Zero Mostel during the blacklist

Zero Mostel self-portrait

Okay, so, about Zero Mostel's testimony before House Unamerican Activities Committee and his days on the blacklist, there's this from Wikipedia:

His testimony won him admiration in the blacklisted community, and in addition to not naming names he also confronted the committee on ideological matters, something that was rarely done. Among other things, he referred to Twentieth Century Fox as "18th Century Fox" (due to its collaboration with the committee), and manipulated the committee members to make them appear foolish. Mostel later commented "What did they think I was going to do - sell acting secrets to the Russians?"

The admiration he received for his testimony did nothing to take him out of the blacklist, however, and the family had to struggle throughout the 1950s with little income. Mostel used this time to work in his studio. Later he said that he cherished those years for the time it had afforded him to do what he loved most. [emphasis added]

I thought that last part might be helpful somehow to those of us sweating out the pandemic, isolated in our homes. I know that some people are in circumstances more dire than others and some people just like being out in public more that I do. I haven't done much of anything whether I love it or not. I just keep relating everything to the pandemic. War of the Worlds, The Day the World Ended, and now The Front.

Woody Allen interview in The Guardian

Rainy Day in New York opens in the UK on June 5th, so Woody Allen has been talking with the British press.

Here's an excellent article from The Guardian, going into detail debunking Mia Farrow's accusations against him.

So many people today were born after this was reported in the press, or they didn't pay attention to it at the time, or have forgotten what was reported. A lot of them don't seem to know there's any evidence to consider. They think you just pick a side.

There's too much to quote but here's the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/29/do-i-really-care-woody-allen-comes-out-fighting

Martin Ritt's The Front, 1976, Woody Allen, Zero Mostel

The Front was one of the very few movies in which Woody Allen starred but didn't write or direct. After Scenes from a Mall, people got the idea that the poor guy couldn't act at all except in his own movies, but he was fine in this. He can only play one character. And you sort of forget that that one character usually isn't very bright. He's in over his head in this film, but so is everyone else. They're up against something bigger and dumber than they know how to deal with.

Allen plays Howard Prince, a cashier in a restaurant. He has a friend from high school (Michael Murphy) who's now a television writer. He's been blacklisted and wants Prince to work as a front, to submit his scripts as if he (Prince) wrote them.

Soon he's doing this for other blacklisted writers. They're all Communists or leftists. They're not Democrats who've been falsely accused.

Zero Mostel as Hecky Brown, a leftist comedian who appears as host of an anthology series on what appears to be live TV.

I read that some who survived the blacklist were angry with the movie. They thought it was too comedic with Allen in the lead. It doesn't seem that way now. It was released between Love and Death and Annie Hall. Allen's reputation was different then. His movies, even the comedies, are more serious now and that may change how the movie is perceived.

I thought it might be an antidote to The Majestic, starring Jim Carrey as a blacklisted screen writer. But Carrey plays an apolitical victim who's blacklisted due to a misunderstanding. It stupidly ends with Carrey's triumph over McCarthyism although his victory comes because he names someone as a Communist.

There are no triumphs in The Front.

Directed by Martin Ritt. Written by Walter Bernstein.

Free on Amazon Prime.

Woody Allen on Ronan Farrow's shoddy "journalism"

Ronan Farrow

From an interview with Woody Allen in the UK Telegraph. Allen discusses his horrible son, Ronan Farrow, Timothee Chalamet and more. This except starts with his comment on Farrow:

“Up until a couple of days ago I would have said ‘Gee, this is great, he’s done some good investigative journalism and more power to him, I wish him all the success in the world,” [Allen] says. “But now it’s come out that his journalism has not been so ethical or honest. Now, I found him to not be an honest journalist in relation to me at all, but I write that off because, you know, I understand he’s loyal to his mother. But now people are beginning to realise that it isn’t just in relation to me that his journalism has been kind of shoddy, and I’m not so sure that his credibility is going to last.”

Dispassionate doesn’t quite capture Allen’s tone as he talks about this. Extreme nonchalance is more like it. The emotional drawbridge was clearly hoisted up years ago, and though he happily and fully answers any question you put to him, it still feels as if you’re standing on the far side of the moat, throwing stones at the portcullis. The same equanimity comes into play when he talks about the actors who have publicly disowned him since the revival of Dylan’s accusation, including Colin Firth, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Kate Winslet (more opaquely), and now Timothée Chalamet, A Rainy Day in New York’s leading man.

Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Diane Keaton and Jeff Goldblum are among those to have spoken out in his defence, while last year, Michael Caine walked back his earlier disavowal, describing the allegation as “hearsay”.

In A Rainy Day in New York, Chalamet plays the now-familiar figure of the Allen stand-in – here a bookish gadabout called Gatsby Welles, whose romantic trip to Manhattan with his girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning) goes whimsically awry. Like many of Allen’s late-late films – and this is a good one – much of it feels beamed in from 50 years ago. Though it’s set in the present, Chalamet croons a Chet Baker number at the piano, and cracks wise about Lerner and Loewe’s Gigi. That it works as well as it does comes down hugely to Allen’s three vivacious young leads: Chalamet, Fanning, and Selena Gomez, who plays a young actress on the rise.

Both Fanning and Gomez have artfully deflected attempts to extract apologies for appearing in the film. But in a January 2018 Instagram post, Chalamet said he’d come to realise “that a good role isn’t the only criteria for accepting a job” and he would donate his salary to charity, adding that he didn’t “want to profit from [his] work on the film”.

In his book, Allen explains away Chalamet’s mea culpa as pre-Oscar nerves. (In the end Chalamet was Oscar-nominated, but lost to Gary Oldman.) “He made a mistake,” Allen says. “He was nervous about wanting to win it, and it turned out to be a poor decision because he didn’t win it… Perhaps when he’s older he won’t feel that way. I can only say that I had a wonderful time working with him, and I liked him, and I was surprised when he denounced the project – well, not the project, but me. I found it hard to believe that he felt that way, having worked with him closely for a couple of months.”

...

Did he ever worry that he was finished? Today he says not; he’s finding the allegation “hasn’t resonated in any real practical or detailed way” away from the media churn. “I still make my movies, I still get my plays produced. My following has never been huge but it’s always been loyal, and has remained for the most part intact. Every now and then there’s an annoying little glitch when an actor says they’re not going to work with you, but I just get a different actor. Not the end of the world.”

Planning an outing

I did some looking online and found an old friend's grave. He died twenty-four years ago of a drug overdose. I don't know if he ever really counted me as a friend. We only saw each other at school. He was very nice. When another kid started talking about the party they had over the weekend, he subtly gestured to him to shut up because I was standing right there and hadn't been invited.

But I was the one who came to hear his band twelve years later after he had gone through treatment for drug addiction.

I had gotten in on the ground floor of his drug problem. He was at school at age 14 or so. I had given up hanging around him by then, but I happened to be there while he talked to another kid about the set up in his bedroom. There was a built-in desk with drawers. He had taken out the drawers and glued on false drawer fronts and in the empty space put some marijuana plants and some grow lights. I wonder where he got the money. I was impressed at the amount of work he put into it. He said his mother came into his room to put his clothes away in some other drawers. I don't know how it worked out, but he didn't think she'd suspect a thing.

Like a lot of drug addicts, when he got off drugs, he was stuck at the emotional level he was at when he started using. He was in his late twenties and was losing his hair, but he was in a punk rock band with four teenagers. The oldest was fifteen. The youngest was their singer who looked thirteen and could have passed for twelve. That kid was the band's Achilles' heel. It turned out he was a runaway. He had a brush with police and they sent him home to his parents who lived in the South. That was the end of the group.

My friend relapsed some time after that. When he was on drugs, he was in a constant state of rage. Someone who worked at the treatment center saw him digging through a dumpster. He waved and said hi, and he yelled obscenities back at him. I only saw him once at that stage and it was the same thing, this look of intense anger and disgust on his face.

Poor devil. Died at age thirty-three. I didn't know about it until several years later. I'd look for him online from time to time and found nothing. I finally searched for his band. I found their old My Space page and learned what happened to him.

Now, another several years later, I did another search and found where he was buried.

It's at least a forty minute drive to the cemetery if I can find it. It's in farm country southwest of town. I'm thinking about driving down there.

Buddy Foster, Mayberry RFD

It's on TV now. Mayberry RFD. The episode I mentioned before, with Buddy Foster. The brief, innocuous line of dialog that haunted me for years which it turns out may not have been in this thing.

I didn't remember this, but Ken Berry had a stunt in it. He climbs a crude wooden ladder up a water tower. He's a couple of stories up. The ladder is too straight, isn't at an angle which makes it look dangerous. And there are TWO ladders. One goes halfway up, then there's a platform with the water tank on it and there's another one going to the top of the tank. The slightest slip and he could have been horribly injured. But he climbed down effortlessly, staying in character the whole time.

