[Originally posted on 8.13.16]: There’s an anecdote in David Handleman‘s 1985 California piece about Terrence Malick (titled “Absence of Malick“) that has always amused me. It’s a brief recollection about Malick having landed a New Yorker assignment in the late ’60s to write a piece about Che Guevara, and his having travelled to Bolivia to research it. But he over-researched it, Handleman wrote, and “got drowned in it, and never turned [the piece] in.”

The story made me chuckle and shake my head because I did the same damn thing in ’84. I had pitched an article to an American Film editor, Jean Callahan, about the inner lives of film critics — who they were deep down, what had lit the initial spark, what drove them on, whether they’d become corrupted by their access to film industry titans and were nursing dreams of becoming screenwriters or producers.

For a while I called it “The Outsiders”; I also called it “The Big Fix.” I knew it had the makings of something really good. So I talked to many, many critics and transcribed the interviews and wound up with at least 25 or 30 pages of single-spaced pages, all typed out and corrected with side notes and thoughts about structure and whatnot.

I got into it more and more, and it became a small mountain. And then a bigger one. And then it became quicksand and I began to sink into it. The feeling of having gotten myself into this kind of trouble was awful. I was unsure about whether to keep trying or to forget it and walk away. I felt like I was covered in glue or tar. I finally gave up. The guilt was agonizing. I’d never worked so hard on something to no avail.

Today I came upon a letter — a confession of defeat — that I sent to Callahan in December of ’84. The letter was sitting in a manila folder in the bottom drawer of a small wooden chest filled with magazines from early to mid ’90s. It was mortifying to write and certainly to send.

But at least the experience taught me three things.

One, never churn out that much research about a single topic ever again without writing anything down — write as you go along. Two, forget about big subjects and grand designs — always choose a topic that appears to be small or smallish and then make it bigger or richer with your interpretation of it. And three, always listen to what people say and let that material point the way.

The title of this piece is a quote from the late Stuart Byron, former movie columnist for the Village Voice and development exec for producer Ray Stark. In ’89 or thereabouts I briefly partnered with Byron in a venture called re:visions, which was about analyzing the problems of screenplays that had gotten stuck in development and weren’t going anywhere.

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Friendo: Was there ever an actress who graced more blockbusters but had less to show for it than Anne Archer? Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction. and Phillip Noyce‘s Patriot Games and Clear & Present Danger. Big hit movies, and she was even Oscar-nominated for her performance in Lyne’s thriller. But she never seemed to reap the appropriate benefit. Now 76, Archer was very talented, beautiful and quite likable, but was there finally just something a tad insubstantial going on?

HE to friendo: Archer was a classy and respected second-tier actress, and of course she peaked during her late ’80s to mid ’90s heyday. She’s been acting since the early ’70s, and at least she peaked during the Poppy Bush and Clinton eras! Plus she’s still with us at age 76 or thereabouts.

Archer was always a highly skilled actress, but there was always something a bit conservative and Fairfield County about her. I saw her in John Ford Noonan‘s “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking” at a theatre across the street from the Public at Astor Place, and thought she was excellent. But she mainly seemed to play bland, nurturing wife-mothers who were married to corporate, upper-middle-class alpha-males.

Archer never played cold corporate types on her own steam or sexual dynamos or murdering bitches a la Glenn Close or action sidekicks or frosty district attorneys. Like almost every young actress of yore she performed in the requisite number of sex scenes, but nothing in the 9 1/2 Weeks realm.

Noyce and Lyne cast Archer in her most commercially successful films, but in so doing she kind of became known as the consummate classy wife. In a way these castings seemed to vaguely suppress her career. Or do I mean that she was too convincing as the classy homemaker, such that no one could see her as anything but?

Wiki excerpt: Since the 2000s, Archer has sporadically worked in acting. She appeared in the film Lullaby (2014) and made her stage debut as Mrs Robinson in the West End production of The Graduate in 2001. She played the eponymous actress in The Trial of Jane Fonda at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and had recurring roles on television shows such as Boston Public (2003), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2006) and Ghost Whisperer (2006–2008).

Friendo to HE: Maybe JoBeth Williams is another of her ilk (and from roughly the same time period): Attractive and talented, but, as the producers and agents are fond of saying, “She’s just not a lead.” I’d love to have seen Archer playing an amoral Maddy Walker-type (i.e., Body Heat). Or someone whose warm, nurturing demeanor masked a heart of ice.

I feel happy…truly happy now. This feels to me like …well, I wasn’t around but this is probably what VE or VJ Day felt like to millions of Americans.

…around people who say “see this movie only with people you feel safe with.”

What might happen of an unwelcome nature if you were to see, say, an ethnically-focused film with someone or a group of people you didn’t feel “safe” with? What would these imagined threat people do that might mess with your heads or feelings? How would they malign your viewing experience?

Remember that 20something TikTok woman who called upon white moviegoers to not attend commercial showings of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever on opening night?

