Tulsa World posted two photos today of Terrence Malick, Javier Bardem and Ben Affleck — collaborators on Malick’s latest film, which is untitled but has something to do with fishing. They’re shown hanging on a street in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. They tell us, at least, that Bardem is playing a bespectacled priest or minister.

(l. to r.) Javier Bardem, Terrence Malick, Ben Affleck during filming of Malick’s untitled “romantic drama.”

“It’s unknown what the movie is about,” reports Tulsa World‘s Michael Smith, “outside of a nebulous description as a love story. Filming began in October in Bartlesville, then moved to Pawhuska for a time, with shooting also taking place in Tulsa at a refinery and at Tulsa International Airport.

The costars are Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams and Barry Pepper.

Why, I wonder, hasn’t a serious stealth photographer visited the set and taken a decent photo of Malick? It couldn’t be that hard. The last full-face smiling shot of the secretive, Sasquatch-like director happened during filming of The Thin Red Line some 12 years ago . Isn’t it about time for a new one? Only one person has had fewer photos taken of him/herself than Malick, and that’s Nikki Finke.

Pawhuska is the county seat of Osage County, Oklahoma. The population was 3,629 at the 2000 census. The late Ben Johnson (“Sam the Lion” in The Last Picture Show) is probably the most notable native. Tracy Letts‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County is set on a farm near Pawhuska.

Nobody in the world is more queer than myself for color photos taken on the sets of films shot in black-and-white. I would kill to see a couple of robust color snaps of Paul Newman hanging with Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott during the making of The Hustler. Or of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas between takes on Seven Days in May. A rich color capturing of Peter Lorre and Michael Curtiz and Dooley Wilson and Humphrey Bogart on a sound-stage set of Casablanca would be heaven.

(l.) Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot; (r.) Dr. Stranglelove shot of Peter Sellers and Stanley Kubrick copied from a column on Ain’t It Cool.

Or a nice color snap of John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, John Ireland and Howard Hawks shooting the shit between takes of Red River . Or one of Hawks and Cary Grant, Thomas Mitchell and Jean Arthur on the set of Only Angels Have Wings. Or color shots of Marlon Brando and Eliza Kazan and Eva Marie Saint on the Hoboken docks during the shooting of On The Waterfront. Anything along these lines would be great. If anyone has any scans or sources of any kind, please forward.

I wrote yesterday that the late Sterling Hayden was “one of the most spiritual” actors I’d ever had the pleasure to know or speak with. And a guy named shanes5 asked what I meant so I replied this morning as follows:

There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time, but Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents.

He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.

Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved pot. And he loved his Johnnie Walker Red. We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, and I said it before he did — “I’ve always loved the wind” — and he loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said “God love ya.”

I know how difficult it can be to keep the ball in the air when you’re doing an interview, so I’m not faulting David Poland‘s way with talent as far as that aspect is concerned. I’m certainly no expert at the form and am hardly one to talk. Poland keeps it going and the ball is definitely batted back and forth. The problem is that what results is a kind of frothy intellectual fervor with everyone grinning and chuckling in a way that feels simultaneously loose and manic and aimless.

Too much alpha chuckling can be an unwelcome thing, and I don’t mind saying that Poland’s relentless chuckling can feel truly oppressive at times. After a while it can feel like a form of torture.

What happens in these DP/30 interviews is that people talk a lot — expressively at times and certainly at great length — but every so often they drive me crazy because it hits me that all I’m watching is a lot of chuckling and effusive blather because Poland’s questions are sometimes inane and forced and/or anxious, and because nobody’s really saying anything. It’s Poland going ‘bee-duh-bee-duh-bee-bee-bee-bee’ and the interview subject going ‘well, okay, hold on…I’m going to answer you, of course, but I want to slow it down a bit.”

It’s like some kind of polar opposite of that vibrant atmosphere that Tom Snyder had going with Sterling Hayden way back when.

In his current N.Y. Times column, Frank Rich asks “whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich. That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness.”

Rich is echoing, of course, the more-or-less-accepted notion that America has become South America — a country ruled by super-elite haves with vastly different interests and goals than those of the rest of society. Which is the same point made by Arianna Huffington‘s “Third World America.” And by N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman when he said we’ve become “a banana republic with nukes.”

“‘How can hedge-fund managers who are pulling down billions sometimes pay a lower tax rate than do their secretaries?’ ask the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker (of Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley) in their deservedly lauded new book, ‘Winner-Take-All Politics.’ If you want to cry real tears about the American dream — as opposed to the self-canonizing tears of John Boehner — read this book and weep. The authors’ answer to that question and others amounts to a devastating indictment of both parties.

“Their ample empirical evidence, some of which I’m citing here, proves that America’s ever-widening income inequality was not an inevitable by-product of the modern megacorporation, or of globalization, or of the advent of the new tech-driven economy, or of a growing education gap. (Yes, the very rich often have fancy degrees, but so do those in many income levels below them.) Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election.”