Ken Berry was a tougher customer than I imagined.

Reminds me of two other things. All this is stuff I've written about before.

There was the episode of that practical joke show where Dick Van Patten calmly lies to a man pretending to be a goon working for a bookie threatening his friend.

And there was Scotty Beckett, former child actor who, as an adult, was reduced to playing a character named "Winky" on Rocky Jones: Space Ranger. Beckett was an alcoholic with a gambling problem and was found passed out with a gun in a hotel that had just been robbed. He didn't have the loot on him so they didn't charge him with robbery, but they got him for carrying a gun. He fled to Mexico City. When Mexican police came to his hotel to question him about the bad checks he'd been passing, he got into a gunfight with them.

Hollywood's toughest star.

From "Ronan Farrow Too Good to be True"

I'll just quote the conclusion of Ben Smith's New York Times article:

Farrow has a big following on social media, too, and some of the same tendencies that undermine his reporting show up there. In January, when jurors were being selected for the Weinstein trial, they were asked what they had read about Weinstein to see if they could serve impartially. Farrow tweeted that a “source involved in Weinstein trial tells me close to 50 potential jurors have been sent home because they said they’d read Catch and Kill.” 

Farrow was not in the courtroom that day, and he told me last week that his source stands by that figure. But the court reporter, Randy Berkowitz, told me that he recalled laughing with lawyers and court staff the day after about Farrow’s tweet, which he said was seen as “ridiculous.” 

And Jan Ransom, a reporter who covered the trial for The Times, was there. The actual number of potential jurors who read the book, according to Ransom’s reporting? Two.

Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York

Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York is the top-grossing film in theaters today. It's the most popular movie in South Korea where theaters have just re-opened. It's made $21 million worldwide. Will be released in the UK soon.

According to Roger Friedman on Showbiz 411:

I know, when #MeToo started, a lot of actors were cornered into saying they’d never work with Woody again. But now that his memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” has stated his case and explained his side of things, it’s time to move on. 

I do have it on good authority that Chalamet has seen the film, and loved it. He is said to have remarked he thought it was his best work so far. I totally agree. Elle Fanning is always good, she’s lovely in this and very funny. Selena is the revelation. What a film career she could have playing a smart cookie in smart comedies.

Chalamet was one of those who vowed never to work with Allen again. Allen said in an interview:

‘Timothée told my sister [the film producer Letty Aronson] it was important for him to say what he did at the time because he was nominated for an Academy Award [for best actor in Call Me By Your Name last year] and he needed to steer clear of any association. It was a tactical thing."

They keep repeating that Chalamet donated his entire salary from the film to the #MeToo movement, but they never say how much that was. Allen pays actors the union minimum, so it was probably no more than $20 thousand. Chalamet is a millionaire. Others in the cast donated a lot more than that and said they'd like to work with Allen again.

Of course, movie theaters are closed in much of the world and a lot of the other movies being shown are also available on streaming video. Still, it's the top grossing film and people are risking their health to see it.

Ronan Farrow tried to kill profile of Soon-yi Previn

There's more on Ronan Farrow. The New York Post has run a story about Farrow trying to stop a profile of Soon-Yi Previn from running in New York magazine. This after all the crap from Farrow about people trying to stop his reporting on Harvey Weinstein. 

Ronan Farrow has denounced Moses Farrow and Soon-Yi for talking about the abuse they suffered at the hands of Mia Farrow. 

Soon-Yi was seventeen when Ronan was born. Moses was ten.  It's safe to say that Ronan has no memory of Soon-Yi before she was an adult and no memory of Moses before he was in high school. He has no idea how they were treated as children but he felt free to call them liars for daring to talk about it.

From the Post article:

[Ronan] Farrow and his family directed a pressure campaign toward top brass at New York magazine in the days before they published Merkin’s lengthy profile of Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of Woody Allen and adoptive daughter of Allen’s ex Mia Farrow, Merkin — who has never spoken publicly about the conflict — told The Post. 

“I wasn’t used to this level of fear … fear of Ronan, of being sued, of the power of Mia and Ronan, simply culturally, their power on Twitter,” Merkin said. 

... 

Merkin’s story included Previn’s brutal assessment of Mia Farrow’s parenting and her dismissal of decades-long Farrow family allegations that Allen sexually assaulted his 7-year-old adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992. 

... 

