Trump held a “media availability” slot open during his New Year’s celebration at Mar-A-Lardo, and nobody showed up! A reporter’s tweet: “Trump appeared tired last night at Mar-a-Lago when taking limited questions from the press (a total of 2 minutes) - as he couldn’t even fire back on a question about DeSantis. Instead he was rendered mute. To make it worse, even NewsMax didn’t even pick up his remarks.”
You’re right, he does look like a washed up Vegas lounge singer. Singing his medley of songs: Criminal, Poor Poor Pitiful Me, I Fought the Law, Dirty Laundry, and last but not least...I’m a Loser.
Aaah, memories! The first time I recall hearing this was about 1982-83 in a local news collection of outtakes given to me by a friend who was a news cameraman with that channel. I still have the VHS tape somewhere - I should dig it out and get it copied to DVD! It's loaded with weird outtakes by key on-air news personnel of that time, many of whom friends today would remember. BTW, Ron Burgundy was modeled on one of that channels news anchors: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357413/
I always thought Ron was an amalgamation of all of them back then.
The Mexican restaurant Veronica visits with the girls from the station is named "Escupimos en su Alimento". In Spanish, that means, "We spit on your food".
The Duty to Warn account at twitter (https://twitter.com/duty2warn) has mentioned "narcissistic collapse." I see it as happening in gradual stages. Peeling paint, lights flicker and go out, a window shade flapping out an open window, gardens overgrown. Soon, structural items fail to serve. Don't grab that handrail. Look out for broken glass. A little sag in the once magnificent skyline.
DJT is sagging. See his face? See his posture? Hear the meandering, repetitive speeches?
But still dangerous. It'll be interesting when indictments come down.
TC, a small correction : twumpy didn't go to Penn State, he attended an offshoot of The University of Pennsylvania. They are different. I only bring it up because my wife did her undergrad at Penn State, and she would be royally pissed if I allowed her to be associated in any, even indirect way with loser twumpy.
BTW, Penn State is playing in the Rose Bowl shortly. You might have noticed traffic or something. 😆
I was under the impression that he never actually graduated from any four-year school (I KNOW that he quickly dropped out of Fordham, those Jesuits being pretty smart guys) and that the Wharton thing was all about family money. and doesn't he CLAIM to be a Wharton graduate?
I once got into it with a high school friend who kept insisting that TFF had to know something about business because he went to Wharton. I reminded him that the profoundly dyslexic Nelson Rockefeller had to hire other students to read to him when he was at Dartmouth (which is, based on two or three visits to friends who went there kind of a shithole because Hanover, N.H. isn't even really a TOWN and back then, if a Dartmouth student wanted to glimpse a human female, he'd have to drive at least forty miles) so therefore, TFF 's degree in Economics(!) indicated NOTHING. but I digress. the point is that the more we learn about TFF, the more shocking his total ignorance about everything becomes.
Hanover has turned into a yuppie town. No longer the nice town it was in my day. There was a tree for every boy. Road trips to Colby Jr, Smith, Holyoke, Green Mt College and Skidmore.
I always figured that once the place became coed, attending would be a lot less painful. and now, ANY school's gonna have a public gay presence. in the '60s, that naturally wasn't remotely the case. but you say it's actually populated enough to be a real TOWN?
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the yuppie thing although I can't figure out why it'd be a desirable location for anyone NOT affiliated with Dartmouth. I like university towns as a rule, having spent many happy days visiting friends in Ann Arbor. but it's (or WAS) also not far from what was once a great city. closest great city to Hanover is...what? Boston?
Great analysis, TC! And again, thanks for quoting his best raves from “Truth” Social, so we don’t have to. How fascinating that “Sunset Boulevard” is his favorite movie. You’re so right about the psychological “tell”. The fact that it is his favorite, and that he openly lets people know it is, let’s people see him watching it over and over again, also means he has zero self awareness—no clue whatsoever about how transparent his pathologies are. No clue that he’s airing every bit of his mental and emotional dirty laundry for a worldwide audience.
