Venice Film Festival honcho Alberto Barbera to Vanity Fair‘s Rebecca Ford on (a) Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, (b) Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie a Deux and (c) the all-but-total diminishment, prestige and award-season-wise, of the Toronto Film Festival:

Barbera on Queer: “It’s not an easy film. It’s very bold.” HE translation: Gushings of gay sex. Daniel Craig goes down on Drew Starkey and vice versa, and early on he fucks a young Mexico City lad.

Barbera: “I don’t know if you are familiar with the book or not. It’s a short novel that was published only in 1985, right after the death of William Burroughs. It’s a very autobiographical novel when Burroughs was a drug addict and a gay man, and he was forced to leave Texas. He went to Mexico City, and he started to cruise in the bars and the restaurants trying to find company.

“The film is fantastic. I think it’s the best film by Luca Guadagnino so far, and the performance of Danny Craig is absolutely outstanding.” HE translation: I’ve seen a snippet or two from Queer and can tell you that Craig exudes a great deal of emotional vulnerability.

Barbera: “It’s not just I think it’s the performance of his life. He’s a great, great actor, and he takes some risks, of course, because it’s something that’s not in line with his previous films.” Imagine Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan getting down in the same fashion.

Queer‘s running time, by the way, is down to 135 minutes.

Barbera on Joker: Folie a Deux: “If you expect just a second part of [2019’s Joker], exactly the same kind of narrative and situation and so on, you are wrong, because the theme is much darker. It is much more inventive from every point of view. It’s completely unexpected. I think it is very bold, and brave, and creative, and an incredibly original film.”

Barbera on the collapse of the Toronto Film Festival (yippee!): “In 2012, most of the American films preferred to go to Toronto instead of coming to Venice, because Venice, of course, is more expensive. Toronto, it’s a lot cheaper and easier for them. In most cases, that was the option for the big studios. So it was not easy to convince all of them to come back to Venice. There were no studios’ films in Venice in 2012.

“The following year, we opened the festival with Gravity. That won the Oscar, and that was the beginning of a change in the relationship with the studios. After that, every year we had one or more than one films that went to the Oscars, then won the Oscars — like Birdman, Spotlight, La La Land, Shape of Water, Joker. So of course now it’s easy to get a film, because the studios and the Americans understood that they can use the platform of Venice to launch the film internationally, and to start a campaign for the Oscars, with all the press that we have in Venice.

“There is almost no press in Toronto, apart from the trades. We have something like 3,000 media representatives from all over the world, so they can really make a proper promotion with the film, the marketing of the film, starting from Venice.”

The flying monkey commentariat will go “hee-hee hah-hah hoo-hoo” when I extend heartfelt thanks to Breitbart’s John Nolte for his words of admiration and support, which were posted today in a riff about Rebecca Keegan’s THR hit piece on Sasha Stone.

Two small corrections are in order.

One, Nolte suggests I’ve been writing Hollywood Elsewhere for 15 years — it’s actually been 20 years and a bit more than 25 if you count Hollywood Confidential on Mr. Showbiz (launched in October ‘98), plus subsequent versions on reel.com and Kevin Smith’s moviepoopshoot.com.

Two, Nolte says I got into trouble in March ‘21 for suggesting that Chloe Zhao’s chances of winning a Best Director Oscar might have been augmented, sympathy-vote-wise, by the ghastly Atlanta massage parlor killings. I actually didn’t write that — a friend did during a back-and-forth discussion, and I decided to post this observation for intrigue’s sake. The identity outrage police freaked out at my lack of sensitivity (however accurate the post may have been at the time) and so I took the post down after 45 minutes or so. Three similar incidents (i.e., tragic news affecting Oscar fortunes) had been written about in the early teens and nobody said boo.

Tom Teodorczuk to Rebecca Keegan:

I haven’t time to post about It Ends With Us until later this evening, but I’ll try and post some thoughts and observations between now and 9 pm.

