Vanity Fair’s Feinberg Headline is Dead Wrong

by

The wolves are circling and the hyenas are hee-hee-ing over yesterday’s Vanity Fair story, penned by Charlotte Klein, about THR columnist and executive awards editor Scott Feinberg allegedly asking for me-first screening access as far as hot film festival titles are concerned.

Let every Oscar pundit and chatterbox know, whether it wishes Feinberg well or ill, that the headline of Klein’s article is flat-out erroneous, and that the jackals looking to lick Feinberg’s blood are also dead wrong.

In an email to studios and strategists last week, Feinberg did not request “priority” access (as in “me before everyone else!”) to early-bird screenings. He asked for concurrent access along with the other swells. Not “me first!…me! me! me!” but “please allow me to see hot-buzz festival films at the same time as the elite trade critics and long-lead journos and editors.”

Feinberg didn’t say the following but he could have also put it this way: “Please don’t favor these guys and gals over me…the people who are routinely shown the hot-ticket films early and who have filed their reviews before the big premieres in Cannes or Telluride and Toronto…please let me into this elite fraternity…don’t give them preferential treatment over me as every second counts during film festivals, and it’s not fair to let a tiny handful of hotshot critics have the first crack while I have to scramble and hyperventilate and file reactions on the fly.”

Again — the implication of Klein reporting that Feinberg “requested priority access to the hottest movies coming this year” is an obscuring of the truth. Asking for priority access doesn’t mean exclusive priority access. In some people’s minds the word suggests “me first” but that’s not what Feinberg wrote or meant.

Feinberg: “As you plan the rollout of your film(s), I would like to respectfully ask that you not show films to any of my fellow awards pundits before you show them to me, even if that person represents himself or herself to you as (a) a potential reviewer of it, (b) needing to see the film in order to be part of decisions about covers, or (c) really anything else.”

As for the portion of Feinberg’s email that implied a certain degree of THR pushback if publicists fail to consent to his request…well, that’s not what any experienced industry vet would call a capital crime. There isn’t a power player in Hollywood who hasn’t said at one time or another “do not fuck with me because if you do…well, actions have consequences.” I’m sorry but this falls under the heading of standard negotiating postures.

A publicity source confides that Feinberg has already sent a clarifying letter to the recipients of his original email, but if I were in his shoes I would plainly state that (a) the word “concurrent” was and is key to the original import, and (b) that he shouldn’t have implied any sort of quid pro quo retaliation if publicists failed to consent to his request.

We all make tactical or phrasing errors from time to time. Feinberg wasn’t wrong in the first place, but just to cover the bases I would apologize for the sabre-rattling and for temporarily overplaying his hand. Not a huge deal. This is merely a Twitter/X flurry.

I would also bicker with Erik Anderson’s claim about Feinberg having posted “misogynistic” tweets about Letitia Wright last November, which was more bullshit. Feinberg simply stated that Wright, who didn’t have a prayer of landing any kind of acting nomination for Wakanda Forever, had baggage due to allegedly promoting anti-vax messaging. Which she did.

Statement of values: There are few things more disgusting than Twitter/X predators ganging up on this or that person who has allegedly said or written or tweeted the wrong thing. You can hear the snarls and see the saliva-coated sabre teeth and feel the hot breath of pathetic pisshounds…”the genius of the crowd,” as Charles Bukowksi once wrote. I have never taken part in a mass pile-on, and if I have I’ve forgotten about it. Wokesters are great at this stuff, and I am completely proud to spit in their faces for this behavior.

Bill Maher Roughed Up Over Anti-“Barbie” Tweet

by

Earlier today Variety’s Zack Sharf, The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd and Vanity Fair’s Savannah Walsh bitch-slapped Real Time’s Bill Maher for tweeting that Barbie is a “man-hating zombie lie.”

One, there’s absolutely no question that for all its spritzy satire and humor, Barbie positively seethes with contempt for guys. It’s a “fun” flick, a huge hit and a major cultural event, but there’s no arguing this.

Two, if a male director was suicidal enough to make a fantasy film that radiates the same degree of loathing for women that Barbie throws at men, Sharf, Hibberd and Walsh would be part of a mob calling for his immediate lynching and subsequent dismemberment.

Infuriating “Pot au Feu” Stasis

by

I’ve been moaning and groaning for weeks about the seemingly unfortunate fate of Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu, which I praised several weeks ago during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

The greatest foodie flick of the 21st Century and a hit waiting to happen among over-35 viewers, this Cannes award-winner (i.e., Best Director) was hit with a waffle iron when it was acquired by IFC Films and Sapan Studios earlier this summer.

The instant I heard this I went “oh, God…no.”