The alleged pressure campaign succeeded in knocking the story off the cover of the Sept. 17 issue, which Merkin says she was “practically promised” in exchange for agreeing to changes from Team Farrow. 

The Farrows also specifically demanded the insertion of a line conceding Merkin had been “friends” with Allen for over 40 years. They cited her 2014 book, “The Fame Lunches,” in which she revealed she developed a correspondence with Allen after writing a fan letter to him. Allen also helped Merkin while she was suffering from depression and encouraged her writing career. 

After the piece came out, critics zeroed in on this admission of friendship to savage Merkin as incapable of reporting objectively. 

“I wasn’t that friendly with Woody Allen — saw him maybe once or twice, if that, a year for a drink,” Merkin said. “I was never invited to his Christmas parties or any of that stuff.” 

... 

Merkin, 65, a former staff writer at the New Yorker, has spent decades covering hyper-litigious people and institutions. But she says nothing compared to the full-court press the Farrows brought to bear.

... 

The pressure campaign included a direct and contentious call from Ronan Farrow...to then-New York magazine editor-in-chief Adam Moss demanding he pull the plug on the 9,000-word story, a person who spoke to the former editor about the matter told The Post. 

“Ronan did call Moss and Moss expressed unhappiness about the call. [Farrow] definitely tried to prevent New York magazine from publishing,” the source said. The magazine also confirmed Farrow did try to “discourage” the piece. 

... 

“Ronan is a powerful journalist now with lots of connections. It had absolutely influence on what we’re doing,” Merkin’s editor, Laurie Abraham, told Merkin in a Sept. 10 email explaining the phone call. 

There was also a flurry of emails from lawyers and other representatives of Dylan Farrow, now 34, to the magazine, said Merkin. 

A New York magazine source confirmed to The Post that PR reps for Dylan and family did reach out but insisted the correspondence had been “standard for a controversial piece” and that no lawyers were involved. 

Emails to Merkin from Abraham viewed by The Post, however, alluded to the “assertiveness of Dylan’s legal team” and warned that Moss was “nervous.” 

Merkin ... also says Team Farrow was able to obtain at least a partial, and possibly full, draft of her story before publication, a dire concern she raised to her editors at the time. 

... 

Dylan Farrow told The Post her efforts were necessary to push back against “falsehoods that Woody Allen has been pushing for a long time.” 

“I did my best to respond to inaccuracies and flat-out lies about my assault and my family, and I was shocked that a magazine I respected was planning to run a one-sided piece on such a sensitive topic pertaining my childhood sexual abuse,” she said. “So, yes, I expressed my very real concerns about that, and I’m glad I did, because if I hadn’t, there would have been even more misinformation in what was already a puff piece about my abuser written by his friend.” 

Ronan Farrow declined to comment, though a person close to him insisted Farrow “didn’t want to kill that story,” and accused the magazine of “deeply unethical” behavior. 

He “only wanted to understand the story better, so he could advise his sister, who was worried about a piece that discussed her sexual assault,” the source continued.

War of the Worlds, 2005, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg

A comedian was making fun of Ellen Degeneres. On her sit-com which I've never seen, she played an employee in a store of some kind. As the show became successful, she decided she was too big to play a mere employee and that her character should OWN the store. Like if Charlie Chaplin became a huge star and thought his Little Tramp should start wearing a well-fitting suit. If Sergeant Bilko decided he should be CAPTAIN Bilko. If Mary Tyler Moore decided Mary Richards should work at a big successful TV station.

War of the Worlds starts with Tom Cruise as a crane operator unloading shipping containers at a sea port. He's their ace crane operator. No one is as good a crane operator as him. They desperately need him to work because no one can unload shipping containers like he can. It had nothing to do with anything to come in the movie. He doesn't use his advanced crane abilities to defeat the Martians.

We can blame Tom Cruise and his massive ego for this. And Spielberg obviously.

If you don't like Steven Spielberg, people will accuse you of insincerity. They can't imagine anyone not especially caring for his work. It's just GOT to be an affectation. I can't put my finger on what I can't stand about him, but trying to sit through this movie, I feel that I don't hate him nearly enough.

Oh, and here's the scene. Tom Cruise starts acting crazy saying "funny" things then throws a tantrum. He does it in every movie. In this case he starts making peanut butter sandwiches making "funny" comments, then throws one of them against a window. There's a YouTube video of him in A Few Good Men yelling funny things at his co-counsel, talking like he's a funny game show host, then sweeping breakable items off a table in a fit of rage. I think it's a Scientology thing because Will Smith and John Travolta keep doing the same thing. The rubes commenting on the video thought this is fine acting.

