If Harvey Weinstein puts a longer version of Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof (i.e., the second half of Grindhouse) into theatres sometime this month, I’ll pay to see it in a New York minute. (And that’s saying something for a freeloader like myself.) Especially if sex scenes featuring Vanessa Ferlito are added.

I didn’t pay for a second encounter with Grindhouse last weekend because I didn’t want to sit through the Rodriguez zombie film a second time, plus I didn’t feel a great need to go there all over again (especially at the cost of three hours and change). But the Tarantino film is beautiful in a disjointed, half-and-half way (i.e., the two parts of the film don’t jell at all, but they’re great as stand-alone halves), and I love looking at Ferlito from any angle.

I don’t know how Weinstein can afford to throw up a whole new ad campaign as well as do it quickly (the new Death Proof would have to be in theatres by April 20th), but I hope he manages it.

New Yorker critic David Denby wrote this about the presently available version of Death Proof: “Tarantino obviously likes his characters a great deal, but he’s caught in the contradictions of making an hommage a schlock: he has to kill the women in order to set up the rest of the movie. It’s as if he couldn’t decide whether to be a humanist or a nihilist, so he opportunistically becomes both.

“Immediately, he brings on another group of chattering girls, two of whom (Zoe Bell and the fast-talking Tracie Thoms) are movie stuntwomen themselves. Just for fun, Bell straps herself to the hood of a roaring 1970 Dodge Challenger, with nothing more than two belts tied to the window posts. When Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) shows up and starts banging his death car into the Dodge, the women refuse to give in, and a classic battle follows.

“As the cars try to force each other off the road, the struggle rages across backcountry Texas terrain, in (as far as we can tell) real space, at good speed, and without digital enhancement. Nothing quite this exciting has been seen since Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film Duel.”

I’m way, way late to the party on reactions to Jimmy Kimmel having ambushed and tongue-lashed Gawker editor Emily Gould on a guest-hosted Larry King Live segment last Friday night, but I’m only a day late in responding to Gould’s post-mortem commentary about the on-air fracas.

Gould’s defense is fairly cogent — comprehensive, point-by-point, emotionally balanced, a wee bit snide — plus it brought something into relief that I hadn’t really considered before, which is that Kimmel is sounding like a bit of an old-school pisshead with a Joey Bishop attitude about the internet.

Kimmel was fuming that night about Gawker having reported that he was “visibly drunk” (he said on the show that “I might have been loud but not drunk”). He also ripped into the Gawker Stalker map (i.e., an interactive feature that allows posters to identify the whereabouts of celebrities in Manhattan on an hour-by-hour basis) as something that may one day precipitate an attack on a celebrity. (C’mon…nobody stands still like a statue for an hour or two, and GS postings almost always go up an hour or so after the fact.)

For apparent empathy reasons, Kimmel also felt it was cruel and small of Gawker to remark that Kevin Costner, sighted somewhere in Manhattan, looked “fat.” (I think we all know Costner’s not svelte, and that this is a fairly old tune — I pitched a “Costner is looking beefy” idea to an EW editor fifteen years ago, and he’s bulked up plenty since then.)

Anyway, here’s a Radar piece about the Friday night fracas, a CNN transcript of the show, and Gould’s response piece on Gawker.

The quietest opener of the coming weekend has to be Lonely Hearts, a period police procedural set in the late ’40s and early ’50s, which means all the actors will be wearing bulky-ass trenchcoats and fedoras and talking like they’re in costarring with Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. It’s a little bit strange that there’s zero buzz around this thing and the fact that the opening is being so faintly promoted because it’s got a few big names — John Travolta, Salma Hayek, James Gandolfini, Jaredo Leto, Scott Caan and Laura Dern.

This obviously suggests that the movie, directed by Todd Robinson and released by IDP Films (a Samuel Goldwyn subsidiary), has problems, but I’ve been told that Hayek’s performance is pretty good. The story was the basis of Leonard Kastle‘s The Honeymoon Killers (1970), a cult favorite that starred Tony Lobianco and Shirley Stoller.

Robinson is the grandson of Nassau County Detective Elmer C. Robinson (Travolta), who helped to capture and convict “Lonely Hearts” killers Raymond Fernandez (Leto) and Martha Jule Beck (Hayek). Robinson stayed with the case right to the moment that Fernandez and Beck were electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison in 1951.

