Friendo: How are you feeling about tomorrow?
HE: The Biden victory starts tomorrow night, concludes Thursday or Friday. Anyone who thinks that Tuesday’s returns will be an either-or, could-go-either-way, “who knows?” thing is living in a nether realm.
Friendo: It’ll come down to four states: Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
HE: Not North Carolina? Not Arizona?
Friendo: I think Trump has NC and maybe AZ, but this is based purely on advanced voting. My prediction is Trump has a slight lead over Biden before we find out the results of WI, PA, MI and MB and MN. This is going to the courts, bruh.
HE: A slight electoral lead over Biden until those four states come in?
Friendo: Three of those four states have installed rules to continue counting ballots until Friday
HE: Right.
Friendo: It’ll be too tight to declare a winner tomorrow, in my opinion. Trump won three of those four states in 2016 so Biden needs to flip them but he is leading in polling in each.
HE: A cliffhanger situation until Thursday or Friday? Naaahh. Tuesday tallies won’t be conclusive, but they’ll be pretty encouraging. If, God forbid, it somehow goes the wrong way regardless, everyone will be blaming wokesters and cancel culture.

Everyone who attended Kendall Jenner‘s birthday party last Saturday night (Halloween) had to first be insta-tested and given a clean bill of health before going upstairs. It isn’t cool to throw a big party these days, of course, but if you’re gonna say “fuck it, I don’t care, life is short, let’s do it anyway”, Kendall chose the right methodology.

The party happened at Harriet’s Rooftop atop WeHo’s 1 Hotel.

Roughly 100 coolios attended, including Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Jaden Smith, Hailey Baldwin, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Scott Disick, Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott, Paris Hilton, Justine Skye, Quavo, Winnie Harlow, Swaeetie and Doja Cat. I trust they had a good time and that the testing was efficient and everyone’s fine, etc . We’re all entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that includes the above. No one’s better than anyone else.

But I have a question. Imagine for the sake of imagining that Kendall’s guests were on a Los Angeles-to-Seoul flight aboard a privately-charted jumbo jet, and an hour or two past Hawaii the jet was shot down by terrorists and sank into the Pacific. Apart from the loss of life suffered by the crew, how exactly would the world be a lesser place as a result of this tragedy?

Imagine that a gathering of old-time Hollywood hotshots were all on a Pan American Clipper flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu in early 1939…Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Joel McCrea, Olivia De Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Don Ameche, Jean Arthur, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Victor Fleming, Alfred Hitchcock, Viven Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Ann Sheridan, Ray Milland, Rosalind Russell. And an hour or two west of Los Angeles the plane was shot down by Axis agents and sank into the Pacific. Would the world have been a lesser place?

“Oh, yeah, he’s definitely going to leave. The secret about people like [Trump} is, a lot of bluster and a lot of overcompensation, but most boys are actually cowards. And I can tell you the President does not like personal confrontation. He’ll tweet at you, but then if he sees in you in person, like was with Chris Wallace last summer, he tries to act lovey-dovey.

“It’s very typical, that middle-school bullying behavior…he’ll leave. The Secret Service and the Marines have already talked about the idea of him not leaving and who’s going to escort him out of the White House. There’s no chance that’s gonna happen. The defeat, the electoral defeat…he’ll be the third U.S. President in the last 120 years to only serve one term. That’ll be humiliating enough. I don’t think he wants to be physically escorted out of the White House by the U.S. Secret Service.

“His personality is bluster and saying things, but he really isn’t a doer that way. I think he will blow out. He’s a showman, but he actually hates the fucking job. Barack Obama has him read perfectly. [“He’s a bullshitter.”] He doesn’t like the arduous nature of the job. He doesn’t like the pain in the ass [stuff].” — former White House Communications Director, all-around New York financial hotshot and gregarious media gadfly Anthony Scaramucci, speaking with The Sun‘s Henry Holloway.

Like everyone else I was seething in the days immediately following Trump’s election. But I was surprised and touched by Kate McKinnon‘s SNL performance of Leonard Cohen‘s Hallelujah. The lyrics are about despair and resignation and feeling “cold and broken”, and I thought to myself “wow, this is ballsy…an SNL opener that’s frankly glum and saying “God, this hurts.'”

