Sterling Hayden and I had a few friendly encounters in ’77, ’78 and ’79 — twice on the set of Frank Pierson‘s King of The Gypsies and two or three times at his home in Wilton, Connecticut, where I went to high school for two years. I loved him because he reminded me of my eccentric grandfather on my father’s side, and because he was one the most emotionally vulnerable guys I’ve ever known. Vulnerable and yet brusque when he needed to be. Literally twitching with this or that source of guilt, uncertainty or existential angst. Ignore the beginning and start at 2:40 — and just listen to the man.

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A smattering of quotes from American Hustle director-writer David O. Russell, as to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn during a Nantucket Film Festival chat: “American Hustle [will be] like visiting another country, where the women and the men dress and behave in certain ways. That in itself is riveting. They sweat life and death through stakes that are terrifying. What they go through is almost like being in a boxing ring. You’re either going to get knocked out or knock the other guy out.

Christian “combover” Bale between takes of American Hustle shoot.

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No film reduces me to mush like The Wizard Of Oz. Every damn time. It’s that vulnerable, open-hearted, lay-it-down Judy Garland performance. (She really meant and felt every line.) Bert Lahr and Jack Haley‘s New York accents have been making me chuckle or decades. And those song lyric rhymings. “For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the young in heart, and time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion.” I know that seeing it in IMAX 3-D is going to be at least interesting. The 2D version will always be there.

This film gets better and better the more I think about it. A legendary work always does this. Initial viewing yields high pleasure and satisfaction but you’re not quite levitating. Then it kicks up the next day. Two weeks later you’re telling everyone you meet about it (even cab drivers). Two months later it’s really gotten better, and you’re telling yourself “this is so good that the Academy will probably ignore it.” Wait…am I setting the stage of an Inside Llewyn Davis backlash?

Wells to Disney NYC Publicity Reps: “I brilliantly took the wrong train (south instead of north) and wound up arriving late at tonight’s Lone Ranger all-media at the Regal E-Walk. At 7:18 pm, to be precise. And I was told by theatre management that you and yours had declared the screening closed. May I ask why you would do that? Have you ever heard of people arriving late due to mishaps? Don’t most screenings start about ten minutes late anyway?

“I experienced a lot of stress, sweat and trouble to get to this screening, and I think it’s a teeny bit inconsiderate that Disney would say no to a latecomer. Who cares if I miss Johnny Depp in his Little Big Man makeup at the beginning? You should always wait for stragglers to show up. It’s simply good manners.”

Eight weeks ago I paid a secret visit to the set of George Clooney‘s Monuments Men in Germany’s Harz mountains. It wasn’t on the level of Henry Kissinger‘s secret visit to China to arrange for Richard Nixon‘s 1972 state visit, but when Sony publicity told me to keep mum until after shooting wrapped on 6.26, I gave them my word. Yes, I’d previously told HE readers I was doing it, but then I clammed up and pretended I’d never posted such a thing. My mother called from Connecticut to ask where I was. “I can’t say, mom,” I replied, “but I can tell you this much — I’m definitely not visiting a movie set.”

On the set of Monuments Men in Bad Grund Germany on 5.6.13: Producer & co-writer Grant Heslov, star-director-producer & cowriter George Clooney.

The outdoor mine-shaft set that was Ground Zero on the day I arrived.

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Deadline‘s Nancy Tartaglione has been “told” that Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color, the epic-length lesbo love story with the hot sex scenes that won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, will not be submitted as France’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Feature, and is therefore out of the race before it begins.

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If someone told me that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me is some kind of dry put-on doc about a fictional ’70s band that never quite made it, I would have said “okay, fine.” They were 100% real, of course, but I’ve never effing heard of these guys. I didn’t hear one or two of their songs and go “meh.” I didn’t like one of their singles but then kind of forgot about them. I’ve flat-out never heard of them. So they were definitely doing something wrong in some way. I would have at least picked up on a fragment of their lore, their sound…something would have registered.

The Lone Ranger, currently earning a 25% Rotten Tomatoes rating, “is a catastrophe of tone, a truly tortured screenplay that seems embarrassed by its central character, and at two-and-a-half hours, it may be the single most punishing experience I’ve had in a theater so far this year,” writes HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny. “This is a terrible film by any standards. Overlong, with a script that reads like a notes session no one ever organized into something coherent, and totally confused about what audience it supposedly plays to, The Lone Ranger is grim, ugly, and deeply unpleasant.”

Which means, of course, that The Lone Ranger will (a) probably win the weekend’s box-office crown and (b) Disney will soon announce the green-lighting of a sequel.

“At one point in the film, William Fichtner‘s villain cuts a man’s heart out of his chest and, in front of the immobilized Lone Ranger, eats it,” McWeeny says. “I repeat. He cuts the man’s heart out. And then he eats it. And this is a big summer Disney movie? Really?”

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When was the last time a big-budget or indie-level action-thriller (or cop-vs.-bad-guy film) was made with even semi-realistic brushstrokes? You know…you’re watching this or that activity and your sense of reality and plausibility don’t feel rudely violated? Remember how it felt to watch No Country For Old Men for the first time? A bad guy, cops, chases, attack dogs, metal slugs in forehead, blood on the floor, life-of-death coin tosses, all that good stuff…and it all happened within a realm that you could easily accept as rooted in (cough) “reality”…you know, that combination of occasionally drab naturalism and shifting weather patterns and laws of physics and cosmic fatalism that guys like Julius Caesar and King Henry II (played twice by Peter O’Toole) and Woody Guthrie and Steve McQueen lived by?

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It wasn’t just the raptor hate directed at the Gandolfini funeral piece that slowed me down. Okay, that was half of it but there’s another reason. I haven’t been banging out six or seven pieces per day because I’m feeling kinda serene and dreamy and…oh, fuck it, I feel happy. Because of a lady, all right? One of those once-in-a-decade things. Connection, trust, touch, comfort, serenity…when the right combination kicks in you’re finished. Then again finishing or anticipating each other’s sentences is pretty great. Yeah, the feeling is mutual and all that. This morning I said to her, “I guess this is what being happy is like. You don’t feel like working that much.” All I know is that I have to push pieces out now, and before it was mostly a matter of opening the door and they would run out on their own steam.

It’s bad form to linger. I think we all know this. Keep moving, don’t look back. And so you and Noah Baumbach have this film in the can called Untitled Public School Project, described as “another New York-set film co-written with Gerwig, reportedly ‘looser and wonkier‘ than Frances Ha…costarring yourself and Lola Kirke and comparable on some level to The Great Gatsby and Something Wild (or so Baumbach has indicated) and slated for release in 2014.

But I took the A train up to the IFC Center last night, you see, and I saw Frances Ha again. My first viewing was at Telluride last September. We spoke there at that Film Society of Lincoln Center party with guys like Scott Foundas and Ed Lachman hanging around. (You also spoke to my son Jett.) Anyway I just want to tell you how unusually radiant and wide-open you are in Frances Ha given your character’s faint depression and uncertainty about almost everything. Such a vulnerable, excited state of being and aliveness…live-wire, super-exposed, open-nerve stuff. People say “award-calibre” too often, but this is award-calibre. I just wanted to share this.