I don’t know where this started, but there’s a certain vein of speculation that Donald Trump, fearful of addressing his recently earned status as a convicted felon, might blow off the Thursday, 6.27 debate with Joe Biden in Atlanta. His followers worship his defiant outlaw attitude and certainly don’t care about establishment standards or protocol, so maybe skipping the debate is a viable optioon?

Or, even worse, the apparent fact that Trumpies believe that “evil” — Donald Trump’s shameless criminality, thuggish vindictiveness, anti-fact, anti-democracy, a sociopathic loathing for the “other”, a complete absence of any sort of educated or insightful understanding of anything — isn’t such a bad deal at the end of the day.

Trump supporters are among the lowest forms of life on this planet right now. I hate wokesterism and deplore its pernicious influence more than most, but Trumpsters are pure poison. By blindly supporting a clearly destructive social virus they themselves are viruses. They would destroy democracy in order to suppress woke fanaticism.

Put them all on a large raft, tow it into deep water and sink it.

Last night I watched all three episodes of Hulu’s Cult Massacre, a new, well-honed, very thorough doc about Jim Jones. He was a paranoid user and obviously a stone sociopath, but if you ask me the real villains were his followers, which is to say his enablers.

By the same token the real monsters today are the Trump followers, or so says an HE reader who urged me yesterday to catch Cult Massacre.

“You look at Jones and his heavy-set face and tinted glasses, and listen to his maniacal repeating of cult slogans and phrases, and he really does remind you of Trump, especially against a backdrop of Kool-Aid drinkers.

“Jones’ baseline atttitude, caring for nobody but himself and willing to pull down the temple walls as long as his hold upon his devoted flock is rapt and absolute to the end…that’s about as Trumpian as it gets.

“The story is old, but the comparisons felt new to me. I’ve compared Trump to Hitler before, as many have.  But Jones feels like a closer fit.”

1966 wasn’t exactly a weak year for cinema, but except for three films the output was less than herculean. ’66 was a great year, however, for avant garde rock music (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde, Aftermath), psychedelics, Haight Ashbury and general hippiedom, and it witnessed the birth of the nonfiction novel (Truman Capote‘s “In Cold Blood“).

But let’s focus on 15 stand-out films.

My hands-down choice for 1966’s three finest are Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up, Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar and Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals.

The other 12 (and in no particular order) are Robert Wise‘s The Sand Pebbles, Bernard Girard‘s Dead Heat on a Merry Go-Round, Fred Zinnemann‘s A Man For All Seasons, John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix and Seconds, Jack Smight‘e Harper, Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Arthur Penn‘s The Chase, Irvin Kershner‘e A Fine Madness, Charles Walters‘ Walk, Don’t Run, Claude Lelouch‘s A Man and a Woman and Billy Wilder‘s The Fortune Cookie.

HE to commentariat: Which 1966 films play best by your standards? Which seem the most fleet of mind and self-aware…the most vibrant and socially avant garde…the least moribund or tedious? The most purely enjoyable by a 21st Century yardstick?

I would be lynched if I were to say that there are women who are in the 3 or 4 range. I would be beaten, shot, run over by cars. But I’m not saying that! HE is resolutely opposed to any such associations.

But #emilysavesamerica is allowed to say this. Because of her gender, age and attractiveness. The reason she radiates a certain authority is because she describes herself as a 6.5. Modesty is very attractive.

In my youthful heyday I was somewhere around…oh, let’s say an 8. maybe an 8.5. Age has lowered my current rating to somewhere between a 6 and a 6.5, at best. I’m saying this to demonstrate a willingness to be honest.

Alert, engaged, attuned. Imagine if he were running right now…

Not one shot of Duval Street? No shots of the marina or Ernest Hemingway‘s cats or Harry Truman‘s Florida White House? No shots of any classic Key West homes with those second-story porches?

That’s because The Fabulous Four, which largely takes place in Key West, was shot in Savannah, Georgia.