The story “is about how Ray and Martha travel around together posing as brother and sister, preying on lonely, vulnerable women. Their scam first milks them of their life savings and ends in the murders of several innocent women. They’re a warped and dangerous duo who leave a bloody trail behind them. As their investi- gation progresses, Robinson and partner Charles Hilderbrandt (Gandolfini) become obsessed by the case. It eventually invades Robinson’s personal life and isolates him from those he loves,” etc.

Every time I buy a few things for the refrigerator, I’m kinda forced to contemplate the seemingly tortured, sadly dysfunctional relationships of Brangelina and Tomkat. It’s genuinely sickening the way the tabs keep hammering away. I’d become a loyal customer of any sensibly- priced market that doesn’t stock them, just to avoid looking at those damn headlines.

I’ll admit to a deep-down rooting interest in wanting to see Katie Holmes break free, but that’s mainly because I’ve been brainwashed by the writings of anti-Scientology guy Mark Ebner. If I were Brad or Angie I’d commit to an absolute lifelong pact to stay together no matter what, just to be able to say “fuck you” to the tabs.

There are two films opening this weekend with decent tracking — Perfect Stranger (73, 21 and 8) and Disturbia (54, 31 and 8). The others are as follows: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (35, 26 and 3), Pathfinder (30.26 and 2), Redline (43, 25 and 1) and Slow Burn (32, 26 and 1). No tracking on the smaller openers — Everything’s Gone Green, Lonely Hearts, Private Fears in Public Places, Red Road and Year of the Dog. Fracture (New Line, 4.20), the Anthony Hopkins-Ryan Gosling thriller from director Gregory Hoblit, is at 42, 31 and 2.

They may be some younger readers out there who can’t tell right away what Hollywood guy is reputed to have said the following with a straight face, but whose wisdom is actually under-rated at times:

(a) “Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn’t go see it”; (b) “If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive”; (c) “Don’t pay any attention to the critics — don’t even ignore them”; (d) “I don’t think anyone should write his autobiography until after he’s dead”; (e) “That’s the way with these directors, they’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg”; (g) “I don’t want yes-men around me — I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs”; (h) “You’ve got to take the bull between your teeth”; (i) “Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day”; and (j) “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

Take the first line and turn it around a bit and you’ve got Lem Dobbs‘ classic line from The Limey — “You could see the sea out there if you could see it.” And I agree with the smart idiot-stupid genius comment — he’s saying he’d rather listen to an uneducated guy with horse sense than a PhD with his thumb up his ass. And some of the other lines aren’t so bad. The only emphatically dumb ones are (h) and (j).

When the Sons of Hollywood threesome is flown to Afghanistan later this year for their fight to the death, put Brandon “Greasy Bear” Davis on the plane with them.

Randy Spelling, David Weintraub and Sean Stewart — the young stars of a new Entourage-y reality show called Sons of Hollywood — are giving an excellent impression of being diseased and over-priveleged lowlife scum — representatives of the very thing that Islamic fundamentalists despise about western culture and values. I’m saying this because they need to consider and even accept this opinion because once they do, there is a chance for redemption.

The producers of Sons of Hollywood need to fly these bozos to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan for a hand-to-hand combat with three Taliban fighters, or maybe just three poor guys who believe in the legend of Osama bin Laden. Make it a fight to the death with knives. If Spelling, Weintraub and Stewart are killed, it is the will of Allah. But if they kill the Taliban guys, then they’ll have my respect and they can fly back to Hollywood and act like spoiled assholes all over again and nobody will put them down ever again. I won’t, at least.

Harvey Weinstein has told Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke that he’s “incredibly disappointed” with the piddly $11.6 million that Grindhouse brought in last weekend, and that he’s thinking about re-releasing the movie around the U.S. “in a couple of weeks” as two separate feature-length movies — Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof (only longer with deleted sex scenes put back in) and Robert Rodriguez‘s Planet Terror with extra stuff also. (Which is what the European release plan has been all along,)

“Quentin’s movie goes out first in competition at Cannes,” Weinstein told Finke. “He’ll do an extensive four to five month tour. And the trailer will be all Quentin’s. Then we’ll release Robert’s a couple of months later. By splitting it up, we’re going to do a hell of a lot better internationally than we did here.”

Weinstein added that even in Grindhouse‘s TV deal with Starz Entertainment Group, it’s been sold as two separate movies. “Our deal with Encore is that they can play it any way they want.”

Weinstein said that length and audience education issues were the main reasons why Grindhouse did so cruddily in theaters last weekend.

