N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has tapped out a post-4th-of-July Twilight Zone riff on Rod Serling…without mentioning that recent Mike Fleming Deadline story about a Serling biopic from screenwriter Stanley Weiser (W, Wall Street). And yet Dowd mentions “Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone” (2009), a 50th anniversary tribute book co-edited by Carol Serling, who will produce the Serling biopic along with Andrew Meieran.

The Twilight Zone, Dowd notes, “was never gangbusters” in the ratings. Then why did CBS keep it going for five seasons? (The original series ran from October 2, 1959 to June 19, 1964.) Presumably the ratings were good enough for renewal although Kennedy-era viewers weren’t exactly watching en masse, cheering each episode and waiting with bated breath for the next. The real adulation didn’t kick in until the ’80s and the second Twilight Zone series, which ran from September 27, 1985 to April 15, 1989. Lasting, legendary stuff is rarely celebrated when it first appears. Classic status almost always develops years or decades later.

This sounds snarky but it seems a bit dated now to talk about 4th of July Twilight Zone marathons on the tube, as Dowd does. There’s only one way to watch the old episodes now, and that’s by popping in the five Buray discs containing the original five seasons, and watching them on a 50″ flat screen. The detail and clarity are realms and worlds beyond anything seen by even the guys in the processing labs who developed the original footage. (I actually haven’t watched and am not likely to watch seasons #4 and #5, which saw a steep fall-off in quality.).

I’m also a little confused by that friend-squashed-during-World-War-II story that Dowd passes along. “During a lull at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific,” she writes, “[Serling] was standing with his arm around a good friend and they were having their picture taken. At that moment, an Air Force plane dropped a box of extra ammunition that landed on Serling’s friend and flattened him so fatally that he couldn’t even be seen under the box.” Serling’s arm was around the guy — presumably around his shoulders — and he himself didn’t get hit by the box? That can’t be right. Update: I wrote Weiser about this, and he answered that Serling “was standing nearby…not next to him. An exaggeration, I think.”

“It’s impossible not to watch a stretch of the endlessly inventive Serling and not notice how many of his plots have been ripped off for movies, and how ahead of his time he was,” Dowd observes.

Twilight Zone book co-author Doug Brode tells Dowd that “everything today is Rod Serling…everything. Nearly 35 years ago, George Lucas told me that the whole concept of the Force comes from Rod Serling.

“Looking at this summer’s lame crop of movies and previews,” she concludes, “you can appreciate Serling’s upbraiding of the entertainment industry for ‘our mediocrity, our imitativeness, our commercialism and, all too frequently, our deadening and deadly lack of creativity and courage.'”

Yes, Johnny Depp — he was talking about you.

[Here are part 2 and part 3 of the 1959 Mike Wallace interview with Serling — part 1 is YouTube’d above.]

The other day I agreed with Clarence Thomas; now I’m siding with Bill O’Reilly. What’s happening? “Do you have chloroform residue in your car, Geraldo?”

Posted this afternoon: “In an exclusive interview set to air on ABC World News and Nightline, Casey Anthony juror Jennifer Ford said she and the other jurors cried and were ‘sick to our stomachs’ after voting to acquit Anthony of charges that she killed her 2-year-old daughter Caylee.

“‘I did not say she was innocent,’ said Ford, who had previously only been identified as juror number 3. ‘I just said there was not enough evidence. If you cannot prove what the crime was, you cannot determine what the punishment should be.’

“Ford described the jury as emotional and upset at their own vote, feelings that led the jurors to decide not to speak with reporters immediately after the verdict was read in court.

‘”Everyone wonders why we didn’t speak to the media right away,’ Ford said. ‘It was because we were sick to our stomach to get that verdict. We were crying and not just the women. It was emotional and we weren’t ready. We wanted to do it with integrity and not contribute to the sensationalism of the trial.'”

“I can’t just keep taking one reprehensible paycheck job after another,” Johnny Depp is probably saying to himself. “Pirates, Lone Ranger…I have to break the cycle. How much more do I need…really? How much better can I live? How many hundreds of millions must I have in my bank account before I stop tarnishing my rep? I know that people of taste hated the last one and the third one. They’re starting to hate me in a way, I think. The cool people, I mean.

“I know that, I know that. But I can’t say ‘no’ to more truckloads of money. I can’t. I’m weak. I’m pretty good at pretending it’s all cool, at shrugging at the absurdity of making these grotesque movies. I can play the ‘who cares?’ guy. But deep down I do care. It pains me to do these things on some level. But I can’t say no.”

Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer told the L.A. Times that Depp’s starring in Pirates 5 “is going to depend on the screenplay. It always does. He’s maniacal about not wanting to disappoint his audience.” Hah!

Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides crossed the billlion dollar mark at the worldwide box-office a few days ago.

Here‘s Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet on the same topic.

In a 5.19.11 posting from Cannes I called Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Live “a wicked-camp thing” that’s “played more-or-less straight…a highly perverse and lusciously sensuous film about a mad plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) who recreates his dead wife and daughter with…well, let’s not say.

“The story is also about rape-payback and revenge and a selfish young hound getting a taste of his own medicine and having the tables turned. That’s vague enough, I think.

“See it at a midnight screening with a hip gay crowd and prepare for doses of exceedingly dry humor and strange-itude in the general vein of David Cronenberg‘s Dead Ringers and Georges Franju‘s Eyes Without A Face.

“Let’s take a wild guess and suppose that straight, hamburger-eating, ESPN-watching guys are not going to beat down the doors to see this. But I like burgers and I had a enjoyable, better-than-okay time with it. It’s a first-class effort, beautifully shot by Jose Luis Alcaine (Volver, Bad Education) and assured and technically spot-on, etc.

“I’m a devout Pedro guy from way back, but I prefer his more soulful, deep-well stuff.”

Hasn’t the release of Albert Nobbs this year been a foregone conclusion for a while now? Hasn’t it been more or less presumed that the Best Actress race will likely include Glenn Close performance in Rodrigo Garcia‘s period drama because she’s playing a gender-swap role?

L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik is reporting that Liddell Entertainment and Roadside Attractions will open Nobbs domestically in the fall with an Oscar campaign for Close.

In this 1860s Dublin drama, Close is a woman pretending to be a male butler so she can keep up with her bills. The story, Zeitchi reports, “turns on a relationship Nobbs has with a male painter who turns out to have a secret of his own.” Meaning he’s either gay or another woman pretending to be a man…right?

I’m guessing that 2011 Best Actress race will probably include Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady (i.e., because she’s playing Margaret Thatcher), Charlize Theron in Young Adult (because she’s playing a neurotic and curmudgeonly writer) and Close. Who else?

Albert Nobbs costars Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Brendan Gleeson, Pauline Collins, Brenda Fricker, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Janet McTeer.

Tatiana von Furstenberg and Francesca Gregorini‘s Tanner Hall — a drama about emotional-sexual intrigues among women at a New England boarding school — began shooting in September 2007, screened at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and will finally open on 9.7.11. The decision by Anchor Bay to distribute is apparently due to Rooney Mara, star of David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, being a costar.

Co-directors Von Furstenberg and Gregorini based their screenplay on their time at Brown University in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Gregorini is openly gay (I’m not sure about Von Furstenberg) but the Tanner Hall plotline is at least partly lezzie, or so I’m given to understand, and I’m wondering why the publicity materials always try to hide this stuff. (The Falco Ink notes refers to one of the female characters coping with “newfound feelings towards another classmate,” blah blah).

Von Furstenberg and Gregorini are both heiresses — Von Furstenberg, 40, is the daughter of Prince Egon von Furstenberg and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, and the stepdaughter of billionaire media mogul Barry Diller. (Her full name is Tatiana Desiree Prinzessin von Furstenberg.) Gregorini, 42, is the daughter of Italian industrialist Count Augusto Gregorini and actress Barbara Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me), and is the stepdaughter of Ringo Starr. (Her full name is Countess Francesca McKnight Donatella Romana Gregorini di Savignano di Romagna.)

Their film wouldn’t have sat on the sidelines for nearly four years if it didn’t have at least some problems, but speaking as a straight male I’m looking to see Tanner Hall for whatever the girl-on-girl action might amount to. Is that a crime? What Average Joe isn’t at least slightly interested in this stuff? At least as a rental or a download?

If only there was a liberal with balls occupying the White House. If only President Obama would call a spade a spade and label Congressional righties as the looney and fanatical faction they’ve become. If a tough, principled Democrat was to run against Obama in the primaries with a proposal of really getting tough on the financial elite, I would volunteer for him/her 20 hours a week. If Obama loses the 2012 election over voters’ conviction that he hasn’t even tried to bring justice to the Wall Street bad guys, he’ll have no one to blame but himself. He talks good, but he’s a softie.

“What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country — the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression,” writes New York‘s Frank Rich. “There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims.

“As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they ‘are burnt and purged away.’

“After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions).

