I have to hump it uptown to Grand Central in order to catch a 3:24 pm train to Stamford and then pick up a rental car, etc. Perhaps another posting or two from on the train, but in a few hours the main order of business will be listening to live music and doing a little beer-guzzling at the Georgetown Saloon. Things always ease down during the 4th of July weekend.

There’s a fascinating article in the August Vanity Fair (i.e., the Angelina Jolie cover) about the early days of professionally-supervised LSD therapy among the Hollywood elite, with samplers including Cary Grant, Sidney Lumet, Esther Williams and Betsy Drake, beginning in 1958.

This was two or three years before the Harvard University LSD experiments with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and seven years before various rock stars (including the Beatles) first began to drop, and nine or ten years before LSD began to catch on with adventurous middle-class youths in the cities and well-to-do suburbs.

It’s a carefully sculpted, touchingly written piece (particularly with quotes from the first-timers’ experiences, which in some cases were quite illuminating and even profound). The article doesn’t appear to be an excerpt from a book. The authors are Carl Beauchamp and Judy Balaban. Consider the opening four paragraphs:

“Our story is set in the years before Mad Men, when Eisenhower was in the White House and America had only 48 states. Our stage is Beverly Hills, still a small town in 1958, where movie stars and other entertainment-industry figures led active but traditional, even somewhat constrained social lives.

“There was a zone of privacy in that time and place we can’t begin to imagine today. Money, emotional traumas, and personal doubts were simply not discussed, even by the closest of friends. Appearances were accepted as reality, so people kept very busy making sure every aspect of their lives looked correct.

“That didn’t mean having the most lavish house, the heftiest jewels, or the largest private plane, as it came to in later decades. It did mean dressing, behaving and speaking appropriately; appearing to be happily married, in love, or looking for love en route to marriage; not complaining about one’s career or annual income; and being enormously ambitious without evidencing any ambition whatsover.

“Evenings were just as circumspect. Dinners were small A-list gatherings at Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, Don the Beachcomber, or poolside barbecues at private homes. The most visible scandals arose when dancing partners who were married — but not to each other — indulged in excessive caresses or when someone (almost always a man) drank too much, though boozy belligerence and even outright drunkenness were rare to invisible.

“Almost everyone smoked carton-loads of regular cigarettes, but a ‘joint’ was a body part of a lower-class dive. If people were ‘doing lines,’ you’d have guessed they were writing screenplay dialogue or song lyrics. And if you mentioned ‘acid,’ you’d mean citrus juice or a stomach problem.

“Nobody in Hollywood — or almost anywhere else in the United States — had ever heard of LSD, or lysergic acid diathylamide. Timothy Leary wouldn’t even pop his first mushroom until 1960. So it was very out of character that against this background a group of more than 100 Hollywood-establishment types began ingesting little azure pills that resembled cake decorations as an adjunct to psychotherapy.”

Call this a nice paycheck gig for a lot of people who didn’t let pride stand in the way. Christina Applegate and Fred Armisen have actual acting roles, and I gather that Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Patrick Harris, James Marsden, Bette Midler, Roger Moore, Nick Nolte and Chris O’Donnell voice animals. Is that right?

How deaf are the people who made this film and particularly those who are planning on seeing it? Deaf to God’s symphony, I mean. One time at a party some drunken friends and I gave a golden labrador two or three bowls of beer and got him stinko. He was losing his balance and rolling around on the floor. The same instinct (i.e., to laugh at animals coping with human bullshit) resulted in this film.

Does anyone remember Robert Downey, Sr.‘s Pound (’70)? Just asking.

The Movie Godz would like to be gracious, but they’ll never look kindly upon a film that kills off a cute kid and then returns him to earth as a ghost. They just can’t. Even with the respected James Schamus** having co-written the script, it seems too manipulative, too Lovely Bones, too give-us-a-break-already. Especially with Zac Efron in the lead.

That said, the most significant piece of information that I got from this trailer is that Efron’s face has filled out — he’s no longer boyish. He’s obviously “acting” and trying to expland his chops, and that’s always to be commended.

Charlie St. Cloud was directed by Burr Steers from a script by Schamus, Steers, Craig Pearce and Lewis Colick. It’s based on a Ben Sherwood book called “The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud.”

** Schamus is not, per the WGA, a credited writer on the project, although he did work on it.

Sixth Ave. and 14th Street station — 7.1, 10:05 pm.

7.3 Update: The digi-pixellated texture of the photo I posted earlier was bothering me, so I found the original and re-cropped without the noise.