As I wrote on 6.28 (“What A Bummer for The Pot au Feu), I’ve long believed that an IFC Films distribution deal is almost tantamount to a kiss of death, as IFC Films seems to specialize in acquiring exciting, critically hailed titles only to bury them.

Will The Pot au Feu show up in Telluride? One can only hope, but I’ve been developing a theory that cash-poor IFC Films (which is based in Manhattan) might be reluctant to offer The Pot au Feu at Telluride and Toronto because they’re too cheap to pay for air fare and hotel rooms for a modest Pot au Feu entourage (i.e., no actors due to the SAFG/AFTRA strike).

I might be wrong, but my intuition tells me these guys REALLY have no discretionary income.

I was thrown even further today when The Pot au Feu didn’t even appear on the New York Film Festival lineup. Right in their home town. Infuriating.

There’s no question that The Pot au Feu is one of the best-directed, most audience-friendly films out there, and yet none of the early fall festivals seem to be playing it. NYFF hasn’t announced its slate of premieres (to be unveiled sometime around 8.24 or 8.25), but why the hell would they leave it off their prime list? Tran Anh Hung won the Best Director prize last May on the Cote d’Azur. Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich called it “some kind of masterpiece.” Variety‘s Guy Lodge praised it to the heavens.

All I can figure is that IFC Films’ management is not offering it to the festivals for some totally perverse reason. Or a candy-assed one. They’re specialists at suffocating films by not promoting them, I realize, but…

Friendo: It has a shot at Telluride.
HE: Based on what intel?
Friendo: Based purely based on Julie Huntsinger‘s tastes.
HE: Just tell me — am I crazy?
Friendo: The Pot au Feu is not the type of highbrow movie that NYFF programmers tend to screen. I never expected it to show up. I’ve been saying all along it’s a perfect fit for Telluride.
HE: What the fuck is going on?
Friendo: I’m surprised it’s not at TIFF but Cameron Bailey has destroyed that festival by insisting on world premieres. Due to this policy, there’s a lot of stuff missing this year from the TIFF line-up.
HE: When you say “highbrow NYFF pick,” you mean “a film that Dennis Lim likes.”
Friendo: Precisely. Slow arthouse cinema. Film Comment-level stuff.

Read more

Lost & Emasculated

by

In a cutthroat business environment, a seemingly mellow and fair-minded mid-level employee (Alden Ehrenreich) can’t quite handle his whipsmart fiance (Phoebe Dynevor) getting promoted over him, and their relationship suffers accordingly.

Fair Play appears to be another feminist film, in short, in which the guy in a hetero relationship is revealed to be less formidable than the woman, or, to put it more bluntly, is something of an insecure weenie.

Directed and written by Chloe Domont, and shot in Serbia. The Netflix debut happens on 10.13.23.

From Brian Tallerico’s 1.22.23 Sundance review: “After a project manager is ruthlessly fired, Luke (Ehrenreich) thinks he’s getting the promotion, but it ends up going to Emily (Dynevor) instead. When the power dynamic shifts at the office, it eats away at Luke. He takes bigger risks, hoping for a huge windfall. He signs up for shallow online courses about confidence and business strategy. And he seems to cringe when Emily even takes control in sexual situations, feeling emasculated.

“For her part, Emily becomes more invested in work, trying to impress a cutthroat boss (Eddie Marsan) and losing all of her work/life divide. She comes home late and often drunk. Emily and Luke start to drift into separate lives, and neither makes much effort to stop it.

“Domont’s script for Fair Play is a sharp slow burn; it’s very dialogue-heavy movie but still plays like a thriller. As Emily and Luke get more competitive, their filters in arguments start to fade away and they say the kind of things that change a relationship forever. Domont captures the insanely stressful world of finance with remarkable detail (working on Billions probably helped), but the movie really hums in Emily and Luke’s apartment.

“Ehrenreich deftly captures the kind of guy who knows exactly what to say about not being jealous, even though he doesn’t quite believe it as it comes out of his mouth. This guy has been working for this job his entire life, and he’s seeing someone else get there first. He’s too shallow to figure out how to reconcile his frustration at work with his love for Emily, especially when they’re so connected.”

Friedkin’s Passing, Oscar “Barbie”, Bayard Rustin, Strike-Besieged Telluride

by

Monday’s Sasha-and-Jeff Substack chat was all over the map. Recalling the late William Friedkin, of course, and The Exorcist in particular. The Barbie Oscar prognosis. The annual competition for woke identity politics awards, formerly known as the Oscars.

HE sez: The factors that go into a good podcast discussion are hard to pin down, but the key thing is not giving a flying fuck how it comes off or how brilliant you may or may not sound. Sometimes I feel right on-target, and other times I feel like I’m squishing around.

