Kilmer Back From Land of The Shadows

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Variety reported earlier today about Val Kilmer‘s AI-fortified return to commercial cinema in As Deep As The Grave, a film directed and written by Coerte Voorhees. The piece stirred a recolllection of an article I wrote for Empire magazine back in ’92, called “Reanimator”.

Excerpted from “Bring Back The Dead,” initially HE-posted on 10.15.06:

Some day down the road emerging digital technologies will one day be able to bring back actors from the grave and put them in new movies in a highly believable fashion.

One computer graphics guy I spoke to for the piece said this could be a reality within 15 or 20 years. And I remember how Army Archerd wrote something in his Variety column not long after that seemed to comment on the piece, and how he faintly pooh-poohed the possibilities.

Well, here we are 14 years later and a Santa Monica-based company called Image Metrics, according to a fairly thrilling article by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, has just about gotten there.

The cyber duplications of human faces that Image Metrics has lately been composing “seem to possess something more subtle, more ineffable, something that seems to go beneath the skin,” writes Waxman. “And it’s more than a little bit creepy. And if you look at the video on the Times website that accompanies Waxman’s piece (which includes footage of Waxman herself being turned into Shrek), you’ll probably agree.

Image Metrics chairman Andy Wood says he likes to call the process “soul transference,” the key process being that “we can have one human being drive another human character…we can directly mimic the performance of a human being on a model.”

“You look and you wonder: Is it the eyes? Is it the wrinkles around the eyes? Or is it the tiny movements around the mouth?” Waxman asks. “Something. Whatever it is, it could usher in radical change in the making of entertainment. A tool to reinvigorate the movies. Or the path to a Franken-movie monster.”

At the very least, this technology will probably one day lead to a situation in which producers and studios will have a certain advantage over difficult or problematic actors, although I’m sure attorneys for actors worldwide are going to be scrambling henceforth to make sure their clients’ organic value will not be challenged or diminished in any way.

Refinements and improvements will inevitably kick in over the coming years, but Image Metrics is pretty much able right now to reconstitute any dead actor and recast him/her in a new movie opposite live actors. There are many other applications for Image Metrics technology besides bringing back the dead, but this has always held a special fascination for yours truly.

Imagine a 33 year-old Cary Grant (i.e., the one who starred in The Awful Truth) starring opposite Rachel McAdams in a new comedy. Or James Dean back from the dead in a new drama directed by Chris Nolan.

“We could put Marilyn Monroe alongside Jack Nicholson, or Jack Black, or Jack White,” Wood reiterates. “If we want John Wayne to act alongside Angelina Jolie, we can do that.”

Once More With Feeling

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On 7.11.18 I posted a riff called “High Tower Drive.” I re-posted on 7.6.22. This is the third time.

“I slept and dreamed that life was beauty / I woke and found that life was duty.” — Ellen Sturgis Hooper, from a book of poems called “The Dial,”

In ’06 or thereabouts I misattributed that line to David Mamet, who had used it for a Hill Street Blues episode called “Wasted Weekend.” I repeated the error in a 7.11.18 riff called “High Tower Drive.” So now we have it straight.

I first heard this line during the original broadcast of this episode on 1.13.87. The guy who said the line was Dennis Franz‘s Norman Buntz, and I’ve never forgotten it.

I was watching Steven Bochco‘s fabled series on a 21″ cable-connected color TV. I was living in a cool little pre-war studio on High Tower Drive, a few hundred yards from the Hollywood Bowl and just down the street from Elliott Gould‘s deco-moderne, elevator-accessible Long Goodbye apartment.

Reanimator‘s Jeffrey Coombs lived in the same complex.

I was working for Cannon Films publicity at the time, writing press kits. My future wife Maggie and I had either just returned from Paris or were planning a trip there. We got married the following October, and Jett came along the following June.

Worst “Point Blank” Promo Art Ever…An Atrocity

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Criterion’s 4K Bluray of John Boorman‘s Point Blank (’67) pops on 4.21.26. I love the extras (which include commentary from Boorman and Steven Soderbergh, an interview with critic Mark Harris, and a “New Reflections on Point Blank” essay by Jim Jarmusch), but I despise Jay Shaw‘s jacket art.