It *had* to end this way, because Dumpster is so NEEDY. While he was getting the constant adoration and adulation he craves, he was in seventh heaven, and to his followers, his neediness was nowhere evident. He was a Big Success! He was Rich, Famous, and no smarter than they were, yet he became President! Which surely meant that the sky was the limit for his MAGA followers,too! And he Loved them!
But we who didn’t fall for him all saw it from the start, that yawning black hole, the desperate, grasping compulsion to get the next hit of adulation, to feed the wolf inside before it devoured him.
He is in cold turkey detox now that nobody’s paying attention to him anymore. The spectacle is only going to get more tawdry with more rambling disjointed raving from here on out. My bet is that politically he’s done because everyone but the most brainwashed devotees can see what a pathetic loser he is.
I think he’s sealing his own fate, and he can’t help himself, because now the wolf is winning.
Interestingly the psychiatrist who wrote/edited "Duty to Warn" quoted several different people who did not know each other and each did not know he was talking to the others, and they all recounted events where they felt they were around an "entity" that was "tryuing desperately to be Donald Trump." They say he has no self-awareness, no curiosity, no interest in learning anything.
Anthony Schwartz, tRump's ghost writer for "The Art of the Deal" and Timothy O'Brien, author of "Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald" both described tRump as a yawning black hole of neediness who could never be satisfied. They both said that what we saw on screen was all there was to see of Donald. There were no hidden depths. He is pathetic as well as pathological. That does not alter the fact that he has committed crimes his entire adult life and has never been held accountable.
So it's unanimous. I don't pity him. If he were a private individual, who had made no one suffer but himself, then I would pity him. But with the power of the presidency, his pathologies made him a monster. I hope he goes to prison and spends the rest of his pathetic life there. It is essential that he be held fully accountable, otherwise the next round of Republicans will figure they can do all the same things only smarter, aiming to actually complete the coup and create an authoritarian White nationalist phony-religious state.
On a roll tonight! Wayne Newton indeed. And yes, back in the day even I was accepted at Radcliffe, Harvard not being an option. Decided to stay where I was, where the drugs were plentiful and my collegiate cocoon was safe. Trumps star, though not Trumpism, has faded. He’s certainly ready for his close up. The parade has passed him by. Pathetic indeed.
Since the guy was at Warner Bros., I'm reminded that the three big bros. had a lunch with the three animation directors, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, and Robert McKimson. At one point, Harry Warner said, "All I know about cartoons is that we have Mickey Mouse." Freleng thought he was joking and said, "We'll do all we can to make sure he remains the most popular animated character." Jack Warner said, "If you want to keep your jobs, you'll see that you do."
Jack later wanted to cast Cary Grant as Professor Higgins. Grant told him it had to be Rex Harrison.
I worked with Harrison's son, Nigel - a writer - on a project about 30 years ago. All the stories you ever heard about Harrison are NOTHING compared to the truth. The son became a writer because it was the one thing the old man couldn't one-up him on.
didn't Noel Harrison make an attempt at being a recording artist for no more than a few months in the early '60s? or was that a different son? I know that one of his sons released a record or two.
Alan Jay Lerner wrote a book touching on his life and the three biggest musicals he wrote with Fritz Loewe (one of Lerner's eight wives, Nancy Olson Livingston, the last surviving cast member from "Sunset Boulevard," has out her autobiography, and I've read some of it--she was just interviewed on Orange Hitler loving the film and the similarities between him and Norma Desmond--or is it Carol Burnett's spoof of her?). Anyway, he said that he loved Harrison, but that he could suddenly change for no reason. I wonder if he had an undiagnosed mental health issue. And then I don't wonder.
