“No, dumbass, it’s not in the center. It’s NEVER in the center. I thought you said you knew a thing or two about framing landscape shots. God, are you some kind of fucking Arizona dumbass?”

David Lynch is supposedly playing the snarly, blustery John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans, according to Rodrigo Perez.

What about a relaunching of thirtysomething, only focusing on child-rearing, home-owning Millennials and to some extent Zoomers? If the producers could keep it real and really drill down on the particulars and undercurrents of life among professional-class people attempting to live more or less conventional lives in the early 2020s (like Jett and Cait are doing right now), it might work. The cast would have to be at least 50% non-white, of course, but we’re all accustomed to that enlightened system and embracing of the here-and-now. What does the HE community think? Yes, it should be called thirtysomething…straight, no apologies, un-ironically.

“Late ’80s Yuppie Blues,” posted on 8.22.09:

I always felt that thirtysomething, the zeitgest-reflecting, essential-viewing yuppie series that ran from 9.87 through 5.91, was too sensitive-wimpy.

As honestly written and impressively acted as it often was, the show suffered from an almost oppressive self-examination syndrome — a constant exercise in fault-finding and angst exploration — among its boomer characters and their difficulties in managing and/or growing into adulthood and parenthood. To varying degrees everyone on the show wore a hair shirt, suffered or caused suffering, and was afflicted (if not wracked) with self doubt.

I forget who said “an unexamined life is not worth living” but thirtysomething sure as hell put the wisdom of that statement to the test. The women (Mel Harris, Melanie Mayron, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper) were constantly fretting and kvetching over some crisis of the spirit, the bedroom, the bankbook or whatever. Always something darkening, taunting or haunting their brow.

And the guys especially (Ken Olin, Timothy Busfield, Peter Horton) — those poor Hebrew rock-pounders, bent and sweating under Pharoah’s lash! — were always being busted, picked apart and de-balled for this and that profound failing.

(l. to r.) Timothy Busfield, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper, Mel Harris, Ken Olin, Melanie Mayron, Peter Horton.

I hated Harris’s character, Hope (who played Olin’s wife), most of all. I remember being told by a cast member in ’88 that Hope was referred to by others on the show as “mope.” Everyone hated her. I’m certain she brought tens of thousands of watchers down every week. For all I know she may have inspired real-life fights, separations, divorces. (Or maybe people saw her personality as a cautionary tale and tried to be unlike her as much as possible.) Either way she was a huge drag to be around.

I related to what the show was, of course. I began watching just before getting married to my ex-wife Maggie in October 1987. and we both both became fairly devout fans (Maggie wore a gray “thirtysomething” t-shirt that I bought her) until the end of the run, during which time Jett came along in June 1988 and then Dylan in November 1989. It wasn’t a portrait of our marriage in every last respect, but there were certainly echoes.

And it happened during the bulk of our time together (we split up in the fall of ’91) so it became — in my head, at least — a kind-of running commentary on not just our life but all yuppie life in the late Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years and yaddah-yaddah.

And that’s what we were, all right — 30ish yuppies with kids and two cars living a nice Los Angeles life. We lived in the top half of a house in the West Hollywood hills (with a great view) and then in a nice Spanish home in Venice. We did volunteer work for Michael Dukakis. We took our kids to Gymboree. We threw parties about twice a year, and often flew east to see the parents (or we hosted them in LA). In Venice we had a backyard jacuzzi, a brick patio and an ivy-covered privacy wall.

The clip below contains one of the greatest statements about artists and performers needing to tell it straight and true, and how this and this alone is what saves people. The actor is Dallas Roberts, and the speech lasts between 1:20 and 2:40 — one minute and 20 seconds — and I could watch it each and every day from now until the day I die. And upon these few words hang all the law and the prophecies. The only thing that doesn’t work is Joaquin Phoenix‘s mournful moaning voice, which doesn’t sound at all like Johnny Cash. But other than that…

Susan Sarandon is fooling no one. She’s a hard-left absolutist zealot who hates mainstream liberals as much as she hates the Trumpists, and she’s still on board with the BLM wackazaoids who were shouting “defund the police” in the early summer of 2020 — arguably the most self-destructive political slogan of the 21st Century.

But she’s also apologizing for that horrible anti-cop tweet from a couple of days ago, and so what the hell…cut her a break. She should’ve taken a couple of steps back and thought it over before posting, but she didn’t. Everyone makes mistakes.

Mike Pence has finally stood up like the weak, slithering, unprincipled shape-shifter he’s always been and said “no, I didn’t have the authority to overturn the election.” Which is tantamount to saying that Trump was living and still lives inside his own delusional bubble. Hey, Mike, don’t go out on a limb!

