In the wake of Billy Bob Thornton‘s psychotic interview on that Toronto radio show last week, it seems timely to note the 15th anniversary of the premiere of George Hickenlooper‘s Some Folks Call It A Sling Blade. There’s a complicated back-story about the short-to-feature transition, but the bottom line is that Thornton differed with Hickenlooper, grabbed the reins and directed the Sling Blade feature, which launched his career as a big-time hyphenate.

The short, too dark and softly focused for my taste, was uploaded to YouTube yesterday for the first time. The above clip is Part 1, of course. Here are part 2 and part 3. And here‘s a clip (the same scene at the beginning of the short) fromThronton’s feature-length version.

There’s a belief in some quarters that Thornton defrauded the Academy when he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Screenplay, having claimed it was based on his own play “Pearls Before Swine.” The play, I’m told, never actually existed, and was instead a one-man show in which the Karl character was one among many many characters. The reality is that the feature was based on the HIckenlooper’s short. I’ve understood that to be the case for years, and I don’t see how it’s disputable.

The above clip is Part 1 — here are part 2 and part 3. And here’s a clip (the same scene at the beginning of the short) fromThronton’s feature-length version.

The cast of the short includes Molly Ringwald, Suzanne Cryer (who later became the ‘yadda, yadda’ girl on Seinfeld), the late J.T. Walsh (the only one recast in the feature), Ron Livingston (who later starred in Office Space) and Jefferson Mays.

Elizabeth Warren, the Obama-appointed chairperson of the five-person TARP oversight committee, offered soothing words last night for Daily Show host Jon Stewart.

I’ve fallen into the small-talk habit of asking people at social occasions (parties, screenings, lunches, interviews) if they have a Bluray player. I’m not talking about MTA employees. I’m talking about folks with semi-sophisticated palates and attitudes — filmmakers, publicists, screenwriters, online entrepeneurs, etc. The point is that each and every one has said nope. Last week I asked a world-famous, absurdly rich actress if she was a Bluray person — ditto. The night before last I asked Diane Sawyer if she owns one, and she wasn’t entirely sure what I was talking about.

They all have high-def TVs but for whatever reason Bluray isn’t part of the picture. I understand being behind the curve on this or that lifestyle indulgence, but I don’t get people of comfort and sophistication not having Bluray players. Not in early 2009. I actually find this mind-blowing.

Racist xenophobe cretins who voted for Bush-Cheney’s laissez-faire “leave Wall Street alone, let the greedy pirates have fun” policies in ’00 and ’04, and who are therefore primarily responsible among the electorate for the current economic catastrophe. And so they’re marching against….?

“Sharif Ali, so long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people…greedy, barbarous and cruel.” One or two people might not know what this line is from.

“It used to be Diane Keaton with me — she always used to tell me, ‘I’m terrible, I’m awful, I can’t do it, you should get someone else.’ And she was always brilliant. Well, Larry is like this,” said Woody Allen via telephone from his Upper East Side apartment last week. The 73-year-old director was discussing his new movie Whatever Works, which stars Larry David, and will open the Tribeca Film Festival on April 22 before hitting theaters in June.

Woody Allen, Larry David.

“I’d always been a fan…I asked him to do it, and he said, ‘But I can’t act! I can only do what I do, I’m not an actor, you’ll be disappointed,'” said Mr. Allen. “You know, those are the ones who can always do it. The ones that tell you how great they are can never do it. Larry is all, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ but when it came time to do it, right out of the box, he did it. And not just the comedy, which I expected, but all the other things he had to do which required acting and emotions and being touching and all that — he did that, too.” — from “The Unshine Boys,” a Sarah Vilkomerson article in the New York Observer that was posted last night at 6 pm..

“I was so excited to get a story in Vanity Fair‘s Hollywood issue two or three years ago. But I was so disappointed in the time I spent with the journalist, because she was giving me stuff about people’s opinions. ‘Well, Ain’t it Cool News says…’ Well, what do you say or think or feel or know about me?

“A lot of journalism has become gossip. I understand it’s a business; people want to sell magazines. But I just think it’s prattle. When I was sitting with this woman from Vanity Fair, I thought her questions were prattle. They were gossipy, they were shitty. It’s like disemboweling a ghost — that’s what Brando called it.” — Brett Ratner talking to Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale about Rat Press, which is re-publishing some very cool journalistic essays/interviews.

The Vanity Fair writer Ratner is referring to, apparently, is Nancy Jo Sales. The piece ran in the March 2007 issue, and was called “The Most Happy Fella.”

For those who read my 4.16 “Beans and Peas” story, which included a unpleasant disclosure about food tampering at a Del Monte Bean and Pea canning company, here’s more to ponder along those lines.