Sitting here watching the giant robots marching on humanity, I suddenly heard a loud, loud roar outside. It kept getting louder. I have my window wide open. I got up and looked out and there were four F-15's flying low over the city. And now it sounds like they're coming back.

In the movie they're hiding in a ruined house wondering how long their food will last, something a lot of us can identify with. I'll need to put on a mask and rubber gloves and go to a store in a day or two.

Katha Pollitt vs Tara Reade

Feminist Katha Pollitt wrote a column in The Nation magazine attacking Tera Reade's sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden. She brings up slight inconsistencies in her story, the fact that she supported Sanders in the election, although I'm not sure why supporting the candidate who didn't sexual assault her over the one who did would raise doubts about her credibility.

Pollitt tried to raise her little doubts. They do that in every case, including the ones that are proven to be true. Look at Weinstein, or Brett Kavanaugh. It's not hard to do.

Pollitt decided to start with a joke. She said she would vote for Biden even if he boiled babies and ate them. Pollitt wrote a recent pro-abortion book called Pro---she doesn't think her terrible joke is going to come up in abortion debates? If she wanted to start with a joke, why didn't she write something funny? She thinks the reaction to it---that more people have attacked that than the rest of the column---is somehow a point in her favor.

Cannibalism isn't even a crime in most places. Cannibals get locked up for murder. How they dispose of their victims is a secondary issue. Biden has in fact played a role in the deaths of thousands of babies in Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Syria and elsewhere.

Pollitt herself is outraged that anyone would dare boycott Israel over its slaughter of Palestinian children, not to mention the adults. What is her feminist reasoning behind that? Blood is thicker than brains apparently.

All this is after Pollitt's column attacking "the left" for defending Julian Assange. "...when it comes to rape, the left still doesn’t get it."

If abortion is Pollitt's issue, why the hatred for Russia? She attacks Reade for failing to adequately hate Vladimir Putin. You can get an abortion in any hospital in Russia and the hospitals are free. Most of the doctors there are women, they're all trained in performing abortions and they consider it medically ethical. You couldn't ban abortion there if you wanted to. Now that "Russiagate" has completely fallen apart, are we still supposed to hate Russia? For what exactly? If you can overlook Biden boiling and eating babies, what could you possibly have against Putin?

Innocent Lori Loughlin to plead guilty

I'm sorry that Lori Loughlin and her husband have agreed to plead guilty. They were accused of tricking a private "university" into taking vast sums of their money. Reportedly, they're changing their plea now because of the coronavirus. If they go to prison, their sentences will be cut way short and it's likely they'll serve their time by staying home which they're supposed to do anyway.

I hoped they would fight it in court and, if they lost, that they'd make a run for it. 

Is she the one they keep calling "Aunt Becky" or is it the other one? I think there was a docudrama she was in that came on TV one time, but I didn't watch it.

Matt Lauer is probably right about Ronan Farrow

The New York Times published a critique of Ronan Farrow's work, "Is Ronan Farrow Too Good To Be True?" I haven't read it but it reportedly points out at that Farrow's book, Catch & Kill, has accusations of conspiracies and cover-ups for which he provides no evidence. The article relates this to the Trump era when Trump will say anything, make any baseless accusation. Trump's opponents aren't nearly as bad but have still responded in kind, with conspiracy theories not backed by evidence. Look at the whole Russiagate thing. Especially the pee tape accusation.

Matt Lauer has chimed in with an article on Mediaite, "Why Ronan Farrow is Indeed Too Good to be True".  Lauer writes about Farrow that:

1. He consistently failed to confirm stories told to him by his main sources. 

2. He failed to provide evidence of important communications he alleges took place between accusers and me. In most cases, Ronan doesn’t even claim to have personally seen evidence of those communications. 

3. He used misleading language to manipulate readers into believing things that could easily be false, or were at least un-provable. In some cases he undeniably withheld information from the reader that would call the credibility of sources into question. 

4. He routinely presented stories in a way that would suit his activist goals, as opposed to any kind of journalistic standards.

...

...I focus on flawed reporting and factual errors that could have easily been avoided with minimal effort on Ronan Farrow’s part, and which bring his version of this narrative into a significantly different light. 

What I am sharing here tightly fits the pattern of journalistic lapses laid out in reporting on Farrow by The New York Times. 

