Llewyn Davis, August: Osage County, Enough Said, Saving Mr. Banks, Iron Man 3 and Rush received four nominations.

The BFCA dropped the ball big-time by failing to nominate The Wolf Of Wall Street‘s Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor or Jonah Hill for Best Supporting Actor. This isn’t just an oversight — it’s an unconscionable “what?”

The BFCA also showed their clubby, mainstream, celebrity-kowtowing colors by failing to nominate Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos for Best Actress. (They chose instead to nominate her as one of year’s Best Young Actor/Actresses — a humiliating consolation prize.) The BFCA did, to be fair, nominate Brie Larson for Short Term 12, but they mostly went for a roster of established, name-brand actresses whose campaigns have been well-funded and vigorously publicized — Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson.

This is a stab at an iPhone obituary for Joan Fontaine, whose death at age 96 was reported today. (I’m sitting at a Pete’s Coffee across the street from the Aero, where Michael Mann‘s digitally reconstituted Thief will screen at 7:30 pm.). I heard of her departure a couple of hours ago, and like everyone else I flashed back to Fontaine’s vulnerable, haunted performance as Laurence Olivier‘s young second wife in David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rebecca, the 1940 melodrama that launched her as a big-name actress.

Fontaine won a Best Actress Oscar for playing another vulnerable, haunted wife (this time betrothed to Cary Grant‘s disreputable Johnny Aysgarth) in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, which opened the following year. But Fontaine seems a bit trapped in this possible-murder tale in more ways than one. Suspicion is a somewhat flawed film because of a notorious cop-out ending. She seems a fool for forgiving and supporting Grant at the end. Rebecca is the better crafted effort, I feel, not to mention spookier (it’s a kind of ghost story) and more atmospheric. Fontaine is much more anguished and aching in it. She carries a greater load on her back.

This is a portion of a DVD Beaver frame capture from the new Arrow Bluray of Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye (’73). So $5000 bills (last printed in 1934) were actually kicking around in the early ’70s? Printed money doesn’t gain in value as the years roll on, of course, but the U.S. Labor Department inflation counter says the purchasing power of $5 grand in ’73 was/is equal to around $26 grand today. So finding a $5000 bill “in a box of Crackerjacks,” as Elliot Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe explained to Mark Rydell‘s Marty Augustine, was quite a discovery.