Hollywood Elsewhere to David Kittredge, director of Boorman and the Devil:

There can be no questioning the fact that Boorman and the Devil, which I saw and adored at the Venice Film Festival, fully deserves to be nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar.

It’s a seriously dimensional film that not only tells a fascinating saga of how a legendary financial and critical disaster came to be made, but also delves into the heart and soul of filmmaking, not just as it existed a half-century ago but today and eternally…what does the making of great cinema truly and finally require? Answer: A willingness to not only flirt with failure but to walk barefoot on the knife edge of that.

For a potential Oscar nomination to happen Boorman and the Devil will have to book week-long releases in both Los Angeles County plus any of the five boroughs of New York City sometime during the remainder of 2025. The qualifying theatrical runs must meet the same requirements as those for non-documentary films regarding numbers and times of screenings. A film must have been reviewed by a critic from The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times.

Surely you’ve discussed how to make this happen. Please tell me you intend to at least try, and that you’ll be reaching out to certain parties (i.e., rich movie-worshipping guys) to fund the theatrical booking as well as the Oscar campaign.

Please tell me what the situation is.

Congrats on the forthcoming 9.24 screening at the Aero. I’m presuming there will be NYC screening of Boorman and the Devil at a similar venue. Please keep me posted.

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HE-posted from Venice Film Festival on 9.5.25:

David Kittredge’s Boorman and The Devil, which I saw this morning at 9 am, is one of the wisest, deepest, most poetic-minded, most eloquent and most satisfyingly assembled “inside baseball meets human vulnerabilty” documentaries that I’ve ever seen.

With the festival nearly over, I wasn’t expecting any kind of triple or home run. But it’s a truly masterful film.

It actually ranks among the four or five best films I’ve seen in Venice thus far…seriously.

Kittredge doesn’t just cover the whole, calamitous, chapter-by-chapter story of the making of John Boorman‘s The Exorcist II: The Heretic. He also assesses Boorman’s entire career while examining his personal passions and tendencies.

The most intriguing aspect is an atmospheric recreation of the fascinating Hollywood milieu of 1976 and ’77, which was when the film was made…the closing chapter of the whole sprawling saga of New Hollywood, which began in ’67 (The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde) and ended with the super-successful, game-changing release of Star Wars in May ’77.

Produced over the last seven years, Boorman and the Devil is a very thorough telling of a grueling creative effort. Kittredge has interviewed pretty much every living person who worked on the film, starting with Boorman, the project’s bruised but resilient godfather.

Costars Linda Blair (who turned 66 last January) and Louise Fletcher (died three years ago) are given a healthy amount of screen time; ditto uncredited screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg and Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown.

A stimulating variety of peripheral participants and observers are also heard from — directors Joe Dante and Jeff Kanew, critics Bilge Ebiri and Stephanie Zacharek plus author and former Variety reporter Joe McBride.

There’s footage of a funny story about a sneak preview screening, passed along by Exorcist helmer William Friedkin….hilarious.

The Boorman interview apparently happened in ’18, as he tells Kittredge’s camera that he’s 85. Born in 1933, Boorman is now 92.

The two best docs about “difficult shoots that produced a good or classic film”, of course, are George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coopola‘s Hearts of Darkness (’91) and Les Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (’82).

Kittredge’s doc belongs in the pantheon of an opposite category — i.e., docs about the making of movies that went horribly wrong.

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I often post or edit WordPress content on my iPhone during my limo-driving sojourns. But I was unable to post anything yesterday (Friday, 9.19) because I was totally unable to access WordPress on the phone.

I can sign in to my WordPress content on my Macbook Pro laptops, no problem. The same username and password that’s been working just fine since ’22 or thereabouts works perfectly as we speak, but when I try to sign in on the phone via the WordPress app or through a certain URL access link, WordPress says “nein”. And it’s all the fault of those tech-bro mofos behind IOS 26, which was released on Monday, 9.15.

Why did I download this new operating system two daysd ago when everyone knows you always wait a couple of months for the bugs to be ironed out?

I’m blaming a certain Upper West Side Apple Store employee (a guy who looks like Ving Rhames, only younger and shorter)…he’s the little twinkle-toes troublemaker who suggested that I do this.

Should I have refused given my troubled experience with newly released operating systems in the past? Yes, of course, but I prefer to blame Ving. His fault, not mine.

Two days ago (Thursday, 9.18) I was having trouble pairing an Apple Air Tag with my iPhone 15, and so Ving said I should download IOS 26.0, just to be on the technically thorough and updated side. So I did so, and soon after noticed the WordPress access problem.  I’m now wondering if there’s a work-around, or if i could simply sign in with an alternate username or something.

I know that if I was walking across a suburban street today and happened to notice Ving Rhames behind the wheel of an inexpensive car at a stoplight, I would stop dead in my tracks and say “muthah-FUCKAH!” And then I’d go all medieval on his ass.

