…that despite an easy, no-big-deal agreement with the “WELCOME ALL” portion of this sign…what if one of your beliefs is that people who put up signs declaring that they won’t serve “assholes” may be aspiring assholes themselves on some level?

And when’s the last time a customer at a hip West Hollywood cafe said or did anything that led everyone within earshot to suspect that he/she was a racist, a sexist or a homophobe?

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “You know what’s even more disturbing [about the Dennis Harvey thing]? How absolutely nobody in film criticism is defending him. They’re all absolutely frightened to speak out. This is a guy who has been in the field for 30 years and not one of his former or current colleagues is going to bat for him. I’m just disturbed by the way things are going. You can’t defend a person who’s under attack [by the Khmer Rouge] without the risk of hurting your career. This is the result of ultra-progressive cleansing of wrongthink. The Democrats are just letting this shit happen everywhere. They need to start taking a stand against cancel culture. Trump is no longer at the eye of the storm.”

All my moviegoing life I’ve been slightly perplexed by Ernst Lubitsch. Not his excellent films (Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, Heaven Can Wait) but the fact that he never looked the part. Not with that fat cigar, those intense beady eyes and those thick, thuggish features.

One look and people said “no offense but physically this guy is no personification of wit, sophistication and elegant understatement.” For he had the face of a brute, a mob boss, a Teamsters goon, one of Johnny Friendly‘s torpedos, the owner of an interstate trucking company, etc.

I’m sorry but you have to look like the person you are deep down. If you’re a comedian you have to look like Richard Pryor, John Belushi, Chris Rock, Lou Costello or Chris Farley. If you’re a prizefighter, you have to look like Mike Tyson, Joe Frazier, Rocky Graziano or Jake LaMotta. If you’re a poet, you have to look like Bob Dylan, Ezra Pound or James Joyce. If you’re a film critic you have to look a little dweeby and rumpled and bespectacled. If you’re a daily online columnist who does nothing but write all day and watch movies…well, several years ago LexG saw me at a screening and said, “He looks like he writes.”

Hollywood Elsewhere has just come up with the hottest and coolest award-season concept of 2021…and not just a promotion but an opportunity for a possibly profound meeting-of-the-minds discussion that everyone, and I mean every living soul in the entertainment industry will have to watch start to finish and then post tweets and articles about. The only question is, will Variety‘s stiff-necked editors go along with it?

Within the realm of the current Carey Mulligan / Dennis Harvey / Variety kerfuffle, each has a profile that could stand some tweaking.

Mulligan is the gifted actress and Promising Young Woman Best Actress contender who didn’t register her displeasure with Harvey’s Sundance assessment of her casting until Kyle Buchanan popped the question, and then, a few weeks later, expressed satisfaction when Variety apologized for a certain paragraph in Harvey’s review. One one hand she’s almost certain to win the Best Actress Oscar, but on another the whole “trade paper apologizes for an allegedly offensive paragraph in a review because an actress didn’t like it” thing is a matter of serious concern among every critic and editor in this industry, and Mulligan is at risk of seeming as if she’s enjoying this debacle a little too much.

Harvey is the veteran Variety reviewer who may or may not have expressed himself indelicately, but whom everyone feels sorry for now, especially with Variety having thrown the poor guy under the bus after not saying boo for 11 months (the Promising Young Woman review went up in mid January 2020). Certain #MeToo radicals have actually called for Harvey’s dismissal (ridiculous) but these are the Khmer Rouge-tainted times in which we live.

Variety is the unequivocal bad guy in this affair. As The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield wrote this morning, “Variety has achieved the perfect trifecta that is the trademark of today’s trade coverage — that magic combination of woke grandstanding, kissing up to the powerful and mistreating your underlings.”

The solution? Arrange for Mulligan and Harvey to do a one-on-one Zoom discussion of the whole affair. Let their hair down, explain their respective positions, re-phrase if necessary and presumably arrive at some sort of mutual understanding. Present this historic discussion as an extra-special edition of Variety‘s Actors on Actors series. Instead of a typically toothless chit-chat with actors (forgive the Quentin Tarantino-esque description) sucking each other’s dicks, this could be something you’d actually want to watch and take notes on.

And everyone would come out ahead — Mulligan would be seen as slightly more supportive of journalistic integrity, Harvey would be seen as less of a sexist ogre (which he isn’t but once the #MeToo cadres have a notion between their teeth they never let go of it) and Variety would be seen as a little less deserving of Rushfield’s trifecta trophy. A win-win-win all around.

And if Variety wimps out and decides against this exciting idea, someone else should offer to Zoom it. TheWrap, the NYTimes, The Daily Beast….anyone with balls.

