Okay, if they come out with a really nice-looking Duck, You Sucker Bluray (and if they don’t call it A Fistful of Dynamite), I might watch it again. Maybe. But I’m more or less at peace with never seeing this late-period Spaghetti western ever again. I’m not saying I hate it. I’m saying I can live with having just seen it once.
Early this afternoon People‘s Stephen M. Silverman delivered the first-anywhere image of Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock from the currently shooting Hitchcock, which used to be titled “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” when I read the script…what, four or five years ago?
Anthony Hopkins (r.) as Alfred Hitchcock (l.). I’ve already spotted a problem — Hitch’s hair grew only on the sides but it was thicker and clearly longer than Hopkins’ hair, which is quite thin and too closely cropped. Why do they let this stuff happen? How hard can it be to match hairstyles?
Hitchcock began shooting late last week under director Sacha Gervasi (Anvil!). It costars Helen Mirren as Alma Reville, Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh (bad casting), Jessica Biel as era Miles and James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins.
The credited screenwriters are John J. McLaughlin and Stephen Rebello. Rebello’s 1999 book is the seed of the thing.
For the last seven years of so I’ve been a huge fan of the Snob dictionary books (film, rock music, food, wine) that David Kamp and collaborators have written. There’s a new one excerpted in the current Vanity Fair called “The TV Snob’s Dictionary.” A tip of the hat to Zohar Lazar‘s illustrations.
Like the previous Snob books, the latest is exquisitely written. Every sentence is a Hope diamond, chiseled and honed and phrased to perfection with just the right seasoning of know-it-all attitude.
My favorite passage from the Film Snob Dictionary: “The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge. The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff — the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films.”
American Bandstand host and rock music-promoting smoothie Dick Clark has left the earth. He died earlier today of a heart attack at age 82. Clark’s peak influence period was from the mid ’50s to early ’60s. In Eisenhower-era America early rock music (i.e., “Hound Dog” Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.) had a slightly racy and raunchy vibe. Clark came along and basically sold watered-down rock to middle-class America (kids, parents, advertisers) by making it seem safe and unthreatening. Which wasn’t hard.
Clark’s hottest period, then, was the late ’50s to pre-British Invasion early ’60s when pop and early Motown and “wop rock” and teen bubblegum tunes ran the hit parade — Ricky Nelson, Fabian, Danny and the Juniors, Frankie Avalon, Dion and the Belmonts, the Four Seasons, etc.
Clark loved ’50s and ’60s music, for sure, but he was first and foremost (in my eyes, at least) a hustler and a businessman whose eye was always on the dollar. I mean, the man’s name was all but synonymous with Beech-nut spearmint gum and the term “flavorific.” Beech-nut spearmint gum, Beech-nut spearmint gum, Beech-nut spearmint gum, Beech-nut spearmint gum, Beech-nut spearmint gum, Beech-nut spearmint gum…until they’re repeating it in their sleep and it’s coming out of their ears. Hammer it, hammer it!
Clark was always so handsome and young-looking and constantly active — the very model of a guy who seemed to live right, eat right, always stay trim and never age that much. But sooner or later the natural process starts weakening and taking you down and then your number comes up and that’s it.
Michael Cieply has tapped out a 4.18 N.Y. Times article (which will appear in Sunday’s print edition) about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master (Weinstein Co., 10.12). The piece is titled “Filmmaker’s Newest Work Is About…Something” and is subtitled “Paul Thomas Anderson Film May Be About Scientology.” The basic “tell” is that PTA’s film is partly about a figure who could be L. Ron Hubbard (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and is largely about the beginnings of Scientology, at least in broad historical spitball terms.
So the article, no offense, doesn’t exactly advance the narrative since people have been batting around the Scientology connection angle for quite some time.
Anderson wouldn’t talk to Cieply but Cieply spoke to a Scientology spokesperson, and he quotes from a short piece I wrote last September when I spoke to Hoffman at a party for The Ides of March. Plus the article has some cool black-and-white location photos of actors hired to perform in a period scene from the film.
Key passage #1: “Anderson has declined to speak publicly about the movie…but the details suggest a story inspired by the founding of Scientology, and that has provoked industry whispers. With that church’s complicated Hollywood ties and high-profile adherents like Tom Cruise, a film even loosely based on it will guarantee discussion upon its release.”
