Here’s a good Ben-Hur joke that I never heard until today. The oar slaves on the warship that Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) has been condemned to serve on (the one commanded by Quintus Arrius, the senior Roman officer played by Jack Hawkins) are told to listen up by a galley commander. “I have good news and bad news,” he announces. “The good news is that we won’t be going into battle today against the Macedonians.” And the oar slaves all whoop and cheer. “The bad news is that Arrius wants to go water-skiing.”

C.C. Goldwater has her day in the N.Y. Times sun, talking about her grandfather, Barry Goldwater, and more particularly the doc she produced, Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, which will debut on HBO starting 9.18. Directed by Julie Anderson and co-produced by Tani Cohen, it reconfigures the image of the late Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican President candidate as a kind of liberal-styled libertarian…a fair-minded, independent-minded guy in the vein of, say, John McCain or maybe even a bit to the left of that.
I saw Mr. Conservative in late June at the L.A. Film Festival. I always respected Goldwater for being a helluva lot more candid than most politicians and especially for sticking to his philosophical guns at all times, but this doc provided a fuller acquaintance. My two favorite bits from the doc: (a) Goldwater’s two points of advice to son Barry, Jr., about hound-dogging, which was to “keep it out of town”, and “if you’re not successful by midnight, go home and get some sleep“; and (b) a story about Goldwater being denied a chance to play golf at a certain country club back in the ’50s because of his Jewish name, and his replying that “I’m only half-Jewish from my father’s side so what if I play nine holes?”

Another 3-Disc Apocalypse Now DVD Story: “That Circuit City third-disc Complete Dossier deal was advertised here in a flyer that appeared in the Philadelphia area, which is why I went to Circuit City to get it, not to mention the fact that their $12.99 price beat out Best Buy’s $14.99,” writes Feeling Lucky in Philadelpha.

“So I showed up early and scanned the displayed copies. None of them had any identifying markers on them, so I assumed they all came with the extra disc. But while I was doing this, I noticed a Circuit City employee going through the stock copies on the bottom rack and comparing them. Then he pulls one from stock and disappears. I grabbed a display copy from the rack (you’d think I would have taken a moment to check the stock copies like the clerk), bought it, headed home, opened it up and found no extra disc inside, so I turned right around and head back to the store.
“I asked the clerk I’d seen rummaging through the stock copies why mine didn’t have the extra advertised disc. ‘Uhm, did it have a sticker on it?’ he asks, at which point I notice the stickered copy he’d pulled for himself on the counter. He walked me over and explained that they’d only gotten 3 or 4 copies with the sticker, and then he searched through the stock copies and gets me one.
“Even though he pulled only one copy for himself, it still felt like he’d intentionally jobbed all the stickered copies into the stock section where no one would look. Was he still making up his mind about how many to hoard? Who knows? But I can tell you that they did advertise the damn thing and I thought it was awfully strange that out of the 20 copies or so available, first day mind you, only three or four had the advertised extra disc.”

I’m thinking of a Career Chiller Top Ten — a rundown of the best actors and actresses of the last 15 or 20 years whose careers suddenly stalled for no apparent reason. Their talent didn’t evaporate, they didn’t get fat, they didn’t get pinched for child molesting…but the wheels just stopped turning. This happened to poor Ned Beatty for a while over, I was told, an inside-the-industry sensitivity issue. John Travolta went cold for a while, of course, but that was mostly over lousy choices and the curse of Jonathan Krane . Whatever happened to Shelley Long? Bridget Fonda? Bijou Phillijps? With every career freeze, there’s always a political story that goes with it. Send these along too, if anyone can think of any good ones. The best, of course, are the ones that end with the actor getting back in the groove and finding work again.

I’ve seen Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan three times now — once at the ’05 Toronto Film Festival, twice on DVD. Why is it, then, that I’m seriously contemplating going to see it again as the final showing in the Aero’s “Mods & Rockers” series on Sunday night (8.27)? I’ve thought it over, and all I can figure is that it feels immensely cool to soak in the specialness of that early-to-mid ’60s Dylan thing, which isn’t “better” than the bolt around the current Dylan album or the late ’90s incarnation or the one that happened in the mid ’70s when he sang “Hurricane.” I only know that the ghost of electricity howled in the bones of her face only once, and then it very gradually faded over time.

