I intend to purchase the Bluray of George Roy Hill‘s The Sting when it comes out in June. I can’t find a link but Pauline Kael allegedly wrote, “What is this movie about anyway?” Answer: Emotional comfort in the form of assured professional craft. It’s about conning people into caring about a shallow story with no themes or subcurrents whatsoever. It’s about keeping them intrigued even though the good-guy con artists have the upper hand all the way.

18 months ago I wrote that the Chicago Limited poker-game scene “is the most satisfyingly shot and performed scene of its type in Hollywood history because it’s not about poker, but about two cheats trying to out-fuck each other. Paul Newman‘s smug and rascally confidence is key, but the whole thing really depends upon Robert Shaw‘s seething rage — the scene wouldn’t play without it. It’s all about boiling blood.

“I can watch this scene all day long and never get bored because it’s perfectly shot, acted, lighted and timed. It’s the kind of thing that big-studio movies used to do really well. The emphasis was just so.”

In 2008 director Rob Cohen (The Fast and The Furious) told the following story to reporter Germain Lussier of the Times Herald, a Hudson Valley newspaper:

“I was a reader for 100 bucks a week for a big agent named Mike Medavoy, who went on to be a studio head and producer,” Cohen began. “Mike put me in this cubbyhole and they hadn’t had a reader in about a month and the backup was enormous in this agency because I was reading scripts for all the agents. So I was in this little cubbyhole piled floor to ceiling with unread scripts and I began to develop a little code unto myself. Like ‘I will never read two scripts in a row with yellow covers.’ Or ‘On Wednesday, I only read scripts with blue covers.’

“So there are all these piles, and Wednesday came and I pulled this script out of the bottom of heap. I had to read five scripts a day and write the coverage on them, basically reading 600 pages of material and writing 10 pages of material a day, which is a lot. So I started to read this script like you begin to read all scripts, like, dubious, because after you’ve been disappointed so many times reading, ‘When am I going to read a really good script?’

“And so I kept turning the pages on this one and it got better, then it got better and it got better and I realized that finally at the end I had been conned and the audience had been conned just like any other long con or short con in the movie. I flipped out and I wrote this glowing two-page synopsis and opinion, that I still have framed in my office, in which I fully went on record as this is the great American screenplay and this will make an award-winning, major-cast, major-director film.

“And the agent, Medavoy, came into my cubbyhole after he read the coverage and said, ‘How good is this script?’ and I said, ‘It’s as good as I just told you.’ And he said, ‘I’m going to try to sell it this afternoon and if I don’t you are fired, so tell me how good the script is.’ I said, ‘You can fire me if you don’t sell it.’

“And he went out, called a few people at Universal and the script was bought that day. And by the end of the week, it had Newman and Robert Redford and George Roy Hill reprising their relationships from Butch Cassidy.'”

Martin Scorsese‘s brief discussion last night of New York, New York (“I tried, I tried”) reminds me of a January 2010 post called “Honest Failure,” to wit: “Very few people feel much affection for New York, New York. It has one terrific scene — i.e., when Robert De Niro is thrown out of a club that Liza Minelli is performing in, and he kicks out several light bulbs adorning the entrance way as he’s manhandled out by the manager and a bouncer — but otherwise I’ve never wanted to re-watch it on DVD.

“But I’ve always liked Pauline Kael‘s line about New York, New York being ‘an honest failure,’ and I’m wondering what other films could be so described?”

Films that didn’t sell many tickets, I mean, and perhaps were critically dumped on besides, but which had a certain unmistakable integrity and stuck to their guns and did what they did without any crapping around. Movies that gave it to you straight and clean.

Here’s my idea of an honest failure: Freddy Got Fingered. The script, at least, was really up to something. The movie captured about 75% or 80% of what was on the page, but the idea and the current were exceptional. I laughed out loud at portions of it, and I almost never do that.

We all run into films every so often that seem exceptional in a deep-down way. Not just in a particular-personal vein but smacking of some kind of profound life-lesson and/or greatness of theme that seems to reach out and strike a universal chord. Or they deliver an emotional connection that seems to reflect our commonality in some rich and resonant fashion. And yet — here’s the rub and the shock — much or most of the world doesn’t agree. Almost everyone you know and nearly every other critic seems bored, unmoved, mocking, snide.

