I’m sorry to be slow but I only began to pay attention last night to Neda, the young Tehranian woman who was killed last weekend and became an instant martyr and “central rallying cry” of the Iranian rebellion. Everyone’s sister, everyone’s daughter. Here’s the original video and separately shot footage.

Ed McMahon, who passed early this morning at age 86, was Johnny Carson ‘s indefatigable announcer and sidekick for 30-odd years. He was known for being likably jovial — a dependably upbeat middle-class personality. I knew him well because he was almost exactly my father’s age. To me he was always strictly a World War II generation guy. Yaw-hawh, scotch and soda, get out there and sell! He never got the transformational ’60s youth culture thing, never grew a moustache, never stopped being “Ed McMahon.”

McMahon played a straight supporting role in a 1967 Larry Peerce film called The Incident, which was about hooligan terrorism on a New York subway car. (He played a regular married commuter type, and wasn’t half bad.) There’s a McMahon tape loop from my teenage years that won’t go away. He’s doing a straight-to-the-camera ad on the Tonight show, and he finishes with this line: “Serve your man an Uncle Ben’s meal.” (An old ’70s joke. Q: “What’s white and crawls up your leg?” A: “Uncle Ben’s perverted rice.”) I still say McMahon’s biggest cultural accomplishment was inventing “Hiyohhh!” Ask Martin Mull.

I met concert promoter and original Woodstock producer Michael Lang socially last summer and again at a recent Woodstock DVD/Bluray press junket in Manhattan. At the time I told him my mezzo-mezzo feelings about Ang Lee‘s Taking Woodstock, and just now Lang has written and shared his own reactions. With his permission, here they are:

“Just thought I’d let you know that I’ve finally seen the film and thought it was very cool. It stayed away from the problems I had with the Eliot Tiber‘s book and I was really brought back to those days leading up to that magical weekend. Objectivity for me was, of course, out of the question, but there were some terrific performances and I think Ang Lee captured the spirit of those times.”

Lang has written a memoir called The Road to Woodstock (Ecco) that will hit stores on 6.30. I’ll give it a read soon

A three-mile-wide meteor is going to slam into Los Angeles within two or three hours. You’re the commander of a special titanium transporting device that can hold 250 people, and your mission is to save as many of the best and the brightest Hollywood professionals that you can — actors, directors, screenwriters, editors, dps, journalists, marketers — so the industry can start over after the dead have been buried and the wreckage has been all cleaned up.

You have speed-dial access to everyone of any importance, and you have less than an hour to call those you want to save and arrange to pick them up. Who would you call? Who would you definitely not call?

Suggest away but answer me this — would Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of Transformers: Rise of the Fallen and G.I. Joe, be on your list? Read this N.Y. Times Michael Cieply profile of the guy before answering.

Off the top of my head I would save Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow and his family, publicist Chris Libby, Michael Mann, Kim Masters, Rod Lurie, Steven Soderbergh (if he’s in town), Robert Towne, Pete and Madelyn Hammond, Tilda Swinton (if she’s in town), Ben Stiller, James Cameron (although I’d first make him promise not to take any more eight-year vacations), Universal marketing/p.r. guy Michael Moses, the 42West gang, publicist Jennifer Chamberlain, Cameron Crowe, MPRM’s Mark Pogachefsky, Laura Kim, Anne Thompson, Todd McCarthy….I can’t make a list of 250 people, takes too long.

…to be wearing this solidarity-with-the-Iran-protest ribbon, which I’ve had since last Saturday, I’d feel better if there’s was some way to really help. It would obviously be stupid and reckless and ruin everything, but my inner 12 year-old would dearly love to see dozens of teams of paramilitary hard-asses dropped into Tehran — cool guys like Chris Walken in The Dogs of War, I mean — so they could kick some mullah ass.

Not remotely my turf but how can anyone not be touched by Ryan O’Neal‘s announcement that he and the ailing Farrah Fawcett are remarrying? The future will last as long as it lasts so make the best of it while you can. I just think it’s awfully nice. God, I sound like Larry King.

“Perhaps it’s too early to be talking about Oscars at this point, but Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker absolutely belongs in the mix,” writes Hollywood & Fine’s Marshall Fine. “There’s more tension in this gripping tale than in the waistband of Oprah’s skinny jeans. [And] its commercial fate is fraught with as much suspense as its action sequences, which will have you chewing your fingernails.

