With a dynamically enhanced, 4K-scanned and restored Hearts of Darkness opening at the Film Forum tomorrow, it’s an opportune time to remind the HE readership that while this 1991 doc about the making of Apocalypse Now uses the late Eleanor Coppola‘s footage and narration, the heavy lifting in most senses of the term was done by the late George Hickenlooper, whom I regarded as a friend, and Fax Bahr.

Here’s what Hickenlooper told me on 8.26.10:

“I think the more appropriate way to look at it is that Hearts of Darkness is Eleanor Coppola‘s story, but it’s not her film. Hardly. It’s her story. But that’s because I decided to make it her story.

“When I got involved with this project 20 years ago, Showtime was going to make it a one-hour TV special called Apocalypse Now Revisited. It was going to be basically an hour-long special about how they did the war pyrotechnics. It was going to be dull and stupid.

“At the time I told Steve Hewitt and my partner Fax Bahr. ‘Nobody cares about a making-of movie, especially one that is 14 years old.’ I argued that the film had to have an emotional component. At the time, no one was familiar with Eleanor’s diary ‘Notes.’ My father had purchased it for me on my 16th birthday [in 1979]. I devoured it up.

“When I got involved with Hearts of Darkness, I advocated using her diary as the narrative thread. I got incredible resistance from Showtime, and I got initial resistance from Eleanor. Not much, but some.

“Once I was able to convince everyone that the film would best be told through her narrative voice, it was then and only then it became HER STORY.

“Eleanor did shoot the footage in the Philippines back in 1976, but she only stepped twice into our cutting room on the back lot of Universal. Twice. For a total of eight hours.

“I was there for a year, 15-18 hours a day. So it’s not a film by Eleanor, but I guess it’s sexier from a marketing angle to make it look that way.”

Hickenlooper elaborated upon the Hearts of Darkness history in a 2007 interview with laist correspondent Josh Tate.

In an 8.27.10 HE followup Hickenlooper stated that “the reality is that Fax Bahr hardly had anything to do with HOD. He was writing for the show In Living Color at the time. He spent a total of about three weeks out of the entire year in the editing room. Eleanor spent two days. It was me and the two editors for an entire year.”

James Mockowski, Film Archivist and Restoration Supervisor at American Zoetrope: “For the past 30 years, Eleanor’s 16mm behind-the-scenes footage has been three to four generations removed from the original elements. For this new release and restoration of the documentary, Francis decided to scan the original sources in 4K. The extensive excerpts from the feature are now presented in their original 2.39:1 aspect ratio, rather than being letterboxed into a 4×3 frame.”

The great Michael Madsen has been found dead in his Malibu home, and at age 67 and not cancer-ridden (or even if he was) how can the authorities say his death was due to “natural causes”?

Way too soon, man. Madsen could have played a few Lawrence Tierney-ish roles (crusty old criminal) into his 80s or beyond. Very sorry that it’s already over for the poor fella. Respect.

I’m not even going to say that Madsen peaked in the ’90s (Thelma and Louise, Reservoir Dogs, The Getaway, Wyatt Earp, Donnie Brasco), although that’s how it played out. But man, Madsen kept working ever since.

HE-posted on 11.13.06: John Travolta and Michael Madsen as the twin brothers of Vic and Vincent Vega descending upon Los Angeles to avenge the deaths of Vic (drilled by Tim Roth‘s Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs) and Vincent (grease-gunned by Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction) in a new Vega Brothers movie? That”s the dumbiest sequel set-up I’ve ever heard in my life. Tarantino must be losing his mind.

But you know what? Fuck what happened in Dogs and Fiction…really. To hell with who got killed story or whaever. Just bring the brothers back and put them into some heavy-shit situations and just do it. Did anybody give a damn when Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson didn’t fall down bleeding when that dope-dealer kid ran out of the bathroom and started blasting? Of course not. Was it logical? No, and it doesn’t matter.

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[SPOILERS HEREIN] Jurassic World Rebirth is a competent diversion, but I was bored. No awe or shock left in this 32-year-old franchise. Same old chain-jerkings, reptilian jolts and snarls, CG crap. You can’t go home again.

Well, you can if your audience is young enough and gripped by primitive expectations. My three and a half year old granddaughter would be wowed by Rebirth.

The predicting game we all play is “which characters will be eaten?” It’s understood, of course, that the proverbial white yuppie hardhead (Rupert Friend) will be chomped. And don’t you dare call this a spoiler! Bottom-line shitheads always end up in dino stomachs.