And then the song ended and McKinnon turned to an MCU camera and said, “I’m not giving up and neither should you.” And with those eight words, the spell was shattered.

Well, maybe there’s a God above / But all I’ve ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya / And it’s not a cry that you hear at night / It’s not somebody who’s seen the light / It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah / Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Friendo: “If I told you that I recently saw Bari Weiss on TV talking about cancel culture, what show do you think that would have been on? Probably Real Time with Bill Maher, right? Well, she was doing that very thing five or six days ago…on The View. I thought: Shit, that’s a change. And I think it’s a sign. Within a year, I could see the mainstream media’s trendy new meme being ‘Has cancel culture gone too far?’ Do people in media REALLY want to work with a yoke of ideological censorship hanging over their heads? No. There has to be a reaction against this. And with no ‘But look at Trump!’ to point to, the wokester argument is going to carry a lot less weight.”

West Hollywood and Beverly Hills retailers are boarding up their windows. The concern, I’m presuming, is that wokester shitheads will trash storefronts if Trump wins. Or Trumpsters will do the same if Biden wins. Neither scenario is likely.

No, you probably didn’t. Not until I mentioned it. But 1.66:1 was totally standard in England and Europe back in the day. Which is why I’ve long claimed to have seen a 1.66 version of Rosemary’s Baby in Paris back in the mid ’70s. Like Dr. No and Goldfinger, From Russia With Love was shot at 1.37:1 It was projected at 1.66:1 in Europe and 1.85:1 in the U.S.

In 2016 the honest Hillary Clinton argument went something like “look, we get it, she’s Ma Clinton…not your favorite person…isn’t naturally charismatic and probably too flush, too aloof, too establishment, too mainstream…but she’s brilliant and well seasoned and will steer a steady course…I mean, you can’t be thinking of voting for that bully, that blowhard, that fact-averse sociopath…c’mon, there’s no choice here…Hillary may rub you the wrong way but you’ll be cutting off your nose to spite your face if you vote for Trump…please don’t do that.”

Hollywood Elsewhere voted for the only sane major-party candidate that year….there was no other choice.

2020 is a different deal. At the very least no one is saying “hold your nose and vote for Biden.” They’re saying “for God’s sake, get rid of that asshole by electing a better alternative…choose a decent man, please.”

How much of a juggernaut or a chugging locomotive is David Fincher‘s Mank? N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” columnist Kyle Buchanan has posted an assessment of the situation.

Mank is a comer, he says. It even has “the look of a potential juggernaut.” Yeah, it does — I agree. I said this two or three days ago, but one mark of an excellent film is immediately wanting to see it another couple of times. That’s how I felt after last Thursday’s viewing.

Except it’s quite the smarthouse thing — gently or obliquely emotional but mostly a Hollywood lore head-trip movie, And it’s aimed almost solely at seasoned, well-educated film sophistos. Which is one reason why guys like San Francisco Chronicle critic Bob Strauss are doing cartwheels.

Brilliant and savory as it is, Mank is mostly about the ways of genius mixed with the rigorous discipline of writing, the slow ways of alcohol poisoning and the complexities of studio politics.

It could be argued that a deeper, sadder emotional current can be found in Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland, which is probably Mank‘s strongest Best Picture competitor as we speak.

Yes, there’s something inscrutable about Frances McDormand‘s lead character — a woman who declines a third-act offer of love, companionship and financial security. It’s a head scratcher that leaves you with an inescapable conclusion — i.e., that she’s finally a tragic character.

There’s a “fake news” subplot in Mank (about a pre-scripted, Louis B. Mayer-funded newsreel hit job against California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair) that injects a certain offer present-day relevance. And yet Nomadland is more rooted in 21st Century angst and anxiety. It comes from the Great Recession of ten years ago. It’s Grapes of Wrath-y.

