And the other three for good measure. Exclamation, affirmation and primal triumph. Those final three bludgeonings, each accentuated by Monty Norman‘s score, are therefore wonderful. To the best of my recollection James Bond never again killed a poisonous (or otherwise lethal) predator. Or have I forgotten?
True story: During a Tailor of Panama round-table interview with Pierce Brosnan, I suggested a 007 concept that I’d recently read online — Bond vs. aliens. Without missing a beat, the half-amused Brosnan looked at me like I’d had one too many and said “aliens?”
“He was my father…not in life but in Indy 3. You don’t know pleasure until someone pays you to take Sean Connery for a ride in the side car of a Russian motorcycle bouncing along a bumpy, twisty mountain trail and getting to watch him squirm. God, we had fun. If he’s in heaven, I hope they have golf courses. Rest in peace, dear friend.” — Harrison Ford to Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister.
I love “if he’s in heaven”…very few tributes step out of the usual realm.
In hindsight, Ford would probably agree that the motorcycle chase sequence is lively but somewhat routine, but the revolving fireplace barrier bit is a classic. Like almost everything in this 1989 film, it was perfectly choreographed and filmed, and cut just so. Tip of the hat to dp Douglas Slocombe and editor Michael Kahn.
Significant pushback from good people (i.e., friends) and bad has prompted me to junk HE’s proposed Straight Shooters Oscar handicap chart.
All I was suggesting was a forum that would predict Oscar contenders without the woke filter, as woke filters are everywhere. But nope, bad idea, can’t do that, will only make things worse. Okay, fine. I wasn’t married to the idea — just tossing it out there.
But full steam ahead on HE’s “I Just Ran Out of Bullshit.”
Journo pally: “To me, you’ve never written one thing in this era that is illegitimate. But then neither did Andrew Sullivan. Despite the wokeness (it sounds like the title of a Stephen King novel: ‘The Wokeness’), he seemed to be thriving at New York magazine. And then…no. They wanted him out. For the crime of having been fearlessly honest. Sometimes that’s all it takes now.
“Not sure what you should do, to be honest. Don’t neuter yourself, that’s for sure.”
“I distinctly remember feeling tear-struck in 1986 when I learned of the death of Cary Grant, whom I’d always regarded as a beloved debonair uncle of sorts. I didn’t feel anything close to that when I heard the same news about my dad. The truth is the truth.” — from “Nobody’s Perfect,” an obit for my father, James Wells, who died on 6.19.08.
Grant, John Lennon, Marlon Brando and JFK — these are the only famous guys in my entire lifetime whose passing brought tears to my eyes.
In Los Angeles the news hit sometime around 10 pm on the evening of Saturday, 11.29.86. I was living in my Hightower Drive bungalow. I recall stepping outside and sitting down on my little front porch and meditating on finality as a general concept. The weepy moment came the following day. In a sense Grant had been a close companion almost my entire time on the planet, or at least from my teenage days onward, when I began watching some of his old films on the tube.
It was only a week or two later when I went down to Al’s Bar with a friend, and it was there that I ran into my future wife Maggie, who was hanging out with two girlfriends. We flew to Paris the following January, during a fairly brutal cold snap. We moved into the upstairs portion of 8682 Franklin Ave. the following August or thereabouts, and got married in Paris the following October.
HE to Scott Mantz: I’ve pointed this out on several occasions, but at the time of its release Phil Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78) had nothing to do with anything. It was just a well-made Bay Area spooker (man’s head on dog’s body!)…just a remake that Kaufman decided to do, knowing full well that the social metaphor that had fortified and deepened the 1956 Don Siegel original had evaporated. Kaufman’s version is not amazing. It’s just okay or, you know, good in a spotty kind of way.
Where was the late ‘70s metaphor for creeping conformity (i.e., large seed pods taking over bodies)? It was obvious 22 years earlier with suburban multitudes falling into line with bland Eisenhower-era vales and lifestyles, but not so much in the era of cocaine, Studio 54 and Jimmy Carter.