Again, the link.

Funny Friedkin vs. Stone Quotes

by

On 2.19.10 Movieweb’s B. Alan Orange posted an interview with William Friedkin, and since the director’s passing everyone’s been chortling over a certain excerpt in which Friedkin challenged an Oliver Stone statement about how long DVDs are good for playing.

For what it’s worth I’ve experienced more than a few Bluray freeze-ups over the last couple of years, and even more stalls and seizures while watching 4K Blurays. Yes, I take the discs out and clean them as best I can, and sometimes they still freeze up.

I Dream of Spielberg in Dealey Plaza

by

The late Abraham Zapruder was a good fellow and family man who, through sheer happenstance and an odd quirk of fate, captured the most famous home movie footage of all time.

But in my heart of hearts I can’t help regretting that Zapruder was the one who happened to be filming from that Dealey Plaza slope on 11.22.63. In my heart of hearts I wish that a more devotional movie nerd had been standing there instead of unexceptional, penny-pinching Abe.

8mm home movie cameras were the default choice for tens of millions of families in the mid 20th Century, but the 8mm images were jumpy and hazy and basically looked like shit compared to 16mm, and Abraham Zapruder KNEW that.

Did Zapruder care about the difference in quality? Above and beyond being a decent man who loved his family, I’ll tell you one thing Abe cared about. Like most responsible-minded fathers and business owners, he cared about SAVING MONEY.

You know who cared much more about visual values and cinematic quality? 17 year old Steven Spielberg, a fledgling filmmaker who in late ‘63 was living in Arizona with his family (and who shot his first feature, Firelight, the following year).

If only Spielberg had somehow made his way to Dallas (a school trip? a special family adventure?) and shot the assassination footage in 16mm color instead of Zapruder with his boilerplate 8mm family-man camera!

On top of which Zapruder’s amateurish eye for framing was atrocious. He allowed the Kennedy limo to sink to the very bottom of the developed image during the low 300 cycle of frames (the final 15 or 20 before the explosive head shot). 85% to 90% of these frames captured almost nothing but green grass and a few spectators.

The truth is that unexceptional, well-meaning Abe almost managed to eliminate JFK and Jackie plus John and Nellie Connolly altogether, but they clung to the bottom of the frame for dear life.

So Zapruder earned two failing grades — one for using a vagueiy shitty 8mm camera when he could have bought and used a vastly superior, professional-grade 16mm device, and the second for exhibiting piss-poor visual framing instincts.

I know this article sounds a bit silly, but imagine what the JFK assassination community would have had to work with if a serious cinema worshipper, a devotional, Gregg Toland-like crazy man with a 16mm Arriflex or Bell & Howell, had been standing in Abe’s shoes.

Friedkin Had 15 Powerhouse Years, But His Golden Period Lasted Only Seven

by

The great William Friedkin has passed at age 87.

I was going to begin my brief obit (other obligations are pressing as we speak) with a headline that shouted “drat!…zounds!…now Friedkin will never come clean on the French Connection censorship thing!”

Because it is entirely fair and logical to presume that no one in his inner circle will now come forth to sully the late director’s name by confirming the likely truth of the matter, which is that “Hurricane Billy” did, in fact, either ask for or approve the censoring of the Act One N-word scene in his 1971 Oscar-winning crime flick.

So yes, I’m a little bit angry and muttering “curses, foiled again!…he snuck out like a cat burglar!” But let’s put that story aside and show proper respect to a great, outspoken, occasionally turbulent director who ruled the ’70s with enormous drive and primal hunger and churning ambition.

Friedkin was one of those seriously ballsy grade-A hot shots who flourished when big-boy auterism was in flower…from the early to late ’70s he was one of the leaders of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” motorcycle club, standing side by side with Steven Spielberg, Brian DePalma, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Fosse, et. al.

And yet, truth be told, Friedkin’s serious golden god period lasted only eight years, or from ’70 through ’77…a chapter that encompassed the making and release of four grade-A films — The Boys in the Band (’70 — a delicious zeitgeist-capturing bitter comedy that I own on Bluray and watch every couple of years), The French Connection (’71 — his finest and most vigorous and super-adrenalized achievement — a truly great film…winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture), The Exorcist (’73 — an excellent, wholly believable horror classic….his commercial peak achievement) and Sorcerer (’77)…a first-rate, hugely ambitious action action thriller that not only disappointed commercially but killed Friedkin’s career momentum.

He recovered, of course, but Friedkin never reclaimed that special current of dynamic power and auteurist urgency…from the late ’71 opening of The French Connection through the collapse of Sorcerer six years later he was damn near king of the fucking world.