Poor Morning Glory should have made at least $20 million this weekend, but it only took in $12 million and change. Why people see what they see and don’t see what they don’t want to see is a mystery at times. (The critics probably helped kill it to some degree.) But Tony Scott‘s Unstoppable came in second with $24 million — good but not great.

My feeling is that Unstoppable is a great action film for the first two-thirds, but then it gets a little too rah-rah and mechanistic during the last third. And the HE community thought what? Here’s a good piece about Scott by “Actionman.”

Sterling Hayden, whom I knew slightly and visited three or four times in the late ’70s, when he lived in Wilton — was probably the most intimidating actor I ever spoke with. And the most spiritual. And he had one of the greatest laughs ever. You had to let him run the conversation, but if you didn’t look sharp and ask intelligent questions and occasionally contribute something good of your own, he’d get bored and give you a look that was just shattering.

Audio-only clips of the first legendary Tomorrow interview between Hayden and Tomorrow‘s Tom Snyder, which aired on 3.25.77, are available on YouTube. I wish I could find video clips. It was one of the greatest interviews ever broadcast. Here’s part #2, part #3, part #4, part #5 and part #6.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has opened in England and assembled a stack of reviews, and is about to drop stateside on 11.19. Hundreds and hundreds of shows are sold out in advance. But step outside the Harry Potter church and no one cares. It’s one of the biggest cash cows in the history of motion picturts and nobody gives a toss.

The 11.10 Gurus of Gold chart has eight gurus predicting David Fincher will win the Best Director Oscar but only two of them saying that The Social Network will take the Oscar for Best Picture. They’re predicting, in short, a split decision with TKS getting the heart vote and Fincher getting the head vote plus the “okay, he’s earned it, he’s due” approval.

As a friend says, “The gurus always choose what they feel is the Best Picture emotional default film — the one that supposedly makes older viewers feel chest pangs. But they’re betraying themselves in the director category where many of them, including EW‘s Dave Karger, a totally political finger-to-the-wind consensus guy, have Fincher in the number one spot. That tells me a lot more than The King’s Speech in number one. The directors almost always lead the way.”

And you know what else may very well happen? The more people see The Fighter, the more you’re going to see it rise in the Best Picture ranks, and the more you’ll see David O. Russell elbowing into Best Director contention. The top five directors right now are Fincher, The King’s Speech‘s Tom Hooper, Black Swan‘s Darren Aronofsky, 127 Hours‘ Danny Boyle and Inception‘s Chris Nolan. But if The Fighter starts to catch on like I think it will, one of these five might begin to experience a little slippage.

HE reader “Webster” (i.e., the guy who recently gave an A-minus to How Do You Know and said Paul Rudd is the standout) caught a 10.26 research screening in Pasadena of Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants. And he says it “traverses that fine line between comedy and drama without a hitch.

The Descendants star George Clooney (l.), director/co-writer Alexander Payne (r.) during shooting in Hawaii last March.

“George Clooney anchors the film as a man whose obligations to his daughters, his dying wife, his family, and even the state of Hawaii all come into play against a backdrop of infidelity, envy and greed,” he writes. “And a good ensemble cast supports him, although there’s no career-changing performance a la Thomas Haden Church in Sideways. All in all, it’s an entirely worthy addition to the Payne canon.

“Fox Searchlight obviously has its hands full with 127 Hours and Black Swan to awards season, but it clearly has a leg up on the competition with this one for 2011, along with Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life.”

It’s widely presumed that prior to its 5.27.11 opening, Malick’s film will premiere a couple of weeks earlier at the Cannes Film Festival. And to hear it from Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, The Descendants “may also be headed to the South of France.

“I ran into one of that film’s key players [at the Black Swan AFIFest showing] who said he had heard of ‘a Cannes plan just a couple of days ago,'” Hammond wrote. “If the Cannes berth does happen I’m told The Descendants domestic release would still be held until around this time next fall for maximum Oscar potential. In other words you can place your bets now that we’ll probably see it opening or closing the 2011 AFI Fest.”

A boilerplate Fox Searchlight/IMDB synopsis reads as follows: “Matt King (Clooney) is an indifferent husband and father of two girls forced to re-examine his past and embrace his future when his wife (presumably Judy Greer) suffers a boating accident off of Waikiki. The event leads to a rapprochement with his young daughters while Matt wrestles with a decision to sell the family’s land handed down from Hawaiian royalty and missionaries.”

The Descendants costars include Matthew Lillard, Beau Bridges, Shailene Woodley, Robert Forster and Michael Ontkean. Ontkean, best known for his roles in Slap Shot (’77) and Making Love (’82), hasn’t been in a theatrical feature of any distinction since Postcards From The Edge (’90). He’s been working on TV ever since.

Here’s an interview about The Descendants that Payne gave last summer to the Omaha World-Herald‘s Bob Fischbach.