If, back in the summer of 2007, James Mangold had been a man of honor, precision and decency he would have only forwarded the portion of my sixteen-paragraph letter that he thought would be of interest to Lionsgate marketing hotshot Tim Palen — a portion in which I discussed my having recently spoken to Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, original author of “3:10 to Yuma” (the short story published in March ‘53) about Mangold’s adaptation of same.

I can’t recall if Dutch had seen Mangold’s film at the time (I don’t think he had) but we did discuss Delmer Daves’ 1957 adaptation with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. I definitely recall that mild-mannered Dutch of Bloomfield Hills thought Daves had missed the essence or messed it up to some degree.

Anyway THAT, in Mangold’s view, was the most compelling portion of my long letter and not the digressive, adolescent, piddly-dick paragraph about Vinessa Shaw, which I, coasting along on the white-water rapids of my second glass of Pinot Grigio, had forgotten about two minutes after tapping it out .

Alas, Mangold wasn’t enough of a tech-savvy fellow of precision and discretion to simply copy and paste the Dutch section of my email and forward it to Palen. That, for Mangold, apparently required too much vigor, too much technical exactitude.

So Mangold, Sloppy Joe-style, just forwarded the whole damn email to Palen, who, as fate would have it, was miffed over my having characterized the Beau Brummell western duds worn by costar Ben Foster, images of which were used in ads for Lionsgate’s 3:10 to Yuma, as gay cowboy-ish or metro-sexualish or otherwise disrespectful of the Old West atmosphere.

This was why Palen, a genius photographer and marketing wiz** but also a vicious & scheming flying monkey if there ever was one, forwarded the letter to Nikki Finke, the vindictive, green-faced, broom-riding Wicked Witch of the West who was determined to get me for having passed along a second-hand tale about Finke to a couple of N.Y. Daily News guys…a loose-talk story about Finke having allegedly faxed an early draft of an EW story to a source — a story I had only “heard” and knew almost nothing about, but which seemed of mild interest to a couple of N.Y. Daily News colleagues during a no-big-deal water cooler moment in ‘94.

And that was what happened, o my howling, screeching, petty and profoundly detestable winged monkeys of the HE sewing circle.

Being a straightforward, high-thread-count T-shirt-wearing straight guy I am not calling myself the Dorothy figure in this Wizard of Oz saga. I am, rather, an Average Suburban Joe who is one-part sentimental Tin Man, one-part Cowardly Lion, one-part brainy Scarecrow and one-part Professor Marvel. In the shower or in the car I tell myself I can sing as well as Jack Haley and certainly better than Ray Bolger or Bert Lahr.   

** https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/?s=Tim+Palen

I’m not going to lie and say I absolutely adored Gena Rowlands‘ many sterling performances over the years. I always admired her but never quite fell for her.

I respected the hell out of her chops — she was obviously a top-of-the-line, Barrymore- or Streep-level performer and then some — but I never felt all that emotionally entwined with her characters. She always seemed propelled by ferocious integrity, intensity and technique, and less propelled by an interest in reaching out to Joe and Jane Popcorn.

To keep the engine chugging for 94 years in relatively good health (except for the awful Alzheimers affliction of the last few) is a blessed thing. Good for Rowlands living a long full one. Her last gig (Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks) was 10 years ago.

Rowlands peaked between the late ’60s and late ’80s — call it 20 years. Her Mount Everest achievement was A Woman Under the Influence (’74), made when she was 43 or so. Her most vulnerable, least attention-seeking performance was as Kirk Douglas‘s understanding but frustrated girlfriend in Lonely Are The Brave (’62), made when she was 32 or thereabouts.

10 Rowlands essentials: Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, The Brink’s Job, Gloria, Tempest, Love Streams, Light of Day. Another Woman.

Rebecca Keegan‘s long-foretold hit piece on Sasha Stone (“How an Oscar Blogger Became a MAGA Darling“) dropped today.

