Susan Lacy‘s Inventing David Geffen, an American Masters documentary, will air on PBS on 11.20.12. I watched it twice last summer in preparation for a PBS press event with Geffen at the Beverly Hilton. After covering this I posted a combination review and commentary on 7.22. With the show airing in two weeks I might as well re-run the piece.

Inventing David Geffen “is a somewhat candid backrub piece that pretty much allows the 69 year-old supermogul to tell his life story the way he wanted it told. Which feels okay as you’re watching it, I guess. It doesn’t excite but doesn’t offend either. And I watched it twice in a row, which says something.

“Lacy includes an occasional blunt comment (one-time litigant Neil Young shares a few choice phrases) about Geffen’s combative nature and scrappy business dealings so as to give a feeling that the doc doesn’t ‘flatter,’ but it mostly does flatter in a sense because it underlines how an awful lot of people are scared of Geffen, and therefore respectful. They all kiss the ring.

“Lacy’s doc is an engrossing sit because Geffen is a fascinating player, full of emotionality (some of it angry and combative) and contradictions and humor and fierce will. As a columnist I love rich hardballers (Geffen is worth over $5 billion) who are tough and know all the angles and how to play everything to their advantage, but Lacy’s doc is not about that territory. Not really.

“Inventing David Geffen is an agreeable thing, nostalgic for the ’60s and ’70s, flavorful and amusing at times and ‘honest’ as far as it goes but basically friendly and affectionate. Lacy obviously likes Geffen, and after watching her film it’s hard not to feel the same. He’s a kick, he’s been around, he’s lived it, he knows everyone.

“But if after seeing this film you want a less varnished portrait that’s probably closer to the real deal, dust off the late Tom King‘s 2001 biography — “The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys and Sells The New Hollywood.” Now that had real juice and adrenalin and aroma and nerve, you bet! Geffen hated it, calling it a hatchet job and conniving and agenda-driven, but if you read Lisa DePaulo’s June 2001 New York article about how King and Geffen’s relationship began amiably with a written agreement to give King access and then deteriorated and got worse and worse until everything was poison, it’s hard to accept Geffen’s view that King just set out to trash him with little regard for truth or fairness or appropriate journalistic standards.

During the PBS press q & a event Geffen said he’d “had no input into this film, honestly,” referring to Lacy’s doc. “I had nothing to do with the makeup of those questions. I wanted to tell the story as accurately as I can. I had no idea what this was gonna be. I didn’t think I was a good candidate for this thing. But I was happy with it.

“I’m proud of all the things I’ve done,” he said. “I [see] this film and I think, ‘wow, you did have all that.’ I don’t think about the past. I think about what I’m doing now. I really don’t reflect on my career. I don’t like to talk about myself. I avoid it as much as possible. When I saw the film, I thought ‘wow’…I was impressed.”

All through the sometimes depressing and occasionally scary fall election season N.Y. Times Fivethirtyeight columnist and stats guy Nate Silver chilled out the entire liberal community from Seattle to Miami, San Diego to Bangor. I slept better because of this guy. He recently projected Obama’s electoral count to be 300-plus, and he was right. Obama won all the swing states except North Carolina, had a “pretty decisive win,” etc. And yet Silver wasn’t that good last year at predicting Oscars.

During last night’s ABC election coverage Diane Sawyer was clearly not her usual self. Tipsy, slurry, feeling no pain, three sheets to the wind. Speaking as an ex-drinker, I think I know the behavior. Look at George Stephanopoulos as she gets into trouble. He’s clearly sensing what’s up.

Does Sawyer not have an assistant who’s seen Flight? What did drunk Denzel do before the big testimony scene at the end? Are you going to tell me Sawyer’s assistant couldn’t call a John Goodman-type character and have him rush over to the studio, etc.?

28 or 29 days after Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln debuted at the NY Film Festival, two days before it opens commercially and with nearly everyone in my realm having already reviewed it, my looksee finally happens Wednesday night.

President Barack Obama‘s re-re-election was called at 8:13 pm when MSNBC declared that he’d won Ohio and gone over 270 electoral votes. A little earlier than I expected. All along I predicted that Obama would squeak through to a victory….nope. Nate Silver’s arithmetic is going to prove prophetic. The popular vote, apparently, will go for Obama also — 51,504,366 (49.4%) vs. Romney’s 51,269,650 (49.1%) as of 10:10 pm Pacific. Romney’s concession speech was classy.