Oh, and ghoulish Donald Sutherland howling and pointing is not an echo of the pandemic, Scott — most of us see him as a representative of wokesters accusing those who’ve failed to uphold woke standards -— those who’ve used the wrong term, tweeted something clumsy or inappropriate 5 or 10 years ago, failed to submit to anti-racist training, answered a question in the wrong way or muttered in passing that “all lives matter.”
Mantz doesn’t want to acknowledge that wokesters are the same people who burned Oliver Reed at the stake in The Devils. He’s understandably scared of even alluding to this. But Bret Stephens gets it.
“Our compromised liberalism has left a generation of writers weighing their every word for fear that a wrong one could wreck their professional lives. The result is safer, but also more timid; more correct, but also less interesting. It is simultaneously bad for those who write, and boring for those who read. It is as deadly an enemy of writing as has ever been devised.
“The more some ideas become undiscussable, the more some things become unsayable, the more difficult it becomes to write well. We are killing democracy one weak verb, blurred analogy and deleted sentence at a time.
“I should be more precise. When I say ‘we’ I don’t mean normal people who haven’t been trained in the art of never saying what they really think. I mean those of us who are supposed to be the gatekeepers of what was once a robust and confident liberal culture that believed in the value of clear expression and bold argument. This is a culture that has been losing its nerve for 30 years. As we go, so does the rest of democracy.”
What’s my richest musical recollection from Scorsese’s doc? Easy — Joni Mitchell playing the then-recently composed “Coyote” for Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Gordon Lightfoot and others at Lightfoot’s home during the tour. The clip, originally shot for Dylan’s misbegotten Renaldo and Clara, is on YouTube, of course. “Coyote” would go on to open Mitchell’s 1976 album Hejira but was in the early stages while Mitchell was performing on the RTR tour.
From “The Four Fakers,” posted on 6.10.19: To my mind the only serious problem with Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue doc is that he includes four phony talking heads among several real ones, and thereby violates the trustworthiness that we all associate with the documentary form, and for a reason that strikes me as fanciful and bogus.
The doc acquaints us with 22 or more talking-head veterans of the tour (Dylan naturally included) but among this fraternity Scorsese inserts what Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is calling the “four fakers” — made-up characters portrayed by real, recognizable people.
Sharon Stone, who was 17 when the Rolling Thunder Tour was underway, seems to be speaking as herself but she’s actually “playing” The Beauty Queen. At first Michael Murphy seems to be speaking from his own perspective, but then you realize he’s playing The Politician. Actor-performer Martin von Haselberg (the husband of Bette Midler) plays The Filmmaker. And Paramount chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos portrays The Promoter.
Some of what they say to the camera might be factually correct in this or that anecdotal way, but it’s all basically bullshit — made-up, written-out or improvised recollections that are performed for a chuckle, for the hell of it.
Scorsese explains his decision to include the four fakers in the press notes: “I wanted the picture to be a magic trick. Magic is the nature of film. There’s an element to the tour that has a sense of fun to it…doing something to the audience. You don’t make it predictable. There’s a great deal of sleight of hand.”
Who says RTR was driven by a sleight-of-hand, put-on mentality? I never heard that before. I thought it was about keeping it real, small-scale, people-level, driving around in a small tour bus, passing out pamphlets, etc.
Scorsese’s doc isn’t some fanciful, mask-wearing thing. 96% of it is just footage of Dylan’s ’75 Rolling Thunder tour throughout New England intercut with visual-aural references to what life was like back in the mid ’70s. The fact that it contains invented testimony from four fleeting fakers doesn’t dilute the basic composition. Perhaps the four fakers idea came from Scorsese’s regard for Italy’s Comedia dell’arte tradition.
“Positively Bank Street“, posted on 6.17.18: “The last time I posted this true story, about an event that happened in ’81, I was accused by some of having lacked scruples. That wasn’t the thing. I’m going to try it again with extra wording — maybe this time it’ll be understood. The original title was “My Own Llewyn Davis Moment“:
For a good portion of ’81 I was living in a sublet on Bank Street west of Hudson, almost exactly opposite HB Studios. The rent was around $350 per month. (Or so I recall.) The sublessor was a 40something guy who lived in Boca Raton, Florida. The landlord, who knew nothing of this arrangement, was one of those tough old New York buzzards in his ’70s.
