“We’re supposed to hate Jaws now?” He was responding to “Did These Chinatown Viewers Understand?” And I replied by summarizing Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” as follows:

The huge primal successes of Jaws (6.20.75) and Star Wars (5.20.77) slowly bland-ified the moody, anti-establishment ‘70s thing that had permeated Hollywood…the New Experimental Anti-Conventional Hollywood Party Era that began with Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and The President’s Analyst (all released in ‘67).

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the directing maestros behind Jaws and Star Wars, pretty much killed the cool kidz party by injecting (a) a win-really-big greed jackpot virus into the Hollywood bloodstream and (b) a strain of thematic infantilization into movies in general.

These guys didn’t didn’t suck the creative oxygen out of the room deliberately or maliciously, but the massive success of their historic blockbusters gradually introduced the idea of “high concept” and suppressed the commercial intrigue factor among industry folk and audiences alike for adult movies like Night Moves, The Conversation, The Outfit, The French Connection, Z, Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, Scarecrow, Get Carter, The Day of the Jackal, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather I & II, That’ll Be The Day, Stardust, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Chinatown, The Hospital, Network, Prince of the City, The Ruling Class, Quadrophenia, The Last American Hero, Performance, Don’t Look Now, etc.

The French title is Coup de Chance, pronounced coo-duh-chonce. (Thanks to Jordan Ruimy.)

Michelle Yeoh has no problem with Da Rizeborough (aka “Reezy”).

During a brief interview on Kermode & Mayo’s Take, Till star Danielle Deadwyler said she agreed with Chinonye Chukwu, her director, that Till was shafted by the Academy due to “unabashed misogyny towards Black women.”

She also blamed the lack of nominations on “people who perhaps chose not to see the film. We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”

Deadwyler: “The question is more intent on people who are living in whiteness, white people’s assessment of what the spaces they are privileged by are doing.”

Do actresses like Deadwyler and directors like Chukwu and Gina Prince-Blythwood have anything in their quiver besides guilt-tripping over white oblviousness?

Friendo Who’s Had It Up To Here With All This Sore Loser Stuff: “I’m so sick of this shit and so is everyone else. The problem is the media — all these woke cheerleaders. They have seriously damaged the discourse.”

HE to FWHIUTHWATSLS: “Of course, without a doubt…Deadwyler and her supporters firmly believe that Andrea Riseborough did it. But I have to admit that ‘misogynoir’ is a catchy-sounding term.”

FWHIUTHWATSLS: “The truth the media won’t say is [that] Deadwyler wasn’t THAT good in the movie. She was good, but the limitations of the movie didn’t allow her to be great.

HE to FWHIUTHWATSLS: “Her big Mamie Till scene was the emotional meltdown moment when she shudders and faints and rolls her eyes upward into her forehead.”

FWHIUTHWATSLS: “She was fine, but I found something a tad studied about her emotionalism. The whole movie was too studied. It was okay, but in a way it blew a great subject.”

BARRY DILLER: “Look, the woke thing swung too far. The beginning process of it, which is, we should be more aware and more sensitive, is rational and reasonable. But when you take it to the extremes that the woke community has taken it…that pendulum swung all the way up and to the side of the socket. And it’s now starting to come back.

“And part of its starting to come back is that there’s been opposition to it. Yes, it is a lot from the hard right, but it’s also from just ordinary, normal-thinking folk who say, ‘well, gee, that’s ridiculous.’ You know, it’s ridiculous to shut off speech because one person out of two thousand…it will be too sensitive for that person to hear that. I think that it’s just like many things, it just went too far.

Earlier in the conversation…

DILLER: “And then along comes the pandemic, and that increases the shift because people stay home more, etc., etc. So there are more subscriptions, etc. The entire movie business crashes because there’s no movie theaters, because people can’t go to the theaters. And that whole infrastructure of– the hegemony, let’s call it, of Hollywood, which had ruled for 75, 80 years, it only took three or four years for it to totally disappear. Totally disappear in the sense that it’s over. There is no hegemony anymore of those, let’s call it those major motion picture companies. It’s truly finished. It is never coming back.”

HOOVER: Is there a reform formula for the Oscars?

DILLER: “No — they are no longer a national audience worth its candle because that audience is really no longer interested.”

HOOVER: They’re not interested in the awards and the showmanship of the awards?