Does Anya have a preference among the current crop of Best Picture contenders? That’s not a facetious question as she does occasionally “watch” — pay a certain amount of attention to — films on our 65” Sony 4K HDR. The last feature she actually stared at was the Criterion Bluray of Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Respect and affection for the late Cicely Tyson, who’s passed on at age 96. Her name became iconic between her 38th and 44th birthdays, give or take. Rebecca Morgan in Martin Ritt‘s Sounder (’72). The titular role in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (’74). Binta in the 1977 miniseries Roots. As Coretta Scott King in King (’78), a 300-minute miniseries which also starred Paul Winfield as Martin Luther King. Plus her 2013 Tony Award (Best Actress) for playing Miss Carrie Watts in a revival of The Trip to Bountiful — the oldest such recipient in history.

I’ve been misspelling her first name for decades — spelling it right, forgetting and spelling it wrong, then spelling it right again. Always looking it up…sorry.

News outlets are reporting that the San Francisco Unified School District voted this week to rename 44 schools named after controversial public figures, including a high school named for Abraham Lincoln.

The district, which has more than 57,000 students enrolled, is changing the schools named after historical figures linked to “the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” according to the text of the SFUSHD resolution.

Abraham Lincoln High School will henceforth be called…it hasn’t been reported. If it were up to me I’d rename it Pol Pot High. Lincoln was zotzed because of “his [poor] treatment of First Nation peoples,” teacher Jeremiah Jeffries told the San Francisco Chronicle last month.

This is the kind of thing that wins votes for the Trump faction of the Republican Party. Honestly? I look forward to the day when this kind of insanity finally goes out of political fashion. If Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day Lewis had an ounce of courage between them, they would release a suitably outraged statement to the N.Y. Times.

Because of recent social-media accusations of cunnilingus cannibalism, Armie Hammer has either relinquished or lost a second major role. In the wake of dropping out of a costarring role opposite Jennifer Lopez in Shotgun Wedding, Hammer has lost the role of Godfather producer Al Ruddy in a forthcoming Paramount Plus series called The Offer, a behind-the-scenes story of the making of Francis Coppola‘s 1972 classic.

Tom Hagen: When a famous actor was accused of cunnilingus cannibalism in the old days, the studio would take care of it. Cunnilingus cannibals were always given a second chance, and sometimes a third or even a fourth. The studio helped out, and the families were allowed to keep their fortunes.

Armie Hammer: Yeah, but only the superstars, Tom. Famous, second-tier actors like myself got knocked off and all their estates went back to the studios and the banks. Unless they went home and killed themselves, then nothing happened. And the families…the families were taken care of.

Hagen: That was a good break. A nice deal.

Hammer: Yeah. They went home and sat in a hot bath, opened up their veins and bled to death. And sometimes they had a little party before they did it.

Hagen: Don’t worry about anything, Armie.

Seriously — does poor Armie Hammer really have to die because of certain sexual proclivities that strike most of us as weird? Because of certain kinky but allegedly consensual relationships that were recently revealed, Hammer is suddenly in big career trouble. Various women have came forward about abuse, including inappropriate and nonconsensual behavior they had allegedly experienced from Hammer.

I don’t know much about B&D sexuality and okay, Hammer may have ignored a safe word or two. But is this really a hanging offense? It feels like Hammer’s stripes are being torn off and his battle sabre broken in two.

After a period of curious silence, Variety critic Dennis Harvey has finally spoken out about Carey Mulligan’s objection to a portion of Harvey’s 1.26.20 review of Promising Young Woman, which many have interpreted as a disparagement of Mulligan’s attractiveness.

Variety‘x mea culpa: “Variety sincerely apologizes to Carey Mulligan and regrets the insensitive language and insinuation in our review of Promising Young Woman that minimized her daring performance.”

Variety‘s apology didn’t appear until Mulligan complained to the N.Y. Times‘ Kyle Buchanan in a 12.23.20 profile.

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman.

The Guardian‘s Catherine Shooard speaking to Harvey in a 1.28.21 article:

“I did not say or even mean to imply Mulligan is ‘not hot enough’ for the role,” Harvey has told Shoard. “I’m a 60-year-old gay man. I don’t actually go around dwelling on the comparative hotnesses of young actresses, let alone writing about that.”

Harvey added that he has been “appalled to be tarred as misogynist, which is something very alien to my personal beliefs or politics. This whole thing could not be more horrifying to me than if someone had claimed I was a gung-ho Trump supporter.”

Harvey said “he avoided the social media discourse triggered by the fallout on the advice of Variety, who said it would “blow over”, and friends who said nobody commenting appeared to have read the review and that some people had said “I must be advocating rape, was probably a predator like the men in the film.” Good God! There’s no terror like that of the Khmer Rouge. They’ve made plastic suffocation bags fashionable again.

Harvey has also questioned the timing of the controversy, as Hollywood Elsewhere has two or three times. He’s noted that his review “had apparently been found unobjectionable enough to escape complaint for 11 months, “until the film was finally being released, promoted and Oscar-campaigned”. Only then [was] his review was “belatedly labelled ‘insensitive’ and flagged with an official ‘apology’”.

Variety’s editors “had not raised any concerns with the review when he first filed it,” Harvey tells Shoard, “nor in subsequent months until [Buchanan’s New York Times article [appeared].”

