Feinberg Digs in With Famous Omelette Chef

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Scott Feinberg’s 90-minute interview with Harrison Ford is interesting, substantive, good-natured. Definitely worth a listen.

But Ford speaks too softly (I was wearing my best headphones with the sound turned all the way up so don’t tell me), and it kinda makes me sad that he no longer sounds like Philadelphia detective John Book or Clear and Present Danger‘s Jack Ryan or even the aging Indiana Jones in Steven Spielberg‘s disappointing Crystal Skull, which came out 18 years ago.

The smooth depth and manly assurance of Ford’s movie-star voice has evaporated. Breaks my heart.

THR/Feinberg boilerplate: Over the course of a 90-minute conversation at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, the 83-year-old Harrison Ford reflected on how depression during college led him to acting; the fateful events that resulted in him moving to Hollywood, becoming a contract player at the tail-end of the studio system, and landing his life-changing role in Star Wars; why he quickly developed a desire to escape being a “leading man” and to instead play “character parts,” and what he made of the opportunity to do so in projects such as The Mosquito Coast, 42 and Shrinking; what it is about Shrinking that he finds so challenging and rewarding; how he feels about the future of moviegoing; plus much more.”

You know going in that Feinberg will never ask tough or provocative questions — his THR brand is about tossing softballs. You know he won’t ask Ford if he has any regrets about passing on Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic. You know he won’t ask Ford to repeat the omelette story that included Calista Flockhart, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. You know he won’t ask Ford if he still regularly tokes up, and if he’s as much of a “head” now as he was in the ’80s, ’90s and aughts.

I don’t understand why the “Awards Chatter” coding insists on producing that big blank space below. I can’t figure a way to eliminate it.

Are Language Police In Retreat?

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Yesterday I listened to this 4.8.26 N.Y. Times podcast, “Language Policing and the Return of the R-Word.” It’s really worth sinking into.

The moderator is Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman. The panelists are the brilliant Brock Colyar (love this refresingly candid non-binary person who began life as a biomale!) and Animatou Sow.

Copy: “The r-word is back. Why? The right is known for using provocative language. But lately there’s been a push to be transgressive, even on the left — from the return of certain slurs to the removal of pronouns from bios. To what degree is our culture abandoning political correctness — and if so, why? Plus, stick around to hear what words Aminatou and Brock would like to ban.”

Background Noise Linked to Melania’s Video Message About Jeffrey Epstein?

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I know absolutely nothing about any of this, but much of what Michael Wolff has written in his four books about Donald Trump strikes me as reasonably real-deal and mostly compelling, and I’m at least half-persuaded that British author and historian Andrew Lownie, whose suppressed 2025 book, ‘Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York,’ contains a Jeffrey Epstein quote that compromises Melania Trump, is a respected and respectable professional.

NBC News, Oct. 22, 2025, 9:13 PM EDT, by Chloe Atkins and Dareh Gregorian:

“Author Michael Wolff has sued first lady Melania Trump, charging that she threatened a $1 billion legal action against him to stop him from reporting and writing about her alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein.”

AI sez: Based on reports from August to December 2025, British historian and biographer Andrew Lownie faced significant backlash and legal pressure from Melania Trump regarding his book, “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York“.

The Claim: The book, which focuses on Prince Andrew, initially alleged that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein introduced Donald Trump to Melania in the 1990s.

Retraction and Legal Threat: Following a threat of a “billion-dollar lawsuit” from Melania Trump, HarperCollins UK removed these passages from future editions, apologized, and pulped approximately 60,000 copies of the book.

Author’s Stance: Despite the retraction, Andrew Lownie stated he stood by his source and his reporting, claiming his source was reliable, though he did not want to fight the U.S. President.

Impact: The controversy caused significant issues for the book’s release, with Lownie reporting that US publisher Simon & Schuster also pulled out of distributing the book after the allegations surfaced.

Context: Melania Trump has vehemently denied this account of how she met Donald Trump, stating she met him at the Kit Kat Club in 1998.

Passage from Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York”>:

“Boorman and the Devil” Has A Home

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I was so turned on by David Kittredge‘s Boorman and the Devil in Venice last September (seven months ago) that I naively presumed that a distribution deal would be announced within weeks or even sooner. How could distributors not pounce on this sucker immediately? Instead NOTHING happened for months and months.

I began to wilt or weaken within, thinking that perhaps a theatrical debut might not be feasible (although it’s a great audience film…very funny in a sardonic, gallows humor vein). I thought, however, that a Bluray was certainly warranted, and that some kind of streaming thing had to happen. A Netflix or HBO Max or Criterion Channel deal…anything.

But for months on end Boorman was just roaming around from one hip horror festival to another, which is fine in itself but it’s so much deeper than that…it has so much more going on inside than a film aimed at horror fans. And think of the hundreds of thousands of ‘70s film buffs and Hollywood aficionados nationwide who would never see it without some kind of general access.

Earlier today I learned that Boorman and the Devil has finally found a supportive distributor, and that a specific announcement will be forthcoming during next month’s Cannes Film Festival. The doc will receive an Oscar-qualifying theatrical release, I’ve been told, and that Bluray, cable and streaming releases will follow.

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“Jerry Maguire” Was Cruise’s Magic Career Moment

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I guess I don’t understand why Jerry Maguire has been restored (did it ever look like it needed rejuvenation?) and why it’s getting the big 30th anniversary whoop-dee-doo treatment this weekend with a special three-day booking at various AMC and Cinemark theatres. Not over the actual weekend, though — it’ll screen between Sunday, 4.12 and Tuesday, 4.14.

The restored Maguire will also be shown at the TMC Classic Film Festival at month’s end.