“As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department’s bally¬≠hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes. You almost have to feel sorry for the era’s designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky ‘Fabulous Fab’ Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else. It’s as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.

Obama’s big political problem “is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him. Given Obama’s humble background, his history as a mostly liberal Democrat, and his famous resume as a community organizer, this would also seem a reach. But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money — he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen — he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

“Obama arrives at his reelection campaign not merely with a weak performance on Wall Street crime enforcement and reform but also with a scattershot record (at best) of focusing on the main concern of Main Street: joblessness. One is a consequence of the other. His failure to push back against the financial sector, sparing it any responsibility for the economy it tanked, empowered it to roll over his agenda with its own. He has come across as favoring the financial elite over the stranded middle class even if, in his heart of hearts, he does not.

“The central question before the nation couldn’t be clearer: Who pays? The taxpayers bailed out the elite; now it’s the elite’s turn to return the favor. Massive cuts to the safety net combined with scant sacrifice from those at the top is wrong ethically and politically. It is, in the truest sense, un-American. Obama knows this, and he hit a welcome note last week when he urged some higher corporate taxes for hedge funds and the like. But his forays in this direction are tentative and sporadic. You have to wonder why he isn’t seizing the moment to articulate and fight for the big picture instead of playing a lose-lose game of rope-a-dope with the Republicans on their budgetary turf.

“‘A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,’ Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so — and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

“The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation — so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope — would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.”

I have too much going on in my life to have paid any more than faint attention to the Casey Anthony murder trial, but in the wake of this morning’s “not guilty” verdict, the man-on-the-street presumption is that she killed her two-year-old daughter Cayley in 2008 but that she got off because of a lack of hard proof and too much circumstantial evidence. Henry Fonda and others have described cause for rendering a not-guilty verdict as “reasonable doubt,” which I generally believed in until this morning.

In God’s eyes the 25 year-old Anthony may be pure as the driven snow, but she sure seems like a fiend and a sociopath and Florida trash to me. The donkeys on the jury having decided against convicting her doesn’t mean she’s innocent. It means they felt they couldn’t convict her according to the rules of the court.

Let no one doubt that Casey Anthony is from the same low-rent gene pool as Octomom and Pamela Smart.

The last time a person this guilty walked away scott-free from a murder trial was when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty by the infamous “downtown jury” personified by juror Brenda Moran (i.e., “Brenda Moron“) who called the damning blood evidence in that case “a whole lotta nothin'”. Casey Anthony will be in the tabloids for months and months to come. She’ll receive book offers, marriage offers…she’s off to the races. And all it took to get to this amazing place in her life was to kill her two-year-old daughter. Just think of the money Casey will soon have, and all the good-looking guys she’ll eventually be having sex with. Maybe she’ll wind up blowing Tiger Woods, a fellow Floridian?

When Anthony dies she’ll be spending several thousand years roasting on a spit in hell, of course, but that’s down the road.

Four days ago this Matt Zoller Seitz/Stormy Monday video essay (i.e, Kim Morgan reading from Roger Ebert‘s 1988 review) appeared on Indiewire. It’s an intriguing piece — I’d love to see similar video essays about ’70s and ’80s films using Pauline Kael ‘s New Yorker reviews — but Indiewire didn’t supply embed codes so I didn’t repost. This morning it finally appeared on Vimeo with codes.

But to be honest, something was suppressing my interest in this essay to begin with, and in fact had diminished interest when I first saw Stormy Monday 23 years ago. It’s the same thing that kept me from staying with the recently released Criterion Bluray of Something Wild, Jonathan Demme‘s respected dramedy-farce. And to varying degrees has compromised my ability to get into The Milagro Beanfield War, Working Girl, A Stranger Among Us, Nobody’s Fool, Mulholland Falls, Lolita, Celebrity and RKO 281.

That thing is Melanie Griffith. I used to roll with her manner and personality and raspy, pouty, mincing voice, but I just can’t anymore. To me she’s always been the ultimate Hollywood ditzoid. Obviously not the brightest bulb and not well educated. (That Holocaust remark she made in ’92 while promoting Shining Through, about the six million Jews exterminated by the Third Reich in the 1940s being “a lot of people,” will haunt her until the day she dies.) She can ably convey hurt, vulnerability, flirtatiousness, tenderness. But she never seemed to be dealing from a full deck.

The only film in which she doesn’t convey this flaky affected quality is in Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (’75), made when she was 17.

On top of which the supermarket tabs have been telling us for years about her struggle with this and that personal issue that reflect an unstable, uncertain mentality. Plus she has trout lips.