Here’s an mp3 of a three-question chat with director Mike Nichols at MOMA about 45 minutes ago. He was there to kick off a two-week retrospective of his films. I began by mentioning production designer Richard Sylbert, who worked with Nichols on The Graduate, Catch 22 and Carnal Knowledge, among others. We ended by discussing The Fortune, his 1975 bomb that costarred Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Stockard Channing (and which Nichols says he still doesn’t care for).

Diane Sawyer, Mike Nichols outside MOMA’s Titus theatre prior to this evening’s launch of a two-week Nichols retrospective.

My middle question was whether he’d be interested in directing that possible HBO narrative film, just announced as a possibility today, based on the 2008 election. In the same vein, I was thinking, as his work on Primary Colors.

Here’s his answer: “I would never again do a movie based on real life. It’s too hard. You can’t find a metaphor. You have to do what happened, and you’re chained to a series of facts. Or even pseudo-facts. It doesn’t matter [because] it’s what everybody thinks happened. And you can’t examine the story and find out what the secrets are. You have to turn yourself inside out to turn it into a metaphor and make it into a movie, but it’s really hard.”

Both Nichols and his wife Diane Sawyer looked very well tended. I’d like to look that well-tended down the road. I wouldn’t mind looking that well-tended now.

Hollywood Elsewhere hereby submits Jason Bateman‘s performance in State of Play — a performance I admittedly didn’t mention in my review posted earlier today — as the first supporting performance of 2009 deserving of award consideration. He plays a sleazy Washington, D.C. publicist named Dominic Foy, and is quite good in a sort-of sweaty and grotesque way. Why didn’t I mention Bateman earlier? No excuse. I was thinking too much about Somali pirates.

I’m sitting in the lobby of the Standard Hotel on the Lower West Side, and about to leave for the start of a two-week Mike Nichols retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (And, just for fun, a screening of Carnal Knowledge.) I haven’t time to write anything fresh, so I’ll just quote from my 12.17.07 response to Glenn Kenny‘s profile of Nichols that ran on 12.16 in L.A. Times .

Kenny wrote that “one shouldn’t underestimate the Nichols touch” in having made Charlie Wilson’s War into a potentially popular ‘sand’ movie, despite Americans having said /no way’ to every ’07 film with the slightest whiff of any Middle Eastern elements.” Kenny was right, as it turned out — Charlie Wilson’s War went on to become a moderate hit, earning about $66 million domestically.

But “nobody has a ‘touch’ to have and to hold,” I wrote. “Artists are touched by inspiration like lightning — it passes through them, and they are nothing more than lucky conduits when this happens.

“The exceptional, long-lasting artists, of course, are those with a knack for keeping themselves open to inspiration, or who at least know how to position or trick themselves into the right state of mind so that lightning comes their way more often than not. And the fact is that Nichols-the-director went through two creative lightning phases in his life — the first from 1966 to ’75, the second from ’83 to the present. And there’s no question that the Phase One, so to speak, was the more searing and profound of the two.

The creative lightning of Phase One half-began with Nichols’ direction of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff but it really kicked in with the enormous success of The Graduate (’67) — easily his finest film — and continued with the mixed successes of Catch 22 (’70), Carnal Knowledge (’71) and The Day of the Dolphin (’73). The end of Phase One was apparently caused or at least triggered by the crash-and-burn reception to The Fortune in 1975. Nichols disappeared for seven years after that.

“NIchols got a more subdued version of the ‘lightning’ back in his Phase Two career with Silkwood, Biloxi Blues, Heartburn, The Birdcage, Wolf , Regarding Henry, Postcards from the Edge, Working Girl, Primary Colors, Closer, Angels Over America and Charlie Wilson’s War.

“Kenny mentioned a profile piece by the New Yorker’s John Lahr in which Nichols ‘described the waning inspiration that struck him in the years after his steep ascent’ and that ‘he also reveals that in the ’80s he struggled with a Halcion dependency that induced a breakdown.’

“But Kenny doesn’t acknowledge the extreme unusualness of Nichols’ career in that his Phase One brushstrokes — his signature style as a filmmaker from The Graduate to The Fortune — had totally disappeared when he returned to filmmaking in ’83 with Silkwood. He had literally abandoned his muse of the ’60s and early ’70s and become an entirely different (one could say less distinctive and more accomodating) film artist.

“The late Richard Sylbert, the fabled production designer who worked for Nichols on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff, The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, The Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune and obviously saw it all first-hand, explained this directorial-personality-change arc a few years ago over a lunch at Swingers.”