Repeating:  Logging into WordPress successfully and using it without issue is NOT A PROBLEM on the laptop.  This is strictly an iPhone problem. With either of my three (3) Macbook Pros, I can always reliably get WordPress access to my site (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) by using a certain link, which of course I’m not going to reveal.

But when I try signing into WordPress on the phone via any username (redacted) and any old password (redacted), it rejects these flat-out. 

I’ve used different WordPress usernames and passwords over the last six or seven years, and please don’t ask why….but only now and for the first time, I’m totally blocked from accessing my WordPress account on the phone. I’ve tried asking freelance techbros for help, and they know absolutely NOTHING because this is a brand-new problem (i.e, less than week old).

Has anyone in the HE commentariat experienced any IOS 26.0 problems?

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…but if I was Woody Allen‘s editor I would’ve pushed for a younger, more homey-ish, more ’90s-sounding title, like “Whassup With Baum?” Or, slightly better, “Whassup, Baum?” Or better yet, “Yo, Baum…What Up?”

“Vaguely fearful of ‘The Housemaid’“, posted on 3.22.25:

Indications are that Paul Feig‘s The Housemaid (Lionsgate, 12.19), based on Freida McFadden‘s three-year-old novel, a feminist potboiler that has since grown into a multi-book franchise, is going to be a bit of a groaner…perhaps even a forehead-slapper.

All feminist airport fiction is based upon a single premise, which is that the principal male character is a toxic piece of shit who has made his own bed and deserves all the bad karma that’s sure to come his way.

It certainly seems unlikely that Feig’s film will deliver the intrigue and complexity of Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (’10), which I recall as being half-decent.

Both versions have vaguely similar plots with the husband banging (or at least looking to bang) the housemaid, and the wife freaking out and the usual blowback kicking in.

The Housemaid costars Sydney Sweeney as the titular character; Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar (the bearded, nice-guy suitor in It Ends With Us) are her wealthy employers.

I feel like a total effing fool for having paid $180 bills to see a NYFF closing-night screening of Bradley Cooper‘s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19). Two $90 tickets, I mean. 180 smackers! Charging this much for a movie seat is exploitive, disreputable, ugly. I wish I had summoned the character to say “uhhm, wait, no…I can’t pay this much” to the Avery Fisher Hall ticket-seller. But I didn’t. I failed.

The bottom line is that I wanted to catch this presumably award-worthy film because I respected and admired Cooper’s filmmaking chops in Maestro. Anyway, it’s done. I feel angry and nearly humiliated, but the tickets are in my possession and that’s that.

Hollywood Elsewhere has been an ongoing thing since August 2004, and posting on a daily bloggy-blog basis since April ’06, and it’s always looked the same…same front, same dark-blue headlines, same light gray background, same Hollywood hills logo. I feel really terrible that this ongoing visual signature has collapsed over the past two days…it’s all been shattered.

I know the HE presentation will soon be replaced by something better, and that upgrading to the the 2025 realm is obviously a good thing. There’s no percentage in hanging on to the past. I just want to say that I’m very, very sorry for this trauma, which of course is entirely my fault. I feel so fucked up about this…I feel lost, adrift, cut loose.

Hollywood Elsewhere has been my security blanket for so many years…my little blue blankie, and now it’s gone.

N.Y. Times, February 4, 1939, Page 1….

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ABC is deep-sixing Jimmy Kimmel Live! “indefinitely”, which sounds like “adios”, fare-thee-well and that’s all she wrote. The yanking was ostensibly about Kimmel saying something erroneous or insensitive about Charlie Kirk‘s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson. Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr wants Kimmel gone, having suggested that ABC’s broadcast license “is at risk from Kimmel’s statements about Robinson.” Nexstar Media Group, which is seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna, was ebviously eager to dump Kimmel. The Trumpies, in short, are doing everything they can to eliminate late-night Trump antagonists.

For the last several months I’ve been skeptical about the notion of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 9.26), which I caught yesterday morning inside the AMC 34th Street, being any kind of artistic comeback flick, much less an Oscar contender. In my mind PTA has been vaguely downswirling or certainly treading water since There Will Be Blood (’07), his last really good film.

Well, it’s now Wednesday afternoon and I am no longer skeptical about the potential award-season fortunes of this film. It’s a serious winner — thrilling, complex, darkly humorous, poignantly emotional from a father-daughter perspective, dramatically scored, beautifully shot…it really connects. Battle might run into some trouble commercially as it’s strictly a blue-cities flick from a political-ideological standpoint, but in all other respects I am now a believer.

Battle is certainly a Best Picture contender, and it could even potentially win (although I doubt this given that it’s too emphatically woked-up and white-male-hating or white-male-pitying for general comfort). But it’s going to be nominated in almost every category. Anderson has bounced back big-time, and is certainly no longer slumping…he’s riding the award-season whirlwind. Who remembers the paranoid imaginings of Alan Pakula‘s The Parallax View (’74), and particularly the vibe of the Parallax Corporation? I’m not saying that Battle is even vaguely analogous to Parallax, but they do line up in one respect.

