Small Error Never Fixed

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One of the most realistic line-readings in The Godfather happens when James Caan’s Sony Corleone warns the beaten and bloody Carlo (Gianni Russo) to never again brutalize his sister Connie (Talia Shire), Carlo’s wife. What makes it great is that Sonny is so winded from beating up Carlo that he’s forced to take a breath after saying “touch” (beat) and then “…my sister again I’ll kill ya.”

And yet this scene has been blemished for a half-century by a small but memorable error that could have been easily fixed.

“There’s Still Time, Brother,” posted on 9.19.08:

Early this morning HE reader Frank Booth, commenting about the Francis Coppola/Robert Harris restoration of the Godfather films, made a good point about an irritant in the original 1972 film — one that’s been bothering me for decades.

He was speaking of the second-act beating scene in which Sonny laughably air-punches Carlo. There’s no missing the mistake because the shot is perfectly positioned to catch it — a nice clean side-angle. And it’s so distinct that it takes you right out of the film. When Booth saw a theatrical screening “it took a minute or so of the Sicilian wedding for the audience to stop giggling,” he says.

And yet despite all the digital refinements and restorations, not to mention that massive re-edit of Parts I and II that resulted in The Godfather Saga in the mid ’70s, Coppola has left that mistake in — minor, yes, but one that slightly interferes with the enjoyment of this film each and every time.

All Coppola would have to do is cut away from the Sonny-Carlo beating for a a second or two and show…whatever, one of the hoods standing nearby, one of the little kids watching the fight, a master shot from a different angle. There must be extra footage lying around. All Coppola would need is 24 to 36 frames.

If you had directed The Godfather, would you want that mistake to remain in the definitive print for centuries to come? I wouldn’t. If George Lucas can make Greedo shoot first, Francis Coppola can fix Sonny’s air punch.

“Did You Not Hear Me?”

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Respect for the late Kathy Lamkin, the No Country for Old Men trailer park manager who took no shit from Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed this classic scene, of course, but Lamkin’s tough steely demeanor made it work. The 74 year old actress, a resident of Pearland, Texas, passed on April 4th.

Side note: Autocorrect just suggested that the last name of Bardem’s character should be changed from Chigurh to Chihuahua — Anton Chihuahua.

This Happened

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Around 5:20 pm on Monday, 4.11, drivers of black, expensive, late-model cars slammed into each other at high speeds near the southwest corner of Fairfax and Willoughby. Look at the decimated auto on the right…total junkyard. Who was the bad guy? The one who was speeding, that’s who. Whomever got hurt had presumably been taken to a hospital by the time I got there. Cracked windshield, air bags.

Remember Those Rip Van Hippie Jokes?

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In Senior Year (Netflix, 5.13), Rebel Wilson‘s “Stephanie Conway” awakes from a 20-year coma at age 38 or thereabouts, and decides to return to high school in 2022 to finish her senior year.

You can tell by the lame-ass humor in the trailer (jokes about Madonna vs. Lady Gaga, the relentless Fast and Furious franchise) that the senior creatives were terrified of doing the obvious.

The obvious would have been to create a fish-out-of-water comedy about a woman from 2002 suddenly grappling with woke Stalinism.

Wilson and her colleagues were too scared, in other words, to focus on the horror of Twitter, totalitarian safe spaces, the revolutionary consciousness overhaul brought about by #MeToo, the prohibition of certain terms, the dismissal of nearly all over-40 white males, Variety apologizing to Carey Mulligan for a single sentence in Dennis Harvey‘s review of Promising Young Woman, CRT and equity in schools, trans activists calling the shots (and therefore the triumph of Lia Thomas and the grooming of three-year-olds so they’ll understand the particulars of all the various genders), all people of color regarded as hothouse flowers and given sainthood status, celebrating obesity in underwear ads, etc.

There was a 1989 Cheech and Chong comedy called Rude Awakening — late ’60s hippies hiding in Central America and suddenly returning to the U.S. in the late ’80s and confronted with yuppie culture. Similar.

HE salutes Wilson, by the way, for dropping 77 pounds between ’20 and ’21. She’s still “ample” but within reasonable proportions.

More Sunset Strip Corporatism

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A year or two from now a large, rectangular, 12-storied, glass-walled building (business + residential) will arise on the south side of the Sunset Strip — 8850 Sunset Blvd.. Right across from Panini, an Italian pizza take-out place that I’ve been going to for decades, and bordered by Larabee on the eastern side and San Vicente Blvd. on the west.

No, they’re not destroying the Viper Room…well, they are but they’re re-launching or reconstituting it as a kind of corporate lounge rock-music club, or so it seems. The VR’s glowing shamrock green color (a trademark thing) will frame the entrance.

This morning a couple of older guys with a notepad and printed reading materials dropped by to solicit opinions about the forthcoming structure. I shared a few thoughts, using the words “soul-less” and “rancid” and “corporate-feeling”, etc.

After they left I posted the following on the 8850 website:

“The proposed (and almost certainly forthcoming) 8850 Sunset Blvd. structure will be, to go by your illustrations, another moderately ugly and soul-less office building that will (what else?) degrade the aesthetic atmosphere of the Strip. All of that glass looks so synthetic, so humdrum, so similar to tens of thousands of other office + residential buildings all over the world.

