“I remember seeing Greenwich Village from seven feet up in the air growing up as a kid, because he’d have me on his shoulders and we’d be tripping around. And at a time before underground and independent film became a hot idea, then a dirty word, then a hot idea again as it is nowadays, my dad was making films that influenced a generation of filmmakers.'” — Robert Downey, Jr., speaking four days ago about his director dad, Robert Downey, Sr., at the “Time 100″ celebration at Lincoln Center.

This is an opportunity to pay tribute to “I can crawl again!” — my favorite line from Greaser’s Palace (’72), my all-time favorite Robert Downey, Sr. film. Every now and then that line comes to me and repeats in my head, over and over.
Here’s another great scene:

“I’d almost forgotten I existed. Being selected by Cannes has done wonders for me. I thought working again might have a negative effect and I nearly turned it down, but it’s been quite the opposite. My heart beats anew.” — British director Terrence Davies, director of Of Time and City, a low-budget, personal documentary about the changes in Liverpool since his childhood, speaking to the Guardian‘s Jason Solomon.

That’s a great line about Davies forgetting his own existence. He’s not just saying he’d forgotten or given up on the idea that he existed — mattered — as a filmmaker of some consequence within the British film industry, but that he’d stopped thinking of himself as an entity at all — that he’d so completely surrendered himself to feelings of drift and nothingness that he had actually stopped saying “I am.” An amazing thought. Worthy of Kant or Kafka.

Articles by Maureen Dowd, Robert Novak and Bob Ray Sanders are saying either Barack Obama won’t ask Hillary Clinton to be his vice-presidential running mate, or would be wise not to.
Clinton’s loathsomeness has become the stuff of legend, yes, and her campaign since the start of the New Hampshire inning has colored her reputation for good. But sometimes in politics you have to hold your nose and make an accomodation with people who may be repugnant in some respects if they can provide what you need. John F. Kennedy didn’t pick Lyndon Johnson for vp because he loved the guy or admired everything about him. He picked him because he wanted to win.
Obama definitely needs the older, under-educated women who voted for Hillary. I’m not sure he needs (or has a chance to win over) the racist dolts, who will probably go for McCain anyway.
“So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?,” Dowd wonders. “It is, verily, a sticky wicket.”

Steven Soderbergh has been doing his frantic last-minute editing of Che at Post Works, a Soho facility on Varick. (“The best in the world for film and video post-production…no one compares. For real.” — Bob J.) A magazine editor told me over lunch a couple of days ago that he’s spoken to a Che guy who wonders if they’ll finish in time for the Cannes screening on Wednesday, 5.21.

It hit me yesterday afternoon that I had left my passport in my bureau drawer. My flight to Paris leaves Monday at 1:45 pm, so I called Fed Ex and was relieved to hear they could deliver it to my Brooklyn address no later than 8:30 am that morning. So I called the guy who’s staying in my place and left a message to please put the passport in an envelope with the Brooklyn address on it, and give it to a Fed Ex pick-up person who would be there between noon and 2 pm yesterday.
Except the guy didn’t get the message in time (his phone had a drained battery), and therefore had no idea what the Fed Ex guy wanted when he arrived at 12:30 pm. The apartment-sitter guy finally called around 4 pm Eastern and said he’d do what I asked. So I called Fed Ex back and asked if they could please send someone back to the house between 4 pm and 6 pm. They said they would. They didn’t.
The home guy waited until 9 pm Pacific to tell me that the passport hadn’t been picked up, which meant I wouldn’t be getting on tomorrow afternoon’s plane. Panicked, I searched around for an emergency courier service that could pick up on Sunday morning and deliver to NYC the same day or early Monday, but nothing was turning up. The Fed Ex people, who obviously owed me because of their negligence, were amazingly unhelpful. Three people I talked to refused to pass along a referral of any kind. As I pleaded with these bozos, I imagined them roasting over a spit in deepest hell.
I finally found an operation called Action Messenger and a good guy named Jamal, who said they could pick up the passport this morning and get it to JFK for pickup this evening for $275 bucks. I obviously didn’t like paying that, but what was I going to do? At least the issue is solved. Here’s to Jamal and the professional people everywhere who stand up and do the job. I’ll be getting on the A train to JFK around 6:30 this evening.