Last night GQ‘s Logan Hill spoke to Martin Scorsese at a Soho House fundraiser for Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and they talked a little bit about vampires, zombies, a 2008 Mark Price zombie movie called Colin and Scorsese’s own, dearly lamented New York, New York:

Scorsese: The vampire thing always works for some reason. Always works. I happen to like vampires more than zombies.

Hill: Why?

Scorsese: Well, a vampire, quite honestly, you could have a conversation with. He has a sexuality.

Hill: And you don’t want to get kissed by zombie.

Scorsese: Yeah. I mean the undead thing…zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them. It’s a whole other thing that apparently means a great deal to our culture and our society.

There are many, many books written about it and many movies. I saw one in London when I was doing Hugo. I saw one late at night one weekend. It was called Colin, by a young filmmaker [Marc Price]. He shot it, I think, digitally by himself, edited it himself. It was savage. It had an energy that took the zombie idea to another level. Really interesting filmmaking. Disturbing.

Hill: Some directors want to check off these genre boxes: a comedy, a horror film, musical, a sci-fi film. Do you think about it like that?

Scorsese: I thought that in the ’70s. I tried. I really tried. I mean, we did an exploitation film right away, Boxcar Bertha, which was in the new genre of Bonnie and Clyde at the time. Now that’s gone. Mean Streets was Mean Streets. If anything, its lineage was as a film because it was really a story about friends and myself and my father. In any event, it had ties to the early gangster films of Warner Brothers in the 1930s. So, that’s about it.

But the rest, I tried. New York, New York, I tried something there. But I didn’t know. I mean Francis Coppola at the time said you have to stay within the conventions of the genre. I said, ‘I’d like to change it.’ He said, ‘It’s not going to work.’

I was purging spambots this morning and in a hurry, and without realizing it I erased all the comments from yesterday and this morning. Profuse apologies. This kind of thing will never reoccur once WordPress is fully installed.

A typical grain-monk sentiment is in this review of Universal Home Video’s Buck Privates Bluray, courtesy of Bluray.com’s Jeffrey Kaufman: “Is there DNR? Yes. Is it horrible? [That] depends on one’s tolerance for a digitally scrubbed image. There’s still grain in this presentation, but it has been diminished. The noise reduction is not as dramatic as in many Universal catalog releases, and the studio seems to be gaining cognizance (albeit too slowly for some) of how their efforts are being greeted by potential consumers.”

I love Universal’s Psycho Bluray, which has certainly been been DNR’d. It’s one of the most soothingly beautiful black-and-white Blurays I’ve ever owned, and it ticks me off knowing that if monks like Kaufman had their way it would be covered in grain. (On the other hand I would like to see a truer Bluray representation of the real Spartacus.) If loving that Psycho Bluray is wrong, I don’t want to be right. The grain-monk community is a very small clique of elite snobs who are so caught up in grain savoring that they can’t see the forest for the trees. “The people” (i.e., peons like myself) like a good sharp image, period. I personally can’t wait to take a bath in the DNRing of Buck Privates.

Sooner or later the Greta Gerwig relationship movie will happen. As good as Greenberg only better. A voice is telling me this probably won’t be it, but sooner or later it’ll come to pass. I hope. Maybe.

Everyone loves the plan for a new Alamo Drafthouse to occupy Manhattan’s long-struggling Metro Theatre (2626 Broadway, between 99th and 100th) by sometime next year. This is especially good news at a time when the classic theatrical experience seems to be in decline, at least in terms of the quality of the audience. It’s no secret that more and more theatres are attracting uncouth texting hordes while more and more discriminating types are opting for digital downloads at home.

Most of the patrons of the Metro Drafthouse, I’m guessing, will be Columbia University cineastes — a good fit given the famous “no talking” policy enforced by Alamo Drafthouse management. But ask anyone who’s ever lived on the Upper West Side and has seen a film or two with an urban audience, and they’ll tell you there’s a fundamental rift waiting to happen. The Alamo guys are going to have to ease up. No talking among patrons, perhaps, but “commenting on the action” and “talking back to the screen” will have to skate.

Less than a year ago N.Y. Times reporter Julie Satow wrote that Albert Bialek, owner of Manhattan’s long-struggling Metro Theatre (2626 Broadway, between 99th and 100th Street) was “in discussions to convert the Metro into a new home for Wingspan Arts, a 10-year-old nonprofit group that provides arts education for some 6,000 students in New York City, New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut.” Where’d that one go?

