There’s an excellent Peter Biskind piece in the new Vanity Fair about Warren Beatty‘s long and difficult effort to make Reds (1981), his Oscar-winning epic about journalist and romantic revolutionary John Reed. (The cover tease reads, “What did Warren Beatty do to make Jack Nicholson cry?” A Beatty pull-quote reads, “I told Jack I needed someone to play [Eugene] O’Neill, but it had to be someone who could convincingly take this woman from me.” A Diane Keaton pull quote: “I don’t think we were much of a couple by the end of the movie.”) The piece is an excerpt from Biskind’s Beatty biography. He’s been working on it for a year or so but it probably won’t be on the stands until sometime in late ’07 or early ’08, he told me this morning. Biskind added that Paramount Home Video is finally putting out their long-delayed Reds DVD in November. It took them years to get it done and on the schedule, in part (largely?) because of Beatty’s reluctance to sit down for an interview and/or record a commentary track. (PHV spokesperson Martin Blythe acknowledged three or four years ago this was an issue/concern.) Reds is one of the greatest and proudest achievements of Beatty’s career, so naturally he hems and haws when it comes to providing supplementary materials for the DVD.

A National Public Radio piece on the Brokeback Mountain trailer spoof and others like it. The funniest Brokeback ad was on Leno the other night. I’d describe it but it wouldn’t be the same.

Friday, 2.10, 7:50 pm. The Texas ladies and I needed directions to a Crash party just starting up in the hills, so we pulled into the Liquor Locker on Sunset and we noticed this blond bearded guy coming out of the store: Philip Seymour Hoffman. “Philly? Jeffrey Wells. Journalist…friend of Bennett Miller?” Hey, smile, handshake. “We’re just down tonight from Santa Barbara, where you’ll be tomorrow, right?” He’s receiving the Riviera Award at the Arlington tonight (2.11) with Leonard Maltin hosting along with the usual montage of film clips. Hoffman had come to the store for a pack of smokes (I think) and seemed to be in a slight hurry to be somewhere else, and he almost seemed to do an “oh, yeah” when I mentioned Santa Barbara. The Texas ladies came up and rattled off his six or seven best films and told him they loved his work, and you could see him stiffen slightly as he gave them a polite smile and a curt thanks. “See ya tomorrow,” I said, and he smiled and waved and hopped into his car and pulled out.

MSNBC’s Erik Lundegaard has a pretty good piece here about the best screen kisses, but unless I read it too fast he left out a whopper:
That late-in-the-second-act moment in Hustle & Flow when Terrence Howard walks back into the house and plants a real passionate one on Tarij P. Henson. A great kiss because it’s not about down-on-the-floor passion as much as Howard’s D.J. charatcrer having finally recognized the love and the loyalty he’d been getting all along from Henson’s “Shug.” Which, of course, makes it very hot.

“Interesting complaint about using World Trade Center as the title of Oliver Stone’s 9.11 film,” a very smart industry guy who knows a lot stuff wrote a few minutes ago. “Here a a couple of thoughts to add to the mix. Maybe he should’ve called it Wall Street II. Or, more seriously, made a simple edit which would make the title less plodding: World Trade. That makes it sound like an action picture, and yet it resonates. There was indeed a worldwide tradeoff that day.” Seriously…I think this is a great title.

Hollywood-based reader Dixon Steele is saying that closet homophobia regarding Brokeback Mountain is not a rumor. “I had dinner last weekend with my uncle, who is a senior level executive for one of the networks,” he writes. “We both see a lot of movies and talk about them at our occasional get-togethers. I was surprised when he told me he hadn’t seen BBM yet. Although he’s your typical mostly-liberal thinking person (post-middle-aged), he represents the typical Academy voter. And I know from our past talks he’s slightly homophobic. And this was confirmed when he told me he had no interest in seeing the film. When I asked him why, he couldn’t answer…but we both knew why.”