DILLER: “They’re not interested in the whole process of it. Just, by the way, the awards don’t reflect their interests either. It used to be that there was congruence between the movies that people went to see and the awards that were given to those movies that were most popular. Not that they were the most necessarily or the least artistic or whatever, but there was a real correlation between popular movies and the giving of blessings on those movies and the people in them. But that disappeared a while ago, and the awards went to movies that nobody watched, nobody went to see. And then no one went to see anything because the pandemic came. So the whole house has kind of collapsed upon itself. And what I think is, is that the awards ceremony should be for the industry and not for consumers. And that would change everything.”

HE to Diller: The Oscar audience has shrunk big-time, but a voice is telling me that it will hang on at the level it is now. It won’t drop any further.

For the last eight years Gone With The Wind, one of the most financially successful Hollywood epics of all time as well as a moving parable about survival in hard times, has been on the liberal shit list — officially shunned, regretted and derided by film festivals, the Academy’s Apology Museum, HBO Max, etc. All to placate the African-American community and their more-than-justified resentment of the film’s antiquated racial attitudes.

If I were African American I too would flinch at certain scenes in this 1939 release, but here’s the thing: the main focus of GWTW isn’t slavery or the Civil War — it’s actually a parable about the deprivations of the Great Depression, and it’s really about necessary gumption and determination when the chips are down.

Plus the second half of Part One is indisputably great, and the baby shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater.

And yet David O. Selznick‘s classic has been jettisoned by its own home-video distributor — Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (WBHE) — in an upcoming Bluray box set.

Ten years ago Gone With The Wind was good to go when Warner Home Video issued a Best of Warner Bros. 100 Film Collection DVD box set, which was priced at $352.91. It was a prime collection of classic Warner Bros. films along with a few choice titles that WHV had long held licensing rights to — GWTW, Mutiny on the Bounty (’35, not ’62), The Best Years of Our Lives, North by Northwest, Ben-Hur.

Now a new restricted version of the same basic package is coming out in April, and Gone With The Wind is MIA.

The new Warner Bros. One Hundredth Anniversary Blu-ray Box Sets are broken up into four 25-film collections ($149 each) according to genres — (1) Award Winners, (2) Comedies, Dramas and Musicals, (3) Fantasy, Action and Adventure and (4) Thrillers, Sci-Fi and Horror.

The package is basically aimed at chumps, not serious collectors. None of the Blurays are 4K, and North by Northwest is also missing.

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Voice, eyes, tone of voice, no-bullshit honesty, radiant skin…the whole package.

@lea.greyy I had to say it , I’m genuinely so tired of this new wave of transgender activism! #pridesegole #SAMA28 #southafrica #transgender #southafrcantiktok ♬ original sound – Lea.grey

In the latest episode of The Hot Mic (recorded on 2.9), the incisive Jeff Sneider and the blustery, gravel-voiced, Seth Rogen-aspiring John Rocha discuss anti-Black racism in the industry and particularly the sore-loser attitudes of Gina Prince-Bythewood, Danielle Deadwyler, Till dierctor Chinonye Chukwu and the Woman King allies (3:02).

They also discuss the Jeff Sneider-vs.-Don Murphy thing (39:45).

Rocha sounds to me like an insufferably woke accusational shrieker. Like he’s stuck in 2019 or ’20. Everyone’s sick of this schtick, and in a year or two wokesters (“white people are hopelessly bad!”) will be searching for tall grass. God….he sounds like a male gurgly “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. Plus Rocha completely ignores the ELEPHANT IN THE “WOMAN KING” ROOM, which is that the African nation of Dahomey was a slave-trading nation….he ignores it!! And so does Sneider!

And what about proportionality? What does Rocha want, half of all nominees to be African American? The US population is 13% African American. What’s the percentage of African Americanas in the film/TV industry? An ASU study says that “recent studies show that Black actors comprise 12.9% of leading roles in cable-scripted shows (proportionately reflecting the overall Black population of 13.4%). The numbers behind the scenes aren’t as encouraging, though. Only 6% of the writers, directors and producers of U.S.-produced films are Black.”

But I’m not feeling or finding it, and I’m unhappy about this. I was dreaming about a fresh fix when I allowed myself to believe that a 2.15 Andrea Riseborough appearance at the Santa Barbara Film Festival was all but inevitable. But then, according to popular theory, Danielle Deadwyler’s reps put the kibbosh on that. I guess the DD juice is over. I should just accept it.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance director Steven Soderbergh to Rolling Stone‘s Marlow Stern (as transcribed by Jordan Ruimy): “This year’s [Oscar telecast] is going to be very telling. You cannot this year say, ‘Well, they didn’t nominate any popular movies!’ You cannot say that. So, we’ll find out if that’s really the issue or if it’s a deeper philosophical problem, which is the fact that movies don’t occupy the same cultural real estate that they used to. They just don’t.