I’ve been watching films all my life (starting at age four or five) without knowing or caring to know if people sitting around me were “safe” or not. As long as they don’t talk or text or take their smelly shoes off I can watch films with anyone.

Because I really don’t want Kamala Harris to take over. Really. I’m a center-lefty (i.e., a centrist with a classic liberal history before the scourge of wokeism) but I’d honestly feel better about Nikki Haley. She’s a better candidate now than Harris was in ‘19 and early ‘20.

“That’s the one thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common — they’re both waiting for their [likeliest Presidential] candidates to die.” — Bill Maher monologue, 11.10.23.

Yesterday Warner Bros.s David Zaslav shelved the finished and ready-to-go Coyote vs. Acme — no theatrical or MAX release. From this act of brutality WB derived an estimated $30M writedown, with Coyote vs. Acme having cost $70 million.

Had a lot of fun scoring Coyote Vs Acme. As no one will be able to hear it now, due to bizarre anti-art studio financial shenanigans I will never understand, here is a bit of behind the scenes footage of our “Meep Meep” Roadrunner choir, with apologies to Tchaikovsky… pic.twitter.com/HL7h00rXpp

— Steven Price (@SteveBPrice) November 10, 2023

I was lucky with the ladies for a fairly long stretch, from the mid ’70s until the late 20-teens. My hound-dog period ended precisely in June of ’17, when Tatiana and I tied the knot.

Before that moment I was mostly just fortunate. Either women find you attractive or they don’t. You can’t talk them into anything they don’t want to do — they hold the cards and control all the traffic lights.

I was a celibate, low-self-esteem nerd in my teens, but after hitting my early 20s I was blessed with dozens of glorious green lights for many subsequent decades. (I was faithfully married between ’87 and ’91.)

In this respect Alfred Hitchcock was one of the unlucky ones. He was obviously quite brilliant, wealthy and powerful during his directing heyday (mid 1920s to mid 1960s), but women found him ugly and Uriah Heepish, and despite his obvious interest and heated libido he never got anywhere.

When he entered his early 20s he should have just said “aahh, fuck it…God has both gifted and cursed me, and I’m just not going to score…women find me grotesque and that’s that.”

Alas, Hitch kept expressing himself in sexual ways throughout most of his life. Indirectly (mostly through surrogates) but creatively and forcefully.

For many decades the standard narrative about Hitchcock has been that he was more than a bit of a misogynist — cruel, pervy, sexually frustrated.

This view was launched almost exactly 40 years ago by Donald Spoto‘s “The Dark Side of Genius” (’83). It certainly got the ball rolling.

Roughly 29 years later Spoto served as script consultant for Julian Jarrold‘s The Girl (2012), an HBO/BBC flick based on Spoto’s Hitchcock books (the other two were “The Art of Alfred Hitchcock” and “Spellbound by Beauty”). Hitch and his Birds/Marnie victim Tippi Hedren were played by Toby Jones and Sienna Miller. (Not a good film.)

In the fall of 2016 came “Tippi: A Memoir”, in which Hedren passed along first-hand accounts of Hitchcock sexually assaulting and generally pressuring and tormenting her…”I’m giving you a career…how about some reciprocity?”

On 6.21.18 noted critic David Thomson posted a London Review of Books essay about Hitchcock‘s notoriously perverse (and arguably misogynist) Vertigo. The piece questioned whether Vertigo was an acceptable fit in the #MeToo era. Given Hitchcock’s creepy attitudes toward women on-screen (and his behavior toward Hedren in the early ’60s), Thomson doubted that Vertigo would be #1 again when Sight & Sound critics voted in 2022.

Thomson turned out to be right. In an act of seeming woke ballot-stuffing, Chantal Akerman‘s Jeanne Dielman became the new S&S champion.

Now comes another Hitchcock study, one that basically says that he greatly enhanced the careers of several blonde actresses even though he was a fascinating creep — Laurence Leamer‘s “Hitchcock’s Blondes.”

Yesterday The Atlantic posted a mostly negative review by Matthew Specktor, titled “The Baffling Cruelty of Alfred Hitchcock.” Here are excerpts:

“Despite a title that may come off as objectifying, Leamer’s book is in many ways empathic and thoughtful, and he seems ready to train a generous eye on these actresses, to extract them from Hitchcock’s shadow without shoving the director under the wheels of his own limousine.

“The Hitchcock depicted in these pages is lonely and remote, yet also controlling and often vicious, at once fearful of and fixated upon sex, a devoted caregiver to his wife during her later years and, as Leamer is not the first to speculate, possibly undiagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.

“The intention here is not so much to redraw our understanding of Hitchcock as it is to shift the emphasis altogether: to provide a new picture, or rather a series of pictures, of the actresses whose lives and careers are too often viewed in relation to the director’s.

“The problem is, Leamer doesn’t quite bring enough to the table. He doesn’t have much in the way of new information, and however nobly he strives to foreground the women in Hitchcock’s orbit, the book comes to life only when the director emerges from the wings to reclaim the stage. Leamer’s attention to the details of the actresses’ erotic lives can also give off a whiff of misogyny.

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