From Peggy Noonan‘s latest (3.7) “Declarations” column in the Wall Street Journal: “What do I think is the biggest reason Mrs. Clinton came back? She kept her own spirits up to the point of denial and worked it, hard, every day. She is hardy, resilient, tough. She is a train on a track, an Iron Horse. But we must not become carried away with generosity.
“The very qualities that impress us are the qualities that will make her a painful president. She does not care what you think, she will have what she wants, she will not do the feints, pivots and backoffs that presidents must. She is neither nimble nor agile, and she knows best. She will wear a great nation down.”
In a recent Elle magazine interview, Natalie Portman dismissed much of what offends the Hillary haters as “sexist.” What is her response, I wonder, to what Noonan and Maureen Dowd have been writing all along about Clinton?
Noonan ends her column with a ghastly quote from Christopher Hitchens spoken during an interview with Hugh Hewitt, to wit: Hillary will eb the next president because “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power…people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”

Samantha Power, described as a “key foreign policy aide’ to Barack Obama, told The Scotsman that Clinton “is a monster….she is stooping to anything. You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

Power was forced to resign for understandable reasons. One of the most fundamental rules of public relations is that you can’t bluntly say what almost everyone believes deep down. In my book she’s a truth-speaker likeRobert Ryan‘s John the Baptist in King of Kings. King Herod ordered his head cut off for pointing at Brigid Bazlen‘s Salome and calling her a “daughter of abomination,” but John was at one with God’s heart. I am standing (well, sitting) here and telling, as God is my witness, the truth, which is that Power (a) should have been more careful but (b) she said it straight and true.

The spirited Hector Elizondo did a q & a following last night’s Aero screening of Joseph Sargent‘s The Taking of Pelham 123. Elizondo plays the coarse, dryly menacing “Mr. Gray,” one of four disguised men who hijack a subway train in this 1974 classic. I didn’t know Elizondo would be visiting until I arrived, but it was a real pleasure to absorb his humor and energy and rascally wit.

Born in 1936 and raised in southwest Harlem, Elizondo gives off a kind of sophisticated street schwing that feels highly infectious. His basic attitude is a combination of “what’s next?,” “keep moving,” “look deeper” and “never stop with the jokes.” You can take the man out of Manhattan (I presume Elizondo lives out here) but you can’t the Manhattan out of the man. I didn’t take his picture but I applauded with vigor when the interview ended.
The Taking of Pelham 123 looked great — no scratches or color deterioration, although the sound felt weak. Charley Varrick, which went on at 10 pm after Elizondo signed off, came from a very clean and well-tended print, but the images seemed too dark at times. The DVD delivers more visual value. Too many scenes last night seemed underlit in a way that couldn’t have been intended by director Don Siegel.

“How is it that Clinton became the one who’s perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn’t panic when he’s losing or get too giddy when he’s winning, who’s as comfortable in his own skin as she’s uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she’d actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane.” — Larry David in a 3.6 Huffington Post.

The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell has passed along a clip of the only completed footage of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the 2000 Terry Gilliam project with Johnny Depp that folded after a week of shooting. It runs about six minutes: Neither Howell nor myself are sure if this ended up in Lost in La Mancha, the ’02 doc about the aborted attempt to make this movie, but neither of us remember it.

“It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like.

“For me, it was just like any other weekend in my life. I didn’t eat a last meal, I didn’t jerk off any more or any less, I didn’t climb a mountain or end up swinging from a noose with Mozart’s Requiem in the background. But suddenly it’s important exactly what I did, because they are the last few days, and what you do in the last few days, down to your last lunch, becomes a fairy tale.
“If you force me to make my last weekend a microcosm of my existence, and what my existence means to you, then I’ll tell you how it went and who I played. But first things first: It was an accident. I’m not some fucked-up star who couldn’t deal. I could deal; I just couldn’t sleep.” — from Lisa Taddeo‘s fictional, diary-like riff on Heath Ledger‘s final days, written as if it came from the “other side” (i.e., William Holden-in-Sunset Boulevard-style), in the new Esquire magazine.

Now we’re hearing it was somebody from the Clinton camp, and not Obama’s, who said to take their candidate’s anti-NAFTA speeches with a grain of salt. Water under the bridge, right?

McCain lite is a pretty good retort to Hillary right now. So is “what the hell did she really actually do during the ’90s that involved 3 am courage”? So is “where are her tax returns”? For anyone with a modicum of perspective, the fact that Clinton is not only willing but eager to play it butt-ugly and burn the house down in order to take the Democratic nomination is ample damnation.