Griffith is basically why I’ve never re-watched Stormy Monday on DVD. I’ve been a fan of director Mike Figgis and costar Tommy Lee Jones for a long while so there’s a part of me that would like to watch it. But I just can’t. I can’t do Griffith anymore.

Daniel Radcliffe has admitted to GQ magazine he “‘became too ‘reliant’ on alcohol while filming the last few outings in the Harry Potter franchise.” The Guardian‘s Xan Brooks, lifting from the monthly, quotes Radcliffe as saying “there were a few years there when I was just so enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person’s lifestyle that really isn’t suited to me.”

Radcliffe “admits [that] his lifestyle became an issue on the set of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the article says. “He went on to claim he has not touched alcohol since August 2010, shortly after completing work on the final Potter production. ‘There’s no shame in enjoying a quiet life,’ the 21 year-old actor says. ‘And that’s been the realization of the past few years for me.'”

A q & a transcript between Screen Junkies‘ Fred Topol and the relentlessly feisty director Uwe Boll was posted four days ago (i.e., Thursday, 6.30). Early on Topol mentioned Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life; Boll said he hates it and explained his thinking.

Boll: “I totally hated that movie because I feel as a filmmaker that besides the fact that Terrence Malick did some great visuals on some movies, also on The New World, like the opening of that movie was really good but then he completely lost it. I think The Tree of Life is a piece of shit. Totally, and I think Sean Penn is ridiculous in it, like walking around in the elevator. It’s nothing.

“This is the thing. It’s so overrated because it’s Terrence Malick. Same as Lars von Trier‘s movies. I like Breaking the Waves. After that [his output] was all crap. The thing is, he gets all the Hollywood stars. ‘Oh, I want to work with him’ and they don’t know what kind of [a] retard he is. I think the same with Terrence Malick. I think Terrence Malick is one of the overrated directors of all time.”

Topol: “Is that just because it doesn’t have a story and it’s more impressionistic?”

Boll: “Absolutely. You have to tell a story that you get a connection to something. When he starts doing after 25 minutes a National Geographic break where you see volcanoes and planets coming together. Then his dinosaur episode with Jurassic Park. You think well, what’s going on with him? What is wrong with the guy?

“I was not engaged [enough] to keep watching. If I would have known how this ends, I would have walked out. But I watched the whole movie because I wanted to see how it ends also. The end was I think the most pathetic thing, when they’re all at the beach hugging each other. It was fucking disastrous. It was a complete disaster and it shows also that a lot of stars have no taste. Like Sean Penn, Brad Pitt has no taste what a good movie is. They trusted the director but you have to have your own brain.

“I’m very mad right now because I want to do a bail-out movie about the financial crisis where a guy is losing everything and then he starts killing the investment bankers. I did various offers to stars and they passed on it. So CAA gave it a good reader’s review, so they’re supporting us but William Morris gave it a bad reader review.

“Like I also watch Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau, also a piece-of-shit movie. It was a disaster. It was a complete disaster and a guy like Matt Damon should feel that, that this story is nothing. It’s like a mini-Matrix in the normal world but it makes no sense because that agency who’s changing it all, who is that? What was the plan of these guys? Who pays them? It’s totally absurd because that agency is doing everything but not doing anything basically. Also it’s a very flat movie and I think with The Tree of Life, this was for me an embarrassment and it gets hyped up because of Terrence Malick and I didn’t like it.

Topol: “Well, I knew from his other movies that he was experimental.”

Boll: “Right, because his other movies you get the feeling he tries to tell a story and cannot do it. But this was poor experimental. You cannot tell me you were not bored to death while you watched The Tree of Life.”

Some kind of congrats is hereby offered to Oscar blogger Scott Feinberg for landing in a big Samsung “Wonder Exchange” ad campaign in the pages of Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ and Architectural Digest. Feinberg shares the five-page spread (which begins on page 67 of the August issue of Vanity Fair) with Ubergizmo co-founder Hubert Nguyen.

Feinberg and Nguyen were given free Samsung Galaxy Tabs (10.1 version) in exchange for their supplying “review comments”, as it were. They also commented about lounge robes, a titanium watch, a jacket, barbells and whatnot. C’mon, it’s all free! And pretty good publicity. You know that Glenn Kenny or Karina Longworth or Eric Kohn would take the merchandise, share their opinions about same and run like thieves. Where’s the harm? Didn’t Mike Wallace used to do ads for Chesterfields?

One question: what’s a Samsung “Wonder Exchange”? It sounds like a combination of Wonder Bread and a desk at Best Buy where you go to return stuff.