I’m sorry but the Tony Awards mean nothing to me. I was a regular B’way theatregoer for decades, but starting in the mid to late aughts ticket prices (including those for rock concerts) became so costly they’re now absurd. They’re comical. For swells only. I wish I was loaded enough to afford them. It breaks my heart but that whole magnificent universe has a CLOSED sign on its Tin Pan Alley door.

“Glorious Theatre Years,” posted on 10.16.22: For decades I tried to catch the most highly-regarded Manhattan plays, and I’m very grateful that I made the effort. We all realize that the last Broadway era for great playwriting ended between 20 or 25 years ago. (It’s all musicals now, and damn the sappy tourists for making this happen.) For me the mid ’70s to mid ’80s was close to a golden stage era. Which isn’t to say it was the greatest by the measure of any Broadway-veteran perspective, but simply a time when I was living near or in Manhattan, or often flying there from Los Angeles. Things were happening and I knew I had to get what I could.

It was a time in which certain well-reviewed plays (and one glorious musical, Sunday in the Park With George) seemed to speak directly to me and my experience…written by the youngish lions of that era (David Mamet, Simon Gray, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer) and focused on anxious, unsatisfied white guys whose situations seemed to echo my own…taunted by various urban anxieties, ambitions…by aloneness, sex/love, existential voids, “who am I?”, “what’s it all about?” and “will my life always seem this much of an uphill thing?”

It almost makes me weep to reflect on that period, which for me began in ’76 and started to wind down in ’85. (I lived in Manhattan for a bit more than five years — ‘early ’78 to ‘mid ’83.) Film-wise and quite sadly for many of us, the last third of the ’70s marked the beginning of the end of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” period, and the early ’80s would became known as an era in which “the bottom [had] fallen out of badness in movies,” to borrow from Andrew Sarris.

But the quality of the plays seemed wonderful; ditto the culture (mostly pre-AIDS) itself. Life was hard, of course (my finances were mostly a shambles until ’87) and the wrong people were in power and writers were stuck with typewriters and white-out, but compared to today it almost seems as if I was living a kind of half-charmed life. I could live and work and run around (my batting average was around .400, give or take**) and write without fear of wokester death squads, for one thing.

I wouldn’t say that my future seemed especially rosey or brilliant back then, but it certainly lay ahead. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

The Reagan-era play that lifted me up and melted me down like none before or since was Tom Stoppard‘s The Real Thing (’84). Sappy as this sounds, it made me swoon. Okay, not “swoon” but it struck some kind of deep, profound chord. Partly because I saw it at a time when I believed that the right relationship with the right woman could really make a difference. That was then and this is now, but I was in the tank for this stuff in ’84. The play used the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” as mood music, and I pretty much was one at the time.

I’m speaking of the original B’way production, of course, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. My admiration for Irons’ performance as Henry, a witty London playwright who resembled Stoppard in various ways, was boundless. Close, whom I was just getting to know back then, was truly magnificent as Annie. N.Y. Times critic Frank Rich called it “not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.”

(I went to see the 2000 B’way revival and was bitterly disappointed by Stephen Dillane‘s uncharismatic lead performance, which wasn’t even close to what Irons had brought.)

I was also floored that same year by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim‘s Sunday in the Park With George, which opened at the Booth theatre on 5.2.84. It was one of the few B’way musicals that really reached inside, and it still makes me choke up when I watch it on YouTube.

I’m just going to list some of the plays that really hit the sweet spot between ’76 and ’85…I’m bypassing a few but here we go regardless:

Peter Shaffer‘s Equus, which I saw in London in the early summer of ’76. The great Colin Blakely was magnificent in the lead role of psychiatrist Martin Dysart (and better, I have to say, than Richard Burton was in the Sidney Lumet film version). I saw Anthony Perkins play the role in a B’way production of Equus in ’77, and I’m sorry to say that he underwhelmed.