Oh, yeah…I was going to say something about Firewall, the new Harrison Ford thriller that opens today. Directed by Richard Loncraine, it’s a reasonably well-made programmer. Not boring or horrendous, and it moves along and does the job. Ford (a.k.a., “Uncle Festus”) is very good (as usual) at the non-visual stuff…at making you share the tension that his good-guy character is going through as he figures how to stick it to the bad guys who are holding his family hostage. There are about 18 movies that Firewall reminds you of — The Desperate Hours (both versions), Hostage (the Bruce Willis film), Air Force One, Don’t Say a Word, Trapped, etc. But the films it most closely resembles are British-produced — one made in 1961, the other in 1987. The former is called Cash on Demand, a Quentin Lawrence film with Peter Cushing as a bank manager whose wife and child by a criminal who’s looking to rob the bank by pretending to be an insurance investigator. The ’87 version is Loncraine’s own Bellman and True, which is about a computer expert [who’s been] bribed by group of bank robbers to obtain details of the security system at a newly-built bank, and is later re-accosted by the criminals when they invade his London home and take his son hostage. They force him to decode the information about the alarm and then to take part in the robbery.”

Embarassment Redux: “Often there are good movies that win, but it’s the movies that they beat which says it all,” says reader Mark Smith. “My personal hell is Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas in 1990. You tell me which movie has become a timeless classic and which has been forgotten about. The grandfucker of them all was in 1976 when Rocky beat Network, Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men .” C’mon, Mark…the Oscar always goes to the Best Picture contender that summons the strongest (i.e., weepiest) emotional response. You know it, I know it…par for the course.

That explanation from a “distribution insider” in yesterday’s (2.9) Variety story about Tuesday’s massive firings at Paramount due to the DreamWorks merger (109 out of nearly 129 employees — including “almost all senior execs [and] virtually all of former distrib president Wayne Lewellen‘s staff”) is fascinating because of the obvious parallels in male-lion behavior. “”They didn’t just get rid of high-level people,” the distribution insider told Variety‘s Ben Fritz and Chris Gardner. “Clearly, they didn’t want anybody from the old regime.” A nature website I’ve found says that “a male lion doesn’t tend to think in term of his species survival but in terms of his survival through his progeny, meaning that anything that gets in the way of this is a threat…even other cubs of his own species. If the male wants to procreate and encounters a female with cubs, his natural instinct is to get rid of the cubs of another lion so she’ll bear his cubs, thus insuring the survival of his progeny.”

New York Press critic and blogger Matt Zoller Seitz defending that grotesque Munich sex scene that was intercut with Munich airport shoot-out footage.

Reader Andy Smith is adding Cimarron (1931) to the list of Best Picture Oscar Embarassments. “Most people have forgotten it but it took the prize in 1931, beating out the likes of The Front Page, Public Enemy and City Lights,” says Smith. “Seems to have won primarily due to its scope and general ‘bigness’ (i.e., ‘must be a great…look how much it cost to make!’)”

More Best Picture Oscar Embarassments, submitted by reader Gabriel Neeb: (a) Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (let’s call this one a post-Passion of the Christ reassessment); (b) How Green Was My Valley (it beat out the political hot-potato Citizen Kane and the legendary The Maltese Falcon, which was seen in ’41 as a hardboiled genre piece and therefore not toney enough for a gold statuette); (c) 1940’s Rebecca (a strong piece, but this is the Hitchcock film the Academy went for because…hmmm, let me guess…because producer David O. Selznick was out there twisting arms and calling in the muscle and invoking favors?); (d) 1958’s Gigi (has anyone in the presently-configured world ever seen this curiously antiquted museum piece on DVD? There isn’t a single cultural echo in all of it); (e) 1932 and ’33’s Cavalcade (the year King Kong should have been at least nominated); (f) 1936’s The Great Ziegfeld and ’37’s The Life of Emile Zola .