It was reported today that the MPAA has given Lee Hirsch‘s Bully a PG-13 rating after all. The decision was ratified after three f-bombs that nobody remembered hearing in the first place were removed from the soundtrack. The MPAA is also easing up on its 90-day rating change rule, permitting Bully to open in 55 territories on 4.13 with the PG-13 rating. Can we agree at this point to never discuss Bully‘s MPAA rating ever again?

If I was Jim Cameron I would move mountains in order to direct a nice, modest, middle-range relationship movie. Or a nice, midsized American political drama. Or anything at all in the middle range. I’d want the world to know that my films don’t have to be big or super-expensive or push the technological envelope. Most of what constitutes “human drama” happens in the modest middle regions, and I wouldn’t want to go through life suggesting that I don’t get that.

I suggested this notion to Cameron in late ’97 from the offices of People, when we did a Titanic phoner. I may have actually said “you should do a My Dinner With Andre-type thing, just to fuck with people’s heads”…or words to that effect.

I haven’t put enough effort into developing relationships with reliable tecchies who can help with issues like data migration. HE’s regular tech guy has been otherwise engaged so over the last four weeks I’ve hired two freelance guys to migrate Hollywood Elsewhere from Movable Type to WordPress, and they’ve both failed miserably. The first turned out to be a psychotic flake, and the second guy — a resident of Dana Point and an HE reader for the last two or three years — turned out to be comically unreliable and also a loon.

Two weeks ago he disappeared without a peep due to a three-day bout of meningitis in the hospital. (Or so he said.) I’d been feeling worried again because I hadn’t been able to reach him for the last two days. Last night his mother called and confessed that last Monday he was arrested for driving with a suspended license, and is now in jail in Santa Ana, awaiting a 4.17 court hearing.

I work hard, don’t drink, love my cats and this my life? I’m dealing with a guy who can’t complete a freelance job because the cops have come to his home and cuffed him and put him behind effing bars? This is what happens when you improvise and decided to trust intelligent-sounding people who seem smart and reasonable over the phone.

Anyone who drives with a suspended license poses a serious threat to the safety of any community so unless somebody posts bail ($17,500) the authorities won’t let this guy out for another two weeks, give or take. So now I have to find a third person to take over and finish the job. I’ve re-appealed to HE’s technical consultant plus another person I know. The Santa Ana jail guy had allegedly moved the migration along to a fairly advanced stage, or so he claimed last weekend. What a calamity this whole effort has been.

Mouse, my obese, four year-old Siamese male, goes out every night from 9 or 10 pm until crash time around midnight or so. I clap and he comes running from the shadows. Last night around 12:45 am I heard him yowling in that distress-call sort of way that cats use when they’re scared. He’d gotten himself trapped inside the outdoor backyard area of Le Pain Quotidien, which is right next door. There’s a big gate that the employees close and lock when they go home, and Mouse was on the wrong side of it.

I went outside and told Mouse to hang on. The gate has five or six inches of free space so I called him over to see if he could slide under, or could be pulled under. But Mouse was too fat. I was about to haul myself over the gate, which is about eight or nine feet tall, and go through the whole strained-exertion, T-shirt-ripping, pulling-a-ligament routine. Then I suddenly said “eff it” and called the West Hollywood fire station. They asked for details and said to hang tight. They showed up ten or twelve minutes later — four guys in their late 20s to mid 30s. No fire hats but rubber boots and T-shirts and overalls and all the rest of the unifirm.

One of the guys leaned over an adjoining wall and used a long wooden pole to open the two or three metal slide bolts on the gate, and the gate swung open. Mouse and I were relieved and very grateful.

Thanks to the good firemen of West Hollywood, and no, I didn’t buy them a 36″ pizza or a 24-pack of beer. That would be patronizing. That would be me saying “you guys are a team of really nice, good-hearted, blue-collar schlubs in the Denis Leary mold, and I appreciate what you did.” This is West Hollywood. There’s a decent chance that one or two of the guys who visited last night were gay and perhaps more health-conscious than your average Rescue Me-type firefighter, and therefore don’t drink beer or eat pizza or watch ESPN. Maybe I’ll bring them a plant or something. I need to give this some thought.