Hurricane Billy kept that major-auteur-fascination thing going for another seven years (’78 through ’85)…galloping along on his mighty egoistic steed with the making of four more films…The Brink’s Job (’78), Cruising (’80), Deal of the Century (’83) and To Live and Die in L.A. (’85), his second best urban crime flick and arguably his third best of all time.

A 35-year downshift period followed, during which time Friedkin directed The Guardian, Blue Chips, Jade, Rules of Engagement, The Hunted, Bug, Killer Joe and the forthcoming Venice Film Festival non-competitive selection, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

If the keepers of Friedkin’s legacy want to do the right thing, they’ll push for the restoration of that censored French Connection scene and erase all copies of the edited bullshit 2021 version. If the Disney guys have any decency they’ll just forget about the whole matter…they’ll say “look, Friedkin was in his late 80s and censoring that scene was completely out of character for a guy known for his ballsiness and obstinacy, so let’s just forget it happened and restore the footage and be done with it.”

Read more

Misery as Only Feminism Can Deliver

by

Obviously tens of millions have been having a great time with Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie, and relatively few have suffered from watching it. I was appalled by the misandry, of course, but what is my voice compared to the thundering pink multitudes? I am nothing, not even a worm, at most a speck of dust.

Konstantin Kisin, the British conservative guy, isn’t claiming that Barbie is making anyone miserable either. But he has written a Substack piece titled “Barbie: Misery as Only Feminism Can Deliver,” dated 8.7.23. Here’s a compressed version:

“It is said that hurt people hurt people. No statement could sum up the ideology of modern feminism better. And no movie does as good a job of illustrating this warped worldview than Barbie.

“If the poison pill of hyper-liberalism is to encourage us to see ourselves as atomized individuals, the liberal feminism of Hollywood depicted here is worse still.

“You’re not actually free to pursue your happiness by yourself, says Barbie, because you live in a world which is run by one of two competing gangs — the matriarchy or the patriarchy. Pick your champion.

“The modern feminist movement [sees] the relationship between men and women as one of competition.

“But, fear not, Barbie has a solution. When she returns to the Barbieland Ken has now ruined with his toxic masculinity. Barbie and her fellow plastic girlbosses work use the ego, hubris and stupidity of men against themselves.

“Once this humiliation is complete, men stop oppressing women and instead cry, talk about their feelings and do all the other things men need to do to be better. Because, as we all know, the way for men to be better is for them to be more like women. Because women are equal to men. And better too.

“In any case, having retaken Barbieland from the clutches of the patriarchy and rejected Ken’s quite reasonable suggestion that he and Barbie, i.e., men and women, are created to be together, Barbie is free to ride off into the sunset. Alone.”

Continuing Legend of Badge Man

by

The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination is three and a half months away. The usual conspiracy titillations will be reconsidered, but no one will ever know anything conclusive about an alleged conspiracy because two witnesses to the murder who had cameras (Abraham Zapruder and Mary Moorman) were too cheap to buy better cameras, and a third witness (Orville Nix, who died in 1972) has two strikes against him — he shot his Dealey Plaza footage with a mildly shitty 8mm camera, and was either too dumb or too lazy to shoot the Kennedy motorcade from a reasonable distance.

If Zapruder had shot the murder with color film inside a decent 16mm camera instead of an 8mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD…if Moorman had used a movie camera instead of a black-and-white Polaroid Highlander 80A…if Nix had used a 16mm color movie camera with a decent zoom lens….all three had their unique motives and economic limitations and that’s understandable, but from a forensic perspective they sorta kinda blew it.

Imagine being Orville Nix at 12:28 pm on 11.22.63, standing on the grass in Dealey Plaza between 80 and 100 feet away from Elm Street, all pumped and primed with his 8mm color camera…

Interior Nix dialogue: “Okay, I can hear the motorcycles and the cheering…the Kennedy motorcade is coming down Main Street and will be cruising down Elm in a minute or two…maybe I should run over to Elm to get a decent shot of the President and his wife and Governor Connally??…naahh, it’s better to stand 80 to 100 feet away…that way my family and friends can see the grassy knoll hillside and the plaster walls and the bright blue sky…who needs to capture film of the actual faces of President Kennedy and Jackie?…the green grass and the panoramic vistas are better.”

In the meantime, what about that mysterious muzzle flash and the legend of Badge Man?

HE to JFK conspiracy pallies (including Joseph McBride and Oliver Stone): “A rifle muzzle flash is said to be barely detectable above a grassy knoll wall. Or at least, so says assassination researcher Robert Groden.

Groden’s film A Case for Conspiracy shows a flash above the small concrete wall at frame # 24 in the Nix film, which is the same instant as frame # 313 in the Zapruder film.

Read more