With great respect and profound sadness Hollywood Elsewhere is acknowledging the death of producer Alan Ladd, Jr, an old-school guy & son of Shane who believed in taking the occasional risk, standing by certain filmmakers and supporting the advancement of women in the ranks.

Ladd was 20th Century Fox’s production chief between ’76 and ’79, and distinguished himself as the guy who stood behind Star Wars and Alien. In ’79 he launched The Ladd Company, which yielded Chariots of Fire (’81), Outland (1981), the truncated & narrated version of Blade Runner (’82), Night Shift (1982), The Right Stuff (1983) and Police Academy (’84). He also produced Gone Baby Gone (2007).

Ladd joined MGM/UA in ’85 (Giancarlo Parretti!), and thereby cranked out A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Moonstruck (1987) and Thelma & Louise (1991). Ladd re-started the Ladd Company with Paramount Pictures in ’93, and thereafter produced The Brady Bunch Movie and Braveheart.

Last night’s image of everyone in the House chamber listening to President Biden‘s State of the Union address without masks was very gratifying. It was almost surreal. I have to drive out to the Valley now and in so doing will visit two or three stores, and for the first time since last June I won’t be wearing a mask. Let’s see what happens. Yesterday masks were being worn everywhere I went.w by

‘This is ridiculous’: @GovRonDeSantis scolds students for wearing face masks during his @USouthFlorida visit https://t.co/v9XLjueCYi pic.twitter.com/TFeC6t6wL9

— WFLA NEWS (@WFLA) March 2, 2022

In one corner we have Oliver Stone, who gave Vladimir Putin a friendly interview four or five years ago, suggesting that we’re overly consumed by anti-Putin hysteria while “omitting key facts when inconvenient, and that we’re failing to “understand the full spectrum of what’s happening.” Which boils down, Stone feels, to Putin’s territorial anti-NATO paranoia being justified or at least understandable.

And in the opposite corner we have former chess champion and anti-Putin, pro-democracy activist Garry Kasparov, telling Megyn Kelly that this is Putin’s last stand. Not to mention Michael Moore posting yesterday terms of surrender that Putin might want to consider.

Read more

Every now and then we have to remind ourselves how far everything has fallen. Indeed, collapsed. How no one is even attempting this kind of thing in mainstream cinema — how completely shut down things are now. (Obviously not in cable/streaming but theatrically.) This scene was written and shot 42 or 43 years ago, but listen to it…feel it. Nobody’s even trying to deliver this kind of middle-class angsty stuff now, in large part because dramas about wealthy suffering white people are verboten.

Yes, yes…I agree that Raging Bull should have won the 1980 Best Picture Oscar, but if Robert Redford’s 1980 drama had never happened 42 years ago and was made and released sometime in 2021, are you telling me it wouldn’t be the far-and-away favorite to win Best Picture? Because it totally kicks CODA‘s ass. Don’t even mention CODA in the same sentence.

Originally posted on 5.10.19: The late Alvin Sargent was one of Hollywood’s finest and classiest 20th Century screenwriters, especially in the realm of adult relationship dramas. On the same level as Bo Goldman, William Goldman, Ben Hecht, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, David Rayfiel, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne, etc. Ordinary People was the peak, but the runners-up were The Sterile Cuckoo (’69), Paper Moon (’73), Julia (’77), Straight Time (’78, w/ Jeffrey Boam), Dominick and Eugene (’88), Hero (’92 w/ Laura Ziskin and David Webb Peoples) and Unfaithful (w/ William Broyles Jr. — ’02).

Toward the end of his career Sargent wrote or co-wrote three or four Spider Man scripts. Alas, his kind of movie had fallen out of favor and paychecks were there for the taking.

This YouTube short was posted around ten days ago. (It was shot somewhere in the San Diego region.) If this isn’t a defining portrait of pathetic self-absorption in 2022 America, nothing is. This video should be converted to 4K and played on bus-stop video screens and in fact played on super-sized screens in all the major tourist areas worldwide — Times Square, Piccadilly, Sacre Coeur region of Paris, Shibuya in Tokyo, etc.