Yesterday my son Dylan and I visited my mom at an old folks’ home where she lives in Southbury, Connecticut. I’d been told by a nice woman who works for the facility that my mom, who’s been grieving since the recent death of her daughter Laura, was somewhat upset by the presence of her ashes, which she had been keeping in her bedroom closet. So Dylan and I resolved that we would take the remains down to the family plot in a cemetery in Wilton, Connecticut, where our family lived from ’64 to ’94, and surreptitiously bury them ourselves.

Nancy Wells at Southbury Deli — Saturday, 5.10, 1:55 pm

It seemed like the right thing to do. My sister had spoken more than once about the comfort she felt knowing that her final resting place would be alongside our parents, and it’s no big deal to deposit ashes in a piece of turf that’s been bought and paid for.
So after our visit my mom gave us a plastic bag containing Laura’s ashes, and Dylan and I drove south to Wilton. On the way there Dylan composed a beautiful prayer-eulogy on my i-Phone notepad. We borrowed a shovel from a friend who lives in Wilton, and drove into Hillside Cemetery to try and find the unmarked plot. My mom had told us it was about 10 or 12 paces south of where an old friend, Herb Gross, was buried. We asked a kindly older man who serves on the cemetery committee with Wilton’s Congregational Church to help us find Gross’s gravestone. It took us the better part of an hour to do so.
After the man drove off we went to the trunk and got out the bag and the shovel. Inside the bag we found a silver crucifix (my sister had bought it in Italy during a trip we took together in ’03) and a sweater jacket that my sister had bought for $10 dollars. (The price tag was still on it.) But we found no ashes. I called my mom with the news. She said she didn’t know where the ashes are. She’d just moved from a large apartment into a smaller living space, and had perhaps lost them in the shuffle. “I don’t care about the ashes that much,” she said. “It’s the spirit of her that counts…how we’ll remember her.” Of course, I said. You’re right, mom.
We returned the shovel to the friend’s house and caught the 7:37 train from Norwalk back to the city. This morning I read this Thomas Freidman column about Mothers’ Day, and it gave me a little pang.

Amy Poehler‘s delivery of the “my supporters are racist” line got the biggest laugh and even a little applause on last night’s SNL. The other two rationales: “I’m a sore loser” and “I have no ethical standards.” Not genius-level or even that funny, really, but who would argue this isn’t where Clinton is coming from? It’s easy, of course, to go with a spot like this now.

Lena Gieseke‘s 3-D recreation of Pablo Picasso‘s Guernica. I’m wondering if any American painters or sculptors have created anything within the last three or four years about the horrors of Iraq? If so, have they appeared at an any galleries?

HE reader Matthew Dessem has sent along a still taken from that first seven minutes of Speed Racer clip that went up last Thursday. He pointed out the numerous duplications that the Wachowski’s CG guys copied and pasted to make up the crowd. The same five or six people are everywhere, and nobody is sitting in rows — they’re just thrown together in rough collage fashion. It’s no big deal, but I can’t recall seeing a frame capture of digital crowd with this many obvious repeats. (Click on the photo caption for a larger image.)

Yellow shirts, red ties, pork-pie hats

After reading Nikki Finke‘s well-reported story (last updated yesterday morning) about the temporary SAG shutdown of David O. Russell‘s Nailed, a Washington, D.C.-based comedy about relationships, politics and morality, I reviewed the Amazon.com information about “Sammy’s Hill,” the Kristin Gore novel that the script, co-written by she and Russell, is based upon, according to Finke.

There are differences between the book and screenplay synopsis, but the attitude and tone of both suggest that the film is going to be sharp and deranged. It seems right up Russell’s penchant for the dryly absurd. It doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as hyper or schizy as I Heart Huckabees, and doesn’t seem that removed from the realm of Flirting with Disaster — real neurotic people, a recognizable milieu and situations.
The discrepancies between the book’s story and what Finke says is the movie’s plot are striking, though. The movie literally involves the presence of a nail imbedded in a main character’s head, and there’s nothing like this in the book, for one thing. Russell’s film also seems a bit more sexually attuned. The more I examine the two stories, in fact, the less alike they seem. If anyone has a PDF copy of the script…
Finke writes that Russell’s film is about “a naive small town waitress (Jessica Biel) — the character’s name is Alice Eckle, according to the film’s IMDB page — who gets a nail lodged in her head and discovers a new-found sexual drive. When she travels to Washington to fight for better health care for the ‘bizarrely injured,’ she meets an unscrupulous U.S. congressman (Jake Gyllenhaal) — the IMDB says his name is Howard Ryder — who attempts to take advantage of her. James Brolin plays the U.S. Speaker Of The House.”