Harvey’s professional fate “remains uncertain,” Shoard writes. Harvey: “It’s left in question whether after 30 years of writing for Variety I will now be sacked because of review content no one found offensive until it became fodder for a viral trend piece.”

Hollywood Elsewhere to Scott Alexander: Don’t shit me.

In France they kiss on Main Street, and in India they poop whenever the mood strikes, and right out in the open. And then they laugh about it.

It all started yesterday with HE positive reaction to The White Tiger. Which was followed by the following Alexander post on Facebook:

HE to Alexander: Did you like the “laughing uproariously while squatting and shitting” scene, Scott? I ask because the photo above is from this exact moment in the film. Squatting and shitting is what the main protagonist is laughing about. He and some other laughing, sophisticated fellow.

I thought it was…uhm, mildly appalling. But then I’m a prissy metrosexual dandy type. I wish I could say that the memory of this scene will fade, but it won’t. It’s been burned into my brain. Or smeared, I should say.

When was the last time you, Scott Alexander, defecated in public while enjoying a hearty horse laugh? I myself have never done this. Oh, it’s never done in Los Angeles, you say? It’s a lower-caste Indian culture thing? Okay. Well, it sure was exotic!

Maybe it’s just a matter of cultural conditioning. We all tend to nature on a daily basis — why not do it publicly and laughingly?

What if American cinema had at least acknowledged public shitting as something that happens from time to time? What if, say, Cary Grant had decided to drop a deuce by the side of the road during the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest? What if Dana Andrews had taken a big steaming dump while inspecting those old dusty WWII bombers near the end of The Best Years of Our Lives? What if Gary Cooper had decided to (heh-heh) mark his territory in the middle of Main Street in High Noon when Grace Kelly and Katy Jurado were clopping by in a horse wagon? “Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’…”

Sometime in the summer or early fall of ’94 (can’t remember which) I visited the Culver Studios set of Crimson Tide. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer had invited me. I hung around in a low-key way for two or three hours. No chit-chats with “talent” or anyone except Jerry — basically an opportunity to see the nuclear submarine set, which was built to tilt and lean and shake around. I watched Tony Scott guide Gene Hackman through a confrontation scene over and over. I was maybe 100 feet away.

When you first arrive on a big movie set there’s nothing more exciting. And then you hang around for a while, doing nothing but watching and maybe shooting the shit with whomever and taking notes and sipping soft drinks and nibbling bagels, and you’re eventually bored stiff.

Eventually it was time to leave. I took a last look at the set, thanked Jerry, shook hands and briskly walked off the sound stage and back to my black 240SX Nissan. I eased out of the parking lot and drove north on Ince Blvd. I stopped at a red light at the corner of Ince and Culver Blvd.

Just to my left was a large black limo, idling like me. I looked over and damned if it wasn’t Hackman in the back seat, just sitting there, three or four feet away.

“And so what?” you might ask. I’d just been watching him play the tough submarine captain, saying the same lines over and over. But I was nonetheless fascinated by my close-up view of the guy, and immediately I was telling myself “Jesus, don’t look…don’t be an asshole! They can feel it when fans are staring at them, even if it’s through glass.”

So I snuck a quick peek and turned away. And then another quickie. And then another. Not once did Hackman look in my direction. Maybe he knew I was sneaking peeks but decided not to confront me because I had the decency not to stare. I know that if I’d quickly turned and found him staring right at me it would have been mortifying. Thank God he didn’t.

Several months later I schmoozed with the whole Crimson Tide crew (Jackman, Denzel, Scott, Don and Jerry) at a Marina del Rey junket. A lot of fun, lots of food…a splendid time was had by all.

I remember asking Denzel about the Silver Surfer scene and asking if he had a preference for the Jack Kirby or Moebius version, or whether it had been discussed between takes or whatever. He looked at me, smirked, shook his head and opened his hands, palms up. He was basically saying “I didn’t ask, and I didn’t care.”

Reviews of The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Hulu, 2.26) won’t be posted until Friday, February 19 at 9 ayem Pacific. But surely we’re allowed to acknowledge that Andra Day‘s performance as the gifted, tortured, persecuted and self-destructive Billie Holiday is obviously an Oscar-calibre thang. The film itself is Lee Daniels’ best ever. It’s not just better than Precious but also The Butler — better than both of them put together. But the main thing on my mind is Andra Day for Best Actress, Andra Day for Best Actress, Andra Day for Best Actress.

Right now Viola Davis and Zendaya are currently leading Day among the handicapping Gold Derby schmoes. Which is sorta kinda ridiculous.

All Davis did in Ma Rainey was act huffy and resentful…a performance that was all crust and bluster. And Zendaya can’t overcome that limited range and those liquid shark eyes. Day should be right at the top of this list, and I don’t want to hear any bullshit about it. Her only serious competitors are Promising Young Woman‘s Carey Mulligan (who will probably may win at the end of the day) and Pieces of a Woman‘s Vanessa Kirby. McDormand is excellent in Nomadland, of course, but apparently she’s not happening — she won a Best Actress Oscar three years ago and that’s enough for now.