Notes on a Scandal book author Zoe Heller (her work is actually titled “What Was She Thinking?” — the movie title is a subhead) recently said during a Hollywood q & a that the plot of the book — about a teacher in her mid ’30s who has an affair with a 15 year-old student — was inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal of the mid to late ’90s.
My feelings on this issue are roughly those of former Labor secretary Robert Reich (i.e., the brilliant, bearded short guy with the Clinton Adminstration), who reportedly said, “Where were teachers like [Letourneau] when I was in school?”
Older males who take sexual advantage of underage females are venal and deserve every punishment society can throw at them, but there’s definitely a different standard when it comes to older women and teenage guys. When I was in my mid teens my mother used to warn me about predatory women who might take advantage of me; I remember saying to myself once as she shared this warning, “Please, please God…where are they?”
If a hotsy-totsy Mary Ann Letourneau figure had deigned to have a sexual affair with me at age 15 or thereabouts, I would have gotten down on my knees with a Bible in my hands every night and praised God for his merciful bounty.
A glum-faced journalist at the Notes on a Scandal junket earlier this week told me that the fantasy hadn’t panned out for a guy he knew who’d had an affair with an older woman when he was at a tender age. Apparently the guy was emotionally thrown by it. Poor baby. I hear stories all the time from my two boys — age 18 and 17 — about what a jarring, in some cases heartbreaking time they’ve had with high-school girls who run hot and cold and drop guys they’ve been intimate with whenever the mood strikes without blinking an eye. It’s quite brutal out there. My younger son feels that high-school girls are “amost evil” in this sense.
By contrast a 32 year-old girlfriend would have to at least be a bit more stable, no? And most likely gentler, kinder, more considerate, etc.? (Unless she’s a druggie or a psycho.) And yet society seriously punishes women who transgress in this fashion. Society is wrong. Society doesn’t get it.

“We’ve pushed the buttons too far. We’ve been greedy and selfish. Everybody knows what we’ve done to the rivers and the oceans; the fact that there’s only 35 years’ worth of fish in the oceans; the fact that the polar ice caps are melting. I think that right under the surface of everybody’s consciousness is the full understanding that we’re in for a really tough ride and everybody is really afraid to face it. The attitude is: ‘Let me amass my pile and we’ll worry about that 10 or 20 years from now.'” — Little Miss Sunshine costar and presumptive Oscar nominee Alan Arkin speaking to Time magazine. (A Time magazine “Numbers of the Year” report actually says the oceans will be fished out within 50 years, so we can all relax — an extra 15 years to sort things out. Pass the shrimp!)

This is for real as far as “real” goes: “I, Vincent Gallo, star of such classics as Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny, have decided to make myself available to all women. All women who can afford me, that is. For the modest fee of $50,000 plus expenses, I can fulfill the wish, dream, or fantasy of any naturally-born female. The fee covers one evening with Vincent Gallo. For those who wish to enjoy my company for a weekend, the fee is increased to a mere $100,000.
“Heavy-set, older, redheads and even black chicks can have me if they can pay the bill. No real female will be refused. However, I highly frown upon any male having even the slightest momentary thought or wish that they could ever become my client. No way Jose. However, female couples of the lesbian persuasion can enjoy a Vincent Gallo evening together for $100,000. $200,000 buys the lesbos a weekend — a weekend that will have them second-guessing.
“I am willing to travel worldwide to accommodate clients. However, travel days are billed at $50,000 per plus all premium flight fees. Scanning for STD’s is required as is bathing and grooming prior to our encounter. Detailed photos of potential clients also required prior. An extra fee for security to protect me is charged on top of the fantasy fee. Security fees will vary depending on the details of an encounter and how much security I will need.”
What’s wrong with redheads? That one stopped me in my tracks. What’s the negative factor he’s alluding to?

Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.27) is a sort of upscale, British-flavored Fatal Attraction minus the grand guignol… with a strong dose of sad-wicked lesbo suppression driving the engine. Skillfully adapted by playwright Patrick Marber (“Closer”) from a Zoe Heller novel called “What Was She Thinking?,” it’s easily one of the best written, best-acted potboilers of this type that I’ve ever seen — particularly when it comes to Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett‘s performance as a pair of schoolteachers caught up in each other’s obsessions and vulnerabilities in a manner that goes way beyond intense.