I just read an article about the Nancy Olson book on Yahoo News. what hit me, very personally, was that she was also married to Alan Livingston (born Levinson), who headed Capitol Records; the genius who refused to release the first two Beatles albums because he couldn't imagine they had any sales potential. in 1965 (the summer I saw "Cat Ballou" in Denver), I was in a writers' workshop in Aspen with his son, Peter. Peter was Byronic, even down to the limp (hemophilia had eroded his ankle bone). he wrote a lot of bad but very flashy pseudo-Ginsberg, which garnered him a LOT of female attention. he was also a nasty, cruel scumbag who took a pathological delight in insulting me, so I obviously remember him well. and every time I see his dad's name (or that of his uncle, who wrote the lyric to "Che Sera Sera"), I get a tiny shudder of what I nowadays could say was PTSD but which I prefer to call "loathing." he was all set to be a literary superstar but didn't get there. hahaha.
and Alan Jay Lerner was no bargain, either...he had to wear gloves because his amphetamine addiction caused him to chew on his fingers until they were chronically infected. speed is not a drug to foster great relationships. I mean, like, EIGHT wives? it puts him in Artie Shaw territory.
I always LOVED Nancy Olson and have always been surprised that she faded so quickly after the '50s. if she liked Harrison, she's probably the only one left who'll say it. in a long interview accompanying the DVD of his great television "Hamlet" from 1964 (in which, btw, Michael Caine is the greatest Horatio of all time), Christopher Plummer is full of horrifying Harrison stories. horrifying.
thing is, I remember talking to several people who worked backstage on various Christopher Plummer plays, and they ALL said that Plummer could be a real prick close-up. stuff like slapping dressers, cursing out stage managers, etc. I'll bet there are many, many people who worked on "My Fair Lady" whose stories could make paint peel, but I can't imagine any of them are left to tell the tale.
Grant said the same thing: his accent was wrong. He also told Jack Warner that he wouldn't go to see it unless Rex Harrison played Higgins, so they requested that Harrison do a screen test. His response was to send a photo of himself on his yacht, naked, with a rolled-up newspaper covering one part of his body. That's pretty much how to treat Jack Warner.
I've read that about Harrison, and about Grant. I still say one of the greatest screen performances ever is his work in Arsenic and Old Lace, where he's constantly having a nervous breakdown and is hilarious doing it.
Mark Harris's "Pictures at a Revolution" is a fun book that examines the five Best Picture Oscar nominees in 1967, and one of them was "Dr. Dolittle." the Harrison stories were actually shocking, and very little shocks me about show business.
and since we're on the "Sunset Boulevard" thing, I once passed a couple on Madison Avenue in the '70s. one of them was a pleasant gray-haired man. his companion appeared to be a half-size version of Gloria Swanson who was, I realized after half a second, the Real Deal. my mouth dropped open and I stared. she gave me a very Norma Desmond look back, probably because she was happy to have been noticed. if she was 4'10" I'd be surprised. who knew?
the funny thing is that when she made "Sunset Boulevard," she was barely fifty. youthful, these days.
yes, "Arsenic and Old Lace" has a fabulous Cary Grant performance. he's also great at going crazy in "I Was a Male War Bride." they're both still incredibly funny.
there are thousands of horrible Jack Warner stories. he ran that studio like an assembly line, and virtually EVERY creative person had a hard time tolerating him, but, in the final analysis, the two studios whose movies still look great today are Warner Brothers and Fox. and when I think of the most "iconic" movie stars, the biggest share were at WB. Paramount was the great "Directors' Studio" in the '30s, but (Billy Wilder aside) Paramount product tends not to date well and MGM, the "Cadillac" studio turned out expensive movies that are mostly unwatchable today. when I was little kid watching the Late Show, etc., I loved MGM because the stuff looked expensive (and it was) but now is to laugh at. and oh yeah, RKO had a nice run ("Citizen Kane, anyone?) but after Hughes took it over as a farm for potential girlfriends, it went downhill FAST.
Tom, you must have gotten an earful about DeMille, who fascinates me. he certainly let Billy Wilder do his thing, but was also pretty hateful in so many ways. anything you wanna share?
I've pointed out before that rage works well for you. and it does.
this reads like you didn't (or COULDN'T) stop to take a breath.
the extraordinary surprise in all this is that TFF not only sits through whole movies, but loves "Sunset Boulevard," which is--let's face it--a SMART movie.
it's too bad that Billy Wilder didn't live long enough to tell you his opinion of TFF. but I think we can pretty much imagine it and be within the ballpark.