Based on Leon Neyfakh‘s “Slow Burn” documentary, Gaslit (STARZ, 4.24) is the story of the colorful Martha Mitchell, the wife of former Attorney General John Mitchell and a Southern belle blabbermouth who was told to shut up about what she suspected about Watergate and yet refused to zip it.

Julia Roberts plays Martha, and a barely recognizable Sean Penn plays husband John. Costarring Dan Stevens, Betty Gilpin, Shea Whigham and Darby Camp.

From Martha Mitchell’s Wiki page: “Following the 6.17.72 Watergate break-in, Attorney General John Mitchell “enlisted security guard Steve King (a former FBI agent) to prevent his wife Martha from learning about the break-in or contacting reporters. Despite these efforts, the following Monday, Martha acquired a copy of the Los Angeles Times.

“Martha learned that James W. McCord Jr., the security director of the Committee to Re-elect The President and her daughter’s bodyguard and driver, was among those arrested. This detail conflicted with the White House’s official story that the break-in was unrelated to the CRP, and raised her suspicion.

“Martha unsuccessfully made attempts to contact her husband by phone, eventually telling one of his aides that her next call would be to the press.

“The following Thursday, on 6.22.72, Mitchell made a late-night phone call to Helen Thomas of the United Press, reportedly Mitchell’s favorite reporter. Mitchell informed Thomas of her intention to leave her husband until he resigned from CREEP. The phone call, however, abruptly ended. When Thomas called back, the hotel operator told her that Mitchell was ‘indisposed’ and would not be able to talk. Thomas then called John, who seemed unconcerned and said, ‘[Martha] gets a little upset about politics, but she loves me and I love her and that’s what counts.’

In her subsequent report of the incident, Thomas said that it was apparent someone had taken the phone from Mitchell’s hand and [Mitchell] could be heard saying ‘You just get away.’ Thomas’s account was widely covered in the news, and many media outlets made efforts to find Mitchell for an interview.

“A few days later, Marcia Kramer, a veteran crime reporter of the New York Daily News, tracked Mitchell to the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York. Kramer found “a beaten woman” who had “incredible” black and blue marks on her arms.

“In what turned out to be the first of many interviews, Mitchell related how in the week following the Watergate burglary, she had been held captive in that California hotel and that it was King that had pulled the phone cord from the wall. After several attempts to escape from the balcony, she was physically accosted by five men, which had left her needing stitches. Herb Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, was summoned to the hotel and he decided to call for a doctor to inject her with a tranquilizer. The incident left her fearing for her life.”

Martha divorced John in September 1973. During her last couple of years she lived without funds and was close to destitution. Martha died of multiple myeloma on 5.31.76, at age 57.

Yesterday Facebook film maven Martin Bradley posted a list of “TEN BORING FILMS THAT ARE HELD IN HIGH CRITICAL ESTEEM.” It reminded me of a Mr. Showbiz piece I wrote in July ’99 titled “A Wee Bit Boring.” The basic idea was that 90% of films that are held in high critical esteem are very slightly boring. Here’s how I put it:

“Anyone interested in higher-quality films these days knows the truth of it. Some of the better ones are unique, special, X-factor — Go, The Matrix, Election, Rushmore, There’s Something About Mary, Run Lola Run, Saving Private Ryan, etc. The rest of the quality movies flirt with being boring from time to time. A good kind of boring, I mean. Nutritional, Brussels-sprouts, good-for-your-soul boring.

“It’s important to understand the degree of boring I’ve speaking of here. I don’t mean sinking-into-a-coma boring. Or regular boring. Or even mildly boring. But a little bit boring.

“I’m always glad after seeing a high-quality, slightly boring film, because I can then say to myself or someone I happen to meet that I’ve just seen one, and because of this my soul is richer and my horizons have been broadened. I never feel this way after seeing a big-studio, high-velocity idiot movie. Does anyone?

“Face it — most of us are peons when it comes to upscale, slightly boring movies. We don’t want to know from complex or sophisticated. We just want to sit there and get stroked.

“This is probably our fault, to some extent. Maybe movies just seem a bit boring at times because we’ve lost the ability (or the willingness) to stay with movies that require a little patience or concentration. The cliché about kids not having the attention span of a flea is reaching out to the older age brackets. Even the over-40s seem to be losing interest in movies with even a minute meditative edge.

“So clearly, in the backwash of all this cultural deprivation, ‘a little bit boring’ is a serious compliment these days. You just have to mean it (or hear it) the right way.”