Because my attention is splattered all over the place and there’s only one of me and because an occasional N.Y. Times editorial will catch my eye, I’ve only just now seen this month-old Elizabeth Warren video (which is mentioned/linked to this 10.17 editorial “Elizabeth Warren’s Appeal”). Sue me, admonish me, slap me around.
“Warren’s larger appea comes from her ability to shred Republican arguments that rebalancing the tax burden constitutes class warfare,” the editorial says. “In a living-room speech that went viral on YouTube last month, she pointed out that people in this country don’t get rich entirely by themselves — everyone benefits from roads, public safety agencies and an education system paid for by taxes. And those who have benefited the most, she says, need to give back more.
“‘You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless!’ she said. ‘Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.'”
So I’m running Tyrannosaur ads to help the film, and Olivia Colman‘s husband and I have arranged for me to do a phoner with her sometime tomorrow. But Strand Releasing is still refusing to screen it for LA movers, shakers & bloggers in a timely manner. The only screening I know about will happen at West L.A.’s Royal Theatre at 10 am or thereabouts on Tuesday, November 8th — three weeks from now, and 10 days before the film opens on 11.18 .
No other screenings have been set, and I double-checked with Strand and its New York pr rep, Falco Ink, just before writing this.
Through my own efforts several noteworthy journalists with the ability to keep the conversation going about Tyrannosaur and Colman’s performance in particular are ready to see it right now, which is a relatively dead time in the calendar and a little more a month before it opens, and Strand has decided to delay showing it until November 8th?
If Strand’s Marcus Hu had been flown down to Mexico and subjected to Manchurian Candidate-type conditioning so that he would return to Los Angeles with the explicit intention of destroying any chance of launching a word-of-mouth campaign for Colman’s shattering performance, he would be playing his cards exactly as he is now.
A morning screening at the Royal Theatre is the pits. Showing your film there at 10 am is a way of saying to critics, “Ladies and gentleman, we are complete losers and so is our film.” I realize that evening screenings at places like the Wilshire Screening Room are on the pricey side — $1500 to $2000, depending on which night, etc. Afternoon screenings can run around $1000 or $1200 or a bit more, depending. So it’s not cheap to hire a room — I get it — but there’s penny-wise and there’s pound- foolish.
Let’s start a Hollywood Elsewhere Tyrannosaur screening room funding campaign right now. All we have to do is raise $2000 for a single evening’s rental. Let’s set a do-or-die deadline of Sunday, 10.23. If you believe in fairies and people power and you feel that exceptional performances like Colman’s deserve their day in the sun, send your Pay Pal dollars to Jeffrey Wells (gruver1@gmail.com). $2000 isn’t that much to raise among 30,000 or so unique readers. I promise I will pass along every nickel to Marcus Hu.
Who cares about this film more, me or Strand?
Has Strand given any thought to passing around a charity bowl at parties? Or asking for modest online donations? Or maybe a little panhandling inside the Westside Pavilion on weekends? Every extra dollar helps.
Has wildcat tweeter Ellen Barkin fired her publicity firm or is she just being spritzy or colorful by saying her “pr peeps can fuck their motherfuckin’ PR selves”? A headache, obviously, for the publicist[s] in question but at the same time it’s hilarious. The woman is manic, fearless…a tweet Valkyrie. We live in public. “Jew. Jew. Jew. Muthafukkin Jewish fuckin’ Jew”…shades of Ginsberg and Burroughs!
If consumed in sufficient quantities, rum can make you feel like you’ve dropped a tab of mescaline. This is a 21st Cenmtury concept, I realize. I wish I’d known about it in the old days but I guess the rum industry wanted it kept quiet. Which reminds me that I haven’t gotten any screening invites to see The Rum Diary. Has anyone?
Philadelphia Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey wasn’t elbowed out of her job like so many film critics have been over the past few years. She opted out, she’s saying, because the 60-hour-per-week pace had become so demanding that she could barely keep up , and because she couldn’t find a way to write book pitches on the side. She wants to write long-form.
Rickey will continue to tap out reviews on the side but only six per month, she says, or roughly 1.5 reviews per week.
A Philadelphia Daily News guy told me this morning that many, many people have been offered buyouts by the Inquirer. Not just editorial but people who work in the printing and distribution end. “There just aren’t a lot of resources over there any more,” he said.
The grind of reviewing so many films was “hard”, Rickey says. Well, yeah…it sure is. I imagine that many, many film writers feel the same way about their jobs. I work 10 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. What Rickey is really saying, I think, is that she sort of doesn’t mind the idea of being semi-retired and not having to work as hard as she once did.
“It’s a great gig you have,” I told Rickey this morning, “and if I were you I wouldn’t give it up for anything, no matter how tired I might be.”
Awards Daily today celebrated its first full year of podcasts. Unfortunately this happened to be a dull week so Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino and I covered the usual topics, etc. But this is a flat period right now — the calm before the storm. It was all we could do to keep from nodding off. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.