Point Blank‘s color scheme is sublimated to an affected, phoney-baloney artist’s impression of old-school cinema. Or a vague impression of Point Blank by someone who’s never seen it. A “painted” black-and-white image of Marvin sits on the right (the flesh tone simulates the painted monochrome look of yesteryear theatre lobby stills), and four color-saturated, vertically-cropped images of a stressed and wincing Marvin are on the left.

If you know anything about Marvin’s Walker character, you know he’s totally stoned-faced…among the least emotionally expressive tough guys in film history. Except for a brief flashback showing his “Walker” character grinning while flirting with his future wife, Sharon Acker‘s Lynne Walker, Marvin never gives up his feelings…even when fighting or dodging bullets he’s all robotic frost and veneer…no apparent stress or uncertainty or struggle of any kind.

Shaw’s decision to use a still of Marvin gritting his teeth in some kind of violent altercation is therefore a total misrepresentation…a fucking lie.

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“Hold That Ghost” 4K? Took ‘Em Long Enough

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Being a total fool for handsomely mastered 1080p versions of silvery black-and-white films of the ’40s, I’ve been saying for years that I’d love to get my hands on a Hold That Ghost Bluray. I think Ghost, a punchy horror comedy released in August 1941, is the greatest Abbott & Costello film of all time…Bud and Lou as Chuck and Ferdie, directed by Arthur Lubin, costarring Joan Davis and Richard Carlson, and featuring a fat, moustachioed gangster character named Moose Matson!

The problem was that back in ’21 a hi-def Ghost wasn’t selling or renting as an individual unit. You had to shell out $105 for an Abbott & Costello Complete Universal Collection box set. And that wouldn’t do.

But now the Universal home video guys have finally eased up and mastered a stand-alone Hold That Ghost Bluray, and 4K UHD one at that. It pops on 4.28.26.

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Who’s The Hottie?

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I was watching Kentucky Sen. Ran Paul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, interrogate Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, whom Trump has nominated as the next homeland security secretary (i.e., Kristi Noem‘s successor).

But I couldn’t fully concentrate because of the woman sitting to Paul’s rear and right, against the wall…the 20-something fashion model type with perfect ash-blonde hair and hoop earrings. I’m assuming she’s Paul’s executive assistant. I know that almost all conservative politicians love hiring foxy blondes or, failing that, foxy brunettes.

Don Simpson once told me that hotties don’t tend to make the best executive assistants because they’ve been catered to and fawned over since they were two or three years old, being beautiful and all, and therefore haven’t been encouraged by life’s rough and tumble to develop inner qualities. Don’t hire a 10, he meant — you’re better off hiring a 7.5 or an 8.

In Wake of N.Y. Times Expose About Diddling Young Teenage Girls, Chavez Rep Is In Tatters — Part Weinstein, Part Polanski, Part Jerry Lee Lewis, Part Jeffrey Epstein, Part Humbert Humbert

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The halo over the head of legendary United Farm Workers founder and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, has suddenly and irrevocably melted in the wake of a N.Y. Times expose about allegations that he had his way with young teenage girls in the ‘70s and was otherwise quite the ravaging hound with other women in his orbit.

The 3.18.26 Times story by Manny Fernandez and Sara Hurtes, well-sourced and thoroughly vetted top to bottom, topples the Chavez legend in one bold, swift stroke. Another liberal-humanist icon has been redefined as a groin-driven hound.

Chavez’s rep is even more tarnished now than Martin Luther King’s was when it came out that King plowed through a long list of white women in several motel room assignations. Chavez hasn’t been MLK’ed as much as Epsteined.

By comparison JFK seems a lot more civilized because at least he was sensible enough to steer clear of jail bait.

I hate to say this but in a roundabout way the Times story might lessen some of the heat around Donald Trump, who, according to recently released Epstein file reports, may have violated this or that young teenage girl.

If the Times Chavez story had been published a month ago, Trump might not have bombed Iran.

The bottom line is that powerful men, regardless of political philosophy or strategic alignment, have often had their way with younger women. Men are basically dogs, and political power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. I’m nonetheless shocked that Chavez went for girls who were way below the age of consent…Lolita territory.

$300 Per Barrel (Six Days Ago, Worse Now)

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We’ve all been through a stage-by-stage Iran War learning process. Over the last few days the Strait of Hormuz choke-hold situation has altered everything. To say that Trump is now between a rock and a hard place is putting it mildly. Hinterland bumblefucks will soon be enraged.