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“The story of this election…is demographics,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said a little while ago. “The Republican Party has not kept up with the changing face of America. That explains what’s going on in Florida. That explains what’s going on in Colorado. That explains, frankly, what’s going on in Virginia and North Carolina. The Obama campaign was right. They built a campaign for 21st century America. The Republican Party has some serious soul-searching to do when you look at these numbers…they are getting clobbered among non-white voters.”

I voted around 3:15 pm today. I didn’t stride into the 2nd floor polling room at Le Parc Suites like Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Far from it. I walked in slowly and almost cautiously, stopping every few steps to make sure of my bearings. I spoke quietly and clearly and bent forward slightly when speaking with the somewhat elderly volunteers. In the booth I referred to a sample ballot on my iPhone, and I voted straight Democratic Lefty all the way. Back now with my MSNBC pallies. Time to shower and settle in for a fairly long night. Biggest pain-in-the-ass slowpoke states: Ohio, New Jersey (excused due to Hurricane Sandy), Florida.

The missing portion of the Lawrence of Arabia “balcony” scene, never seen by anyone, is viewable on disc #3 of the new Lawrence of Arabia 50th Anniversary “Collector’s Edition” Bluray, which will set you back $65 bills on Amazon. Here’s a brief taste of that scene. Jack Hawkins‘ dialogue was dubbed by a guy who didn’t sound much like Hawkins.

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I haven’t seen Crossfire Hurricane but I’ve fallen in love with the Bluray of Charlie Is My Darling, a 1965 black-and-white Rolling Stones-touring-in-Ireland movie that runs only 65 minutes but is, I feel, a perfect capturing of a fascinating moment in time — concise, unforced and almost mild-mannered. This is the marijuana calm before the storm, before the ’60s went mad. It’s been beautifully restored with surprisingly punchy, thumping sound.

Thanks to the guys at ABKCO for sending it along. I wasn’t expecting all that much but wow. I could watch it again and again.

Jay Bulger‘s Beware of Mr. Baker may or may not screen in Los Angeles and other pulsing cities, but it’s definitely set for a run at Manhattan’s Film Forum (11.28 to 12.11). It’ll soon screen for NY press. LA screenings are still being figured out. I always got a bigger charge out of Keith Moon‘s pounding and crashing than I did from Ginger Baker‘s, great as he was and is. Partly because Moon was crazier. But also because Moon’s snare-drum hits always struck me as metronomically and microscopically more highly charged (and occasionally even more precise) than Baker’s…just by a tad. To me great drumming isn’t about being a wild man from Borneo…it’s about hitting the beat exactly dead center, exactly right.”

Here’s an E.T. teaser of a preview of an advance trailer of an official non-trailer hors d’oeuvre for the severely troubled World War Z, the Brad Pitt/Marc Forster CG zombie movie. Reshoots, rewrites, multiple screenwriters, Damon Lindelof, hair-pulling, etc.

A Les Miserables TV spot ran this morning on MSNBC. Vivid, special — it woke me up. The finely textured 19th Century atmosphere and the exquisite, carefully composed, grimy-beautiful visual scheme is clearly top-of-the-line, but the emotional atmosphere seems to be (duhh) largely about pain, anguish and affliction more than anything else. Which isn’t necessarily what the film finally is, or what it will finally feel like.

It was observed three weeks ago that the Les Miserables material is familiar and classic and not exactly thrilling in and of itself, and that the stage musical is over 25 years old and quite traditional and retro-defaulty by today’s standards, and that Tom Hooper‘s innovation of having the actors sing live on the set is (this was a Glenn Kenny riff) doesn’t necessarily mean that the film will work splendidly. Live singing may seem to some like an exciting new approach to shooting movie musicals, but what will finally matter is whether or not Les Miserables works altogether…whether the entire working mechanism harmonizes in a way that inspires “wow, that was truly exceptional!” or “that was an entirely respectable rendering of a classic musical that was all the rage in London and Broadway back in the ’80s.”

If the latter impression dominates and Les Miserables becomes merely one of the Best Picture contenders then we’ll have an uncertain and perhaps even mysterious Best Picture race on your hands — an egalitarian race without a frontrunner or heavyweight contender, a competition among jacks and knaves and outliers without a big gorilla (or gorillas) that everyone’s looking to beat.