From Matt Taibbi‘s 10.12 Rolling Stone article: “Break up the monopolies. Pay for your own bailouts. No public money for private lobbying. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. Change the way bankers get paid.”
If (and I do mean “if”) an Occupy mob was to somehow block the path of Eric Cantor‘s limousine on Pennsyvania Ave. and smash the windows and pull Cantor out and rough him up like a punk and give him a Robert De Niro-in-Taxi Driver Mohawk haircut and rip his clothes off and tie him to a tree and apply a blow torch to certain parts of his anatomy, I’d initially condemn them, as would any responsible citizen…but I’d also try to forgive.
Once-legendary super agent Sue Mengers, whose career peaked from the mid ’60s to early ’80s, died yesterday. She was a bit of a terror in terms of her personality (or so I was always told) but a very tough and shrewd player. Dyan Cannon‘s character in The Last of Sheila was more or less based on Mengers. She was respected and valued and “liked”, but not especially loved…or so I gathered. Here’s an farewell piece written by Vanity Fair‘s Graydon Carter.
Portrait of Sue Mengers painted by Jack Nicholson, as found on this Vanity Fair q & a page.
The Guns of Navarone Bluray looks significantly better than any DVD version I’ve seen. It’s worth owning for that fact alone. Compare, also, the two screen captures and notice how the Bluray version (top) contains just a wee bit more left-right information that the DVD version. As insignificant as this may seem to Average Joes, it matters to twisted Bluray fanatics like myself.
“Playing a bad mother is more taboo than playing a serial killer,” Ellen Barkin recently toldThe Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg about her role in Sam (son of Barry) Levinson‘s Another Happy Day. “It’s just, you know, the untouchable thing.”
As long as we’re talking about attitudinal undercurrents, a friend suggested this morning that Barkin’s current romantic relationship with Levinson — she’s a MILFy 57 and he’s 26 — will somehow work against the film’s rep in some vaguely values-oriented or creatively suspicious or snooty socio-cultural way. I sharply disagreed. People who work together sometimes wind up knocking boots…and so what? If the film is good then the film is good…period. If Barkin is as snappy and snarly as she seems to be in the trailer, nothing else counts.
It certainly doesn’t matter if people who like to share ideas and fluids and whatnot are 30, 20 or 10 years apart in terms of time spent on the planet. Who cares? We’re all going to die eventually so make it and get it while you can. Just don’t hurt anyone and try and be considerate and unselfish.
And I think Barkin’s f-bomb Twitter postings are kind of rad. She’s…I don’t know what she’s doing but she seems to be…what, getting in touch with her inner Bronx girl or something?
“It was hard for me, but I just kept saying, ‘You’ve just got to fucking strap ’em on, and do it, and not be afraid of them not liking you, of being a bad mother, of putting it out there — because it is out there,” Barkin told Feinberg. “That’s also how I felt very early in my career, with a movie like Diner — like, ‘Don’t be afraid to be the girl who thinks she’s ugly ’cause you do think you’re ugly, Ellen.'”
Another Happy Day premiered nine and a half months ago at Sundance 2011 (where I naturally missed it). Phase 4 Films bought it last May. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on 11.18.
Barkin and Levinson “met on the set of an indie movie” — Shit Year? — “in which she was starring and for which he had been brought on to do some emergency rewrites,” Feinberg reports.
“Barkin recalls that after Levinson had been on the set for a full week, he timidly approached her with a script that he had written and asked her if she would be willing to check it out. On the basis of the work that he had done on that film — ‘which was, compared with what they started with, brilliant’ — she agreed, went home and read it, and called him immediately afterwards to tell him she was in. She also signed up to serve as a producer of the film.”
Like any actress of a certain age, Barkin has to hustle to land meaty, attention-getting roles. She respected Levinson’s writing, like his Another Happy Day script, saw there was a good part for her, decided to bankroll or partially bankroll the film (and thereby boost her own profile and career) and then the romantic thing happened along with everything else. Apparently. That’s how it usually goes.
“His writing was just so off-the-charts,” Barkin said, “with a voice that I have never heard before. I think Sam Levinson is really one of the leading voices of a new generation of American filmmakers, and I think it’s a voice that’s going to be talking to us for decades. It’s just very impressive.”
Their relationship will last as long as it lasts. When one or the other begins to feel that his or her interests aren’t being served as well as before or he/she could do better with someone else…we all know how it works. Eat, drink and be merry, and serve the Movie Godz as best you can.
In a 10.16 post on his site, Zachary Quinto has posted the following: “In the wake of the senseless and tragic gay teen suicides that were sweeping the nation [and particularly] the suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.
“Jamey Rodemeyer’s life changed mine, and while his death only makes me wish that i had done this sooner, i am eternally grateful to him for being the catalyst for change within me.
“Now i can only hope to serve as the same catalyst for even one other person in this world. That, I believe, is all that we can ask of ourselves and of each other. Our society needs to recognize the unstoppable momentum toward unequivocal civil equality for every gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered citizen of this country.”