At first taking out the monsters who’ve been funding Hamas and Hezbollah and who murdered tens of thousands of anti-government protestors earlier this year…at first this seemed cleansing and possibly restorational. Now, not so much.

[Posted on 3.11.16] Anti-Iranian-war Tucker Carlson asking Col. Douglas Macgregor how the United States can get out of the Iran war:

“Somebody will say, why should we end it?

“Because if we don’t, we’re going to hit $300 per barrel of oil. We’re going to watch 60 to 80% of stock values crash. People are going to lose trillions in wealth.

“It will be a disaster, and it’s not something we’ll recover from.”

“We’ve thrown all caution to the wind. Think of any number of worst-case scenarios; they’re all on the horizon.”

“President Trump is still president of the United States, not president of Israel.”

“He has to think about the consequences here at home for us for the average man…not for the billionaire class, and not the Epstein class.”

Choke Point:

Janet Flanner on Bette Davis

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The great Bette Davis enjoyed a ten-year career peak between 1934 and 1944, half driven by her brittle, hard-edged, ache-in-the-heart element opposite strong male costars, and the second half largely propelled by her women-centric tragedies.

Among the highlights of Davis’s glory period: Of Human Bondage (’34), The Petrified Forest (’36), Marked Woman (’37), Jezebel (’38), Dark Victory (’39), Juarez (’39), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (’39), All This, and Heaven Too (’40), The Bride Canme COD (’40), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), The Man Who Came to Dinner (’41), Now, Voyager (’42), Old Acquaintance (’43) and Watch on the Rhine (’43).

Davis bounced back, of course, with All About Eve in 1950, and then bounced back a second time with her classic hag-horror performance in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (’62, filmed when she was only 53 or 54).

In February ’43 Davis spoke to The New Yorker‘s Janet Flanner in order to promote her Oscar-nominated performance in Now Voyager. Flanner (1892-1978) was a brilliant writer. Her sentences and phrases (“atavistically suspicious of happy endings”) were perfect in a lean, pared-to-the-bone, thoroughly thought-through way.

Flanner: “As far as she has been permitted, Bette Davis has molded her film career on her motto, ‘I love tragedy.’

“Until Pearl Harbor she was the American favorite of the Japanese moviegoers because, they said, she represented the admirable principle of sad self-sacrifice. An adult-minded New Englander, atavistically suspicious of happy endings, she was so convinced by her early Hollywood parts that a floppy feminine hat was a symbol of celluloid sappiness that she later had written into her contract a clause permitting her to refuse to carry a hat in her hand like a damned basket of rosebuds.

“Becoming a big star often addles a human being, usually in one of three ways; the victim becomes a superior, lonely ego and stays home, or becomes a public character and goes out constantly, or becomes glamorous, no matter where he or she happens to be.

“Miss Davis was glamorous, years ago, for about a month. This period ended when, backed up by a smart town car containing a white poodle and livened chauffeur, and attired in moody black velvet slacks and jacket, she met her mother, who had been on a trip East, at the Los Angeles railway station. Mrs. Davis was unable to believe her own eyes and flatly said so. The glamour was dropped later that day.

“It is her notably large eyes, disliked at first by both Hollywood and herself, which finally accelerated her ascent in pictures. When Hollywood at last got around to making analyses, it discovered that eighty per cent of screen acting is concentrated in the eyes. In Dark Victory Miss Davis made it one hundred per cent.

“Since her role was that of a woman threatened with insanity, her director wanted her to indicate her disorder by crazed motions of the hands. She decided to use only her eyes. Even the quantity of her erotic appeal, which so worried the studios at the beginning, has been recomputed. When, twelve years ago, a producer said she had no more sex appeal than Slim Summerville, she said he went too far. Now producers go even farther; they say she is solid, ice-cold, Puritan sex, of the type against which the Sunday blue laws had to be passed.

“If you ask the Hollywood trade who is the best actress in the business right now, the unanimous, indeed the only fashionable, answer is Davis. The trade adds, sotto voce, that her box-office is enormous because men fans are convinced that she is feminine, though she is really only maternal.