And yet, speaking as the son of an alcoholic who entered AA in his mid 50s and a sober person myself for the last 8 1/2 years, I thought it was significant that I gradually relaxed and grew fond of Oldman and his performance. I haven’t much room for boozing characters as a rule (hanging with Albert Finney‘s drunk in Under The Volcano was a chore for me), but I came to feel for Gary’s Mankiewicz, for who he was deep down.

Buchanan: “In a year bereft of major action spectaculars and blockbuster theatrical releases, Mank has the opportunity to cut a wide swath through the technical categories, notching nods for its high-end production design, editing and costumes.” HE: No argument whatsoever.

But of course, he doesn’t mention the elephant in the room, which is the climate of woke terror that has all but completely taken hold (i.e., been submitted to) in progressive circles, and which faintly haunts every conversation.

It’s not written on parchment or carved in stone that the Academy can no longer give a Best Picture Oscar to a movie that’s entirely about elite, old-school cisgender white guys, but you know that a certain portion of the Academy believes this is a dicey porposition.

This is partly, I believe, why Martin Scorsese‘s masterful The Irishman was so widely dismissed last year. Nobody wanted to embrace another white guy movie, not to mention another Scorsese goombah gangster story. It didn’t fit the vision of the New Academy Kidz. They preferred to celebrate an overlong, good-but-not-great Bong Joon-ho social-portraiture flick with a massive second-act plothole and a prolonged, vaguely shitty ending.

I’m speaking of a general mindset among younger, fringier, multicultural and international Academy voters — those who became members over the last three years after Cheryl Boone Isaacs and Dawn Hudson sought to change the character of the Academy by diminishing the influence of 60-plus white guys.

So basically…what? Fincher wins Best Director and Nomadland wins Best Picture? Or vice versa?

Remember that mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan and and Wisconsin probably won’t be fully counted until Wednesday (11.4), Thursday (11.5) or even Friday (11.6). As Covid-resistant conservative Republicans are expected to live-vote on Tuesday in greater numbers than Democrats and Independents, it’s possible that Trump tallies will initially be higher than Biden’s in these three states…maybe.

So the drama will begin on Tuesday night, but it’s unlikely to conclude. Perhaps the numbers will favor Biden anyway. but the count may not be statistically conclusive until Friday, or five days hence.

I only wish there could be a nationwide referendum on wokeness on Tuesday. On every ballot in every state, an optional supplemental questionaire would read “on a scale of one to ten how much do you hate wokester shithead protestors, especially those from the northwest and double especially those who trash local retail storefronts whenever there’s another horrible, unwarranted shooting by trigger-happy cops?” It would be deeply gratifying to just punch in a response. Just to say this and be heard.

Remember that Atlantic poll from almost exactly two years ago? 79 percent of whites hate wokesters. Ditto Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), American Indians (88 percent) and African Americans (75%).

Vote for the longtime vice-presidential partner of the guy who yesterday made a three-point swish shot in Flint, Michigan, and who made two similar shots in the Middle East in July 2016. All my life I’ve bowed down to beautiful basketball players and elegant pianists. I say this as someone who’s somewhat lacking in physical grace and coordination (I certainly don’t have the natural athletic prowess of my older son Jett), although my dance moves are definitely better than Trump’s.

Without giving it a second thought I bought this Eyes Wide Shut mask 20 years ago in Venice. It wasn’t just the Kubrick connection (his team allegedly purchased a truckload of masks from Ca’ Macana) but the pencil drawings on the mask’s left side. I wore it for ten minutes on my flight back home and also during a relatively recent West Hollywood Halloween parade, but mostly it’s just been a wall ornament.

No parade tonight, of course, but many people along Santa Monica Blvd. are costumed all the same.

Postscript: Last night an attorney friend and I tried to enjoy outdoor Japanese dining on Santa Monica Blvd. WeHo was appropriately besieged with Halloween revelers and the usual (if diminished) array of exotic cosplay. The problem was the constant noise and alarm provided by municipal services — flashing cop cars in a big hurry, howling ambulance sirens and (my personal favorite) a large thundering helicopter circling overhead. In short, Bring Out The Dead meets Apocalypse Now. Where did I get the idea that it might be otherwise?