It’s a diligent if superficial, half-tabloidy, rat-a-tat-tat thing that portrays Stone as a kind of political blunderer who has apparently alienated a few purse-string holders within Hollywood’s publicity, marketing and ad-buying realms by overplaying her MAGA allegiance. But the piece has no feeling, no soul, no intuition, no heart…no sense of grounded, shake-it-off honesty about the whole, tangled-up, identity-driven mess that we’re all living through.

Sasha’s perceptions about the destructive effects of Hollywood’s woke infection are 100% spot-on, but I’ve told her over and over that if she’d only confined her political jottings to riffs about woke ugliness and anti-cancel culture rhetoric and left Orange Beast out of it, Keegan & Co. would have never come after her. But Sasha felt too wedded to what she sees as the fundamental truth of things to back off even slightly. A victim of her own obstinate integrity.

Keegan’s piece is not technically inaccurate but it’s cheap, scolding and rather cruel in a brusque sort of way, and it couldn’t be more shallow, written in a “just the facts, ma’am” police blotter fashion while completely ignoring and in fact suppressing various underlying Big Picture truths…the vapors, aromas, and toxic social realities of our very own woked-up version of China’s Great Cultural Revolution…the superficially glamorous but rigidly instructive and punitive concentration-camp atmosphere that we’ve all been living under since ’18 or thereabouts.

On top of which the THR editors chose a somewhat unflattering photo of Stone to accompany the headline, and that really tells you where they’re coming from. Sasha has great eyes and a bountiful smile and a generally pleasing earth-momma radiance, but the THR photo makes her look like Bernadine Dohrn on the lam.

Friendo: “The impetus was obviously the ‘white power’ tweet. But since Sasha’s actual views are much more circumspect, what are they really saying about her? Since Keegan’s story accepts that the tweet was a sarcastic joke, what the Hollywood gatekeepers REALLY seem to be saying is, ‘You can’t call our identity politics out like that. That’s toxic.’

“Seriously — everyone in Hollywood and the media piling on Sasha is the quintessence of hypocrisy. I honestly don’t know how these people sleep.”

Keegan excerpt #1: “A quote from Sasha Stone is toxic now,” one executive told me, saying that their studio was pulling their ad dollars from Awards Daily. A representative for another studio said they would no longer invite her to screenings and events. ‘If she’s trying to be sarcastic,’ said a high-profile Academy member, ‘It’s not funny.’ HE sez: Ooohhh, no!!…an Academy member isn’t amused by Sasha’s sarcasm!! Talk about a damaging faux pas…off with her head!

Keegan excerpt #2: “While Stone has provoked reactions from cringe to outrage for her comments on race, gender and sexuality”…” HE sez: “Cringe and outrage” for speaking plainly and frankly about the smallpox epidemic of Hollywood’s identity politics, among other matters? There was no mistaking the fact that Lily Gladstone‘s Best Actress campaign was entirely about identity-brandishing; ditto Karla Sofía Gascon‘s forthcoming Best Actress campaign for Emilia Perez.

Keegan excerpt #3: “[Stone’s] white power remark may be the one to finally get her exiled from Hollywood. In some ways, the ostracism seems like what she’s wanted, living proof of her thesis on the left’s growing intolerance.” HE sez: Notice how Keegan hasn’t a single honest word to say about the cloud of Stalinist wokethink and how the only choice a sensible careerist has is to play along in order to survive?

Keegan excerpt #4: “[Sasha] used to be a little bit anti-bullshit,” says one publicist who represents multiple Oscar winners. “She gave a real read. We appreciated that.”

Keegan excerpt #5: “[Stone] defended Ansel Elgort during the 2020 rollout of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story when the actor was accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl (Elgort has denied the allegation).” HE sez: Accused of sexual assault without a shred of credible evidence or testimony, Keegan should have explained. For the alleged victim’s description of what happened “doesn’t sound like sexual assault at all,” I wrote on 6.19.20 . “The sex began as consensual if not eager-beaver on her part, but she felt badly afterwards. It almost sounds like an Aziz Ansari-type situation. In the real world, of course, a 20 year-old guy legally having it off with a 17 year-old is far from Polanski-ville.”

