Year’s Best Trailer

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.?

Cartoonist-satirist Mike Russell did a sitdown last month in Oregon with Beerfest boys Eric Stolhanske and Steve Lemme (two from the Broken Lizards comedy troupe who costarred in Super Troopers), and here’s how it went down.

When I was living in my cockroach-infested, struggling-young- journalist Soho pad in the late ’70s, there were all those Jean Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti pieces painted all over Soho and the Bowery.
SAMO was Basquiat’s graffiti alter-ego — it basically meant “same old shit‘ — and I remember being hugely disappointed when I met Basquiat himself on a street corner and he told me in passing it was pronounced “same-oh”. I had always preferred “sam-oh”.

Some of the slogans were “SAMO as a neo art form,” “SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy” and “SAMO as an escape clause.”
Anyway, I’ve never forgotten a certain SAMO graffiti that said the poiltical power of McDonalds had become equal to that of the CIA or the Vatican. I saw it somewhere near Broadway and Prince. That was something like a Major Moment for me, burned into my brain. McDonald’s = pernicious, anti-human, scourge of cvilization.
McDonalds is on the wane these days. In this country, anyway. The fearsome corporate franchise beast of 2006 is Starbucks, of course. Which is why I paid attention a week or so ago to that story about actor Rupert Everett joining forces with his Bloomsbury district neighbors to try and prevent a Starbucks outlet from moving into the neighborhood.
And then it all came together today with one big whammo when I saw this world map about the spread of the Twin Corporate Cancers of Starbucks and McDonalds.
The chart says there are 6200 Starbucks around the world with an average of 3 new outlets opening each day, and 13,000 — 13,000? — McDonalds around the world generating $41 billlion in annual income. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Sounds light. If someone told me there were 130,000 McDonalds outlets worldwide, I would buy that.

Paramount Pictures “remains firmly in the grasp of a man so out of touch with the modern world that when citing the support he’d had for his remarks, Sumner Redstone told reporters he’d had a congratulatory call from Vanity Fair celebrity chronicler Dominick Dunne, who told him he behaved like Samuel Goldwyn. Being compared to Goldwyn has a nice ring to it, but the truth is that Redstone really has far more in common with N.Y. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. That’s why I suspect that no matter how many good pictures get made at Paramount, as long as Redstone is around, studio executives won’t last any longer than Yankees managers during Steinbrenner’s heyday. Both men live in a world where winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing.” — from Patrick Goldstein‘s latest “Big Picture” column.

A recap & post-mortem on the Redstone-Cruise- Wagner-Grey kerfuffle from Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson. Here’s one thing we definitely agree upon, which is that turmoil and transition can sometimes provide a creative blessing in disguise. Thompson writes that not having a Paramount berth is just such a situation for Cruise: “Freeing himself from a studio like Paramount could be the best thing to happen to him.” And I said last May in my “Upside of Taps” piece about Cruise’s implosion that “if he’s smart (and he is), he can damage control his way out of this, to some extent. Just downplay the weirdo stuff and focus on the work, the work, the work. This a big opportunity for the guy. He’s begun of those life passages that can lead, with the right attitude, to non-material riches.”

I’ve never run a fluffball item of this magnitude on Hollywood Elsewhere before, but you know me…anything to push along the Little Miss Sunshine bandwagon. If you have any “mad money” to spare and you’re on Robertson Blvd., Kitson is the place to drop into. Except I don’t have any mad money because advertising revenues suck in the summer months, so that lets me out and then some. Nonethless, Kitson has a big Sunshine display in the window….cool. I love those family-size buckets of Dinah’s Fried Chicken.

Kitson window display on Robertson Blvd. south of Beverly Blvd.

This article by New York journalist Nicholas Stix (posted on Tuesday and updated today) could have been called “When Billy Shafted Bruno.” It’s not mentioned in the lead graph or the second or third graph, but the heart of the story provides indications and quotes supporting a thesis that Billy Crystal “made” the career of the late Bruno Kirby, who died last week, and then he un-made him.

Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby

Or so the indicators indicate. Crystal certainly seems to have had an indirect hand in limiting Kirby’s acting opportunities and may have been, in a sense, a “career- killing ogre” as far as Kirby was concerned. By all means read Stix’s article, but in a nutshell it says the following:

(a) “Kirby was one of the hottest character actors in Hollywood in the late 1980s, through 1991, the high point of which was Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989), in which Kirby played the male second banana as the sportswriter- best friend of Crystal’s character. Sally would prove to be one of the greatest romantic comedies ever made, and the high point in the career of everyone involved in the production.”

(b) “In 1991, Kirby had an even more substantial role in City Slickers as Crystal’s character’s macho friend,. That same year, Kirby also won acclaim on Broadway, replacing Kevin Spacey as the male lead, playing the smallest of small-timers, would-be gangster ‘Uncle Louie’ in Neil Simon’s memory play, Lost in Yonkers which won four Tony awards.”

(c) “At that point, Kirby was one of the top character actors in the business, his career on a trajectory that was leading inexorably to Oscar nominations, and perhaps even a golden statuette. And then his career tanked. Following City Slickers, the names of most of the pictures he was in were so forgettable — obscure, direct-to-video duds that I had never even heard of — that I instantly forgot them.”

(d) “During or shortly after the making of City Slickers, Kirby and Crystal had a falling out, and not only would Crystal no longer work with Kirby, but neither would any of the many producers and directors associated with Crystal. As a result, while Kirby continued to work, he was cast in fewer movies and the ones he was cast in were, well … take a look for yourself: Golden Gate (1994), Heavenzapoppin’! (1996), A Slipping-Down Life (1999), History Is Made at Night (1999), One Eyed King (2001).

(e) “On 9.12.01, USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna interviewed Crystal as part of a press junket for America’s Sweethearts, and at one point asked for a worst-junket story: Wloszczyna: “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: “He wasn’t in City Slickers II.” Wloszczyna: “Yeah, I know, but there was some reason that he didn’t do it. Are you guys still friends?” Crystal: “I haven’t spoken to him — I think we are. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in a long time.” There’s an interlude and then back to the subject. Crystal: “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.” Wloszczyna: “But it’s about the movie, because the subject of the movie is the press and famous people.” Crystal:: “So now you’re my worst junket story.”

(f) “I think we are” still friends? “Something personal or whatever it is that happened, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago”? “Whatever”? With a guy you went from being practically vaudeville partner with, to not seeing or speaking with “in a long time”?

Three fascinating Dreamgirls interviews in tandem with costars Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Non-i Rose, written by ,em>USA Today’s Suzie Woz (a.k.a., Susan Wloszczyna). Except uhm….well, I lied about the “fascinating.” This may have something to do with the fact that Dreamgirls won’t be screened for another couple of months, probably. And I don’t see why Wloszczyna, whose last name is unspellable, doesn’t just change her handle to Suzie Woz full-time. This is America — land of hamburgers and simplicity and Ford Fairlanes. Answer this honestly: if you were the Pulp Fiction character named Antoine Roquemora and you found out your “street” nickname was Tony Rockyhorror, would you have a problem with that?

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett will be in Toronto to flog the TIFF showings of Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu’s Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27), as will Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott for the screenings of A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10). And a publicist friend called today about setting up an interview with a client.
But nothing can be scheduled, of course, because the Toronto Film Festival hasn’t made the schedules of press and public screenings available.
Remember that exchange from Beat the Devil when the ship’s captain announces that an engine part has cracked and the ship can’t leave port until a replacement arrives. “Now see here,” says an irate English passenger. “This vessel is schedued, most definitely scheduled, to leave port at midnight tonight.” And the captain says, “Scheduled, sir, but not, I fear, destined to do so.” (Dialogue by Truman Capote.)

I was into this for a few seconds based on the headline and the illustration, but the poor spelling and grammar queered it.

It’s my humble opinion that L.A. Times reporters John Horn and Rachel Abramowitz have written more enthralling analysis pieces that this one, a sum-up about the increasingly strained relations between studios, producers and eccentric talent like Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan and M. Night Shyamalan, blah, blah. This mp3 of Mark Ebner‘s mouthing off about Cruise’s situation on a Calgary radio station on Wednesday, 8.23, is a livelier absorption. Ebner naturally embraces the Sumner-was-right scenario (Ebner and Andrew Breitbart’s Hollywood Interrupted book prophesized the Age of Celebrity Meltdowns) and he’s certainly not as measured or cautious as Horn and Abramowitz, but I prefer his take all the same.