Quentin Tarantino smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe…actually a Hans Landa pipe…either way.

QT: “It’s a situation, I think…I’m being fair enough to say that the armorer, the guy who handles the gun, an armorer is 90% responsible for everything that happens when it comes to that gun. But, but, but, but, but, but…the actor is 10% responsible. The actor is 10% responsible.”

Near the end of their chat, Tarantino and Maher are clearly drunk and high. Words and phrases slurred here and there. That’s the fun of it.

Non-truths flood our communal atmosphere, not because we’re compulsive liars but because of our disrespect for various parties.

Nobody’s 100% honest with their bosses or supervisors; ditto their wives or girlfriends. Familiarity breeds contempt, and with that a willingness to dispense occasional evasions and half-truths.

Very few parents are 100% honest with their tweener and teenaged kids. Almost no drivers are honest with traffic cops. If I truly respect and fully trust you, I’ll be as honest as the day is long. But we live in a universe full of short days.

This goes double or triple from a celebrity’s perspective. Pretty much every famous person lies through his or her teeth when it comes to public statements. Not blatantly but in a mild, sideways fashion.

But that’s okay because they’re well motivated. They’re lying because they despise the gossip-driven media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off.

I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”

Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his ‘word’ to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”

Tom Cruise was J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he told Oprah Winfrey he was in love with Katie Holmes and wanted to marry her and so on. He was saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me, and if you don’t think I’m being honest then too bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags who pass along tabloid fairy tales.”

I can’t recall if my pitch was emailed or typed-out and sent via snail-mail, but Esquire bit right away…assignment! Those were the days when it could take as long as two or three months between suggesting an article and seeing it in print. The other freelance piece [after the jump] was about private Hollywood poker games. It was either for GQ or Outside magazine; I honestly don’t remember.

Best idea I pitched that nobody wanted to run: A Playboy parody article called “The Girls of Bumblefuck.” The premise was that (a) the myth of the devastatingly attractive farmer’s daughter bailing hay in Podunk, Arkansas, was bullshit and (b) that beauty always follows wealth and power, hence the dishiest women are almost always found in big cities while women from one-horse, out-of the way trailer-park towns tend to be…well, not in the Ava Gardner or Angelina Jolie realm.

From “She Stoops to Firefight,” posted in mid-May of 2021:

….starts up again in Telluride, let’s get a couple of things straight.

(1) It’s nothing if not audacious but there’s no believing the central conceit and so IMHO it falls short of being a knockout musical masterpiece, as some have called it, and…

(2) Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays the titular character, gives a striking supporting performance. If she campaigns for a Best Actress Oscar, fine, but it won’t result in a win. Identity campaigns (like Lily Gladstone’s) get a lot of attention from wokester journos, but rank-and-file industry types are less taken with the razzmatazz.

With the Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez relationship having decisively hit the rocks and taken on water a second time with relatively few of us understanding the whys and wherefores or even caring all that much…

Richard Burton wanted fulfillment and perhaps even transcendence within the craft of acting while lunging for Herculean heights, but he also loved and needed the big-dough lifestyle and was irrresistably drawn to “Miss Tits,” a simultaneously dismissive and worshipful term he once threw at Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married twice.

About to sit through this, but not happy about it. Grim up. Another deranged, mostly non-human predator…a symbol of today’s socially and psychologically adrift incel misogynists…another hostile demon-dude out to psychologically torture and murder a young terrified lass…the umpteenth variation upon Stanley K.’s “Jack Torrance out to chop up Wendy and Danny”, etc.

If the following 17 films are screened at Telluride 2024, I’ll be a mostly pleased attendee. It all starts six days hence. I’ll be arriving in town by early Wednesday evening.

Highest Anticipation Levels: Anora (D. Sean Baker). Conclave (d: Edward Berger). Emilia Perez (d: Jacques Audiard). The End (d: Joshua Oppenheimer). All We Imagine as Light (d: Payal Kapadia). The Piano Lesson (d: Malcolm Washington). Nickel Boys (d: RaMell Ross). Saturday Night (d: Jason Reitman). Misrecordia (d: Alain Guiraudie). Piece by Piece (d: Morgan Neville). Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (d: Embeth Davidtz). Disclaimer (d: Alfonso Cuaron). Better Man (d: Michael Gracey). Maria (d: Pablo Larrain). The Friend (d: Scott McGehee, David Siegel). No Other Land (d: Basel Adra). The Apprentice (d: Ali Abbasi).

This is the first in a series of special Hollywood Elsewhere pre-Telluride Angelina Jolie hit pieces. No originals, all re-posted.

They will appear between today and Tuesday evening, or just before I wake up at 3:30 am on Wednesday, 8.28, in order to catch a 7:30 am LGA flight to Dallas, followed by a short hop to Alberquerque and then a rental-car drive to Telluride.

Posted on 2.11.15, the title was “Gone For Four Months“:

There’s this imaginary guy I’ve been visiting at Cedars Sinai. He went into a coma early last October and just came out of it yesterday. I wasn’t there when he awoke but he called today to say thanks for stopping by all those times. His mother told him about my four or five visits.

Then he said he’d gone online this morning and visited the latest Gold Derby and Gurus of Gold charts, and he wanted to know what the hell had happened to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, which was the Best Picture front-runner for weeks on end. “Where’d it go?” he said. “What happened? It was the leading Best Picture contender…it was all over but the shouting and the formalities. Every last default-minded, deferring-to-Dave Karger Oscar expert had it at the top of their lists. What’s the most likely film to win Best Picture? Why…Unbroken! What else? And now it’s vanished.”

I tried to break it to him gently. “What happened,” I explained, “is that Universal finally screened it, and a few days later the air had seeped out of the balloon. And then it just disappeared.”

He asked me why. “It was the Christian torture-porn thing,” I said. What’s that? “There was something in the movie that said that the more a guy has been beaten and tortured, the braver and more beautiful and closer to God he is.” Oh, the guy said, suddenly sounding weaker and less curious.

“Right now the only chance Unbroken has at the Oscars is Roger Deakins‘ nomination for Best Cinematography,” I said. “But it would be surprising to a lot of people I know if Birdman‘s Emmanuel Lubezki loses out.”

…because it’s only peripherally about the wedding ceremony and the exchanging of vows, and mostly about unspoken, deeply felt currents between couple #2.

William Wyler‘s ensemble master shot is perfectly composed (nine or ten people posed within a tight box). Not to mention Teresa Wright‘s watery eyes. Awesome cinematography by Gregg Toland. Just-right editing by Daniel Mandell