I’ve heard a couple of good things about ABC’s five-hour TV movie The Path to 9/11, which will air over two nights — Sunday, September 10 (8: to 11:00 pm, PT/ET) and Monday, September 11 (8 to 10 p.m., PT/ET). It’s about the lead-up to the 9/11 tragedy starting with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The director is David L. Cunningham, the writer is Cyrus Nowrasteh, and the principal star is Harvey Keitel playing John O’Neill, the onetime FBI agent and WTC security consultant who was killed on 9/11.
I’m going to try and score a DVD screener, as it’ll be pretty damn difficult to give this film my full attention during the Toronto Film Festival, which starts on 9.7 and lasts until 9.17.
Cunningham’s film is obviously going to overlap over Paul Haggis’s Against All Enemies, a feature based on Richard Clarke‘s book of the same name. Haggis was going to direct a film with Sean Penn as Clarke and Vince Vaughn as John O’Neill, but I don’t know. I’m getting a funny back-of-the-neck feeling about this one. I think it may go south.

CNN will run a replay of its coverage of the 9/11attacks as it actually happened in real time on 9.11.06 on CNN Pipeline, starting at 8:30 ayem and ending at midnight. That means not on CNN’s cable station but online…kapeesh? The 9/11 viewing will be available for free that day — viewers normally pay $2.95 monthly or $24.95 per year. Iinteresting. (I almost wrote kewl.) But why not also make the full-day coverage available via a DVD box set of some kind?

I’ve heard from several people that there’s been some kind of unadvertised deal between Paramount Home Video and Circuit City to provide an Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier DVD package that contains 3 DVDs if — and only if — you buy it at Circuit City. And here’s a review on DVD Talk that mentions this Circuit City-only “third disc” version. And yet these versions were apparently recalled a few days ago and can no longer be found at Circuit City stores.

The review, amended on Sunday, 8.20.06, says, “Thanks to DVD Talk reader Ryan, who passed along this detailed information about Paramount’s bizarre decision to offer excised material from the first two DVD incarnations of Apocalypse Now as a bonus disc exclusively carried by Circuit City in limited supplies: ‘Please note that there is a Bonus Disc Three available exclusively at Circuit City. The disc has this written on it: ‘The Added Scenes and Expanded Themes of Apocalypse Now Redux’; Destruction of the Kurtz Compound with Optional Commentary; 1979 Theatrical Trailer; 2001 Trailer.
“The disc is packaged inside the cardboard outer sleeve and behind the digipack. Editions with the bonus disc will have a sticker on the outside which says “Exclusive Free Bonus Disc With Purchase of this DVD While Supplies Last.” Editions with the free bonus disc have a different UPC barcode: 032429010995.” It’s also worth noting that the ‘excerpts from the original theatrical program’ found on the first DVD have still not turned up anywhere, so again, Apocalypse Now enthusiasts would do well to hang onto at least the first DVD release.”
And yet I’ve called four Circuit City stores today (Saturday, 8.26) and spoken to six or seven employees, and they all said that (a) the Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier double-disc set isn’t sitting on the shelves, and (b) they had no idea there was a three-disc version being offered exclusively at Circuit City. The awareness and sophistication levels of these people was not impressive. Two asked me repeat the name “Apocalypse Now”, as if it was the name of some exotic herb.
Only one Circuit City employee had a clue about what I was talking about. Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier has been recalled, said an assistant manager at the Burbank Circuit City branch on First Street. The discs were sent back “about four or five days ago,” she said. The double-disc version is available in all the other stores at a price of $16 dollars and change (or thereabouts). Circuit City was asking $14.99 when they had them.

Reader Ernie Souchak writes, “I don’t know if Circuit City is a Viacom company, but this deal is really obnoxious, and should piss off everyone else who’s selling this package, not to mention fans whose ‘Dossier’ is less complete than others’.” A friendly clerk named Lon at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer says two or three people have come into the store talking about the Circuit City-only, three-disc version and said they’d bought it, etc.
It’s looking like those three-disc Dossier DVDs are going to acquire the reputation of that Yesterday and Today “butcher block” Beatles album from 1966 with the severed baby-head and chopped-meat cover photo. The purported offensiveness of this immensely cool cover photo resulted in a sudden recall by Capitol Records before the album arrived in record stores.
If Paramount wanted to set this whole thing straight, they would assemble a genuine Complete Dossier with George Hickelnlooper and Fax Bahr‘s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apcalypse, a truly great 1991 documentary about the making of the film, and then issue that sometime later this year — a four-disc set in all.