Pakula’s Parallax Corporation was run by shadowy, cold-blooded, conservatively-attired serpents who were in the business of murdering high-profile liberal politicians. I’m just saying that in PTA’s newbie, which actually has a happy ending, the Parallax Corporation is, at the very least, symbolically back in action, only this time the group is called the Christmas Adventurers, an elite cabal of white nationalists who aren’t plotting political killings but are certainly “think white”-ish and pulling racist strings when strategy requires it. I went into yesterday morning’s 9:30 am screening with an attitude of guarded optimism.

I was mainly hoping that it would be as good as what the earlybird whores have been crowing about for the last few days. I knew it wouldn’t be as good as what IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich has been saying (“…might be the best movie released by a major American studio since I started working as a critic in 2010”) because Ehrlich is, in my humble view, a foam-at-the-mouth woke fanatic, but I really wanted at least a ground-rule-double or a triple. I didn’t trust the idea of a home run as PTA has been off his game since Blood and probably, I’ve been calculating, sinking into soft mud, but I really wanted to hear the loud crack of the bat and the subsequent roar of the crowd. Battle, to put it mildly, has exceeded my expectations.

Form-wise it’s a total homer — a knockout masterwork from a gifted director who knows exactly what he’s doing and how to deliver the right stuff — while the content is so absurdly woked-up in a POC-favoring, over-the-waterfall-in-a-barrel way that it’s sure to be hated or certainly hooted at outside the big cities, especially in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Average Joes and Janes will say “yeah, a really good movie but what’s with the leftist guerilla-revolution jazz?

In the wake of the Charley Kirk tragedy they’re releasing a hooray-for-the-left, defy-the-malevolent-whiteys film? A movie that says all white people and especially guys in starched military fatigues with close-cropped hair are bad…we get that, this is what Hollywood always does…whitey bad, POCs good…whitey baddie-waddie, POCs are spirit angels and God’s chosen..but the Kirk tragedy has changed the political landscape.”

I for one didn’t mind the woke current because OBAA is so damnably well directed. I think it’s PTA’s best film ever, and if you ask me and Warner Bros. marketing’s decision not to premiere it in Venice or Telluride was nonsensical. The present-tense section (the first 40 minutes are set in ’09 or thereabouts while the remaining two hours are set in the present) happens in a Trumpian police-state world that feels fairly current (ICE-like military invasions, rounded-up immigrants held inside chain-link-fence compounds, white shitheads in military fatigues and business suits bringing racist rain down upon the heads of change-seeking POC lefties) and is basically….well, not about an ongoing battle between the POC wokies and the big bad whiteys, although it’s the only seriously action-driven, car-chasey PTA film ever.

Battle is primarily about a father’s attempt to rescue his daughter from rightwing kidnappers (i.e., the present-tense material), but it’s based on an oddly sexual romantic triangle between Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson (grizzled ex-revolutionary), Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (broomstick up his ass, hot for black chicks) and Teyana Taylor‘s Perfidia Beverly Hills, which is dramatized during the first 40. A triangle, incidentally, that doesn’t even spark conflict or recriminations Battle is so well done, so gripping, so well acted, shot and cut, so dynamically captured….the 160 minutes fly by like they’re 95 or 100. But it’s so fucking woke and so virulently against heavily-fortified white authority figures, it’s not going to fly in red states…not in the wake of the Kirk murder.

Owen Gleiberman: “The film spooks us with the question: Is this where America is now heading? Anderson completed the movie before Donald Trump took office in January 2025, but it’s presented as a knowing projection of what autocracy under the current administration could lead to. The film isn’t just some abstract metaphoric cinematic speculation; it’s designed to look and feel just ahead of the curve of where we’re at now. And since Once Battle After Another is trying to be ruthlessly authentic about how an authoritarian state works, the revolutionaries, it turns out, don’t have much of a chance. “The film suggests that the current white-nationalist movement is, in heart, an attempt to separate white and Black people as a primal way of pretending that black-white sexual relationships of the past never happened. And that this denial is nothing less than the key fantasy driving the new alt-right America.

Bob leaves revolution in the dust to rescue his mixed-race daughter, but the movie says that what he’s doing is the real revolution: finding a family that you fight to hold together; keeping Black and white together, as they long have been; keeping hope alive, in the face of a regime that employs the stifling of hope as a ruling tactic. The movie says that out of this revolt of the everyday a greater revolution will rise.” All hail the performances by DiCaprio, Taylor, Penn plus Chase Infiniti (excellent actress!), Regina Hall, Shayna McHayle, Alana Haim, Starlette DuPois, D.W. Moffett, Paul Grimstead, James Raterman, Tony Goldwyn, Jim Downey.