“I’m sure that [streaming] is part of it. In cultural terms, they don’t matter in the same way that they did twenty years ago. As a result, especially for younger viewers, it’s not as compelling as it once was. They’re going to learn a lot this year. We all will.”

HE to Soderbergh: “We will learn nothing except what we already know, which is that the Woke Awards Mafia (which includes a small army of suck-up journalists) are still nominating films that support their myopic worldview, which leans heavily toward identity politics.

With the exception of Top Gun: Maverick, the ten 2022 Best Picture nominees simply aren’t that good…really. Nine of them failed to pass HE’s Howard Hawks test (2.8). It was just a mildly shitty year because of an army of mildly shitty people pulling the strings.

The actual best films of the year were (a) Empire of Light, (b) Close, which A24 decided not to open domestically until this month, (c) Happening (Best women’s-abortion-rights flick since Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days; (d) Vengeance; (e) She Said; (f) Emily The Criminal; Top Gun: Maverick; (g) Tar (despite the many irritations); (h) Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives; (i) James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water; and (j) James Gray‘s Armageddon Time

…that the beginning of the end of the “70s glory days would happen with the release of Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws, which was shooting off Martha’s Vineyard that summer and would open almost exactly a year hence, on 6.20.75?

According to a Twitter caption, the Westwood premiere of Chinatown allegedly happened at Westwood’s Avco Cinema, even though it was slated to open on 6.20.74 at the nearby National Theatre. Why not have the premiere at the National?

Update: It was actually held at the old Directors Guild theatre. Allison Martino of Vintage Los Angeles: “Some noticed a car wash across the street from the Guild. Good detective work!”

The premiere of Chinatown at the Avco Theatre in Westwood, 1974. pic.twitter.com/nL0HQTMrNy

— Vintage Los Angeles (@alisonmartino) February 9, 2023

I’ve posted this summer-of-1974 photo three times before. For me the biggest stand-out element, more so than the dusty brown Ford Pinto looking to join Sunset Blvd. traffic, the VW camper wagon heading west and the run-down-looking city bus, are the thick sprouts of bleached yellow grass at the base of the billboard.

West Hollywood was a less attractive place back then, certainly in the daylight hours, but empty grassy lots were par for the course, and when the constant stink of smog and exhaust wasn’t as strong you could stand on a Laurel Canyon or Playa del Rey streetcorner in the early evening and smell the dirt and the grass and the other forms of under-watered shrubbery. Those aromas are gone now.

via GIPHY

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Is it a bad look that a 17th century ancestor of Jeff Daniels was one of the Salem Witch Trial accusers? When you first hear this, yeah, but if you think about it for eight or nine seconds, not really.

If an ancestor or two did something awful or failed to stand up against evil during their brief hour upon the stage, I can only say “well, I wish they had been braver.” But unfortunately, most people go through life with their head down and avoiding eye contact with the beasts. Most people are mice — they just want to survive and get along, and unfortunately that means looking the other way when wrong-doing occurs, human nature being what it is.

“I’m afraid we can only do what it has been given to us to do, right to the end.” — Edward Anhalt by way of Jean Anouilh, Becket (’64).

Posted on 8.7.19: “Speaking as an X-factor white guy from a middle-class New Jersey and Connecticut upbringing, I don’t feel repelled or disgusted by my Anglo-Saxon heritage and family history.

“I deeply regret the cruelty visited upon immigrants and various cultures of color by whites, but the fact that racist attitudes were common throughout most of the 20th Century and certainly the 19th Century doesn’t mean that white people (more particularly my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, reaching back to the mid 1800s) were inherently evil.

“By current standards they seem insufficiently evolved, of course, but they were born into a certain culture and were dealt certain cards, and most carried the weight as best they could. They weren’t born with horns on their heads.

“Nor do I feel that elemental decency is absent in the majority of white people today. I feel profoundly repelled by the attitudes of your backwater Trump supporters, of course, but they are not me. I come from a family of relatively good, well-educated, imperfect people who believed in hard work, discipline, serving in the military and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and who exuded decency and compassion for the most part. I am not the devil’s spawn, and neither are my two sons or my granddaughter. I’ve witnessed and dealt with ignorant behavior all my life, but I’ve never bought into the idea of Anglo-Saxon culture being inherently evil. Please.”