Key passage #2: “With The Master Mr. Anderson will tell a dual tale. The first is that of a boozy Navy veteran, played by Joacquin Phoenix, who shares what Mr. Anderson’s associates say are accidental similarities with the filmmaker’s father, who died in 1997. The elder Anderson was a Navy vet who served in the Pacific during World War II, and, like [Pheonix’s character], was born about 90 years ago.
“The second story is that of Lancaster Dodd, who is eerily referred to in a screenplay Mr. Anderson initially wrote for Universal Pictures only as ‘The Master’ or ‘Master of Ceremonies.’ Played by Mr. Hoffman, he is the red-haired, round-faced, charismatic founder of that most Californian of phenomena, a psychologically sophisticated, and manipulative, cult.
“Dodd was inspired by — though not entirely modeled on — Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard,” Cieply writes.
Here’s what I wrote about my chat with Hoffman last September:
“At last night’s Ides of March party Phillip Seymour Hoffman — a.k.a. ‘Philly’ — insisted that Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which he just finished filming, is ‘not a Scientology film.’ But I’ve read an early draft and it seems to be about a Scientology-like cult, I said to him. And I’ve read about the parallels. “I don’t know what you’ve heard and what script you’ve read,” Hoffman replied. “Trust me, it’s not about Scientology.”
“Maybe not specifically or literally, but there are just too many proofs and indications that The Master (or whatever it’s eventually going to be called) is at least about a cult with a charismatic L. Ron Hubbard-type leader that could be seen as a metaphor for Scientology. At least that.”
There’s a 4.18 Variety story from Nick Vivarelli in Rome about a new “redux” version of Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time in America (’84) that will screen next month in Cannes. Halfway through the piece is the following: “Redux adds 40 minutes of original footage to the 229-minute running time.” In other words, it will run 269 minutes, or a minute shy of four and a half hours.
So why didn’t Vivarelli or his editors simply say that? Declaring that Once Upon A Time Redux adds 40 minutes of footage to the 229-minute running time is like describing the 44 year-old Judd Apatow as a guy who’s kept a grip on mortality for 12 years since turning 32.
No journalist covering Cannes 2012 is going to sit through a 269-minute time machine zone-out…nobody except for fringe Leone fanatics and sentimentalists who go to older films to weep about their lost youth. There’s too much to cover at Cannes and too little time as it is. That said, I would love to see the Redux version some other time. Maybe it’ll play at the American Cinematheque or LACMA later this year.
Excerpts from OUATIA‘s Wikipage: (a) “The original shooting-script, completed in October 1981 after many delays and a writers’ strike that happened between April and July of that year, was 317 pages in length” (b) “At the end of filming, Leone had about 8 to 10 hours‘ worth of footage. With his editor, Nino Baragli, Leone trimmed this down to about almost 6 hours, and he originally wanted to release the film in two movies with three-hour parts” (c) “The producers refused (partly due to the commercial and critical failure ofBertolucci’s two-part Novecento) and Leone was forced to further shorten the length of his film, resulting in a completed (i.e. scored, dubbed, edited, etc.) film of 229 minutes.” And then the Ladd Co. ogres cut it down even further to 139 minutes, and it was this version that went out to theatres in the initial general release.
So there are now three versions of the film: the 269-minute Redux version, the 229-minute version and the all-but-disappeared 139-minute version, which Encore reportedly aired in 2009.
It’s long been my opinion that Gerritt Graham is one of the greatest under-used comic actors in motion picture history. I believe this because of two performances he gave eons ago — the drugged-up rock star “Beef” in Phantom of the Paradise (’73) and Jeff, the wildly superstitious guy who’s terrified of driving a red car in Robert Zemeckis‘s legendary Used Cars (’80). Anyone who’s seen the latter remembers Graham’s hilarious “too fuckin’ high!” scene…a classic.
And don’t forget the madness of Frank McCrea (i.e., the high prices monster) either.
I failed earlier today to remember William Finley, the anguished central figure in Brian DePalma‘s Phantom of the Paradise (’73) who died four days ago in Manhattan, at age 71. It would appear that Finley was a fine fellow but face it — the world took note of his acting career mainly because of his roles in DePalma films (Sisters, The Wedding Party, The Black Dahlia).
Finley hit the mark in Phantom, portraying Winslow Leach and pouring his heart out for Jessica Harper, etc. But the stand-out performance in that flamboyant glamrock satire came from the brilliant Gerritt Graham as “Beef”…no?