Snakes on a Plane, the hottest internet sensation of the year that opened last weekend, will rank in eighth place as of Sunday evening with earnings of $5,812,000 — a drop of 62%. And Little Miss Sunshine, which expanded to 1450 theatres this weekend, will come in third with $6,928,000. The #1 film, as expected, is Invincible with a projected $16,198,000.

POV Online’s Mark Evanier is arguing that the Bruno Kirby- Billy Crystal piece by Nicholas Stix that I linked to yesterday (i.e., the one that suggested that Crystal might have been a “career-killing ogre” as far as Kirby was concerned). I don’t know anything about this, but Evanier makes some good arguments. I ‘m disputing one of them, though, and I want to point out something he didn’t mention:

“Perhaps Crystal blocked Kirby from being cast in City Slickers II and subsequent Billy Crystal movies,” he writes. “It was probably within his power to do so…but how could he stop Steven Spielberg from hiring Bruno Kirby? How could he stop Cameron Crowe or Ron Howard or…well, name the top fifty directors in the business these days. If one of them decided Bruno Kirby was the best actor for a given role, would that director say, ‘Let’s go with our second choice. I want to help Billy Crystal destroy Bruno’s career’?”

That’s well put and well-reasoned, but I also know from limited experience that when the word goes out on an actor or actress that he/she is bad news and/or more trouble than he/she is worth or has made an enemy of a very important person, etc., people pick up on this and they tend to steer away from him/her. It’s cowardly but people do this. Actors can go cold for long periods of time, and sometimes the cold streak starts when a big name hands them a black spot.

Once again, I’m not saying Crystal did this to Kirby — I don’t know anything — but I know that if a certain heavyweight decides to shun an actor, other heavy- weights pick up on this and figure, “If there’s a 1 in 100 chance I might alienate that heavyweight actor-director by hiring this character actor, why do it? Why not just hire someone else?” This is a town, trust me, that runs on terror, avoidance and backbones made of jelly.

The other thing that Evanier is missing out on are the indications of lying in Crystal’s responses to questions about Kirby put to him by USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna (a.k.a., Suzie Woz) on 9.12.01.

Wloszczyna asked Crystal, “The only thing I could come up with is that when you were making City Slickers II, you and Bruno Kirby had a falling out.” Crystal said, “He wasn’t in City Slickers II.” And Wloszczyna says back, “Yeah, I know, but there was some reason that he didn’t do it. Are you guys still friends?” Crystal answers, “I haven’t spoken to him — I think we are. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in a long time.”
Stop right there — anyone who says “I think we’re still friends” is dodging and side-stepping. And following this up with “I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in a long time” is, I suspect, a code phrase that means “I haven’t wanted to see or speak with him for a long time because of some shit that went down that I don’t want to get into again.”

Crystal later says to Wloszczyna, “This is a perfect situation. We’re here to talk about the movie, and you’re talking about something personal or whatever it is that happened, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago.” That’s an obvious tipoff that speaking about Kirby is an uncomfortable thing for Crystal. And saying the words “personal or whatever” is another lie — he knows it was personal and he’s saying “or whatever” to cover it up.

I’ve believed for years that prepared or carefully phrased statements often cover underlying truths, and that it’s always the words in passing — the obiter dicta — that give the real game away. A professed truth is always suspect, but you can always trust the obvious scent of a lie.

That said, I’m not pushing any kind of notion that Billy Crystal is a “career-killing ogre”, much less the devil. I have no knowledge or stake in any of this. Kirby may have torpedoed himself in all kinds of different ways as far as his career was concerned — I don’t know a damn thing — but Crystal definitely wasn’t being honest with Wloszczyna in that exchange, and that’s why I ran the link to Stix’s piece in the first place.