“At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove,” Times writer Ben Smith wrote of Farrow in his piece on Monday, May 18.

Lauer makes a pretty good case. He fact checked Farrow's reporting on his own case, easily found and contacted the people his alleged victim claimed to have told at the time and found that they told a different story.

Oh, and he mentions that NBC debunked the claim long ago that Lauer had a secret button in his office that would lock women inside. I didn't know it had been debunked, but it seemed a bit outlandish. How would you have something like that installed?

The thing that bothered me about Farrow was that he started using the lack of evidence in the Weinstein case as his new standard of proof. When an interviewer asked about lack of evidence against Woody Allen, Farrow said, Well, there was no evidence against Harvey Weinstein, either. He said the same thing when he tried to get in on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. He found another victim whose accusations may have been true, but seemed less plausible and had no evidence to support them. Even an interviewer on MSNBC doubted the claim and Farrow said it again. There was no evidence against Weinstein, either.

Other than his anti-Woody Allen stuff which I think has been proven false, I'd be happy to believe everything Farrow says. Like his claim that the Clinton campaign, which had gotten money from Weinstein, tried to cover up his crimes. They called Farrow and asked what he was writing about him which Farrow said he somehow took as a threat. Later the Clinton campaign canceled an interview Farrow was going to do with the candidate.

The Clinton people say that they asked because they were going to work on a documentary with Weinstein and didn't want to do it if Farrow was working on something that would make it a massive embarrassment to them.

I know Farrow is supposed to be a boy genius. If he is, he got that from Woody Allen, not Mia Farrow. Certainly not from Frank Sinatra. But I'm not sure that going to college at a young age is proof. Look at James Franco. Look at Natalie Portman. Look at Brooke Shields. It's astonishing how academia sucks up to celebrities. I'm sure they loved having Mia Farrow accompanying her favorite white child to all his classes.

You can't tell anyway. Early educational achievement and real genius are two different things.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

A seedy true crime docudrama about lovers lane murders in Texarkana, Texas. Dawn Wells, TV's Mary Ann, worked a day and a half playing one of the victims. She said that they had to shoot a horse that was injured during filming and that they tried to shoot a pit bull when it broke free and was going to attack her.

With Ben Johnson just five years after winning an Oscar for The Last Picture Show and Andrew Prine.

Directed by Charles B. Pierce who made The Legend of Boggy Creek.

The murders in the movie took place in 1946. When I first saw this movie on Home Box Office as a kid in the '70's, it seemed like ancient history but it was only thirty years earlier. The people who survived the attacks and the families of the victims couldn't have been entirely pleased.

No one was ever charged with the crimes but you'll be happy to know that the guy they think did it was put away as a habitual car thief.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texarkana_Moonlight_Murders

There was new version made in 2014.

Available on Amazon Prime.

Fred Willard RIP

I saw Fred Willard once. They were filming a scene for How to Beat the High Cost of Living about a block and a half from my house. Someone asked if I wanted to go down and watch. I said, naw.

Later, I walked down to Wendy's to get something to eat. It was across the boulevard from the gas station where the scene was shot. I was walking back, carrying my food home. I was going to take a shortcut through the parking lot of the Taco Time. There was an RV parked there. I froze in my tracks.

In the window of that RV was FRED WILLARD. He was eating a taco. Seemed to be talking to someone. I stood frozen for a moment. Then I realized there was really nothing I could do. There was no one around I could excitedly tell. So I kept walking.

The movie came out in 1980. If it was filmed in 1979 or 1980 I must have been sixteen or seventeen.

The last thing I heard about Fred Willard was on the Thought Spiral podcast. Andy Kindler was neurotic and afraid to phone people, but he phoned Fred Willard and had a nice conversation.

Fred suggested that Andy watch Svengoolie on METV. It's a guy hosting old horror movies. The host of Svengoolie--Svengoolie himself--got word of it and tweeted how happy he was to know that Fred Willard liked his show.

The other host of Thought Spiral, J Elvis Weinstein, tweeted:

I worked with Fred Willard on a show for the "Ha!" network shot in Mpls. A couple years later, in L.A., he got me a job simply by recognizing me and saying hello in front of someone important. I was suddenly funny by association.

Fred Willard has passed away at age 86.

Two Men In Town (2014)

Why would Europeans make a movie in the United States? Doesn't it just cost more here? There are cases where they film here because Americans are too dumb to watch anything shot outside the United States. I don't know why they want to break into the American market so bad. But there are fake American movies, like the ones Polanski makes, set in the United States with American actors but filmed in France. There's not a region of Spain or Algeria they could have used? Maybe New Mexico is cheaper than those places.