Richard Eyre’s direction, Philip Glass‘s pulsating score (a perfect compliment to Dench’s obsessive emotional condition), the sense of restraint in Bill Nighy‘s performance as Blanchett’s much-older husband, and also in 17 year-old Andrew Simpson‘s as Blanchett’s teenaged lover. I worship the precisely-honed dialogue and particularly Dench’s voiceover narration (“she and I share an understanding of the quotidian awfulness of things”). I could easily see it another couple of times, just to savor the fusing of all the elements.
Anyway, I recorded some interview comments spoken by Blanchett, Nighy and Marber the other day, and have posted them in this order….

Comments from Notes on a Scandal costars Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy plus screenwriter Patrick Marber at the press junket earlier this week.

Which Oscar competitors won and lost over the past 7 days? Helen Mirren and Clint Eastwood fared the best, according to Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond, and so did United 93 (despite the stubborn posture of Academy ostriches), Babel (all those Golden Globe and BFCA noms), and Dreamgirls costar Jennifer Hudson (who, let’s face it, basically has the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in the bag).
The losers, says Hammond, are Mirren’s Best Actress competitors, Flags of Our Fathers (because it’s been totally overshadowed by Letters From Iwo Jima), World Trade Center (because “the Dallas/Ft.Worth soothsayers didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t like it”…huh?), Venus star Peter O’Toole (Best Actor contenders Forest Whitaker and Will Smith have stolen all the heat), and the DGA chiefs for flip-flopping on whether or not to send out screeners to org members.

I just searched YouTube unsuccessfully for a tape of last night’s “Charlie Rose” interview with the Three Amigos — Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (Babel), Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men). It’ll probably turn up on Rose’s own site sometime tomorrow, but if anyone gets hold of a copy today, please forward.

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman on the documentary that cinematographer Amy Rice has been shooting on the Presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama, with at least some of the funding coming from actor Edward Norton (The Painted Veil).

“As Venus moves casually along, a deep sadness starts to gather around its edges, casting a shadow over the mischievous good humor that is Maurice’s default mood. His mortality portends a larger loss, the eclipse of an approach to life and art that the great British actors of the mid-20th century, from Laurence Olivier to Michael Caine, embodied with such ease and charisma. It is not easy to define that special, paradoxical glamour that Peter O’Toole wears like a well-worn, perfectly tailored jacket — he is a self-made aristocrat, a genuine pretender, a selfless narcissist — but whatever it is, he still has it. Seeing a picture of the young Maurice — the young O’Toole — in a newspaper, someone exclaims, ‘He were gorgeous.’ Indeed he were, and so he is.” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review of Roger Michell’s Venus.

“The Bagger” — a.k.a., N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr — has tallied up all the positive-attitude L.A. Times articles about Dreamgirls and concluded that, column-inch for column-inch, the film is getting a bit more cunnilingus from that paper than may be absolutely warranted.

Carr also suspects that maybe, just maybe, L.A. Times staffers are glad- handing Bill Condon‘s widely-liked musical a bit more than necessary with the idea that David Geffen, the film’s somewhat fearsome, Godfather-like producer, may own the Times before too long…maybe.
“The LAT and its Oscar website, The Envelope, has dived deeper into the [Dreamgirls] tank and more often than almost any media outlet,” Carr writes. “The Bagger is no cynic — he actually enjoyed We are Marshall — but he has watched story after story emerge from his esteemed West Coast competitor and wondered if someone, certainly not him, would begin to think thusly:
“Dreamgirls is the long-beloved project of David Geffen, the Los Angeles macher who owned the film rights to the story and who has been rumored to be in talks with the Chandler family about teaming up on a bid for the LAT. No one knows what, if anything, Mr. Geffen is going to do, but if you worked at the paper, might not the possibility that you would soon be calling him boss or He Who Must Be Obeyed have an impact on the amount of attention Dreamgirls gets?”

Sylvester Stallone‘s Rocky Balboa, as everyone knows by now, was the #1 film yesterday with earnings of 6.4 million, or $2300 a print. Don’t expect it to stay on top, though, after Night at the Museum opens on Friday. The latest tracking has Museum at 84, 44 and 13, but that’s without kids factored in — it’s looking like the weekend’s biggest earner to me. The Good Shepherd is at 75, 38, 9 — not awful, fair, middling. And We Are Marshall is looking a bit weaker at 69, 32, 6.
Of the two Xmas day openers, Dreamgirls is the stronger at 82, 33 and 6 compared to 45, 24 and 5 for Black Christmas. The likely audience breakdown for Dreamgirls is very much female (35-plus). The fact that it’s opening Monday in 800 mostly urban and/or black-supported theatres obviously indicates DreamWorks knows where the concentrated interest is (so far). If they had a huge across-the-board hit waiting to happen, they’d be opening in 2000 theatres-plus…but they’re not. Do the math.