Anyway the landlord got wind and told me to vacate as I was illegally subletting. He naturally wanted a new fully-approved tenant who would pay a bigger rent, but he wouldn’t consider my own application as I was a shiftless scumbag in his eyes. I hemmed and hawed and basically refused to leave until I could find something else.
And then one day I came home to find my stuff (clothes, IBM Selectric typewriter, small color TV, throw rug, framed American Friend poster) lying in a big pile in the hallway with the locks on my apartment door changed. The buzzard was playing rough.
When you’re looking at sleeping on the sidewalk, you man up and do what you have to do to avoid that by any reasonable means necessary. Which is what I did.
There was no point in paying any rent at that point as I was a marked man who would have to leave the place fairly soon. The sublessor’s actual rent was $185 or something like that so he’d been making a monthly $165 profit from me. I figured once the buzzard started playing rough by (a) refusing to consider my application for a legit lease and (b) changing the locks and moving my stuff into the hallway that all bets were off and it was a game of habitat survival at all costs until an alternative presented itself.
My place was on the top floor of the building (i.e., the third or fourth floor). I went up to the roof and looked down the air shaft, which was smack dab in the middle of the building and about eight or ten feet square. I noticed a piece of lumber — not a four-by-four beam but an old pinewood board of some kind — bridging the air shaft with one end lying on a metal ladder or mini-platform of some kind and the other end on a brick ledge outside my bathroom window. I lowered myself down the ladder and slowly crawled along the air shaft board and opened my bathroom window and let myself in. (I said a prayer as I did this and God decided to cut me a break.)
I immediately moved my stuff back inside and then called a locksmith and changed the doorknob and bolt locks. The buzzard or one of his flunkies came by two or three days later and tried to open the door and couldn’t — hah!
I knew I’d have to leave before long but the air-shaft derring-do bought me an extra three or four weeks rent-free. Soon after I found another sublet (the bottom floor of a duplex on West 76th between Amsterdam and Columbus) and all was well.
How was this a Llewyn Davis moment? This was a tale of dark, lowball, no-direction-home desperation with no apparent light at the end of the tunnel. That’s Inside Llewyn Davis in a nutshell. The only difference is that God is indifferent if not mocking in the Coen brothers universe and yet He allowed me to cross the air shaft on that piece of lumber and not fall to the basement level.
But there’s a quick insert shot in the trailer which gave me pause. Southern is shown pasting a sticker to a wall that says “it’s okay to be white.” Which means, given that Southern is being depicted as a non-liberal, discriminatory, less-than-compassionate person, that it’s definitely not okay to be white — that there’s something inherently flawed or diseased or poisonous about being a descendant of white Anglo Saxon or European Germanic tribes.
In other words if you’re a WASP you’re not only in league with Southern and her ilk but you have a real genetic problem, and so you need to pick up a copy of “White Fragility” and go through anti-racism training and gather some birch branches and self-flagellate, etc.
I’m sorry but I don’t buy that.
From “Rosanna Arquette Oversteps,” an HE post from 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 the people I came from may 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 ‘good’, well-educated, imperfect people who believed in hard work, discipline 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 is my Russian-born wife or my two sons. 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.”
Thanks to Neon and Acme for inviting Hollywood Elsewhere to last Friday’s invitational drive-in screening of Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger‘s Totally Under Control. It happened at the Vineland Drive-In in the City of Industry, which I’d never once visited in all my years here. And why the hell would I?
Under the best traffic conditions a late-night drive between West Hollywood and Industry would take 35 to 40 minutes. Alas, the screening was at 7:30 pm. We left around 6:20 pm. It took us about 90 minutes to get there. Mostly stop-and-go misery. Obviously we asked for it.
I had assured Tatiana that Gibney always delivers first-rate docs, and that visiting Industry might be a kind of exotic adventure. I can’t say that it was. Tatiana respected the film, but didn’t seem as engaged as I was. Screen-content aside the coolest thing about the screening was the close proximity of railroad tracks and watching a couple of double-decker Amtrak trains roll by.