Two Men in Town was a French-Belgian-Algerian production filmed in New Mexico, a remake of a 1973 Franco-Italian film, Deux hommes dans la ville.

Forest Whitaker plays William Garnett, released on parole from a New Mexico prison for killing a deputy 18 years earlier. He seems okay. Not friendly. He found religion, has converted to Islam. If he hadn't gotten paroled, he would have been released in three years anyway without the slightest supervision. But the sheriff (Harvey Keitel) starts harassing him.

For a former model prisoner, Garnett is surprisingly easy to provoke. He attacks a neighbor for playing his TV too loud. He was never annoyed by other inmates in prison?

The parole officer (Brenda Blehyn) seems nice enough, trying at one point to help a dying rapist get permission to go to Ohio where his family lives. They didn't say how his family would feel about it.

Crime Wave (Canada, 1985)

A comedy, shot in the style more of less of a 1940's movie with the muted color of one of the early Eastmancolor movies, but set in what was then the present day. It starts with Buddy Holly, Elvis and Sid Vicious impersonators. Filmed static camera.

Made the same year as Sam Raimi's Crimewave which I haven't seen, but my impression was it had a similar look and feel.

Told from the point of view of a young girl whose parents rent a room over their garage to an aspiring director trying to write a "color crime movie". We see some of his ideas come to life. Amway distributors who make their money through crime, an Elvis impersonator who kills a man...

The young fellow uses a Bolex, had already lost a relative fortune on a failed film, he keeps movie film in his freezer.

He sits in his room typing his scripts. But he can only write the beginning and the end. He just can't get the middle part.

There's a serial killer and a cruel spoof of Steven Spielberg (cruel for a Canadian anyway).

I see it referred to a "canuxploitaion" which I didn't know was a thing. I guess they're just Canadian exploitation films. It doesn't look like they play up any peculiarities of Canadian life and culture.

I don't know how much it cost. In one scene, instead of a marked police car they had a Chevy Malibu with a light stuck on the roof. Filmed with a tiny crew---just the director himself on some days.

Directed by John Paizs, starring John Paizs and Eva Kovaks.

Available on Amazon Prime.

Can someone explain...

Rev. Jeremy Duncan: “Can someone explain to me why the same people who don’t need to wear a mask because God will look after them also need an AR-15 because God won’t?”

Matière Grise (Grey Matter) Rwanda, 2011

You know how there are extreme-low budget filmmakers who brag that they paid for their movie with a credit card, and how other people warn that it's idiocy to pay for a movie this way? It can lead only to ruin.

But maybe it's not so bad after all. Grey Matter is a movie about a filmmaker in Rwanda. The government would bankroll his movie with a grant if it were about AIDS prevention or ending gender-based violence. But he's doing a political film, an attack on political violence. He wants to include a long rape scene like the one in Irreversible. The movie he's making is about a woman who survives terrible political violence and finds herself committed to the same mental hospital as the man who attacked her.

So the filmmaker goes to a loan shark. His parents are out of town and he's already given him their car for collateral. Now he needs another million francs. It seems terribly unwise.

Grey Matter itself cost an estimated $250,000.

The director in the movie discusses a long rape scene he wants to film. He's told that he'll just make trouble for himself with the censors. Having the character discuss filming it but not showing him do so may have been the real filmmaker's way of getting the scene in as best he could without censorship.

Considering the subject matter, it made Rwanda look like a nice place. Even the loan shark seemed like a nice fellow. I wouldn't mind living there. If imperialists would just leave them alone----I don't remember the details, but the U.S. was largely behind the conflict that led to the genocide there.

Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954)

The only other Nicholas Ray movie I really remember was Rebel Without a Cause which was just awful, even with the father distressed by his sexual attraction to his teenage daughter and Sal Mineo with a picture of Alan Ladd in his locker. James Dean's character was the opposite of a rebel. He screams YOU'RE TEARING ME APART because his parents didn't give him simple, easy-to-understand commands. He wasn't a rebel. He was just a jerk. So I guess he really was misunderstood.

Johnny Guitar starred Joan Crawford as Vienna. She has a saloon she managed to situate right where the railroad is coming through. This puts her in conflict with the cattlemen who don't want a railroad bringing in a lot of people. Of course, she was only going to profit from it. She doesn't control where they go. And she was already in conflict with Mercedes McCambridge who wanted her and the Dancin' Kid dead.