We know that 40-year-old Scarlett Johansson (talented veteran, no longer young and peachy but in good shape, looks great in her tight T-shirts) will survive to the end. Ditto the kindly, saintly Mahershala Ali.

But we’ve all been trained by the woke playbook to expect that the other significant black dude, Bechir Sylvain (good looking, buff, smooth manner), will survive also because POCs don’t die in these films — only venal scumbag whiteys. So it’s quite a surprise when Sylvain is swallowed. HE to movie: “Wait, wait…did you just kill a handsome, muscle-bound black dude? That’s not right!”

We know the Mexican / LatinX family (dopey dad, two pretty daughters, dumb-as-a-rock boyfriend) won’t get eaten, even though it would be shocking (and therefore perversely satisfying) if one of the pretty daughters were to die howling and shrieking. Or at least the dumbshit boyfriend.

But no — despite this family’s rank stupidity they aren’t consumed. I really wanted the moronic dad to be ripped apart and chewed to death…(“die! Eat that stupid fucker!…die!!”)…but no.

Okay, there’s one quiet, pastoral scene in which the scientific explorers on the proverbial dino island (the natural settings are in Krabi, Thailand) stand next to and stare at a pair of towering, passive, cow-like brontos with absurdly long skinny tails — this is the only majesty-of-dinos scene that really grabs you.**

But they’ve simply gone to this well too many times.

The people in the theatre were “tee-hee”-ing, chuckling and “hoo-hoo”-ing like it was a comedy.

Sick to death of hearing John Williams’ “Jurassic Park” theme, which is dutifully adapted and recycled by Alexandre Desplat.

Excellent CG, but I didn’t believe a frame of any of it. Fake acting, the feigning of extreme fear, stupid or reckless behavior. Go fug yourselves.

A team of scientists (led by Johansson and Friend) are looking to extract blood vials from three species because their blood has properties that can combat or eradicate heart disease, blah blah.

** But director Gareth Edwards ruins this scene by craning upwards a couple of hundred feet to show that these two brontos are part of a huge grazing herd…dozens! HE to Edwards: Why not hundreds? More is better, right?

Flat narration over a sprawling sea. What about this or that? Can’t figure it out. Nolan dialogue isn’t meant to be understood. Brackah-brackah-brack.

The huge shadow of a Trojan horse cast upon a beach. Long shot of same beached, half-buried horse being approached by several men.

Where is Odysseus? Is he dead, lost, searching around…what?

A bald, bearded and tattooed Jon Bernthal speaking with an American accent and gesturing in a semi-exasperated, guy-sitting-in-Yankee-Stadium-bleachers sort of way…Bernthal! Tom Holland’s Telemachus looking like a total twat…bad haircut!! “Where is my father?”, other urgent words to that effect. Holland looks anxious. Bernthal rolling eyes, vaguely annoyed.

Back to the wide sprawling sea and a dude (presumably a bearded, muscle-bound Matt Damon) floating on a slab of wooden ship wreckage. Cut to black…finito.

HE sitting in third–row seat: “That’s it? That’s all?”

It’s nothing, nothing, nothing.

Critical Drinker, posted on 7.2.25: “You know, it’s actually an interesting pattern of behavior in these 40something actresses who all mysteriously get tired of the male gaze just as the male gaze is about to get tired of them.

“Please tell us more, 40-year-old Scarlet Johansson, about how you resented all those high-profile roles that literally made your career and kept it afloat for the past two decades, or how uncomfortable you were with all those multi-million dollar paychecks. Truly, it must have been a real nightmare for you. I don’t know how you coped.

“Not to impugn her acting ability or anything, but do you really think Johansson would have had the career she’s had if she looked [schlumpy]? It all kind of strikes me as the Hollywood equivalent of the old ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’ argument, trying to get ahead of something that’s inevitably going to happen anyway by reframing it as some brave self-sacrificing decision on your own part.

“It’s not like all those juicy, high-profile roles are now being offered to younger and hotter actresses, and you’re kind of yesterday’s news now. I’m choosing to take on more mature and interesting parts, Johansson is saying, because I’m more than just eye-candy for sweaty teenage boys nowadays.

“I kind of agree with Johansson, at least in principle here. I agree that it’s bad for any actor to be typecast and pigeonholed into certain roles when they want to broaden their creative range.

“But what can I say? It’s Hollywood, baby. It’s an industry based around pattern recognition and branding, selling actors like they’re commodities. And it’s not a uniquely female problem in the slightest.

