All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”

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Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17, or eight weeks before David Grann’s source book was published) turned up on a Reddit screenwriting forum.

Roth’s 153-page screenplay, which arrived in my inbox around 6 am this morning, was posted late last year by “Sheshat the Scribe.”

Anyway I finally read it this morning and holy moley…if Martin Scorcese had manned up and shot this version of the tale Killers would have been a much more engrossing kettle of fish.

No exaggeration — Roth’s early-bird script is approximately 17 or 18 times better than the film Marty finally made. Because Killers suddenly has a central character you can easily roll with (i.e., FBI guy Tom White, who Leonardo DiCaprio was originally intending to portray) as well as an actual point of view.

White isn’t just the resolute, soft-spoken, voice-of-the-prairie hero of the piece but a decent, honorable lawman with occasional moments of doubt and uncertainty, but finally a dude who stays the course, toughs it out and brings at least a semblance of partial justice to a sprawling and horrific murder saga.

In Marty’s film version White (played by Jesse Plemons) is reduced to a supporting character who appears at the two-hour mark.

Here’s how I put it to a screenwriter pally a couple of hours ago: “My God, what a truly compelling and fascinating film Killers of thge Flower Moon could have been. Hats off to Roth for some wonderful writing, sublime tension, terrific structure. It really lives and breathes!

“And what a great, soft-spoken, drillbit character Tom White is! His laconic, man-of-the-prairie dialogue is so spare and true and eloquent.

“If only John Sturges had directed this screenplay in his prime! Or Oliver Stone in the ’80s or Michael Mann, Chris Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson…Sam Peckinpah even.

“If only Marty and Leo hadn’t lost their nerve…if only they hadn’t been so scared of provoking the wokesters and suffering their ferocious wrath, i.e., “We’re done with white heroes! Only racists-at-heart would tell such a tale! And fuck David Grann!”

“My head was completely turned around by reading this, and Roth wasn’t even afraid of including racist cracker dialogue from time to time. (Brave.) And Mollie Burkhart actually conveys a certain gratitude (i.e., a slight smile) to White at the very end. I don’t know if Lily Gladstone even read this version of the script, but if so she almost certainly would’ve hated it.

“I wish I had read this six or seven years ago. It would have clarified a lot of things. Roth and Scorsese went with a woke version of Grann’s tale, of course, but in the early stages Roth truly did himself proud.”

If you weren’t much of a fan of Killers of the Flower Moon or even if you were, please read this early Roth draft — it’s a revelation.

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Farting Sasquatch Orifice Leakage

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Posted by Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin after a Friday night (1.19) screening of Sasquatch Sunset at the Sundance Film Festival:

“Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough star in Sasquatach Sunset, an absurdist comedy [that] follows a family of Yetis over the course of a year.

“With zero dialogue or narration but plenty of grunts, the film captures an immersive, ‘true’ depiction of the daily life of the Sasquatch. That apparently involves sex, masturbation, vomiting, flatulence and plenty of other gorey acts that aren’t fit to print.

“A smattering of audience members appeared to be too squeamish about these quotidian experiences, shielding their eyes during bloody moments and stomping for the exit at the Eccles Theater well before the credits began to roll.

“Others delighted in the gastrointestinally graphic sequences. One scene, involving liquids spouting out of every — and we mean every — orifice of the female Bigfoot, played to raucous applause in the room. Less than 15 minutes into the film, one moviegoer announced to nobody in particular, ‘This is the weirdest movie ever.’

“Sasquatch Sunset is the kind of movie you need to see to believe.”

Criminal Protagonists

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A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s.

By which he meant films that spend more time on criminals than people trying to catch them, or no time with the catchers at all.

No cop movies, he said, which eliminates Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, etc. Also no period caper or con movies (The Sting, The Great Train Robbery), no historical gangster flicks (The Godfather I and II). Strictly contemporary crime pictures in which the protagonists are engaged in criminal activity. Hence Friedkin’s Sorcerer (desperate struggle over rough terrain) and Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz don’t qualify. And no Juggernaut because it’s told almost entirely (98%) from the point of view of the catchers.

Three of his picks I immediately scratched off — Richard Brooks‘ $ (aka Dollars), Michael Cimino‘s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (fuck Cimino) and Walter Hill‘s The Driver (too loud, brutalist, mechanical). Which left seven.

I then added seven more for a total of 14 films, all released between 1.1.70 and 1.1.80.