My memory of John Frankenheimer‘s Black Sunday (’77) was that it wasn’t a great thriller but a relatively decent one with a few exceptional action sequences. Not true. I saw it Sunday night at the TCM Classic Film Festival, and everything about it felt off-balance, strained, unconvincing and generally second-rate. Sometimes it’s better to leave well enough alone and not revisit an older film.
There’s a hospital scene in which Robert Shaw‘s character, an Israeli Mossad-type agent called Major David Kabakov, is laid up with injuries. His partner and best friend, Robert Moshevsky, is played by Steven Keats. The scene begins with Marthe Keller‘s Dahlia Iyad, a Black September terrorist, dressed as a nurse and slipping into the hospital (located somewhere in Los Angeles) to kill Shaw. Keats spots her about to go into his room and asks who she is, and tells her they need to go downstairs and check with security to make sure she’s okay.
The fact that Keller speaks with a thick German accent should be a huge red warning light for Keats, but he doesn’t seem overly concerned. Then he goes into an elevator with Keller and turns his back, looking at the floor-indicator panel while Keller stands behind him. When the doors open on the bottom floor Keats is lying dead from a lethal hypodermic that Keller has shoved into his neck artery. Repeat after me: a Mossad agent is going to turn his back on a suspicious nurse with a German accent inside an elevator?
Black Sunday is peppered with ridiculous scenes like this, or with aspects that don’t work or which seem shoddy, or with bad acting or dialogue that strains credulity.
Black Sunday came right after Frankenheimer’s relatively decent French Connection II, but I’ve always believed it was the first significant manifestation of his alcoholic downswirl period. His Wiki page says the following: “Black Sunday tested very highly, and Paramount and Frankenheimer had high expectations for it. When it failed to become the hit that was expected, Frankenheimer admitted he developed a serious problem with alcohol. He is quoted in Charles Champlin‘s biography as saying that his alcohol problem caused him to do work that was below his own standards, such as Prophecy (1979), an ecological monster movie about a mutant grizzly bear terrorizing a forest in Maine.”
Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner has written a good, well-sourced article about the egoistic, reckless mentality propelling some Hollywood hotshot poker games, particularly that infamous Tobey Maguire game that Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon occasionally attended before it all went kablooey after that lawsuit, etc.
“Actor and lifelong poker player Kevin Pollak never played in Maguire’s game — so named because he is among its highest-profile participants and most faithful attendees. But he did play briefly with some of its mainstays, including Nick Cassavetes, former nightclub impresario Chuck Pacheco (now Cassavetes’ producing partner) and Rick ‘Scum’ Salomon, a featured player on Fox TV’s PokerStars Big Game, who once cleared Pamela Anderson‘s quarter-million-dollar gambling debt in exchange for matrimonial favors. And he’s got the scars to prove it.
“‘Cassavetes is one of the most dangerous players I’ve ever seen at a table,’ Pollak recounts. ‘You have to have a certain level of fearlessness along with savvy. If you add in a reputation and deep pockets – that makes someone dangerous.’
“Playing in a regular game that suddenly went from a thousand-dollar buy-in to $5000 virtually overnight, he found himself across the felt from Cassavetes and the others in what was now a full-contact sport.
“‘It was like being surrounded in the Old West by the best gunslingers in town, and I’m the Sheriff or something,’ says Pollak, who was the original host of the long-running Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo. ‘I was like, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat to get out of this.’ I only played with them for three weeks — three games — and then I said, ‘I’m done kidding myself…you guys are insane.’
“To them, it’s all relative. They play in their regular game [Tobey’s], and this is how they play. It’s a tactic — an investment in the future.
“Nick actually pulled me aside — I got up to go to the restroom, and when I came out, he was waiting for me. He took me into a side room and said, ‘Dude, you’ve got to lighten up. You could kill this game if you stopped being so upset about everyone playing like dicks. This is how we play, and you could be killing these guys, because half of them don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. They just know how to play like a dick. You actually know how the game works, so stop being so pissed off at everyone for over-betting 3-2 off, and take their money.'”
I was watching a Bluray of Bull Durham last night when suddenly this happened on the soundtrack and something inside vaguely melted. Five minutes later I was sampling the other version. Obviously the latter kicks harder but I’m not sure which I prefer.
Orson Welles talking sometime in the early to mid ’60s (to judge by his appearance) about legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland, and discussing in particular Toland’s willingness to go along with whatever brazen ideas Welles had during the filming of Citizen Kane , and how Welles wasn’t innovative as much as unaware of what the rules were. Toland died of a heart attack at age 44 — what could that have been about?
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