“Take Hugh Grant, for example. That guy had to labor away for most of his career, playing foppish, bumbling British guys in tedious romantic comedies because that’s what people knew him for. And it’s only now in his 60s that he’s finally able to branch out into more challenging roles.

“Matthew McConaughey suffered from the same problem, trapped in romcom purgatory for more than a decade before escaping into more mature roles in his 40s and 50s. Or how about all those action stars from the 80s and 90s who tried and failed to transition into other genres only to fade out completely in the 2000s when they aged out of their roles.

“The sad reality is that most actors end up being known for something that ends up defining the course of their careers. Whether it’s charm and good looks, a flair for comedy, big muscles, or just being really attractive. I guess it’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s just the way the world works.

“The Scarlett Johansson from 10 or 15 years ago understood this perfectly well because she reaped the rewards of being beautiful and getting lots of opportunities that other less attractive actresses probably got passed over for.

“Do you think all those young aspiring stars felt badly for you, Scarlett? Or do you think they ended up staring long and hard at their own reflections, cursing the fact that in the great genetic lottery, you just so happened to have better luck than them? Do you think they feel badly for you now as you approach the end of this particular phase of a career that they never even got a chance to experience?”

HE: The term male gaze was popularized by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. The basic idea is that men have been objectifying women for their physical appearance since…uhm, prehistoric times.

And this, perversely, has led to an artistic tradition where males get pleasure from looking at females who take on passive roles blah blah. In the world of Mulvey’s “male gaze”, society is still teaching young girls that they need to look desirable in order to get attention from boys while also teaching young boys that it’s okay to view women as sex objects.

The irony is that Scarlett Johansson is on the brink of gradually not being male-gazed any more. It happens to every actress, every woman sooner or later. And to every dude. Everyone,

A six-episode “Plot Thickens” podcast about the extremely troubled, super-costly making of Cleopatra (’63), will begin on July 17. TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz, the grand-nephew of Cleopatra director-writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz (and grandson of Herman J. Mankiewicz), will serve as series host.

But of course, the most alluring way to sink into this saga is Kevin Burns and Brent Zacky‘s Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood.

Released in 2001, the two-hour doc is included in the Cleopatra Bluray package. It’s also on YouTube.

I’ve said two or three times in this space that the Burns-Zacky doc is far more absorbing, entertaining and dramatic than Cleopatra itself (which is actually a moderately good film, certainly in terms of the highly eloquent and literate script and fortified with the most sumptuous production values ever).

And if you can’t handle a two-hour commitment, at least read David Kamp’s April 1998 Vanity Fair piece about the whole clumsy, flamboyant, drawn-out adventure (“When Liz Met Dick“).

The Burns-Zacky is such a wise, tasty and fascinating consideration of…well, the basic stew of things within the Hollywood film-making community and culture of 60-plus years ago. A scenario for all kinds of folly and hubris and large-scale delusion and boredom and indulgence and tenacious uphill determination. It’s about what happens when an ambitious, extremely large-scale film isn’t wisely prepared or planned for. It’s about how a never-ending spigot of studio spending will inspire a torrent of waste, connivance and corruption among the best people.

Who were the “bad guys”? One was definitely 20th Century Fox chief Spyros Skouras, who sank over $7 million into the first attempt to shoot the film in England (directed by Rouben Mamoulian, and costarring the constantly bed-ridden Elizabeth Taylor plus Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd).

It was this initial wasteful investment that put the studio into a hole, and which led to the second, much more costly version that was shot in Italy (directed by Mankiewicz and costarring Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. It wound up costing $44 million, which roughly translates into $462,887,333 in 2025 dollars.

Taylor ended up getting paid around $7 million, which works out to $73 million in our present-day economy.

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My fascination with Clint Eastwood boils down to two…make that three things. One, how he kicked his directing chops up a couple of notches in the early ’90s and became a seriously formidable director. Two, his affinity for jazzy piano playing. And three, an alleged quote of his that I heard 15 or so years ago, and which I’ve repeated a few times over the years:

“Show me a beautiful, fascinating and worldly woman whom any man would be delighted to know” — in the Biblical sense, I presume he meant — “and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of fucking her.”

That sounds initially like a brusque or insensitive observation, but the basic thought is one of fatigue and resignation. He was saying that longterm relationships are hard.

I don’t know anything about longterm relationships, much less keeping the fires going in the midst of one. My first marriage lasted four years (’87 to ’91). My second lasted the same**. My other relationships (including the People magazine affair with the married journalist) have all lasted two or three years so what do I know?