“It seems cruel to suggest that it might face the same sorry commercial fate as such deserving films as In the Valley of Elah, A Mighty Heart and Lions for Lambs, simply because it too is set in the midst of the Iraq war. The Hurt Locker is one of the year’s best films so far, and could easily wind up on many ten-best lists at year’s end. It far outstrips any of the summer’s action films in terms of the jolt it packs. Erase the word ‘Iraq’ from your memory and go see it.”

Fine is too political to state a certain blunt truth so I will. If The Hurt Locker doesn’t catch on over the next three or four or five weeks it’ll be because of the general Iraq-movie stigma, yes, but primarily, I strongly suspect, due to women telling their boyfriends and husbands that they’d rather see something else.

I’m obviously not speaking of the multitudes of movie- and art-loving urban women with MFAs and cool apartments and hip attitudes. I’m speaking of the women who came out to support Sandra Bullock‘s The Proposal last weekend — the ones who will almost always say no to any film that doesn’t traffic in emotionality, romantic intrigue and some aspect of domesticity.

Mainstream-culture women are the blandifiers, the shallow enemy, the destroyers of go-for-it cinema. Stand up to them, break up with them, meet them later for drinks, etc., but don’t let them take The Hurt Locker down.

Today’s scheduled films: 40 minutes worth of Davis Guggenheim‘s It Might Get Loud at an LA Film Festival venue, the entirety of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno at an undisclosed location, and a final nostalgia screening of Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker.

In his latest essay Reid Rosefelt recalls his publicity association with legendary director Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian director who had less than 54 years on the planet.

Myron and Geoff Bresnick of Grange Communications “took Tarkovsky to the Telluride Festival, where they put on a big tribute for him in the Opera House,” he writes. “As soon as we got there, the festival directors Bill Pence and Tom Luddy whisked him away to points unknown. See ya! I thought that was a bit extreme as the Bresnicks had gone to the great expense and hassle of bringing him to the U.S., as well as to Telluride.

“The idea of Telluride at that time was that publicity was strictly verboten, and publicists like me, while not completely persona non grata, weren’t supposed to work while they were there. Telluride opened up that policy years ago, but then it took a major effort just to locate Tarkovsky and meet my commitment for one measly phone interview. But the thing that really drove me nuts about the whole Telluride experience is that they programmed Ivan’s Childhood, the one Tarkovsky film I hadn’t seen, at the same time as the Tarkovsky tribute!

“But the tribute was amazing, as all Telluride tributes are. And after the festival ended, Geoff drove me back to Denver at what seemed like 150 mph the whole way, which now that I think of it is a perfect way to top off watching a lot of Tarkovsky films.”

It would appear that Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland is rooted in the mid 19th Century (i.e., 1865) , when Lewis Carroll published the original book. (Which was followed by an 1871 sequel, “Through The Looking Glass.”) Hence the all-Anglo cast and lack of minorities, not to mention the possible absence of any political points or metaphors as they might apply to the present. But I don’t have the script.

Johnny Depp as Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway as White Queen, and Helena Bonham Carter as Red Queen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, due spring 2010 from Disney.

For any half-literate person who’s ever turned on, Alice in Wonderland isn’t just a surrealist political satire but the ultimate hallucinogenic fantasy. For boomers and older GenXers it’s always been stoner central, Owsley/Sandoz ground zero, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in 19th Century garb, a Grace Slick anthem, etc. All of which is anathema, of course, to Disney and their antiseptic family demo. “Mommy, did grandma or grandpa ever eat mushrooms?”

Obviously not pictured above are Michael Sheen (the White Rabbit), Alan Rickman (the Caterpillar), Christopher Lee (the Jabberwock), Stephen Fry (the Cheshire Cat), Crispin Glover (the Knave of Hearts), Timothy Spall (the Bloodhound), etc.

It is little remembered that Cary Grant played the Mock Turtle in Norman Z. McLeod‘s 1933 version, or that Cary Cooper played the White Knight.

Chalk this up to Live Free & Die Hard or not, but either way action movies are being pressured into PG-13 ratings. Sylvester Stallone‘s comically porno-violent Rambo might have grossed more domestically with that rating. One difference between R and PG-13, I feel, should be a tone of obvious over-the-top absurdism. Because Rambo was clearly trying for a certain type of ridiculous-gore humor, it should have been handed a PG-13, exploding heads and all. R ratings should go to the violent films that really and truly mean it.