Year’s Best Trailer

Stop what you’re doing and click on this trailer for Todd Field‘s Little Children (New Line, 10.6). It’s probably the best trailer for a dramatic film I’ve seen this year, no shit. It really grabs you, and it’s almost all about the sound. No music, almost no talk, no story. All you hear is a wonderfully haunting, far-off train horn in the distance. And the whole piece just seeps right into your soul the second you start watching it.

The trailer tells you right off that Little Children is a smart, A-level drama about suburban infidelity with a kind of John Cheever-ish guilt-trip atmosphere. It tells you it’s about Kate Winslet and her little red-headed daughter (who actually looks like her…amazing), and an extra-marital affair she has with Patrick Wilson, and how Jennifer Connelly, playing Wilson’s wife, fits into the general discomfort.
Fields’ script is based on Tom Perrotta‘s novel of the same name, and there’s more to the story than an extra-marital affair, but for the purposes of the trailer and the “sell,” it works beautifully. And with the train-horn effect and all (I used to listen to that lonely sound every night when I was a kid living in a sedate New Jersey suburb called Westfield), it feels exciting. As in original, grabby, exciting.
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The idea for the trailer came from Field in a meeting in…actually, there’s some debate about that. Two sources say that the first creative sitdown happened in very late 2005, and another says it happened in March or early April of 2006. That’s a huge discrepancy, but whatever.
The main thing is that Field said early on that he didn’t want the Little Children trailer to have music, dialogue or story. The guy he told this to was Mark Woollen, 35 year-old owner of the Santa Monica-based Mark Woollen & Associates, an agency known for creating smart atypical trailers for hip movies like About Schmidt, Adaptation, I Heart Huckabees and The Royal Tenenbaums.
The other agency guy in the room during that first meeting was Woollen’s top editor, Chad Misner. The third principal party was New Line executive vp creative advertising Laura Carrillo, who had brought Wollen and Misner in.
“The train horn came from something that Chad found,” says Woollen. “And we had a piece cut together by January ’06, which was pretty mich the version you’re seeing now.” Another source says Woollen’s train-horn trailer was delivered closer to early April 2006. (Are these discrepancies amazing or what?)
“So we showed it to Todd and he was very turned on,” Woollen says. The other source says Woollen’s first cut wasn’t quite as train-horn pure as the final version. Field and Little Children editor Leo Trombetta actually cut together a trailer of their own around this time, and I’m told that a fair portion of the elements in their version made it to the finish line.

“And then we spent several months revising,” says Woollen. [The New Line people] wanted to see how it would play with music, which we worked on in June. The final version was locked only just recently.”
As it turned out, the final version does have a few quiet lines if dialogue, but they’re spoken in almost a whispering way. I especially like Kate Winslet’s line about how almost everyone she knows has “a hunger for alternatives and a refusal to accept a life of unhappiness.”
From Carillo’s point of view the trailer was basically a Field-and-Woollen show. “Mark really wrapped his brain around this [piece],” she says. “He began as a trailer editor and has grown this company on his own. He likes to be away from the whole Hollywood thing but tends to be a very collaborative partner with filmmakers.
“I also know that early on, Todd brought up the metaphor of trains connecting all these towns in America. I wrote this down as a note. As you’ll see in the movie., there are trains and train sounds in it. Todd shot lots and lots of trains, although a lot fewer made it into the final cut.”
The operative phrase here is a famous one: success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.

Woollen started his company in ’01. He’s been cutting trailers since he was 18. The first trailer he did that he was really proud of , he says, was one for Schindler’s List.
Mark Woollen and Associates also did the trailers for Crash, Brick, Syriana, March of the Penguins and Hard Candy.
Note: This piece was slightly re-written between the time it was posted early Friday evening and Saturday morning at 9:40 am, some 15 hours later.

This is the strangest piece about The Searchers that I’ve ever read. Written by Alex Cox, it’s supposed to be about his watching John Ford‘s 1956 classic western in Utah’s Monument Valley, where it was shot. Cox describes the drive (a little bit) and then sidewinds into a perceptive but relatively generic appreciation of the movie, blah, blah, the duality of John Wayne‘s Ethan character, blah, blah. What happened to the outdoor movie-watching experience? The desert dust inside the boots, the way they bleachers felt, the size of the screen, whether it was sufficiently audible, what kind of people showed up, etc.?