A Broadway production of David Mamet‘s American Buffalo in early ’77. Directed by Ulu Grosbard with Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage costarring. Four years later I saw it again (twice) at the Circle in the Square with Al Pacino as Teach. Pacino wasn’t a robot — he played certain lines and scenes a bit differently at times…experimentally, if you will. I was in heaven.

My current plan is to avoid Inside Out 2. I feel fully respectful of an allegedly well-made film that has obviously connected worldwide in a huge way…congrats to everyone involved. Good for the movie business, good for exhibition, etc. I’m just going to sidestep it for the foreseeable future. No harm, no foul.

Or they know all too well, and they don’t know what to do with it. Either way it’s never a good sign to show an allegedly important film to “critics” before Venice and Telluride. It basically means “uh-oh.”

Friendo: “Movies screen early all the time. But I seriously doubt that any critics were invited this early to a screening of a movie like Blitz. If they were and the names leaked, it would be a bit of a scandal because it would be obvious that their positive reaction was being bought.”

The couple that I most want to see go south is Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Please — I want their love affair to die of malnutrition by Labor Day if at all possible, or certainly before the end of ‘24.

Only a lunatic would marry Swift — even a lughead like Kelce surely understands this.

Ben and J.Lo divorcing is…okay, I’m sorry. Clearly she’s driven him to madness with hyper frustration and career anxiety and whatnot. Key insider quote: “[Ben] wants a life with serenity and peace, and escaping this roller coaster will be a relief.”

A little more than eight years ago (4.14.16) casting maestro Juliet Taylor sat down with an AMPAS moderator to talk about her 50-year career and particularly the 42 films she cast for Woody Allen.

The session was entitled “Perfect Choice: The Art Of The Casting Director”. It happened at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Wilshire.

Sasha Stone earlier today: “Why would the Academy omit Woody Allen’s name from Juliet Taylor‘s bio? That would be like omitting Alfred Hitchcock’s name when honoring Grace Kelly. Or Frank Capra’s name when honoring Jimmy Stewart. You can’t do that and pretend any sort of validity in preserving, celebrating or honoring film history.

“Who made the call? Was it the Academy or was it Juliet Taylor’s people? We’ll never know because these are questions no one is allowed to ask. Partly they’re afraid to ask why. And they’re afraid of the shitstorm eruption soon to follow in its wake.

“The last thing they seemed to be concerned about is whether or not they look ridiculous. My dudes, here’s the answer to that question, YES. With all due respect, YES.”

Bill Maher had a girlfriend when he was 16? I didn’t do the deed until I was 18, and that was because a girl had put the moves on me, not vice versa. I was so beset by insecurity and low-self-esteem in my teen years I could barely function socially. Movies had been my only escape from the time I was eight or nine, and then I coupled that with serious weekend drinking (100 proof vodka!) when I turned 15 or thereabouts.

I didn’t feel even half-confident in a sexual sense until I was 22 or 23, but once I knew how to turn that key I became a shameless hound. (Not a predator but a hound — there’s a difference.) Before long I was batting .400 or better, and that streak lasted throughout the rest of my 20s and into my 30s, and then re-ignited in the ’90s after Maggie divorced me.

“Entirely Natural and Inevitable,” posted on 10.1.22: HE’s big office romance…I’m sorry, I meant to say the emotionally devastating extra-marital affair that I fell into during my time as an in-office freelancer at People magazine and which continued until her husband found out a couple of years later…it was almost the emotional death of me. (The actual span was between early ’98 and the early fall of ’00…call it 32 months.) No relationship had ever brought so much heartache, hurt or frustration. Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard had nothing on us. I was a man of almost constant sorrow. I was so upset by one of our arguments that one afternoon I made a reckless left turn on Pico Blvd. and got slammed by a speeding BMW, and for weeks I told myself it wasn’t really my fault — it was the married girlfriend’s. Definitely a form of insanity.