Next time I’m invited to the Vineland, I’ll probably say “thanks but no thanks and all the best.”
I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen John Irvin‘s City of Industry (’97). Harvey Keitel, Timothy Hutton, Stephen Dorff, Famke Janssen, et. al.
Buying a house is necessarily a slowish, meticulous, step-by-step process. Endless protocols and procedures, and it’s never a done deal until you’ve signed every last form and inspected the place with a fine-tooth comb. But congrats are nonetheless in order for HE’s Jett Wells and wife Caitlin Bennett on purchasing their first home.
It’s located on a leafy cul-de-sac in West Orange, New Jersey, which is 20 or 25 minutes from Manhattan. Built in the 1930s, nice-looking floors, three bedrooms (or three and a half…I forget), an attic, a basement, 1 1/2 bathrooms, excellent front porch, huge back yard for the dogs, hilly. Expected occupancy by 12.1.20, or possibly a bit earlier. Their neighborhood is due south of Montclair; it’s also near Caldwell, where my maternal grandparents lived for decades.
This is going to sound a bit strange, but late last night I experienced what felt like a kind of epiphany — a sense of myself and especially my hardnosed style of writing that that I’m suddenly not happy with on a certain level, and an idea that henceforth I need to dial that down. I’m not talking about abandoning my voice but chilling it down some.
After last night’s debate I was reading over some of my old stuff, and the strangest thing happened. I was suddenly stepping outside myself and reading the material like a 30something critic from England, and I was saying to myself, “This guy pushes too hard and uses too many adjectives. I could make him sound better by turning the current down and easing up on the pugilism.”
The combination of listening to Donald Trump bark and goad like a junkyard dog and then (this is going to sound really strange) watching Mervyn LeRoy‘s The FBI Story (’59), a total Eisenhower-era propaganda film that is nonetheless about basic middle-class decency and serving something greater than yourself…the combination of these influences seemed to open a door within, and all of a sudden I was saying “I have to stay as far away from caustic Trump vibes as possible, and I need to inject a little Jimmy Stewart into my soul.”
I know, I know…I’ll never be Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks either. I’m a sober, cat-loving Chris Walken from Connecticut by way of Next Stop, Greenwich Village, The Dogs of War, At Close Range and The King of New York. But I just knew last night that I needed more Stewart and less barking in my life.
The daily HE grind is a bear. It’s tough to push out four or five riffs or rants or reviews in exactly the right way. Sometimes a column piece won’t really read right until I’ve edited it over a 12-hour or even a 24-hour period, and then even then it sometimes feels a bit off.
I only know that I need to calm things down and not push quite so hard. I learned the value of “less is more” back in the ’70s, but I need to re-apply it. A voice is telling me this, or more precisely a whisper. Which is how inspiration always makes itself known.
To echo that great South African critic and cinematic seer Guy Lodge, “What a brand!”
Over the last 22 years Hollywood Elsewhere (including the early expressions on Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com and MoviePoopShoot) has gone through four phases.
First was the frank, occasionally tart, sometimes bludgeony attitude that began with the October ’98 launch of Mr. Showbiz, and which ended in April ’06 when I junked the twice-weekly column posting with “The Word” (short items) and shifted into a daily bloggy-blog format.
HE output increased greatly after that, and built up steam between ’06 and ’12 — a somewhat more gushy, stream-of-consciousness tone began to take over, and with that a certain…well, brashness-and-buckshot approach from time to time. Not always but now and then.
Phase Three began to take hold when I embraced sobriety on 3.20.12. The effects of a dry lifestyle are always gradual and drip-drip-drip (and sometimes one step forward and two steps back), but the wild and woolly era of ’06 to ’12 began to downshift in…I don’t know, ’13 or thereabouts. Certainly by early ’14.
Phase Four began in early ’18 when the wokester Robespierres began to seize the reins and go after transgressors, and despite the fact that my sins have never been about anything other than being overly mouthy and intemperate within the confines of the column, things became to get increasingly combative and punitive. A consensus began to take hold that I was some kind of obstinate shitheel and that I needed to dial it down and eat a little humble pie. More and more the title of this column became Hollywood Elsewhere: Under Siege.