“I’m not what you would call a happy man, but I have a pleasant enough disposition to get through cocktails.”

– John Ford

Regular readers must be aware by now what I think of Donald Trump. The hell of it is: Joss Whedon’s tv programs and movies are good. They are filled with wit and with a genuine appreciation of the human capacity for heroism. But, politically, Joss Whedon is obviously a totally self-congratulatory conformist airhead.

Whedon has started his own Super PAC, called “Save The Day,” which is intended, just like Spike’s self-sacrifice in the final episode of Buffy to close the hell mouth, save the world from ending, and… elect Hillary Clinton!

Joss Whedon is going to do his personal bit to save the world from a Trumpocalypse by producing a series of videos featuring famous Hollywood actors, all self-importantly preening for the camera while delivering cutesy, but puerile, admonitions to register and vote… against Trump and in favor of everything really stupid people believe to be good.

Yech! One wanted to believe that Tony Stark (Robert Downey) is smart. The sad truth is obviously that he is a total waste, and might just as well go back to the cocaine. One used to believe that Julianne Moore was desirable. The sad reality is that she is a left-wing shrew with a foul mouth.

These people are so incredibly stupid, so incredibly self-entitled, and so incredibly annoying that one could almost be in favor of letting the Great Old Ones rise again and destroy the world just to be rid of them (“The Cabin in the Woods” (2012) allusion), or vote for The Donald just to spite them. Almost.

Josh Karp, in Vanity Fair, recounts the story of another never-finished Orson Welles masterpiece film, The Other Side of the Wind. Imagine a film about a troubled director in which Orson Welles collaborated with both John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. What could possibly go wrong?

In early 1970, director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood after more than a decade in Europe, and later that year he began work on his innovative comeback movie—The Other Side of the Wind.

The movie was the story of a legendary director named Jake Hannaford, who returns to Hollywood from years of semi-exile in Europe with plans to complete work on his own innovative comeback movie—also entitled The Other Side of the Wind.

Welles said it wasn’t autobiographical.

The story line of The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day. At one point, Welles intended to shoot it in eight weeks. Instead, it took six years, and the film remains unfinished nearly four decades later.

Based on a script Welles revised nightly, the film was financed principally by the Shah of Iran’s brother-in-law and offered possibly one last shot at topping Citizen Kane. The making of The Other Side of the Wind began as a tale of art imitating life, but ultimately morphed into life imitating art, on a set where it sometimes became difficult to tell the difference between the movie and real life.

During production many people asked Welles what his movie was all about. To his star, John Huston, he once replied, “It’s a film about a bastard director…. It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”

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Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Richard Dreyfuss in front row at Ted Cruz rally.

The actor, well known for portraying Dick Cheney as a villain, provoked alarm in Hollywood by showing up last Saturday at a Ted Cruz rally in Iowa.

Dallas Morning News:

AMES, Iowa — Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss – star of Jaws and Mr. Holland’s Opus – was on hand, somewhat inexplicably. He quietly nabbed a reserved front-row seat as Cruz made his own entrance. Afterward, in a brief interview, he said he wasn’t there to support Cruz and isn’t supporting any candidate.

“It’s the politics of my country, so I’m interested,” he said.

“No,” he said, when it was pointed out that his presence suggested support. “It suggests that I’m interested in what he has to say.”

“We come at it from different places. But he reveres the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When you seek to be the president of a country that has 300 million people, you can’t get everyone on the same platform. You can’t. But if you can make it clear that the most important things are shared, then fine.”

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So upset with this evidence of ideological treason was the entertainment community that Dreyfuss’s son felt obliged to defend his father at the Puffington Host:

My father, actor Richard Dreyfuss, is taking heat for attending a Ted Cruz rally. I shouldn’t have to write this, but here goes: curiosity is not a sin.

My father went to a Ted Cruz rally. My father also won an oscar in the ’70s, and his name is Richard Dreyfuss. Those two things are only related because by virtue of being famous, my father’s attendance at a Cruz rally got written about by a couple of media outlets. Those write-ups were absorbed by a number of mouth-breathers, and so began The Dumb.

Let me clarify. When asked if his being there suggested he supported Cruz, he responded, “It suggests that I’m interested in what he has to say… It’s the politics of my country, so I’m interested.” This seems like a pretty clear answer to me. I don’t necessarily endorse these views, but I’m curious about them because they are poised to have a very big effect on me and my country.

