I remember reading about a comic bit performed by George Bush at the ’04 or ’05 Gridiron Club dinner about looking around for WMD’s that didn’t exist, like he was looking for a lost wallet. The fantasy rationale Bush had used for starting the Iraq War and causing the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and U.S. troops and bringing untold pain into the lives of millions had devolved into joke material. By admitting he’d been full of it he won people over…hilarious.

In the same vein Hillary Clinton tried joking her way out of telling that whopper about dodging bullets in Bosnia on Jay Leno last night. Is that how it works now? Sell a lie as fact and get nailed for it, but all you need to do to turn it around and improve your public standing is deliver a “funny” mea culpa in the right forum? Does this mean Iran’s President Ahmedinjad could theoretically go on Late Night with David Letterman one day and make a joke about having been a former Holocaust denier? Why not, given the system we clearly have in place?

As I said in my initial review of Shine a Light, which opens today (and, to repeat once again, must be seen in the IMAX format), it’s hard to get into the big standards that “Shattered,” “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” etc. The highlights of Martin Scorsese‘s concert film are the less well-known, mid-rangers like “Tumblin’ Dice,” “Live With Me,” “As Tears Go By,” “Champagne and Reefer,” “Faraway Eyes” and “She Was Hot.” If there are You Tube/Shine a Light videos of these performances, it’s news to me.

The Harry Ransom Center, an arts and culture study and archive branch of the University of Texas at Austin, has put up over 50 videos of “Mike Wallace Show” interviews from 1957, plus a selection of audio-only revisitings and transcripts. What a weird, constricted, almost repulsively narrow-minded world it seems to have been back then. Or at least, as far as what’s implied by Wallace’s questions and the answers he gets.

Wallace smokes constantly during the interviews and hustles Phillip Morris cigarettes like there’s a stern-faced Phillip Morris account executive standing just out of camera range. Where would Wallace have been financially back then without cigarette advertisements? He also sold Parliament cigarettes like there was no tomorrow.
The only half-agreeable clip I took the time to watch is of Wallace asking Kirk Douglas, who was then filming The Vikings, about hiring former Nazis and Communists. Douglas, obviously feeling a bit threatened but standing up nonetheless, basically replies that he doesn’t believe in persecuting people for past alliances, mistakes and/or errors of judgment. Good answer. Douglas and director Otto Preminger brought the curtain down on the black list three years later by openly working with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
Wallace later asks whether European or American women makes the best wives. These two politely joshing males could be talking about cars or haberdasheries or washing machines.
We’re all products and members of our immediate environment, but the people in these videos seem to be living in a kind of gulag — the Leavenworth State Prison and Siberan salt mines of 1957-style propriety and conformity. The implications of a guarded, button-down, autocratic world in these videos are positively stifling. And to think that I wasted over 45 minutes watching the damn things.
When I think of 1957 I think of the vitality and reach and yearnings of Elvis Presley, Paths of Glory, the original Broadway production of West Side Story, the debut of “American Bandstand,” Chuck Berry, Eugene O’Neill‘s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Fats Domino, Jack Kerouac, Jerry Lee Lewis, Night of the Demon with Dana Andrews, Mickey Mantle, Moose Skowron, the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, Bob Dylan at age 16, Sayonara, The Tin Star, the original 3:10 to Yuma, the death of Humphrey Bogart, A Face in the Crowd, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Hatful of Rain, Ben Gazzara in The Strange One, Little Richard, Twelve Angry Men, etc.
There are faint echoes of these events, artists, athletes and creations in the Wallace videos, I suppose, but the world that’s mainly conveyed is one of arch attitudes and forced viewpoints, and above all a cautious, corporate mentality filled with people who weren’t really on to what was starting to happen back then, and certainly not about where things would be in a few short years.
Thanks to HE reader Mike Gaertner for passing these time-wasters along. “Another notable moment,” he writes, “is when Wallace attempts to make Tony Perkins the poster boy of the beat generation (???). Perkins seems very uncomfortable when Wallace asks to him discuss On the Road and jazz music (Tony apparently haing ben a fan of both). You can almost sense Perkins hoping a studio publicist would swoop in from the side to save him from having to reveal his bizarre side-life to middle America.”