“On a recent War Bond selling tour in the Ozarks and other rural districts, Miss Davis made the perturbing discovery that she scared lots of simple Americans of both sexes. This in turn alarmed her. Some metropolitan theatre critics claim that she seems complex in her roles because she herself is an unresolved character.

“On the other hand, émigrés from Europe feel that she should be the dominant member of a great national stock company, like France’s Comédie-Française, rather than be allowed to beat out her talent and wings in the movies.

“Her own idea of an ideal program would be, as she puts it, ‘to play one good play a winter on Broadway and then photograph it that summer in Hollywood.’ She will probably always think of the stage when she thinks of a good play, and to her the cinema will undoubtedly remain something done with improved lantern slides. ‘A movie,’ she once said, ‘is not even a dress rehearsal.'”

Perri Nemiroff vs. Mean HE-Styled Commenters

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[20:51 mark] Perri Nemiroff: “Yeah, I’m sorry…I’m just focused right now on the people who are being queggered in the comments” — “queggered”? What does queggered mean? Is she saying quaker-ed? Or quavered? None of these terms make any sense.

Nemiroff: “I’m happy to put them into time out [mode]. We don’t need to….ahhh…we don’t need to disrespect anyone in order to make our opinion known. Some of you are well aware of this and yet you continue to do it, and [you should know] it’s very easy to ban you from these conversations ’cause we pride ourselves on, yes, having different opinions about award season topics but also treating each other with respect….it’s not that hard.”

Simple Reason Why I’m Not a Denis Villeneuve Fan

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During the last act of Dune: Part Three (Warner Bros. 12.6), Timothée Chalamet‘s Paul Atreides runs around with a tennis-ball haircut. Which, of course, makes him look much less attractive. It makes him look vaguely wacko or criminal even.

Why did Timmy lose his longish hair? Because director Denis Villeneuve wanted him to look 15 or 20 years older — a totally deranged decision. But that’s Villeneuve for you. A dweeby oddball who simply doesn’t get the sexy-movie-star thing. A blockage.

It doesn’t take a genius mentality to understand that fans of this or that movie star want their idols to look good in a flush, sexy, full-head-of-hair way. Tennis-ball Chalamet looks like a right-wing Aryan psycho from rural Idaho, and yet Villeneuve wanted Chalamet to look like this….he wanted Chalamet to look like an effing East Los Angeles gang-banger.

Imagine if Howard Hawks had insisted that Cary Grant wear a tennis-ball cut for Only Angels Have Wings, or if Alfred Hitchcock had insisted on tennis-balling Grant for his lead role in North by Northwest. If they had done so Hawks and Hitch would have been fired. Hell, blackballed.

Tennis-balled John Wayne in Red River. Tennis-balled Steve McQueen in Bullitt. Tennis-balled Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. Tennis-balled George Clooney in Michael Clayton.

People‘s Michelle Lee, 12.12.25:

“Last summer fans of the once curly-haired actor were shocked to see him out and about with what appeared to be a buzz cut that was confirmed in October. Turns out, he was just as surprised as everyone else.

“During a Dec. 12 appearance on The Graham Norton Show, the Oscar nominee, 29, said that his hair transformation, done on June 25 for his role in Dune: Part 3, started with what’s called a ‘3 millimeter hair cut.’ Then director Denis Villeneuve kept asking the star to go shorter and shorter with his hair.”

HE reaction: Because in terms of understanding the value of traditional movie-star glamour vibes, Villeneuve is a clueless clod.

People: “At the suggestion of a 1 millimeter chop, Chalamet said he practically ‘begged’ to have his hair kept longer. “You know, your hair…weirdly we’re all attached [to our hair]…it’s kind of like our personalities, these follicles that grow out of our heads”.

But his locks were “stolen.”

“It’s supposed to be a nice character shift, and I’m playing 15, 20 years older,” Timothee explained.

Wait…$551M or $887M?

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In my mind, David Zaslav was never a WB exec who was propelled by dreams, visions, soul and spirit. He was a bottom-line bean counter who made the Hollywood realm into a stingy, smaller place. Plus he lives in Bob Evans ‘ French chateau home on Woodland, which I visited several times in the ‘90s. Now, there was a studio chief and producer with a semblance of blood ins his veins.

Glenn Kenny informs that Zaslav’s compensation is $551 million in cash and $330 million in tax reimbursement.