But clarity be damned, the same day as those articles were published I started getting calls and complaints asking me why my father was a Ted Cruz supporter. This is where we should leave the story of “Richard Goes To Ted Talk” behind, and just start talking about the principle of the thing. I’m really not trying to talk about my dad. I just want to address The Dumb.

It is not shocking that people mistake curiosity with support, but it is pathetic and it is tragic.

If you can’t stand to listen to an idea, it does not prove that you oppose it. Refusing to show interest in a different perspective should not serve as a badge of pride in your own ideas. It actually serves the exact opposite function. It proves that you don’t even understand your own opinion. If you can’t understand the argument you disagree with, then you don’t have the right to disagree with it with any authority, nor do you really have a grasp on what your own idea means in its context.

I’m not saying all ideas need to be validated, or even respected. There are absolutely some beliefs that simply deserve to be tarred and feathered and never given the time of day. Bigotry falls under this umbrella. But when some ideas are so prevalent that they hold huge sway over your own country, you’re an idiot if you decide to stuff your ears with your fingers and start humming.

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As Christopher Buckley noted on Facebook:

Wunst they wuz a little actor, an Oscar he din’t lose:–
An’ when he went to hear a speech by Texas Sen’r Cruz,
His fans was heerd ta holler, an’ the left was heerd to bawl,
An’ when sonny said “he’s curious!”, they din’t believe a’tall!
An’ they hounded him in Hollywood, an’ Twitter, an’ the press,
An’ angry talk’d at tha Whole Foods, an’ ever’-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz thist his pants an’ roundabout:–
An’ the Liber-urls ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

Guitarplayer.com has a story not very complimentary to Quentin Tarantino.

The makers of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight never told Martin Guitars how a historic acoustic guitar on loan from its museum came to be destroyed on the set of the 2015 film.

Dick Boak of C.F. Martin said the company did not learn that the instrument was smashed by actor Kurt Russell until the incident was reported on Tuesday by Reverb.com, an online marketplace for gear. That story was itself based on an interview with the film’s sound mixer, Mark Ulano, that ran on SSNInsider.com.

Boak, director of the museum, archives and special projects for C.F. Martin & Co, said the company was initially told the guitar had been damaged in an accident on the set. “We assumed that a scaffolding or something fell on it,” Boak told Reverb.com, in response to its story.

The film’s script included a scene, shown below, in which Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character, Daisy Domergue, plays the Martin guitar before Russell’s character, John Ruth, smashes it against a beam. A prop guitar was supposed to have been substituted at the last moment. According to Ulano, Russell was not told of the swap and proceeded to destroy the Martin, an act that is retained in the film’s release. …

According to the SSNInsider interview, upon learning of the guitar’s destruction, Martin reps asked, “Do you need another one and can we please have all the pieces to display in our museum?”

While the pieces were returned to Martin for examination, Boak said restoration is impossible.

“We want to make sure that people know that the incident was very distressing to us,” Boak says. “We can’t believe that it happened.”

As a result of the incident, Boak said Martin will no longer loan guitars to movies “under any circumstances.”

There is a small category of movies which fail to make much of a mark during their theatrical release; but which, when they make it onto television, and are available to be watched repeatedly, begin to commend themselves to audiences in a different and special way and which then proceed to metamorphize into beloved classics.

Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) is that kind of film. Nobody thought much of it at all until television networks adopted it as particularly Christmas-themed, and began making a big deal of broadcasting it around the holiday. Before long, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” turned into a regular seasonal American ritual.

“The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) was a failure in its theatrical release that did not even recapture its production costs, but Ted Turner (then owning Castle Rock, the film’s production company) later essentially sold the movie to himself (as the TNT network) and began broadcasting it in 1997 over and over again. The film slowly and gradually grew in audience acceptance as a sort of 20th century Les Miserables, and now routinely tops the IMBD list of most-beloved films of all time.

Shawshank Redemption phenomenon

“The Big Lebowski” (1998) followed the same pattern, of confusing and boring viewers in the theater, but coming into its own with the aid of repetitive viewings on television.

