Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art is showing William Friedkin’s degraded revision of The French Connection for six days starting today. This morning I sent a letter this morning to Rajendra Roy, MOMA’s chief curator of film. 11:55 am Update: Roy and I just spoke. A summary of his comments is pasted below.

(l. ro.) Owen Roizman, frame capture from French Connection Blu-ray, William Friedkin.

“As you may have heard or read, French Connection cinematographer Owen Roizman, speaking last week in an online radio interview, has called William Friedkin‘s digital restoration of The French Connection (as presented on the recently-released Blu-ray) “atrocious,” “horrifying” and “emasculated” He also said he was “appalled by it,” and emphasized that “it’s not the film I shot.”

“As part of a six-day series beginning today and ending next Monday, MOMA is showing Friedkin’s new version of the film. The MOMA copy says that “Friedkin has called this new digital restoration the definitive version of his masterwork.” MOMA is apparently showing this version without warning, meaning there will be people who haven’t read up on this and who will be attending unaware of what Freidkin has done.

“As a fierce critic of Freidkin’s new version who sides with Roizman 100%, I have two questions I’d like you to please answer for a piece I’m running this morning, if that’s cool.

“Did you, as the programmer, feel any obligation to at least inform viewers that what you’ll be showing isn’t the film that Roizman shot, isn’t the film that played in theatres in 1971, isn’t the film that has been issued on VHS and laser disc and DVD in years past? And that it is a version that Roizman has said he’s appalled by?

“And did you, as the programmer, feel any obligation for contrast’s sake to offer MOMA patrons a chance to see the film as it looked before Friedkin futzed around with it? In other words, did you perhaps consider showing both versions at alternating screenings — i.e., three days showing the traditional version and three days showing Friedkin’s grainy, bleachy, flirting-with-monochrome version?

“There’s nothing wrong with showing Friedkin’s desecrated version if that’s what you want to do, but I think you and our film department colleagues should have made it clear exactly what you’ll be showing to viewers, and given them a chance to compare Friedkin’s digitally-projected version to the traditional 35mm version that’s been around for nearly 40 years.”

Comments by MOMA film curator Rajendra Roy: “We are informing people who come in and buy tickets that this is a digital restoration being shown at Freidkin’s request. Billy came in to my office, said he’s worked on a new resotoration and that it looks like he’d always wished it had looked, the studio never let him get it to the place he wanted to get it and that he wanted to show it. The fact that he said that this digital version looks like he always wanted it to look…I’m highly suspect of [this]. He said he’d never wanted it to look like a dark movie, which to some, I recognize, is flabbergasting.

“But MOMA has to be receptive to being a forum for living artists to reexamine their work, and here we have a living artist getting up and showing this new version and discussing it. And we’ve made it clear this is a digitally-projected version of the film. We have screened the traditional 35mm verson within the last ten months, and this is a chance to see this new version. I would prefer that MOMA patrons have access to this. If I ignore that, MOMA will be in mothballs [one day]. I embrace the debate. I’m doing this because I believe Billy has created something interesting and new. [On the other hand] I mostly agree with what you’re saying about art belonging to the public.”

It would be very cool conceptually if U.S. forces in Afghanistan could deploy 80-foot tall Terminator skeleton robots with laser blasters to fight the Taliban/Al Qeada forces. But of course, the robots couldn’t blast their way into caves (you’re talking billions of tons of solid prehistoric rock) and they couldn’t see through rock and earth to begin with (there being no such thing as Krypton super-vision), so the whole idea is a wash. But I had this thought nonetheless when I saw this trailer yesterday.

Certainly not as much as McQueen’s legend suggested. From Shawn Levy‘s Paul Newman: A Life (Harmony), out May 5th.

Tomorrow afternoon’s Bill O’Reilly TV appearance has been cancelled. As Elliot Gould famously said two or three times in The Long Goodbye, “It’s okay with me.

Hey, I know that Chicago street and building in the background. It seems almost generic, having been used in Brian DePalma‘s The Untouchables and John McNaughton‘s Mad Dog and Glory.

Phillip Noyce‘s Salt began shooting today in Washington, D.C. I know what it is, having read the original Waldo…kidding!…having read the original Edwin A. Salt, which Tom Cruise had thought seriously about starring in. Nobody kicks big-studio thriller ass like Noyce, but I honestly believe they have to come up with a more engaging title. Salt is either abrasion and agitation (i.e., “salt in your wounds”) or something you sprinkle on chicken.

Angelina Jolie as she’ll alternately appear in Phillip Noyce’s Salt.

This USA Today story by Anthony Breznican describes Salt as a spy thriller about a rogue CIA operative who tries to clear her name after she is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent — perhaps falsely, perhaps not.” Is the reputation of the Medvedev Russian government as negative as the rep of the Russian KGB commies in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s? In a popcorn sense, I mean?

MCN’s David Poland has posted a list of the last film critics still working in America (and numbering 117 as we speak). But he wants to hear about anyone he might have missed from anyone who knows for sure. Poland is looking only for full-time death row film critics who do nothing else but go to movies and write reviews and sit at their desks waiting to be canned.