Congrats to Andrew Garfield (and his agent) for landing the role of Peter Parker/Spiderman. Good break, good money. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t mean to be a killjoy but it really doesn’t. It never matters if you’re the guy replacing the original star (i.e., Tobey Maguire) in the fourth film in a diminishing superhero franchise. Will people flock to see Garfield-as-Spidey? Yeah, possibly. Maybe, probably. But it won’t matter.

Vulture: Have you read the reviews for The Last Airbender?

M. Night Shyamalan: No, I haven’t.

Vulture: Well, are you aware of the reviews?

Shyamalan: No, actually.

Vulture: Well, for the most part, critics have not been kind. Are you just ignoring them? Will you read them this weekend? Have you just not had time?

Shyamalan: Are you saying that in general they didn’t dig it?

Vulture: In general, no. Roger Ebert, who liked The Happening, did not. The first line of his review is, “The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category that I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.” How do you react to something like that?

Shyamalan: I don’t know what to say to that stuff. I bring as much integrity to the table as humanly possible. It must be a language thing, in terms of a particular accent, a storytelling accent. I can only see it this certain way and I don’t know how to think in another language. I think these are exactly the visions that are in my head, so I don’t know how to adjust it without being me. It would be like asking a painter to change to a completely different style. I don’t know.

Vulture: Critics haven’t been kind to your last couple of films. Do you still worry about reviews?

Shyamalan: I think of it as an art form. So it’s something I approach as sort of immovable integrity within each of the stages. So if you walk through the process with me, there’s not a moment where I won’t treat with great respect. So it’s sacred to me, the whole process of making a movie. I would hope that some people see that I approach this field with that kind of respect, and that it’s not a job.

— from a New York/”Vulture” interview that happened this morning, and was posted today at 4 pm.

Mel Gibson has done it to himself again, in spades. Just when he was finally starting to chill down Hollywood Jews over his 2006 anti-Semitic tirade, now he has to spend several more years trying to convince African Americans that he didn’t actually mean it. Radar claims to have “heard the tape,” so when does the mp3 file go online?

On the other hand: While I have no sympathy for Gibson and can only feel appalled by his racist broadsides as well as his stupidity in saying anything inflammatory to anyone that he’s in a contentious legal battle with, he was clearly sold out, most likely by former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva or someone acting on her behalf. It’s the same kind of thing that happened to Alec Baldwin when someone loyal to Kim Basinger sent out that tape of him yelling at his young daughter. Not everyone loses their temper and says venal stuff that they’re sorry about later on, but many of us have — let’s face it. Gibson did this to himself, but an ex-lover (or an ally of same) sending out a tape of a private rant is dirty pool.

What possible reason would Lionsgate and Studio Canal have for putting out a new Bluray of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man if not to appeal to those who were turned off by Criterion’s grain-monk Bluray of this legendary 1949 film?

Joseph Cotten in Carol Reed’s The Third Man.

I realize that the Criterion version is out of print and all, but it only emerged 18 months ago (i.e., on 12.16.08) and I’m sure it was bought or at least sampled by most of the Reed freaks out there so it’s not like the market hasn’t been sated. So why else would this brand new Bluray be set for September release if someone wasn’t persuaded that numerous Bluray fanatics agree with my rants about Criterion’s grainstorm version?

Let’s hope that (a) the Lionsgate Studio Canal version is not going to be the same Criterion transfer and (b) that whoever re-masters it will use at least some restraint in finessing those hundreds of millions of sand pebbles that are currently smothering the faces and wardrobes of Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White and the rest of that post-war Vienna gang. Not to mention those old Vienna locations and that ferris wheel and all those ants on the ground.

I heard about Christopher Hitchens‘ announcement about having esophogal cancer last night. I gather his condition may have been caused by years of cigarette smoking. I’m very sorry. Here’s hoping for some luck.

A journalist friend told me last weekend that he believed that the Russian spy ring story that broke three or four days ago would increase interest in Philip Noyce‘s Salt in the same way the Three Mile Island disaster did a favor for James Bridges‘ The China Syndrome, only to a lesser degree.

I dismissed this because of the anachronistic comedy aspects of the story (a N.Y. Times story said the the spies “could have been more efficient [in their search for information] by surfing the web” and that “none of the accused face charges because in all those years they were never caught sending classified information back to Moscow”) but maybe I’m missing something.

Does this story push Salt into the national conversation in any way, shape or form? Not among HE readers but among rurals, none-too-brights, Average Joes, people who meander around the mall, etc.?