I'd like to say that I hadn't thought about Wayne Newton in years, but I saw some kind of video in which he showed up sometime in the last two years or so. not that I was exactly happy about it. but yeah, TFF looks like a washed-up Vegas lounge act with no voice left, trying to approximate the pitch of his signature tune. I hate to say it, but your simile could easily apply just as easily to the same guy in what the guys on my block used to refer to as "The Mountains."
It's too bad the Press didn't ignore him when he ran for Office the first time.
Soooo true! He received $100’s of millions of free publicity considering the cost of buying such air time!
As Jeff Zucker (the fucker - as he was known here) said back in 2015, "Trump brings us great ratings."
Huge blame for Trump begins with this Zucker/F**ker person. As for Sunset Boulevard, I envy you your multiple lunches with Billy Wilder. A giant. ❤️🤍💙
You’re right, he does look like a washed up Vegas lounge singer. Singing his medley of songs: Criminal, Poor Poor Pitiful Me, I Fought the Law, Dirty Laundry, and last but not least...I’m a Loser.
Let’s add Nowhere Man to the play list…
Most definitely! A perfect fit! Thank you!
Or if it was a Warner Brothers film, Melancholy Baby.
Top ‘a the World, Ma!
I don't think I know "Dirty Laundry."
Don Henley
https://youtu.be/qMa77NSCWK8
Thanks for the link--I'd forgotten just how fitting is that song for the sorry hot mess of the FFG.
Aaah, memories! The first time I recall hearing this was about 1982-83 in a local news collection of outtakes given to me by a friend who was a news cameraman with that channel. I still have the VHS tape somewhere - I should dig it out and get it copied to DVD! It's loaded with weird outtakes by key on-air news personnel of that time, many of whom friends today would remember. BTW, Ron Burgundy was modeled on one of that channels news anchors: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357413/
I always thought Ron was an amalgamation of all of them back then.
The Mexican restaurant Veronica visits with the girls from the station is named "Escupimos en su Alimento". In Spanish, that means, "We spit on your food".
The Duty to Warn account at twitter (https://twitter.com/duty2warn) has mentioned "narcissistic collapse." I see it as happening in gradual stages. Peeling paint, lights flicker and go out, a window shade flapping out an open window, gardens overgrown. Soon, structural items fail to serve. Don't grab that handrail. Look out for broken glass. A little sag in the once magnificent skyline.
DJT is sagging. See his face? See his posture? Hear the meandering, repetitive speeches?
But still dangerous. It'll be interesting when indictments come down.
TC, a small correction : twumpy didn't go to Penn State, he attended an offshoot of The University of Pennsylvania. They are different. I only bring it up because my wife did her undergrad at Penn State, and she would be royally pissed if I allowed her to be associated in any, even indirect way with loser twumpy.
BTW, Penn State is playing in the Rose Bowl shortly. You might have noticed traffic or something. 😆
corrected :-)
Thx :)
I was under the impression that he never actually graduated from any four-year school (I KNOW that he quickly dropped out of Fordham, those Jesuits being pretty smart guys) and that the Wharton thing was all about family money. and doesn't he CLAIM to be a Wharton graduate?
I once got into it with a high school friend who kept insisting that TFF had to know something about business because he went to Wharton. I reminded him that the profoundly dyslexic Nelson Rockefeller had to hire other students to read to him when he was at Dartmouth (which is, based on two or three visits to friends who went there kind of a shithole because Hanover, N.H. isn't even really a TOWN and back then, if a Dartmouth student wanted to glimpse a human female, he'd have to drive at least forty miles) so therefore, TFF 's degree in Economics(!) indicated NOTHING. but I digress. the point is that the more we learn about TFF, the more shocking his total ignorance about everything becomes.
Yes, he CLAIMS Wharton graduation but several professors said back in 2015 that "no way!" was he a Wharton grad.
His total ignorance never a shock to me and I’m not even a New Yorker. Just can smell a phony, even on the airwaves…
Hanover has turned into a yuppie town. No longer the nice town it was in my day. There was a tree for every boy. Road trips to Colby Jr, Smith, Holyoke, Green Mt College and Skidmore.