The vast majority of the threatened work for publications that are primarily print (or at least which began on paper way back when). Are there any online-only film critics facing the axe? It goes without saying that the print-based critics who also do interviews, essays and online bloggy-blogs are probably in much better shape than those who seem to be more or less “waiting for it.”

It seems to me that Poland is looking to more or less elbow aside the Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean P, Means, who’s been keeping the definitive list of laid-off film critics for the last two or three years. Same difference except that the shorter the Poland list, the longer the Means will be. Either way Poland is saying, “Hey, who says Means owns this beat? Or at least, who says I can’t reverse the POV and get into it that way?”

“‘To live my my life like I want to,’ he said, ‘is the least I can do.’ And that had worked for him. And when it was over, he knew it was over and required no explanation. He had spent half a life blowing his brains out with booze, and the bullet was just a period at the end of no sentence in particular.” — the last line of dialogue in a 2006 draft of Bruce Robinson‘s The Rum Diary, an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson‘s revised version of a novel by the same name which he originally wrote in 1959.

I received the Rum Diary script last weekend, and when I read that final page I said to myself, “Whoa.” I mean, is that Thompson talking about his own life or what? Talk about an epitaph.

The Rum Diary, which Robinson will begin directing in San Juan later this month, will star Johnny Depp as expat journalist Paul Kemp, Amber Heard as the temptressy Chenault, Richard Jenkins as the likable Lotterman and Aaron Eckhart as the adjective-defying Sanderson.

Both the book and the film tell Kemp’s story, a malcontent journo who moves from New York to work for a small newspaper, The Daily News, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. If you know Thompson’s stuff, you know what this will be — and that’s okay by me.

In a disconnect-from-reality interview that will live in the annals of psychedelia, French Connection director William Friedkin has waved off cinematographer Owen Roizman‘s very sharp disparaging of the recently-released French Connection Blu-ray, which Friedkin supervised. The result was an abomination that made this classic 1971 cop drama look (and this is me talking) bleachy, blotchy, ultra-grainy and, by any visual standard, degraded. And Friedkin, not unexpectedly, thinks it’s just peachy.

In an online audio interview last week with Back By Midnight‘s Aaron Aradillas , Roizman called the transfer “atrocious” and “horrifying.” Freidkin, talking with Aradillas last night, said that Roizman “happens to be wrong” and called the French Connection Blu-ray “by far the best print that’s ever been made for that picture. You’re hearing this from the director. Not a frame has been changed, but the process is deeper and richer than anything that’s come before….[it’s been made] as good as we could make it look using the new home technology.”

Whuh-whuh-whuh…what?

If your definition of “best” means the closest restoration of the original theatrical print that was approved in ’71 by Friedkin and Roizman and seen by first-run audiences, then Friedkin, no offense, is completely full of shit. If your definition of “best” means a sharper, cleaner, less scratchy, and more visually vivid DVD or Blu-ray of an older film, then Friedkin, no offense, is completely full of shit. If your definition of “best” means re-imagined, revised and altered in a nearly monochromed and sand-stormed way according to a whim in Friedkin’s head, then Friedkin is totally correct.

Aradillas, of course, let Friedkin get away with this. He took forever to raise the subject of the French Connection Blu-ray in their interview, and when the subject came up and Friedkin callled it “deeper and richer than anything that’s come before,” Aradillas didn’t challenge him a bit. He wussed out.

When Friedkin asked Aradillas what he thought of the French Connection Blu-ray, Aradillas manned-up and said it was “pretty impressive…pretty impressive.” What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. It means Aradillas wants Friedkin to come back on the show.

At one point Friedkin compared the French Connection Blu-ray scorn to the boos of the folky faithful who tore into Bob Dylan for going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Nice try, Billy.

Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny came on the show after Friedkin and he, too, tap-danced around the elephant in the room, which is that the French Connection Blu-ray is an unmistakable desecration. That’s my view anyway, and the view of many Blu-ray fans out there. The vast majority, I suspect.

Ain’t It Cool‘s Mr. Beaks wrote earlier this evening that he’s been “receiving emails from people who’ve ‘heard things’ about what Terrence Malick is up to in Austin, Texas, regarding work on The Tree of Life. One thing he’s heard is that legendary visual f/x legend Douglas Trumbull is working with Malick in some capacity.

“Is he assisting Mike Fink on the dinosaur footage?,” Beaks writes. “I don’t know just yet. But he has been seen knocking around Austin with Malick’s crew, and I can confirm that he has been shooting footage of some sort fairly recently. Personally, I hope he’s involved with the NASA-shot sequences that will allegedly be included in the IMAX movie.

“And when I say ‘IMAX movie’, I mean a whole second movie. That’s right — we’ll be getting two new Malick movies [over] the next year or so. The first is The Tree of Life (which one source tells me is ‘massive’); the other will be an ‘IMAX-only’ feature depicting the birth and death of the universe.

“It’s important to note that these films are not narratively connected, [but] are thematically complementary pieces.”

Sounds a little dicey to me, but who knows?

I’m slated to go on Bill O’Reilly‘s show on Wednesday to get slapped around again, this time about my dislike (or more precisely my lack of comfort with) the under-message delivered by Ross Katz‘s Taking Chance, which I wrote about yesterday.

With this video clip, Julie Ferrier has, in a manner of speaking, popped out. I mean, I didn’t know her at all before this.