Keegan excerpt #6: “When Green Book was at the center of a debate over its racial politics and old stories about director Peter Farrelly and a tweet from co-writer and producer Nick Vallelonga surfaced, Stone was quoted in the Wall Street Journal decrying the ‘destruction’ of the filmmakers.” HE sez: Green Book‘s basic game plan was to tell a fact-based road movie about racial relations and values according to the prevailing values and attitudes of 1962. The fanatics were enraged that it didn’t tell the story from the perspective of 2018 woke sensibilities.

Keegan excerpt #7: “One of Stone’s few remaining friends is another self-styled anti-woke writer, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, whom she once dated and who is best known for having asked director James Mangold for nude outtakes of an actress and for writing about subjects like Emma Stone’s ‘slender, shovel-like feet” in a review of last year’s Oscar contender Poor Things.” HE sez: I humbly apologize for reporting that Emma Stone has “slender, shovel-like feet”, but this is a dead fact. As for Keegan’s other cheap ditty, which dates back to 2007 or 17 years ago…really? A single paragraph out of a private, 15-paragraph letter that I wrote to Mangold after two glasses of Pinot Grigio still matters to whom exactly? The Boogie Man? If Keegan were to tap out a capsule description of the 42nd President, she would write “Bill Clinton is best known for having been orally pleasured by Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, and secondarily for not coming in her mouth but on her dark blue dress.”

Keegan excerpt #8: “Stone says she still plans to attend the Telluride Film Festival this Labor Day weekend, where she says people ‘tolerate her.” Come again? Stone “still” plans to do Telluride despite the compromising assertions in Keegan’s earth-shaking article? Don’t flatter yourself, Rebecca.

Either you understand the idea of manning through a difficult workplace situation or you don’t. I don’t even need to mention the stoic Lee Marvin thing.

I’m presuming the SNL host who made Yang and others cry was Bill Burr, who hosted in October ‘20.

This is the music heard just after Vivien Leigh‘s Blanche Dubois is freaked out by the old, darkly lighted woman selling flowers for the dead — an omen that is too much for her.

Why was Bill Paxton‘s Hudson, a cowardly Marine with the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old, included in a possibly dangerous rescue mission? The kind of guy who instantly wimps out when things go badly. Plus Paxton played a guy who confessed to having “a little dick” in True Lies (’94), and his Apollo 13 astronaut, Fred Haise, was also a whiner.

Paxton was 30 or 31 when he made Aliens. When did he finally graduate out of playing chumps and candy-asses? Answer: When Jan de Bont cast him as the tornado whispering hero in Twister. This apparently inspired James Cameron to cast Paxton as a non-boobish submersible guy in Titanic, and then Sam Raimi cast him as Bridget Fonda‘s morally conflicted husband in A Simple Plan. By ’98 he was out of that hole.

Steve Allen to Manhattan pedestrians: “If a brilliant presidential candidate was an admitted homosexual, and yet was clearly the brightest and most emotionally mature guy among all the candidates, truly a fair-minded man for all seasons and a guy with a liberally measured and compassionate view of what governing should or shouldn’t do overall…would you vote or not vote for him because of his sexual orientation?”

Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow (‘50), which starred James Stewart and Jeff Chandler, was shot in June, July and August of 1949. Stewart was 41 during filming, and 15 year-old Debra Paget, born in late August of 1933, played Sonseeahray, the love interest and eventual wife of Stewart’s Tom Jeffords.

Imagine a 41 year-old superstar playing the lover and husband of a 15 year-old actress today. A 26 year age gap! #MeToo fury!

I propose cancelling Stewart and Daves posthumously. As a minor Paget had no agency and was clearly manipulated into submitting to sexual wifely situatione, exposing her to carnal matters at an inappropriate age.