Triptych copied from Finke’s page

The book is about Samantha Joyce, “a 26-year-old self-deprecating health-care policy advisor to Robert Gary, a well-respected senator from her home state of Ohio.” There’s no Samantha on the IMDB page, and no Robert Gary character. There is, however, a Congressional Representative named Pam Hendrickson (Catherine Keener). So — help me out here — Alice Eckle is a working-class, less educated version of Samantha? She seems like an entirely different creation.
“Between endless work days, a grueling campaign schedule, and frequent trips to the pet store where she seeks advice on caring for her listless Japanese fighting fish, Sammy finds time to obsess over her new boyfriend, sexy speechwriter Aaron Driver.” This sounds like Gyllenhaal’s guy — same kind of name, same syllables — except he’s not a Congressman.
“As things heat up with Aaron, Sammy’s work schedule takes on a new intensity when Gary becomes the Democratic candidate for vice president. Along the way, scandal clouds both her personal and professional life, and our heroine discovers the often salacious underbelly of life on the hill.”
Update from HE reader Jeff Puim: “You and Finke have the whole Nailed premise all mixed up. Nailed is not an adaptation of ‘Sammy’s Hill,’ although both were penned by Kristen Gore. I think the confusion comes from the fact that in the original script Kristen uses the name ‘Sammy Joyce’ as the lead character, played by Jessica Biel (the character names have since been changed). As you mentioned in your article, she was also the main character in the book. But the stories are entirely different with the exception of the names of the respective heroines. The script is actually very funny. You’re right that it’s twisted. Very Russellesque.”
Nailed is about halfway done, having been shooting in Columbia, South Carolina since April. Finke has reported it was “shut down by the Screen Actors Guild on Friday because of insufficient funds on deposit with the guild.”
The shoot “is also in trouble with both IATSE and Teamsters,” she writes, adding that “some of those union members have left the beleaguered $25 million budgeted production. Rumors also are circulating that the state of South Carolina could withdraw its incentive monies because of the financing problems. Filmmakers hope to resolve the cash crunch and re-start shooting next week since principal photography is only at the halfway point.
“‘I am confident we will finish,’ an insider on the pic has told Finke. ‘The financing on this like most indies is based on bank loans and bridge loans. This is a matter of waiting on the bridge loan. Hopefully, it will all be resolved.'”
Finke is also hearing, though, that David Bergstein‘s Capitol Films, the film’s main producer, is a “troubled” operation. In 2006, Bergstein “acquired a leading UK-based international sales company which over the years had built a good reputation in the movie biz and made a wide range of commercial and critical successes, including Robert Altman‘s Gosford Park. But [a source from within] NYC film financing circles that ‘a shitload of people are owed a lot of money’ by Bergstein. ‘I heard this week that his major financing source, a hedge fund, has shut down and left him in the lurch.'”

In his usual perfunctory way, N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply has reported on the bad-internet-buzz-chasing-Indy 4 story (“Indiana Jones Is Battling the Long Knives of the Internet”). He’s ignored, however, what may turn out to be the most interesting aspect of reactions to the film.

This, as I wrote two days ago, refers to a possible generation gap with older viewers liking it (or at least finding a place in their hearts for it) and younger viewers being less enthused, at least in part because the film has allegedly been infused with an older guy’s (i.e., Steven Spielberg‘s or Indiana Jones‘ — take your pick) perspective, which wouldn’t be surprising.
According to a good friend of a southern-region exhibitor who passed along some opinions last Wednesday evening, the only viewers at last Tuesday afternoon’s exhibitor screening who liked it “were the older guys.”
Older vs. younger reactions to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, 5,.22) is interesting, and also ties in with the subject and theme of the film. Generic “bad buzz,” which Ciepley’s story says is percolating out there, is a flavor-less story…a yawn.