“Our research showed the length kept people away,” he said. “It was 3 hours and 12 minutes long. We originally intended to get it all in in 2 hours, 30 minutes. That would have been a better time. But the movies ran longer, the [fake] trailers ran longer, everything ran longer. [Plus] we didn’t educate the South or Midwest. In the West and the East, the movie played well. It played well in strong urban settings. But we missed the boat on the Midwest and the South.”

“Educate the south and midwest” about how cool it is to savor the brash cheesiness of exploitation moves from the ’60s and ’70s? You can’t just explain the too-cool-for-school appeal of Grindhouse and expect people to go, “We get it! Thanks for wising us up!” People go for this or that movie for their own reasons. You can’t educate them into “getting” something. Either it reaches them on their own terms or it doesn’t.

“I’ve made about 120 movies. I think maybe six are good. The two pictures that I’m most remembered for are two pictures I never thought would be successful. I thought The Magnificent Seven was going to be terrible. And I turned Bullitt down four times. I thought, ‘This’ll be another dumb picture with a car chase.'” — Robert Vaughan speaking to The Observer‘s Sanjiv Bhattacharya.

What are the other four? My choices are The Young Philadelphians, The Man from Independence, The Bridge at Remagen and The Towering Inferno. None of these are wonderful, but they’re decent.

“To to be a well-known actor growing up in Hollywood, and to have money in your pocket is like having died and gone to heaven. Hollywood is where every beautiful girl in the world between the ages of 18 and 22 comes to become movie stars. By the time they get to 24, most of them are gone, but we got them while they were there.”

An interesting piece by Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke about how The Weinstein Co. flipped off the core audience for Grindhouse by refusing to book the Quentin Tarantino- Robert Rodriguez film in actual grindhouse cinemas like Portland’s Clinton Street Theatre.

“I received some very interesting info this weekend from Seth Sonstein, the owner/programmer at the Clinton Street Theater, detailing how he tried in vain to convince The Weinstein Co. to allow his venue to play the pic,” Finke begins. “The Clinton is a unique single-screen indie art house considered a true Grindhouse in Portland, Oregon. (For instance, it just ran a film series that included original 35mm prints of Switchblade Sisters, Crazies and Spook Who Sat By The Door.)

“Looking at the email exchange, I can see that TWC’s branch sales manager Keir Gotcher kept giving The Clinton the run-around. “I wanted to give you some insight into Grindhouse being a flop,” Sonstein wrote [and explained]. “We begged The Weinstein Company for a print of this film. In the end they would not give us a print.

“Also, Dan Halsted runs the Grindhouse Film Festival out of The Hollywood Theater in Portland, and Weinstein would also not release a print to him. (Dan knows more about Grindhouse films then anyone in the country.) So I attest that the distribution was botched on this film.”

“To not just ignore a movie’s base, but actually rebuff it, makes no sense,” Finke concludes.

With the whiners and haters making Hollywood Elsewhere such a pleasant place to be in recent days, I thought I’d share a letter from a longtime reader named Alexandro Aldrete, who lives in Monterrey, Mexico. Sometimes it helps to consider the perspective of someone outside the country — someone with different cultural references and whatnot — to see things in a fresh light. (And I’m not saying he’s right or wrong or anything in between.)

“The reason I’m writing is because the comments situation has gotten to a point where it’s frankly pathetic,” Aldrete begins. “You must have the most consistent group of whiners on the internet. There’s nothing you can say without receiving dozens of useless posts about how outraged they are by what you say.

“The last one about Easter Sunday is particularly funny in the self-righteous indignation that everyone felt because of what you said about American families watching The Passion of the Christ on DVD. How you are a bigot, an asshole and so on.

“You totally got it right about the director of Porky’s too. It’s refreshing to read some honesty from time to time. I don’t always agree with you (The Aviator sucked? Wedding Crashers was a truly pleasant experience?) but I enjoy it nevertheless. Your site was frankly more fun when you had the ocassional reader response. Now it’s like you’re the evil teacher in the teenage-girls-with- emotional-issues classroom. Everyone is oh so sensitive and melodramatic about everything.

“I hardly read any of those comments anymore because they depress me. Your readership needs a sense of humor. And when you have people that feel that you must be stopped for saying that Eddie Murphy has been a money-grubbing whore, that twenty-something girls at Starbucks laughing out loud can be a pain in the ass, and that the numbers show in a very cold non-judgmental way that the majority of the American movie going public (and worldwide movie going public for that matter) has low, low, low fucking taste (at this point I don’t think that’s even debatable)…well, those persons need a little less self importance.”