The Screengrab

Warner Brothers is fending off reports that they are keeping promotional materials for the November 11 release of the 1987 film The Hanoi Hilton on DVD under wraps rather than using them to stir up interest in the movie rather than advertise any connection to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. The movie, which was released during the same wave of Reagan-era Vietnam films that included Platoon and Full Metal Jacket (as well as such gung-ho popcorn entertainments as Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films), is a sympathetically intended treatment of the American presence in Vietnam that is set among the prisoners of war being held at the Hoa Lo prison where McCain served his time as a P.O.W. (The movie is not meant to depict any actual person's experience. However, it does make room for an appearance by an idiotic American movie star and war protester, played by Gloria Carlin, who is called "Paula" but is obviously meant to be Jane Fonda.) Earlier this year, McCain filmed an interview about his own prison experience which was to be included on the DVD. Now, reports Michael Cieply in The New York Times, Warner Brothers has "moved quietly over the last few weeks to block any promotional showing" of any part of that interview, for fear that it "might embroil the project in electoral politics." A spokesman for Warners' home enterttainment division describes its decision as "just us trying to be cautious and not affect the election one way or the other.” In response, Lionel Chetwynd, the British-born Canadian-American writer-director of The Hanoi Hilton, has fired back that "Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel.” And you thought that British-born Canadian-Americans never got off any good ones!

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Last week marked the passing of one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in American comedy of the last forty years, Bernie Brillstein. Brillstein, who was 77, had a rare combination of taste, people skills, and bulldozing smarts, all of which he applied to his job as an agent and manager. (He was also, not incidentally, one of the best interview subjects on the West Coast.) Eager to embody every cliche of the classic talent-agent success story, Brillstein worked his way up from the mail room at the William Morris Agency, after anti-Semitism kept him from entering advertising in the Mad Men era. ("I loved them," he later said of the WASP agency heads who advised him that he was wasting his time trying to break in, "for being honest.") While he was still at William Morris, Brillstein met his first meal ticket in the form of a gangling, painfully shy young puppeteer from the Washington, D. C. area: Jim Henson. The two were quick to recognize what each could do for the other, and after Brillstein set himself up in private practice in 1970, Henson and the Muppets were his first steady star clients. Another was Lorne Michaels, which explains not only how the Muppets came to be regular cast members during the first season of Saturday Night Live--an arrangement probably best remembered for having inspired Michael O'Donoghue's remark, "I don't write for felt."--but how Brillstein came to guide the careers of many of SNL's stars and to score producing credits on some of their biggest movie successes, including the Ghostbusters films.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes its official debut with a press screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, four days before it opens wide theatrically. The picture has been immersed in a protective bath of secrecy; Steven Spielberg likes his intended surprise to, you know, surprise. But, perturbingly enough, the first reviews have started trickling in, thanks to that bastion of cutthroats and jacka;s known as the Internets. The initial "quick reaction" was posted to Ain't It Cool News last Thursday evening by "ShogunMaster." The spoiler-heavy review reports that Harrison Ford "has a few lines that work and a million that don't", trashes the other performers, laments the last of tension or suspense "During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero ... was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it.. He just never shows signs of worry or distress."), and sums up the proceedings with the judgement that this is "the Indiana Movie that you were dreading."

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There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.)

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"Decade after decade, for well over a century now, the lowly movie extras have been ignored," Robert McClure" tells Michael Cieply of The New York Times. Cieply should know; when he's not working as a paramedic, he's a lowly movie extra who has a duel role in the forthcoming George Clooney comedy Leatherheads. The movie was shot on location in the Carolinas, and the local population, which was thrilled to be a part of it all, does not expect to see Mr. Clooney or his co-star Renee Zellweger again in this lifetime. (Not that they don't think Clooney is a nice guy who isn't always welcome down at the barber shop. Tom Ervin, a disability lawyer who appears in the movie as a football official, recalls that Clooney would allow the extras to watch him watch fresh footage: "He’d turn around to us and say, 'Do you guys like that?'") After all, There Will Be Blood, which was shot in Marfa, Texas, didn't even play within twenty-five miles of Marfa, Texas. So, as Cieply reports, the enthusiastic micro-supporting cast of Leatherheads threw together their own premiere of the picture in Greenville, South Carolina, a real nice place to raise your kids up.

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