Three of my top ten opened in ’77 and ’78, but the other seven were released between ’71 and ’73. In order of preference…

1. The Day of the Jackal (’73)
2. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73)
3. Get Carter (’71)
4. Badlands (’73)
5. The Outfit (’73)
6. The American Friend (’77)
7. Who’ll Stop the Rain? (’78)
8. Charley Varrick (’73)
9. The Hot Rock (’72)
10. Straight Time (’78)

Slightly second tier but at the same time smart and engaging:

11. The Taking of Pelham 123 (’74)
12. The Getaway (’72)
13. The Silent Partner (’78)
14. Going in Style (’79)

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Proud Owner

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I’m going to stick my neck out by saying I’m probably the only tristate area guy with a Red River belt buckle and a “Kennedy for President” sticker on my car’s rear bumper.

“‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”

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I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve frankly stopped trying.

Was the 156-minute version ever seen by anyone except R.G. Armstrong? The 136-minute version is longer but is it necessarily, positively better? I’ve only seen the shortest version (126 minutes) with the Mitch Miller sing–alongers on the soundtrack.

I know two things — during the ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s Peckinpah allowed his career to be stained and diminished by raging alcoholism, and that with the exception of three films (Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs) everything he was involved in was to varying degrees colored by rage and snarls and waste.

Over the years his persistent asshole-ishness overwhelmed his creative visions, and people just got sick of him.

I own a Bluray of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (‘74) and I’ve watched it exactly once. There’s a reason for that. The nihilistic finale leaves you with nothing. Maybe I should give it another go.

I’ve seen Cross of Iron (1977) once, and while I have a favorable recollection of James Coburn and Maximilian Schell’s lead performances, I mostly recall Gene Shalit calling it “a movie of bad.”

All this aside, I sure do envy Joe Dante for having seen the 152-minute version of The Wild Bunch (7 minutes longer than the official, definitive 145-minute Bluray) during the 1969 Bahamas press junket.

Dante recalls as follows:

Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”

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Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led to an idiotic ending.

Her old white van was indisputably on its last legs, and 60ish David Straitharn, lonely but harmless, clearly would’ve settled for simple, no-big-deal companionship.

I’m sorry but there’s this notion out there that choosing a healthy or constructive path in life requires (a) not being a stubborn egoistic purist and (b) understanding that opting for common-sense security isn’t necessarily a death sentence or a prison term.

The curious ending of Nomadland refuses to acknowledge this. It basically says “better to die destitute and alone on a two-lane blacktop while shitting in a bucket in the middle of the night than to accept kindness and sensible adult friendship.”

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The Illustrated Man

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This Marlon Brando drawing was composed nearly 51 years ago by New York Review of Books illustrator David Levine. It appeared alongside a 5.17.73 Norman Mailer review of Last Tango in Paris, titled “A Transit to Narcissus.”

In paragraph #6, Mailer writes that early in the Bernardo Bertolucci film “Brando abruptly cashes the check Stanley Kowalski wrote for us twenty-five years ago — he fucks the heroine standing up. It solves the old snicker of how do you do it in a telephone booth? — he rips her panties open.

“In our new line of New Yorker–approved superlatives, it can be said that the cry of the fabric is the most thrilling sound to be heard in World Culture since the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.”

Tango premiered at the 1972 New York Film Festival (10.14.72), but opened commercially on 2.1.73 at Manhattan’s Trans Lux East (Third Avenue between 57th Street and 58th Street). Tickets went for a then-unheard-of price of $5.00.

Reckless Loins?

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USA Today: “Today Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee gave Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis until Feb. 2 to formally respond to explosive allegations that she has been in an improper romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the private lawyer she hired as a special prosecutor overseeing the election fraud case against former President Donald Trump and 14 alleged co-conspirators.

“McAfee also scheduled a Feb. 15 hearing — likely to be televised — to hear arguments on the issue from Willis and a lawyer for Michael Roman, the Trump-co-defendant and 2020 campaign official who made the allegations last week.

“Willis has declined to specifically address the accusations that she was having an affair with Wade, and that she hired him for the job and paid him more than $650,000 even though he is unqualified to oversee the high-profile case.”

HE reaction #1: Willis and Wade possibly schtupping each other while working on the prosecution of Trump’s Georgia-election-interference case is technically no one’s business but their own. Intimate relationships between high-powered people who work together (whether attached or unattached to others) are fairly common. However…

HE reaction #2: If the rumors of an intimate relationship are true, it was astonishingly arrogant and stupid of Willis and Wade to have opened themselves up to potential ridicule and wagging tongues, and thereby compromise, at least in terms of public image, the integrity of the prosecution’s case against Trump.

What matters at the end of the day is whether or not Willis, Wade and their prosecutorial colleagues have the proof to convict Trump or not — that’s the bottom line. It shouldn’t matter what Willis and Wade were up to after-hours. But that aside, what mind-blowing carelessness on their part…God! This is out of a Harold Robbins novel.

Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, repped by Atlanta lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, is contending that the allegations are serious enough to have Willis, Wade and the entire Fulton County DA’s office disqualified and thrown off the case.

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