Hang this video in the Museum of Modern Art. Hell, hang it in the Louvre.

Last night I posted a YouTube video of recent carnage in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It showed a large building being shelled — shocking, of course, but nothing grotesque, no dead bodies or pools of innocent blood. Almost right away the YouTube censors stepped in: “The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”

Good brave people are going through hell as they fight for their lives and their future, and “some audiences” might be offended by images of same?

Two days ago I read an article in the UK edition of Marie Claire (written by Health, Sustainability & Relationships Editor Ally Head) that offered tips for coping with the images of the Ukrainian horror. Translation: Here’s how you, sitting on your comfy couch or under a hair dryer in your beauty salon, can cope with their experience of death and destruction.

HE to YouTube monitors: Here’s a video of a captured Russian soldier weeping about having killed innocent Ukrainians. Will your extra-sensitive Millennial snowflakes find this offensive also? Contemplating the murder of innocent people is kind of upsetting, no?

If YouTube was somehow a thing back in late 1941, this “protect the delicate sensibilities of certain viewers” policy would prevent posts of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Or footage of the Atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or images of Nazi concentration camps. Or footage of 9/11.

I listened yesterday to Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Sam Elliott, which has blown up due to Elliott’s trashing of The Power of the Dog. Twitter, of course, is depicting moustachioed Sam as a homophobe.

Yes, Elliott is a rugged traditionalist type and perhaps not as embracing of non-straight sexuality as he could be, but I don’t believe he’s homophobic in any kind of problematic sense. Ask anyone — Sam is a decent, considerate fellow who just happens to deal straight cards.

Two fellows of serious character and accomplishment have sent opinions and projections about the Oscar situation right now. They’re both director-screenwriters. HE to commentariat: Don’t start throwing names around — just read what they wrote. Here we go…

Fellow #1: “From my vantage no one gives a fuck about the Oscars anymore. They don’t mean a thing. I could hardly bring myself to vote, try alone watch [the nominees[.

“It’s not just they suck, which they do, especially in comparison to the television (streaming) we’re getting here and from around the world, but also how political everything has become. Movies are not an art form anymore. [In the minds of the comintern] they’re now a vehicle to change society, which is not the Academy’s mandate. It may be one of film’s functions, but no one made the Academy in charge of societal development.

“They screwed the pooch when they didn’t let Kevin Hart host it so the LGBT community wouldn’t be upset. He was a major film star. They were supposed to protect him, and not gay people — they have a group for that. They’re not supposed to protect women’s rights or black people. They’re all covered.

“The Academy’s task is to protect filmmakers and the art of movies. But they’ve cheapened the hell out of it. Everyone that wins now has an asterisk next to their name. I don’t care how many women win this year. None of them will feel as good about it if the Academy hadn’t dragged their purses through the mud on the way to the show.”

Fellow #2: “CODA will not win. No way. Too much of a trifle. But I do think it’ll be the dad for supporting actor.

“I don’t think The Power or the Dog wins either. That movie is an odd slog. I have yet to talk to anybody who has seen it and actually likes it. And nobody is buying Benedict [Cumberbatch]. I guess there will be a kneejerk vote for Campion.

“Oddly, I think Best Picture may go to West Side Story. I just sense the town would love to see that happen. It would make us all happy. Five years ago Spielberg would’ve won for Best Director. Power of the Dog equals Roma and WSS equals Green Book.”

HE to Fellow #2: Then why didn’t West Side Story win SAG’s ensemble award?

I respect Charlton Heston‘s decision to tone it down and go more internal in his rendering of this famous passage from William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar, but it’s still not as effective as Marlon Brando‘s seething, angrier version.

Cry Havoc was the title of a 1943 film, directed by Richard Thorpe, about 13 women serving in Bataan ((nurses and civilians) in the early days of World War II. John Irvin‘s The Dogs of War (’81) is a film about a team of mercenaries (led by Chris Walken and Tom Berenger) out to unseat a dictator of a small African country.

Message to Russian troops from Kyiv's Defenders. pic.twitter.com/mac42RziS9

— UkraineEnglishUpdates (@EnglishUkraine) February 27, 2022