I know that keeping the coals hot isn’t easy. A dude has to reach deeper and deeper within and give it up Delbert McLinton-style, and if he holds back and retreats into his inner man-cave for some selfish reason he’ll gradually lose her. Because you have to give it up even when you don’t feel like it. And sometimes that’s difficult.

HE to Shawn Levy, author of “Clint: The Man and the Movies“, which streeted yesteday (7.1.25):

“How ya livin’? I’m still longing to own copies of your coffee-table books about the Sinatra Rat Pack and Rome in the golden age of the ‘50s and ‘60s. I’ve just decided (15 seconds ago!) to go the Wilton library route, but libraries don’t tend to own glammy large-format books of this sort.

“The early reviews of your Clint book (which I haven’t read yet) seem to indicate that it’s as full, thorough and well-measured as Patrick McGilligan’s “Clint: The Life and Legend”, which published in ‘02.

“If I were you I’d say ‘you’ve got it wrong…my Clint book delves much deeper into the crevasses of Clint’s storied, if peculiar and guarded, life and is far richer and more flavorful’ but what do I know?

I will continue to share my all-time favorite Clint anecdote, whether it’s true or not (when truth becomes legend, print the legend), but please tell me, privately or publicly (whatever), that while researching your book you were told that Clint did in fact say this on occasion. I’ve chatted with Clint a few times and interviewed him once for a Los Angeles magazine piece in ‘95, but you’ll be breaking my heart if you tell me this quote is fictitious or mis-attributed.”

** Then again four years isn’t nothing — it’s 48 months.

“Something of a victory”, according to N.Y. Times reporters Ben Sistasio abd Julia Jacobs.

It’s not accurate to say that Combs has “walked”, but he’s certainly dodged heavy penalties and a long prison sentence.

I confess to not having read the fine print within Trump’s “Big Beautiful” bill — a Poor-Screwing, Medicaid-Gutting, Tax-Slashing, Debt-Increasing Enactment which the Senate has passed but has yet to clear the House — but Elon Musk’s five-alarm, total-war resistance is theatrically striking to say the least…very emotional and absolutist.

…called “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of The New Hollywood“, Harris’s short Criterion essay, “Spotlight on New Hollywood“, recorded in 2024, will give you a little taste.

It’s very satisfying and soothing to liaten to Harris explain what happened within the U.S film industry between 1966 or thereabouts (the beginning) and the debut of Star Wars in May 1977 (beginning of the end). “Spotlight on New Hollywood” is one of the supplements that compliment the Criterion Channel’s HD streaming of The Graduate.

I watched it late last night…no embed code but very nice. It lasts around 15 minutes. Here it is…watch it.

Chris Nolan‘s Odyssey teaser-trailer (reportedly lasting 70 seconds) is playing in front of Universal’s Jurassic World Rebirth, which opens tomorrow (Wednesday, 7.2) in theatres nationwide.

Why do hardcore movie fanatics never look like…oh, like James Garner looked in the mid ’60s or something? Or at least like Don Gordon, who played “Delgetti” in Bullitt? Why do they always look like nerds? Or nerds on cheeseburger diets? Like guys who haven’t a prayer in hell of getting “lucky”? Identify one YouTube movie guy who appears to be in shape.

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Poor Glen Powell can’t land a quality-calibre role to save his life. That or he likes starring in this kind of popcorn crap.

One thing’s for sure: With Edgar Wright directing, The Running Man (Paramount, 11.7) couldn’t get much cheaper or more thoughtless.

Powell plays the Arnold Schwarzenegger role, of course…a featured slot on “The Running Man”, a highly-rated game show in which contestants are chased by killers all over the map, the idea being to escape a jail term and win money. (That was the deal, at least, in the 1987 original.)

Bellowing TV emcee in red-sequin jacket: “This is America, goddamit, and we don’t put up with no bullshit!”

Come again?

HE clarification: This is America, goddamit, and we not only put up with bullshit 24/7, we revel in it…it’s our spiritual mother’s milk.

The 38-year-old Schwarzenegger version is “set in a dystopian United States between 2017 and 2019, featuring a television show where convicted criminal ‘runners’ must escape death at the hands of professional killers.” Loosely based on Stephen King‘s “The Running Man”, published in ’82 and written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman.

There’s no greater shoveller of empty, thoughtless, glossy bullshit-for-glossy-bullshit’s sake than Wright. Whatever social or psychological undercurrents the King book may have had back in ’82, Wright (who cowrote the script with Michael Bacall) will erase them in this November release. For Wright is a 16-year-old in the body of a 51-year-old director.

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