“Imagine if, say, Frank Gehry had been hired to design it. Or a disciple of Gehry’s. I have no ideas myself, but a less conventional Gehry-ish design would probably feel a bit more fitting, given the uptown vibe and all.

“It’s L.A. buildings like these that make visiting the historical sections of London, Paris, Rome, Florence and Prague such transporting experiences. Over there they respect history and classic architecture and keeping in touch with the past. Then again this part of the Strip hasn’t been anything to architecturally shout about for decades.

“The upside is that the building will offer affordable housing to a certain number of low-income citizens (less than $40K or $45K annually), and that’s a good thing. Plus they’re going to include a space for the Viper Room, which unfortunately will lose the coal-black exterior and a ton of other atmospheric touches, but at least will still ‘exist’, so to speak.”

Follow-up: If I were calling the shots I’d insert a kind of Hollywood Walk of Fame marble sidewalk square that commemorates River Pheonix, who died in front of the Viper Room on 10.31.93.

For the usual expedient reasons the people behind this project are pretending to be interested in what average WeHo residents think about it. I don’t know why I just wrote this. The fix is in. What’s next, the destruction of Book Soup?

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Oddly Touching

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Variety‘s Clayton Davis has never been to Europe much less to the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s about to change next month. Congrats and safe travels.

HE to Davis: Your tickets are already purchased, you’ve said, but I’m hoping that you’ve arranged to schedule a brief stop-over in Paris (which you’ve also never visited) on the way back. After every Cannes Film Festival I’ve attended (my first was in ’92) I’ve always downshifted in Paris, Rome, Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Lauterbrunnen, London, Ireland, etc. It would be almost sinful, I feel, to ignore this post-Cannes opportunity. But that’s me.

Never Trust Modified Opinions

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Sam Elliott has apparently been told by his agent to walk back his Power of the Dog diss for political reasons. I don’t know for a fact that industry Robespierres have decided that Elliott is anti-progressive or sexist or something in that vein, but many probably have. And as a result they might’ve diminished Elliott’s appeal as an actor-for-hire. Maybe.

Apologizing for a previously expressed opinion is Elliott’s right, of course, but we all know what the shot is here.

Deep down Elliott is almost certainly saying “c’mon, man…I can’t express an opinion that you don’t like because my career will be hurt if I don’t walk it back? And you think…what, that it’s a good thing that incorrect opinions, as you see them, are being squelched in urban blue environments by wokesters? Okay, guys — I get it. You guys are HUAC-style wolves dressed in humanist-diverse clothing, but I’m nonetheless ‘sorry’ for my transgression. And in the meantime, perhaps some of you might to watch Ken Russell‘s The Devils.”

I’m posting this out of respect for Elliott, of course, and partly from my own experience last year.

Bacon’s Most Enjoyable Character

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Ask me for a Kevin Bacon career highlight, and without hesitation my first answer will always be Tremors (’90). “Valentine McKee”, Bacon’s lively, none-too-bright yokel in cowboy boots and a jean jacket, is his most fully-rounded, emotionally-winning character ever. I re-watched Tremors six or seven years ago and loved it all over again.

Bacon and Fred Ward were a great shitkicker duo in that Ron Underwood film. Tremors was called a failure because it only made $16.7 million after costing $10 million to produce, but it wasn’t a wipe-out. And it did catch on at Blockbuster, and it gradually spawned a few Tremors sequels. I saw the first one (Tremors 2: Aftershocks) and quickly got off the boat. The others were probably just as bad.

Jett, Dylan and I watched the original Tremors over and over when it hit laser disc in ’96. (They called it “Sand Monsters”.) Not long after I introduced Jett to Kevin at a post-screening reception. A proud moment.

I had first met Bacon in early ’82 (40 years ago!) when I was assigned to interview him for Us magazine. The topic du jour was his breakout performance as “Fenwick,” the nihilistic kid who knows all the game-show answers, in Barry Levinson‘s Diner. Every film journalist loved that little movie, and Joe Popcorn mostly went “meh” — it only managed $14 million domestic.

All to say that I found the above Tremors interview fascinating. Bacon was in a shaky position at the time, he says. A career slump, running out of money. But he knew he could have fun with the character.

Right after Tremors on my Bacon scale is Diner (’82). I would never, ever mention Footloose, which I instantly hated. I would then mention Bacon’s wise-ass gay prostitute in JFK, his Marine prosecutor in A Few Good Men and astronaut Jack Swigert in Apollo 13. I also liked him in Paul Verhoeven‘s The Hollow Man (’00), HBO’s Taking Chance (’09) and Amazon’s I Love Dick.

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Why Doesn’t Biden Scold Oil Companies for Unconscionable Profiteering?

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In April ‘62 JFK derided steel executives for raising steel prices by $6 a ton, and thereby showing “utter contempt” for the interests of average Americans. Right now big oil is showing the same kind of disregard by using the Ukraine War as a rationale for sending gas prices through the roof. Lefties are calling them on this, but has President Biden said anything? This is what the bully pulpit is for.

And by the way, on his recent trip to Europe why didn’t Biden visit Kyiv and do a walk-around with Zelenskyy, like British PM Boris Johnson has just done?