I always figured that once the place became coed, attending would be a lot less painful. and now, ANY school's gonna have a public gay presence. in the '60s, that naturally wasn't remotely the case. but you say it's actually populated enough to be a real TOWN?
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the yuppie thing although I can't figure out why it'd be a desirable location for anyone NOT affiliated with Dartmouth. I like university towns as a rule, having spent many happy days visiting friends in Ann Arbor. but it's (or WAS) also not far from what was once a great city. closest great city to Hanover is...what? Boston?
obviously, I'm a city boy.
I have a friend who taught at Green Mountain; she was a history prof.
Congrats Penn State!
Thanks! It was s good game until Utah's QB got hurt.
What happens when the carny barker can’t get the rubes to buy tickets to the freak show? Guess we’re gonna find out real soon…
He IS the freak in the show!
All the freaks he sells tickets to don’t know that he’s selling tickets to a hall of mirrors…
Right, there's no "there" there.
Picture of a slimy ‘lounge lizard’ who resorts to sexual assault on women who rebuff his unwanted attention!
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." Oscar Wilde
Great analysis, TC! And again, thanks for quoting his best raves from “Truth” Social, so we don’t have to. How fascinating that “Sunset Boulevard” is his favorite movie. You’re so right about the psychological “tell”. The fact that it is his favorite, and that he openly lets people know it is, let’s people see him watching it over and over again, also means he has zero self awareness—no clue whatsoever about how transparent his pathologies are. No clue that he’s airing every bit of his mental and emotional dirty laundry for a worldwide audience.
It *had* to end this way, because Dumpster is so NEEDY. While he was getting the constant adoration and adulation he craves, he was in seventh heaven, and to his followers, his neediness was nowhere evident. He was a Big Success! He was Rich, Famous, and no smarter than they were, yet he became President! Which surely meant that the sky was the limit for his MAGA followers,too! And he Loved them!
But we who didn’t fall for him all saw it from the start, that yawning black hole, the desperate, grasping compulsion to get the next hit of adulation, to feed the wolf inside before it devoured him.
He is in cold turkey detox now that nobody’s paying attention to him anymore. The spectacle is only going to get more tawdry with more rambling disjointed raving from here on out. My bet is that politically he’s done because everyone but the most brainwashed devotees can see what a pathetic loser he is.
I think he’s sealing his own fate, and he can’t help himself, because now the wolf is winning.
Interestingly the psychiatrist who wrote/edited "Duty to Warn" quoted several different people who did not know each other and each did not know he was talking to the others, and they all recounted events where they felt they were around an "entity" that was "tryuing desperately to be Donald Trump." They say he has no self-awareness, no curiosity, no interest in learning anything.
That fits. Two and three year olds have no self-awareness or self-reflection, either. And emotionally, he is a toddler.
Anthony Schwartz, tRump's ghost writer for "The Art of the Deal" and Timothy O'Brien, author of "Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald" both described tRump as a yawning black hole of neediness who could never be satisfied. They both said that what we saw on screen was all there was to see of Donald. There were no hidden depths. He is pathetic as well as pathological. That does not alter the fact that he has committed crimes his entire adult life and has never been held accountable.
So it's unanimous. I don't pity him. If he were a private individual, who had made no one suffer but himself, then I would pity him. But with the power of the presidency, his pathologies made him a monster. I hope he goes to prison and spends the rest of his pathetic life there. It is essential that he be held fully accountable, otherwise the next round of Republicans will figure they can do all the same things only smarter, aiming to actually complete the coup and create an authoritarian White nationalist phony-religious state.
"The only thing worse than outrageous is boring." Unknown
But somebody famous must have said it.
It's all over now except for the final desperate gasp...which may not be heard. Like the tree in forest...
Thanks for the new years cheer - sorry for the schadenfreude
The schadenfreude - it burns! :-)
Mary- embrace the schadenfreude… we’ve earned it!!
That's certainly my plan--revel in it!
as Roy Cohn used to tell TFF..."NEVER APOLOGIZE!"