Average Joes don’t want to know from Leatherheads reviews — Thursday’s tracking suggests that George Clooney‘s period football comedy will do about $20 million this weekend — but if they did they’d be sullen. The Rotten Tomatoes creme de la creme has given it a lousy 33% positive and the non-elite has passed along a dispiriting 53% positive.
That said, it’s only fair to acknowledge that Leatherheads has a guy-buried-in- mud gag in the final act that’s pretty good. Even though I’ll bet Clooney stole it from a similar bit in Henry Hathaway‘s North to Alaska. During a big slapstick street fight at the end, Ernie Kovacs, playing a card-shark villain, gets thrown into a pond of quicksand-like mud and is half-submerged. Then a big wooden barrel rolls on top of him and buries him completely. Not that there’s anything wrong with theft. The best artists do it.
Like I said on 3.31, a comedy “without a serious foundation can feel too much like a jape, and so the mood humor in Leatherheads has a kind of ceiling. You want to give yourself over to it, but you can’t. The movie won’t let you. Because it only wants to make you feel good and spritzy, after a while it almost makes you feel a little bit bad. Even though it’s mostly ‘likable.’ A curious effect.”

The hearts of many Los Angeles-based, Hollywood-covering journalists were broken (mine included) this morning when a Michael Cieply N.Y. Times piece reported in today’s edition that Paramount had screened Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder the night before last.

It takes me a while to process these things. I guess I succumbed to a kind of fog or numbness. An hour or so after I first read the article I found myself wandering the streets of West Hollywood, wondering who I was and what my life amounts to if I can’t get into an early-bird screening attended by “several hundred Hollywood agents, managers, publicists and reporters,” for Chrissake.
I called Paramount publicity to kvetch and was told I’m on the list for the next screening. Paramount is planning several, apparently.
Cieiply reported that Tom Cruise “brought down the house with his surprise portrayal of a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools. The joke being that Cruise was essentially playing Viacom/Paramount honcho Sumner Redstone, who terminated Cruise’ s on-the-lot production deal in August ’06.
Ceiply adds a little rah-rah by declaring that Tropic Thunder is (a) a “raunchfest” and (b) is “shaping up as one of the studio√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s best prospects for the summer. Besides Cruise, it costars Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey and Nick Nolte.

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Jon Carroll pays a visit to a large dusty Quonset hut in an abandoned airfield some 15 miles east of San Bernardino — the former headquarters of the National Film Critics Training and Storage Facility (NAFCRIT). “Back when the demand for movie critics was high, NAFCRIT was turning them out by the score,” he notes. “There are a few old movie posters on the walls, all of them tattered. There’s also a desk, although it doesn’t appear to have been used for desklike purposes for some time.”

Another poll has detected a neck-and-neck situation in Pennsylvania following yesterday’s PPP survey that showed Barack Obama with a two- point lead over Hillary Clinton. A poll conducted on 4.2 by InsiderAdvantage/ Majority Opinion in Pennsylvania shows Clinton at 45% and Obama at 43% — the same situation given the usual margin of error. Clinton is ahead among whites by 49% to 40% — a fraction of her earlier lead — while Obama is ahead 56% to 29% among African-American voters. Clinton is ahead 49% to 38% among women; Obama edges Clinton 47% to 41% with men.

“A perennially tan, silver-haired agent was …the kind of man other men liked and women loved — a charming, martini-drinking, storytelling Irishman…gentlemanly yet gruff, easy-going yet stern…[part of] a showbiz breed that is too rapidly dying out along with their enormous repository of Industry history…scrupulously loyal to clients, he was also a tough, shrewd negotiator who knew the politics and the rituals of Hollywood as only a true insider can.” — from Nikki FInke‘s nicely written appreciation to 71 year-old Guy McElwaine, the Hollywood agent, producer and former studio chief who died early this morning.

For whatever reason, characters in movies of whatever slant or character rarely say the word “grotesque.” It’s hardly ever used in regular daily conversation, now that I think of it. Too judgmental, too assertive, too baroque. Perhaps because of this exotic usage, I always feel a certain arousal when a character pops it out. Only people of exceptional confidence and mental acuity seem to do so. And when they do, a little voice inside me goes “yes…perfect.”
George C. Scott says it in The Hospital (“And you don’t find something a little grotesque about all this?”); ditto Robert Duvall in Network (“…this grotesque incident…”). I’m especially pleased with Oscar Werner‘s use of the word in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold because he’s referring only to what he feels is an inappropriate logical conclusion or inference.
I am waiting patiently for the right moment to say “grotesque” in my own life. I will never say it just to say it. The moment and the circumstances have to be exactly right. The stars need to be aligned.

Every so often matters that don’t immediately concern or feed into the writing of the column gather mass and force like a huge wave swell. It doesn’t seem like much at first, but then the wave starts to break big-time and the roar becomes louder and louder and before you know it you’re being slammed and knocked upside down and gasping with water up your nose. This happens every so often. You cope with it as best you can. Not the end of the world, but it eats the day.

The full-boat trailer for Guillermo del Toro‘s Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Universal, 7.11). Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Luke Goss and Thomas Kretschmann costar.