The Big Lebowski phenomenon

NBC:

Exciting news for Big Lebowski fans around the world as a sequel to the cult classic has just been announced.

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, directors of the first Lebowski movie, confirmed with NBC News they will both be returning to direct the sequel.

“We’re thrilled to be coming back to film a second part to this classic movie,” Ethan Coen said. “For years we’ve been staying away from doing this project but when we received this new script and the cast fell into place, it was a no-brainer. We just had to do it.”

Gage Luce, who helped write the new script, spoke with CNN to shed light on the plot behind the highly anticipated sequel.

“Now 18 years later, Maude Lewbowski (played by Julianne Moore) informs The Dude (Jeff Bridges) that they conceived a son together and that he has been kidnapped. The Dude teams up with his estranged brother, played by actor Bill Murray, and fellow bowling partner Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) to track down the child’s whereabouts. Just like the first movie, there’s guaranteed to be plenty of beers, bowling, and laughs.” …

Accompanying the trio on their journey to find the missing teen is Jesus Quintana, played by John Turturro, who stole the show in the original movie. …

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RETRACTION 10/24:

Bummer! The story is not true. It turns out that it was originated by the spoof news site National Report which has a very annoying habit of purveying completely plausible sounding, but entirely false, news stories. National Report often fools people, and this time a number of sources believed the story and picked it up, including me.

Snopes

Thanks to Liberty News for bringing this mistake to my attention in the comments.

“I don’t like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65.” – William Faulkner on Hollywood

Marcelo Zuniga illustrates in a series of videos all the changes that Lucasfilm has made to the original Star Wars Trilogy (and he found a lot of them).

(Watching in Full Screen modes is recommended.)

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Christopher Lee died at 8:30 A.M. last Sunday morning in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London at the age of 93. His family delayed the public announcement of his death until today to allow time for relatives to be notified.

Christopher Lee worked as a character actor in the course of his long career, typically in second-rate horror films, though he was obviously a first-rate human being. He stood 6’5″ (1.9558 m.) in height, spoke six languages, was a world champion fencer, and made a point of performing all his own stunts personally.

Lee was also a political conservative who volunteered to fight for Finland against Soviet Russia during the Winter War, and who then went on to serve as a British commando through the entirety of the Second World War.

He advised Peter Jackson on how properly to sound record a killing during the making of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Dissatisfied with a scene, Christopher asked director Peter Jackson: “Peter, have you ever heard the sound a man makes when he’s stabbed in the back? Well, I have, and I know what to do.”

Christopher Lee became the oldest person to record lead vocals on a heavy metal track when, at the age of 88, he wrote and performed on a progressive symphonic concept album about the life of Charlemagne, from whom he traced his own descent via his mother, an Italian countess.

Christopher Lee remained married to the same woman (a Danish model) for 54 years, and in his later years frequently campaigned for the Tories in national elections.

The younger Christopher Lee as we knew him best.

Robert A. Heinlein

The film version of Atlas Shrugged was financed by outsiders and made, despite Hollywood, which did everything it could to suppress and bury it, as a small-scale, noticeably inexpensive production.

Now, another major libertarian classic, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, portraying a lunar revolt against earthly big government has been scheduled to be made by a major studio with a name director.

Bryan Singer is tackling an adaptation of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, based on the classic sci-fi book by Robert A. Heinlein. Twentieth Century Fox recently picked up the movie rights.

Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim will adapt the book for the project, which will be titled Uprising. Singer is producing with Lloyd Braun of Whalerock Industries and Thor Halvorssen. Executive producers are Andrew Mittman and Jason Taylor, and Alex Lloyd and Richard Martin are co-producing.

Heinlein’s 1966 sci-fi novel centers on about a lunar colony’s revolt against rule from Earth. The novel was nominated for the 1966 Nebula award (honoring the best sci-fi and fantasy work in the U.S.) and won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel in 1967.

An adaptation has been attempted twice before — by DreamWorks, which had a script by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and by Phoenix Pictures, with Harry Potter producer David Heyman attached — but both languished and the rights reverted to Heinlein’s estate.

Several of Heinlein’s novels have been adapted for the big and small screen, including the 1953 film Project Moonbase, the 1994 TV miniseries Red Planet, the 1994 film The Puppet Masters, and — very loosely — the 1997 film Starship Troopers.