On a roll tonight! Wayne Newton indeed. And yes, back in the day even I was accepted at Radcliffe, Harvard not being an option. Decided to stay where I was, where the drugs were plentiful and my collegiate cocoon was safe. Trumps star, though not Trumpism, has faded. He’s certainly ready for his close up. The parade has passed him by. Pathetic indeed.
Since the guy was at Warner Bros., I'm reminded that the three big bros. had a lunch with the three animation directors, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, and Robert McKimson. At one point, Harry Warner said, "All I know about cartoons is that we have Mickey Mouse." Freleng thought he was joking and said, "We'll do all we can to make sure he remains the most popular animated character." Jack Warner said, "If you want to keep your jobs, you'll see that you do."
Jack later wanted to cast Cary Grant as Professor Higgins. Grant told him it had to be Rex Harrison.
I agree with David Thomson about Cary Grant being the greatest of movie stars, but with that accent, Higgins was out of the question.
and it turns out that Rex Harrison was one of the great showbiz assholes of all time, his ability to marry gorgeous women notwithstanding.
I worked with Harrison's son, Nigel - a writer - on a project about 30 years ago. All the stories you ever heard about Harrison are NOTHING compared to the truth. The son became a writer because it was the one thing the old man couldn't one-up him on.
didn't Noel Harrison make an attempt at being a recording artist for no more than a few months in the early '60s? or was that a different son? I know that one of his sons released a record or two.
That was Noel. Who also did "dinner theater" when I knew him, using his father's reputation.
Alan Jay Lerner wrote a book touching on his life and the three biggest musicals he wrote with Fritz Loewe (one of Lerner's eight wives, Nancy Olson Livingston, the last surviving cast member from "Sunset Boulevard," has out her autobiography, and I've read some of it--she was just interviewed on Orange Hitler loving the film and the similarities between him and Norma Desmond--or is it Carol Burnett's spoof of her?). Anyway, he said that he loved Harrison, but that he could suddenly change for no reason. I wonder if he had an undiagnosed mental health issue. And then I don't wonder.
Where was the interview?
The Washington Post, I believe, did a story on his love for the movie and they talked to her about it.
I just read an article about the Nancy Olson book on Yahoo News. what hit me, very personally, was that she was also married to Alan Livingston (born Levinson), who headed Capitol Records; the genius who refused to release the first two Beatles albums because he couldn't imagine they had any sales potential. in 1965 (the summer I saw "Cat Ballou" in Denver), I was in a writers' workshop in Aspen with his son, Peter. Peter was Byronic, even down to the limp (hemophilia had eroded his ankle bone). he wrote a lot of bad but very flashy pseudo-Ginsberg, which garnered him a LOT of female attention. he was also a nasty, cruel scumbag who took a pathological delight in insulting me, so I obviously remember him well. and every time I see his dad's name (or that of his uncle, who wrote the lyric to "Che Sera Sera"), I get a tiny shudder of what I nowadays could say was PTSD but which I prefer to call "loathing." he was all set to be a literary superstar but didn't get there. hahaha.
and Alan Jay Lerner was no bargain, either...he had to wear gloves because his amphetamine addiction caused him to chew on his fingers until they were chronically infected. speed is not a drug to foster great relationships. I mean, like, EIGHT wives? it puts him in Artie Shaw territory.
I always LOVED Nancy Olson and have always been surprised that she faded so quickly after the '50s. if she liked Harrison, she's probably the only one left who'll say it. in a long interview accompanying the DVD of his great television "Hamlet" from 1964 (in which, btw, Michael Caine is the greatest Horatio of all time), Christopher Plummer is full of horrifying Harrison stories. horrifying.
thing is, I remember talking to several people who worked backstage on various Christopher Plummer plays, and they ALL said that Plummer could be a real prick close-up. stuff like slapping dressers, cursing out stage managers, etc. I'll bet there are many, many people who worked on "My Fair Lady" whose stories could make paint peel, but I can't imagine any of them are left to tell the tale.
