RIP Spielberg
#notallboomers... plus The Ankler breaks
Christmas Content Creators,
The Lord Is Born! (Shout out to my shikse friend who taught me that.)
So I've been emailing y'all for a year now, and from the insurrection to the cron, this shit has been tumultuous. But through it all, the centrist freaks at Substack have made it socially acceptable for me to reach out of my cave and tap you on the shoulder. So I have accomplished my goal: talking more with the people I like most about the complete upheaval of our business, against the backdrop of our collapsing democracy/climate/public square, so that we can commiserate and think through it together.
And those of you who don't know me IRL have stuck around, so you're either like-minded or maybe you're just using these emails to learn English? I guess there are a bunch of us gawking, at a loss, but only partially deterred, still enamored by the screen trade. I want to open up an avenue for y'all to react to these screeds like my pals do. I think it's only fitting that that transpire via email. Feel free to holler at your boy: hollywoodforeveryall@gmail.com. Say hey, ask anything except my real name, & put me in my place. Is there something I should write about? Is there something about the skypehalls of power or the rank-and-file realities you want to know? Better yet, is there something I bungled?! Or did you commit a crime against cinema you need to confess??? Like did you serve as a “cultural consultant” on…
West Side Story
In gratitude for your readership, my Christmas gift is telling you not to see Spielberg's West Side Story. Don't be tempted by memories of the original, the timeless tunes, the Gap commercials, or an enduring awe at the highlights of Spielberg's filmography. Just trust Max on this one. It's deathly bad. The trailer made me think it'd have a certain grandeur and that Spielberg's direction of the musical numbers would be fun. But holy shit was I wrong. The movie is a fucking corpse -- and not a loved one's either. I shuddered throughout, trying to parse whether this was just a sloppy re-make or some kind of grotesque human diorama staged by AI. The only comfort here is I'm not alone: Richard Brody, in his review, begins with & continuously returns to the language of death.
What can you do with a popcorn flick that's so off? //deep breath// I think it's time to take the keys away from Spielberg. I feel like the conversation around Spielberg now -- both online & among people I know -- cerrrrtainly acknowledges that he has lost his fastball, but I'm not sure it really reflects what the work has become: the sheer anonymous wreckage. Yes, he made the underrated Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies just seven years ago. But look at the filmography since War of the Worlds (2005). If you remove the dutiful dramas, (Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, and The Post), it's bleak: joyless, featureless, altogether confounding attempts at modern entertainment, rivaling the recent output of fellow 80s-90s hero Bob Zemeckis, who everybody is quicker to roast.
Here's the last fifteen years of Spielberg making movies for the whole family...
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
The Adventures of Tintin
War Horse
The BFG (saw it at the little AMC in downtown Burbank that's inside the mall -- worst combo of movie & theater I've ever had in greater Los Angeles)
Ready Player One
West Side Story
And it’s not as if he was without support. I'd argue that all-but-one of the flicks was written by a hall-of-fame screenwriter: David Koepp, Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, Lee Hall & Richard Curtis, Melissa Matheson, Zak Penn (errr), Tony Kushner.
It may be fitting that Spielberg's next movie will return to his childhood. I wonder if he feels it's time to come home.
Nightmare Alley
I'm not here to throw all the boomers out with the bathwater.
I can't believe I'm saying this... I'm heavy into Guillermo's Nightmare Alley. Heavy heavy heavy. I don't want to say too much, in case you want to give it a shot, but this one clicked for me, especially so once it moves from the carnival fields to the unnamed city's Deco palaces: a club out of Busby Berkeley & a shrink's office that looked like a suite in the Chrysler Building. The movie is wayyyyyy darker than I anticipated. It's not supernatural. It's a straight up noir thriller. I was gobsmacked by the ending. Bradley Cooper is not playing yet another tragic hero, a la his woe-is-me turns in American Sniper (jingoistic horse shit) and A Star Is Born. Here, he is a full fucking sociopath... and yet... for a moment, he sees the emotional truth of who he is.
The ending is the subject of much of Guillermo's interview with Maron. It's a treasure. Maron -- and yeah, I still check in with Maron!!! WHAT OF IT?! -- has been salty as of late, but Guillermo made him melt.
The Ankler breaks; Hollywood Forever has never been more vital!!!!!!
The Ankler was a p good newsletter about the business written by a guy named Rich Rushfield who was early in saying that the movies were toast. But The Ankler is about to get way worse, because he's trying to turn it into a company, and in announcing the launch of the company, his partner couldn't help but THANK AMAZON. So long as there has been a press, it has relied on sketchy advertisers. The Hollywood trade press was literally created by studios to advertise. But let's not forget the cost. Why weren't Harvey & Rudin -- profligate in-print advertisers -- exposed sooner???
Rushfield's whole premise -- which I found fun & even inspirational -- is that The Ankler was NOT like the trades. It was one guy calling it like he saw it. But in thanking Amazon & hiring more writers to pump out content, The Ankler will now just be a trade. It might be a less-bad trade, because his partner, Janice Min, made The Hollywood Reporter way better, and because Richard is often amusing & occasionally clarifying... but in Min's first missive in The Ankler, she said, "We all long for deliciousness in our content." Shai unsubscribe now??
Look, I don't fault Rushfield personally for "monetizing his audience." Who knows what I might do to sell out in my actual career. But reading his announcement was a real moment of clarity for me w/r/t what I'm doing here. I promise you this: Max Fisher is never taking a fucking dime from Amazon or any other "platform."
Amazon is also the main advertiser for the other p good Hollywood biz newsletter, Matt Belloni's twice-a-week thing for Puck. Do they criticize Amazon? It occurs to me that I don't think either of them have taken a swing. Hmmm...
As a demonstration of my independence from the Bezopticon: Their payola scheme for Hollywood biz newsletters is aggressive to the point of being creepy & makes me think there are bodiesssss.
Hope you don't find a limb in your package this Christmas.
Ho Ho Hollywood Forever Y'all,
Max
P.S. Soderbergh said Messhall is one of his favorite bars in LA. He also said he lives part-time in Los Feliz. One of those things can't be true, because as everyone in the neighborhood knows, that place is for carnivorous parents & basics from the west side.
P.P.S. For the last few months, my junk food has been the podcast How Long Gone. The two culture bro hosts are best when they're ribbing each other, because they're loving equals. When they have guests, sometimes they disarm them in a way that borders on negging. Then they got Lena D. She likes them, but she also beat them at their own game. They asked about the press report claiming her husband hadn’t watched Girls. She said, “He doesn’t need to see get semi-violently railed by Kylo Ren.”