[Photo montage borrowed from Huffington Post]

The dynamic will change — it’s already changing — but I can’t shake this godawful sensation I have in my stomach that Pennsylvania’s Reagan Democrats have bought into the fear card that Hillary has thrown into the center of the table, and that the die is cast The older white women love her, and their shlumpy husbands — in Pennsylvania and perhaps elsewhere — may be thinking it’s better to have a combative battle-axe with a fierce glare and puff-bags under her eyes than the other guy with a new, turn-the-page hymnbook.
It’s awful — a downer of massive proportions — but Obama is in a situation now and something has to happen. He has to somehow get it on with the Pennsylvania lowbrows and make the vote in their state close…or there may be trouble. He has to at least keep a strong edge in the overall popular vote or certain spineless superdelegates could fold and Clinton could storm the convention and make a tough case, despite the delegate math that she can’t win on.
God save us from the timidity, sluggish thinking and pathetic malleability of the Dunkin’ Donuts Democrats.
Is there not a certain analogy between the older white women who are standing by Hillary and the “downtown” jury that found O.J. Simpson not guilty in his 1994 murder trial? Did the mostly African-American jury not set a murderer free out of logic-free loyalty because they felt they had to stand by a black man in order to defy, for once, decades of prejudicial handling of African American defendants by a one-sided justice system? What is the difference, deep down, between this and millions of older women standing by Hillary despite her contentious cat-scratch vibe and monstrous negatives that will give not only pause but indigestion to millions of voters in the general election out of a sense of profound loyalty to a woman candidate, regardless of her brief?

Having recently dealt with a somewhat similar situation myself regarding a family member, I’m very sorry for poor Patrick Swayze, his family, and his friends and colleagues. Obviously a hell of a thing to deal with. I’m very, very sorry.

I missed a buried lead in Variety‘s Anne Thompson 3.3. item that seemed to debunk that strange IMDB posting that has the Coen brothers Burn After Reading playing the Cannes Film Festival on 5.14.
Thompson wrote that (a) while Cannes honcho Thierry Fremaux “will want it [although] he hasn’t screened it yet” and (b) Working Title says “it probably won’t be finished in time.” Wait a minute — a movie that began shooting last August and wrapped sometime in late October — over four months ago — isn’t in some kind of viewable form yet? Given the announced September 12th Focus Features release date, a showing at the Venice Film Festival feels more likely.

The guys at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer told me today that while regular DVDs of Into The Wild have sold fine since arriving two days ago, not a single copy of the HD-DVD version has gone home with a customer. Not surprising, but aren’t there hundreds if not thousands of Los Angeles residents who own HD-DVD players?

What this suggests, obviously, is that they’re thisclose to throwing their players into the garbage dumpster and heading out to buy a Blu-ray player. I saw a 46″ high-def flatscreen on sale at the West L.A. Best Buy yesterday for $2000. That plus $333 for the Blu-ray player. I’d love to have that stuff in my living room, but it still feels pricey. I want a 46-incher for $1200, say, and a Blu-ray player for $175. $1500 all in — that’s more my speed.

One reason I’ve been slow to post today is that I’m scanning old articles for the “Yellowing With Antiquity” section that will be viewable on the newly designed Hollywood Elsewhere, which will hopefully be live by the end of the weekend. In any event, I just scanned my only surviving copy of a 1992 Movieline piece I wrote called “Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood” and realized to my horror that I’m missing the final two jump pages.

In the unlikely event that some packrat out there has old Movieline issues sitting in their garage, please get in touch. The issue that contained this article had David Bowie on the cover.
The piece offered summaries of the juiciest celebrity interviews I could find back then. The copy I just scanned features five — Truman Capote vs. Marlon Brando (“The Duke in His Domain,” The New Yorker, November 1957), Rex Reed vs. Warren Beatty (“Will The Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up?,” Esquire, October 1967), Robin Green vs. Dennis Hopper (“Confessions of a Lesbian Chick,” Rolling Stone, May 1971), Tom Burke vs. Ryan O’Neal (“The Shiek of Malibu,” Esquire, September 1973), and Julie Baumgold vs. David Geffen (“The Winning of Cher,” Esquire, February 1975).
Here’s the cover page, page 2, page 3, and page 4.
The opening graph reads, “In view of all the recent bad press Hollywood publicists have been getting for their attempts to control access to celebrity clients, we thought it would be instructive to take a look back at some of the stories published over the years that scared these spin doctors into their current defensive posture.”