Even the son is gone, I believe. Noel, not Nigel. 30 years, what can I say?
I believe she decided to devote herself to motherhood, as too many women were expected to do then. She had a long and happy second marriage.
Grant said the same thing: his accent was wrong. He also told Jack Warner that he wouldn't go to see it unless Rex Harrison played Higgins, so they requested that Harrison do a screen test. His response was to send a photo of himself on his yacht, naked, with a rolled-up newspaper covering one part of his body. That's pretty much how to treat Jack Warner.
I've read that about Harrison, and about Grant. I still say one of the greatest screen performances ever is his work in Arsenic and Old Lace, where he's constantly having a nervous breakdown and is hilarious doing it.
Grant's two biggest problems were that someone who knew Archie back in the day would turn up, or that the closet door might swing open.
Mark Harris's "Pictures at a Revolution" is a fun book that examines the five Best Picture Oscar nominees in 1967, and one of them was "Dr. Dolittle." the Harrison stories were actually shocking, and very little shocks me about show business.
and since we're on the "Sunset Boulevard" thing, I once passed a couple on Madison Avenue in the '70s. one of them was a pleasant gray-haired man. his companion appeared to be a half-size version of Gloria Swanson who was, I realized after half a second, the Real Deal. my mouth dropped open and I stared. she gave me a very Norma Desmond look back, probably because she was happy to have been noticed. if she was 4'10" I'd be surprised. who knew?
the funny thing is that when she made "Sunset Boulevard," she was barely fifty. youthful, these days.
yes, "Arsenic and Old Lace" has a fabulous Cary Grant performance. he's also great at going crazy in "I Was a Male War Bride." they're both still incredibly funny.
there are thousands of horrible Jack Warner stories. he ran that studio like an assembly line, and virtually EVERY creative person had a hard time tolerating him, but, in the final analysis, the two studios whose movies still look great today are Warner Brothers and Fox. and when I think of the most "iconic" movie stars, the biggest share were at WB. Paramount was the great "Directors' Studio" in the '30s, but (Billy Wilder aside) Paramount product tends not to date well and MGM, the "Cadillac" studio turned out expensive movies that are mostly unwatchable today. when I was little kid watching the Late Show, etc., I loved MGM because the stuff looked expensive (and it was) but now is to laugh at. and oh yeah, RKO had a nice run ("Citizen Kane, anyone?) but after Hughes took it over as a farm for potential girlfriends, it went downhill FAST.
Tom, you must have gotten an earful about DeMille, who fascinates me. he certainly let Billy Wilder do his thing, but was also pretty hateful in so many ways. anything you wanna share?
Trumpty's depressed folks. That's why he looks like the washed up has-been he is. The picture of him
with his bowling trophy, the only
award he's ever won, is now in the
hands of special counsel Jack Smith. It was found among various
Top Secret and above docs, along
with a mysterious pair of size 48,
lacey female pantys. I happen to
know Trumpty's waist size is 48.😄
The picture and pantys will be on
full display in the future nook at
The Smithsonian.
48" sounds a tad lowball to me. but then again, he DOES wear some kind of foundation garment.
You must be on my therapy team, do wonders for my attitude…
In that photo, tRump is dressed like stale Wayne Newton.
was Wayne Newton ever "fresh?"
Maybe for about 2 minutes in 1959.
I've pointed out before that rage works well for you. and it does.
this reads like you didn't (or COULDN'T) stop to take a breath.
the extraordinary surprise in all this is that TFF not only sits through whole movies, but loves "Sunset Boulevard," which is--let's face it--a SMART movie.
it's too bad that Billy Wilder didn't live long enough to tell you his opinion of TFF. but I think we can pretty much imagine it and be within the ballpark.
I'd like to say that I hadn't thought about Wayne Newton in years, but I saw some kind of video in which he showed up sometime in the last two years or so. not that I was exactly happy about it. but yeah, TFF looks like a washed-up Vegas lounge act with no voice left, trying to approximate the pitch of his signature tune. I hate to say it, but your simile could easily apply just as easily to the same guy in what the guys on my block used to refer to as "The Mountains."