Way back when in Boston there was this tallish, slender brunette of 19 or 20 whom I knew and liked a lot, and vice versa. Her name escaped years ago, but we had this moment on a second-floor landing of a staircase inside a Boston apartment building. I had to leave and we were talking a bit before saying goodbye, and then we held our arms out and just sank into this hungry embrace.
She had these long sinewy arms and strong grippy hands and so did I, and we just got wrapped up in the envelopment of it, holding each other closer and tighter than we probably expected to do at first but holding, holding…as close together as our bodies could have been from a standing-up position, and neither easing up.
I don’t know how long we held the position hut it had to have been a good couple of minutes, maybe three. We hadn’t been on intimate terms before this moment and we somehow never went there in the aftermath, and, as noted, I don’t even recall her name. Lotsa love, passion and perspiration over the decades, but after that Beantown staircase hug I never experienced anything like it ever again. Which is why it’s still in my head.
The other day I described it to a friend as a “lesbian hug.” She called it a “mommy goodbye hug.”
Who isn’t jarred and saddened by the idea of suicide (I am anyway), and doubly so by the idea of a possible joint suicide between an older husband and younger wife, and even more so when you throw the couple’s dog into the equation?
So let’s do that — Gene Hackman was absolutely among the greatest actors of the 20th Century, and this is what needs focusing upon and will be focused upon today, tomorrow and for a long time to come.
And yet this is the apparent truth of it: Sometime yesterday the 95 year-old Hackman, presumably dealing with diminished terms of life and apparently as an act of decisive agency and dignity, decided to go to sleep of his own volition, and his 63 year-old pianist wife, Betsy Arakawa, decided to take the journey with him.
And somehow or in some way their dog also died, the thinking presumably being that love and devotion are more important than the mere fact of aliveness. The dog would have been devastated to have been left alone so Gene and Betsy took him/her along.
N.Y. Times: “Before entering the [Hackman] home, the sheriff’s department received confirmation from the fire department and the gas company that it was safe to enter. ‘We’re not going to guess this was an accident or natural causes,” a spokesperson said. ‘It wasn’t typical.’ A previous statement sent out early Thursday by the sheriff’s office said that foul play was not suspected.”
AP: “Hackman, 95, Betsy Arakawa, 63, and their dog were all dead when deputies entered their home to check on their welfare around 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Denise Avila said.”
There will be no end to the negativity if the Academy Award telecast producers fail to insert Hackman into the death reel, and I mean at the very end of it.
“Stoplight with Hackman,” posted on 1.28.21: 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 (Hackman, 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.”
“I’m taking a lot of flack, and getting a lot of death threats, by the way. [But] if we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt. That’s why it has to be done.”
The last year in which Nicole Kidman‘s AMC Theatres turned a profit was 2018 — $110M in the black. They lost $4.56B in 2020, $1.27B in ’21…pandemic. They lost nearly a billion in ’22 ($974M), a mere $397M in ’23 and $352M in ’24…closer and closer to breaking even! AMC’s total 2024 revenue was $4.6B.
Every time I go into an AMC theatre, it’s between 15% to 20% filled….if that. Then again I avoid idiot-level movies.
Sasha Stone has been working on this Hollywood-has-succumbed-to-a-woke-apocalypse Tablet story for a few weeks now. It finally surfaced last night (2.25). It’s called “Awards Daily, was all but assassinated by Rebecca Keegan and The Hollywood Reporter last summer. That aside, Sasha’s article is accurate, well written, honest, straight-shooting. I wanted something meaner and more scathing, but that’s me.
Excerpt: “The woke code is like the Hays Code. The rules weren’t written down, but everyone knew what they were. After Trump’s win, the fear of racism morphed into Salem-like episodes of mass hysteria that would find its way to the Oscars, too. Suddenly, it wasn’t just most people who were racists. Most movies were racist, too. La La Land was racist, so Moonlight had to win. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was racist so The Shape of Water had to win. By the time Green Book came along, everyone in Hollywood had lost their minds.
“After the Green Book [foolery], the Academy began adding new members and purging their older members, with the objective of adding more women and people of color. The only requirement would be that they were somehow involved in film and that they weren’t white and male. Women in Hollywood saw this new rule as a perk for going along with the new system, which targeted white men but not white women.
“Over a period of just a few years, the Academy added approximately 3,000 new members, bringing the total membership of the Academy to around 10,000. Of necessity, most of the new instant Academy members were from foreign countries—the same way most “students of color” at prestige American universities these days are the children of wealthy foreign elites, not the products of our collapsing inner cities.
“The sea change in the Academy’s membership was first felt in 2019 when the South Korean art house film Parasite beat some of the most critically acclaimed and profitable films from American film studios, including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker and 1917. Parasite killed two birds with one stone. Had it not won, all of the winners that night from the major categories would have been white. Parasite ensured that the Oscars made history and had glowing headlines the next day.
“But they also proved something else: that the Oscars were no longer as invested in their traditional job of fortifying the American studio system. Most of the members worked in the industry and cared about its continued success. International voters, whose own film industries are often heavily subsidized by their governments, have no such investment.
“As Hollywood began to rebuild after COVID, there was a shift away from reporting on the domestic box office and more on the global box office, which paints a more optimistic picture of the industry. This is the second year in a row that there are two films double dipping in the Best Picture and International Feature categories.
I’ve been a Brutalist hater for several weeks now, and am certainly as dug into this viewpoint as Matt Walsh is….”a long monotonous journey into the void,” you bet.
That said, Walsh’s statement that “there is no valid excuse for a film to be three and a half hours long” is ignorant and (no offense) forehead-slap embarassing. A few Vulture staffers spelled this out on 1.12.25. No excellent movie is too long, and no awful, punishing, “give me some heroin so I can get through this” movie is too short.
A majority of Gatecrashers voters are still predicting an Adrien Brody win….please God…please let Timothee Chalamet win…please…no Brody, no Brody…no, no…I’m already bummed enough by the likely prospect of Demi Moore taking Best Actress…in my mind everyone and everything connected to The Brutalist must not only be stopped but ground into the pavement. I don’t mean to sound hard or cruel but I don’t care if Brady Corbet is living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Yes, another Blue Velvet of sorts, right?…another take on the dark underbelly of an idyllic American picket-fence domesticity?…a midwestern Diary of a Mad Housewife? Obviously something in that realm. Older white male = perverse-to-the-max bad guy…shocker!
The folks at Amazon MGM are presenting. Nicole Kidman, Gael García Bernal, Matthew Macfadyen (whose Succession performance landed him this role), Jude Hill, Rachel Sennott.
Debuting before the South by Southwest whores in 3.9.25 (Austin cineastes will heartily shriek over anything), followed by some kind of release on 3.27.25.