Overwrought psychological western. Mercedes McCambridge was more appealing than Joan Crawford, even though she played a horrible woman who whips a lynch mob into a frenzy. I didn't understand why Vienna didn't let Johnny Guitar kill a few of them. McCambridge's character acted out of spite and not greed or ambition. I can respect that.

I'm glad we now live in an age when men and women are socially equal to the degree that they can shoot each other in a movie.

In garish Trucolor, Republic Pictures' answer to Technicolor.

Todd Solondz, Dark Horse, 2011

This is what I think Jason Mann thought he was doing in his Project Greenlight movie. He thought he was making something unique. Something wildly different. He said himself that he his movie was inspired by Pasolini and Bunuel (although neither of them ever made a broad comedy.)

Dark Horse is a comedy/drama that drifts between grim dream and reality. Abe (Jordan Gelber) is in his 30's. He's both pitiful and unsympathetic. He lives with his parents (Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow), works for his father and collects toys. He's a terrible son. He doesn't see himself as a freeloader because his parents need him to program the TiVo. He meets Miranda (Selma Blair) at a wedding. He gets her to give him her phone number although she clearly doesn't want to. He manages to get a date with her. She forgets he's coming. She's a depressive who's just moved back in with her parents after a divorce. He asks her to marry him.

Abe begins to realize things about his life, but will it do him any good?

Most of us know where things went wrong in our lives, but the tendencies that got us where we are are still in control.

The Leisure Class (2015) Jason Mann, Project Greenlight

I had binge-watched the final season of Project Greenlight, and, considering all the conflict, it was amazing how NICE everyone was. They were always hugging, and everyone was so nice to Jason Mann, even after sitting through his awful movie.

Ben Affleck said that it wasn't the sort of movie he would make, but didn't say a word against it. He suggested that Mann show it to a test audience to get some objective comments about it. He stated it simply. If he had been too delicate, Jason would have realized what he was getting at.

I still haven't sat through the whole movie. This time, my attention wavered and I started reading user comments about it on IMDb.com. I don't know what it tells you that people on there wrote long, long reviews.

I was astonished that a few people liked it. Most of the positive reviews were from white racists who called Effie Brown "racist" for insisting that the lone Black extra in the big wedding scene not play a chauffeur. A couple of them thought the movie would have been better if it had had an all-white crew.

The weird thing was that Jason Mann thought he was really socking it to Hollywood and making something that was radically different.

There was a scene at the beginning where the main character, whose name I didn't bother learning, congratulates his future father-in-law, the senator, for working so closely with someone from the other party. He doesn't say which party that is. I took that as a statement that the movie had no point of view and no ideology. Mann said he was inspired by Pasolini and Bunuel, but they were both Communists and had very definite views. He won't even say if the Senator is a Republican or a Democrat.

Mann has two acting credits and a couple of credits as cinematographer on movies made in southeastern Europe since this thing. Maybe it was a hit there. It might work better with subtitles.

At least the poor devil got something out of it.

Hollywood to send elderly California millionaire into space

The U.S. government needs to make a few demands before NASA works with Tom Cruise on whatever it is they're working on. He'll be launched into a space in a huge cloud of greenhouse gas to film a movie on the International Space Station. Before they do it, the "Church" of Scientology should have to release its prisoners, start paying its members for their labor, start paying taxes, stop harassing people and stop being a cult.

Remember the 1976 Dino de Larentis version of King King? Publicity for it played up the big giant animatronic King Kong that would appear in the movie, then it was only in it for a few seconds and it barely moved.

I think that's what we can expect here; twenty or thirty seconds of Tom Cruise in space filmed by a cosmonaut with a cell phone. NASA thinks it will result in a resurgence in interest in space travel. Seeing 57-year-old Tom Cruise in space with inspire the kids to go into science. 

Anti-Communist Tennessee Christian movie from 1971

Stereotypes sometimes apply. 

An interesting Christian movie from 1971 warning about a sudden Communist take-over of the United States. The minister in it is a bit of a radical himself, advocating a 40 hour work week and weeks of vacation a year.

Most filmmakers shy away from showing children being tortured and murdered. There's a surprisingly convincing vomit scene. 

Impossible to take seriously. It was completely depraved but at least it had a point of view. More enjoyable than anything Kirk Cameron ever made.

It would make a good double feature with Cecil B DeMille's Sign of the Cross.