One of my all-time happiest press screenings was seeing Maguire at Sony Studios four or five weeks before it opened (early to mid November of ’96). Before the film started I remember staring at producer Richard Sakai and thinking “this is very cool…I can feel a special vibe here…something is telling me this is going to be really good.”

10 or 15 minutes in I knew it would be a commercial hit, and once the Jerry Maguire-Dorothy Boyd relationship began to grow and build I knew it was an emotional powerhouse…one of those rare mainstream films that really touch the heart and melt you down. And that wonderful Dicky Fox finale…perfect.

In my mind Maguire was Cruise’s greatest career moment…his peak in the sense that Cruise wasn’t known for emotional connection movies, and this was a kind of breakout. For the first time audiences were really rooting for Cruise / Maguire, really felt an extraordinary emotional bond. Except for the surprisingly emotional Collateral, Cruise never made another sophisticated, deep-down heart movie after Maguire. On top of this he was playing a guy who was really struggling to stay afloat, and was on the verge of serious money problems.

Okay, he played a guy living on the proverbial knife’s edge in American Made, but his law-skirting character was always in command in a sense….always a rakish dare devil. Jerry Maguire, on the other hand, was a guy who seemed emotionally uncertain or unfulfilled, and certainly vulnerable.

During that first viewing I recall saying to myself “ahh, Cruise has new stress lines in his face…he’s acquired a certain amount of character.” And he was only 33 or 34 when Maguire was filmed.

Then again Jerry Maguire persuaded me that sports agents are bad guys because they raised the fees of athletes and subsequently made the price of tickets close to unaffordable to average wage-earning schmoes.

“Guy gets on the MTA in LA…dies. Think anybody’ll notice?”

Cruise’s “hello, I’m looking for my wife” scene in Jerry Maguire still ranks first, but Vincent’s final line in Collateral [4:15 to 4:40] is first runner-up. In a way it’s almost more moving than the Maguire scene because you’re not expecting cynical, hard-case Vincent to emotionally reveal himself.

Ongoing Tragedy of the Dome

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Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome and Arclight plex has been closed since 2020…killed by the pandemic. And no one has come to the rescue.

No rich passionate filmmaker has come along to save the day, turning the Cinerama Dome into a film buff’s haven, more or less in the way Tarantino runs the New Beverly and Vista.

And yet the wealthy but ugly guy who owns the Dome, Decurion Corp.’s Chris Forman, hasn’t sold it to some ruthless, thick-fingered developer who might turn the place into a shopping mall of some sort.

No studio has bought it in the fashion of Disney’s ownership of the El Capitan or how Netflix owning the Egyptian Theatre.

And it hasn’t turned into the Alex Theatre in Glendale, which is still around but doesn’t function like a “regular theater” and is basically a giant museum piece much of the time.

Decurion won’t re-open the Dome/Arclight because Forman knows it’ll lose money. Somebody with tons of dough has to step in and re-open it with the understanding that the operation will lose money, but that it will earn at least some reasonable amount on a monthly basis.

The only solution is that the city of Los Angeles has to step in and offer bountiful tax incentives to a possible rescuer, incentives that will at least allow the new owner to break even. Allowing the Dome to just sit there and collect dust is bad for the soul of Los Angeles….bad for the culture, for the joie de vivre of movie lovers, bad for the spirit of things, bad for the political climate.

I still say that the ultra-curved Cinerama Dome screen distorts the shit out of Scope films (2.39:1). The screen needs to be modified into a slightly curved shape.

I remember seeing Deliverance at the Dome way back when….loved the directional sound.

1080p Pre-Code Gable-Crawford Drama….When Silver Boxy Was The Only Game In Town

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I felt a twinge of arousal upon reading that a Warner Archive Bluray of Clarence Brown‘s Possessed (1931), a hard-knocks, rags-to-riches social drama costarring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, will pop on 5.26.

This is a brand new 1080p Bluray, mind…the product of a 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative…gimme!

Gable was 30 during filming. He wasn’t yet wearing his pencil-thin moustache (he grew one and kept it the following year), and wasn’t yet a big marquee name — he ascended into that realm with his starring role in Frank Capra‘s It Happened One Night (’34).

Crawford, born in 1904, was 26 or 27.

Brown was known as a reliable “house” director, not exactly given to visual flamboyance or artistic ambition. But consider the second half of this clip (starting at 1:34)…a left-to-right tracking shot of Crawford hungrily eyeballing the lifestyles of the swells as a train slowly passes by. This is a moment of serious cinema, one that took a lot of planning and crackerjack timing to get right.

Lenore Coffee‘s screenplay was adapted from The Mirage, a 1920 Broadway play The Mirage by Edgar Selwyn.

The 2015 Version Will Do Just Fine, Thanks

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You’ll notice that in Criterion’s forthcoming 4K version of Point Blank (due on 4.21.26), the red-robed Angie Dickinson has an unhealthy pallor — pale, blood-drained, almost ghostly — while the orange-robed Dickinson in the 2015 WHE Bluray has a robust and creamy sun-tanned look.

HE to John Boorman acquaintance who has his contact info: “I want to reach out to Boorman and ask him why oh why he approved Criterion’s teal desecration of his 1967 crime classic. Could you please share his email? Or contact info for his business rep? I’ve respected the man immensely for many decades but I went into a state of cardiac arrest when I saw those DVD Beaver screen captures.”

Boorman acquaintance to HE: “Given Boorman’s current state of health, it doesn’t feel like now is an appropriate time to engage.”

HE to Boorman acquaintance: “You think that my respectfully and submissively asking Boorman why he approved Criterion’s teal-soaked Point Blank…you think that’ll cause the poor guy to have a heart attack?”