Anthony Thorne

I think pretty much across the board, the general rule of thumb is, anyone who helps or supports a major government conspiracy gets lauded, feted and promoted after the event.

Trine Day has multiple good books and multiple 'cash cows' depending on the mood and season. When Bilderberg hits the news they end up selling a bunch of Daniel Estelin books on that topic. And when Frank Olson was covered in an Errol Morris documentary they sold more copies of HP Albarelli's book on that topic than usual. And Kris Millegan was probably too busy to think about it, but if he'd been on the ball Trine Day could have probably shifted a bunch more copies of Peter Levenda's Sinister Forces trilogy if they'd promoted the Manson stuff that floats through all those volumes alongside the release of Tarantino's fictitious rewrite of the Manson story in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

I've read Walt Brown's disgusted coverage of Baker's books and understand that Baker writes junk for profit, but what can you do? If I go to the Trine Day site, scroll to the bottom, and then scroll back up and count the good to very good books that are solid works of coverage or research that I think are respectable contributions to their various fields, I can see at least 35 books that I either know or have read about enough to know are pretty good, and there's another near dozen that I know nothing about that are probably still legit. This leaves about ten or twelve books (including Baker's) that I suspect, or know, are junk. So maybe Kris Millegan isn't picky. Who knows? Either way, there weren't too many other publishers who were going out of their way to reprint Henrik Kruger's THE GREAT HEROIN COUP or Ari Ben Menashe's PROFITS OF WAR. The former was a book from the late 70's but Kris even got Kruger to write a new contemporary chapter for the book.

Is anyone at CAPA surprised that Baker is doing Baker stuff at her conference? She's a shifty woman and you wouldn't want to trust her with much. But you could also note that the mainstream TV networks in the US, ABC, CBS and NBC, have perpetuated more lies and junk about the JFK assassination than Baker cumulatively will across her entire life. On the anniversary of the 50th, some of them basically played disingenuous bullsh*t for 24 hours straight - or maybe it was for the whole week. You wouldn't want to trust those networks with anything much important either, but if one of the networks offered a researcher 30 minutes or an hour to talk uninterrupted to their audience, should the researcher turn it down because it somehow legitimises the crap the network peddled earlier? Beats me. Maybe some would say that they should.

If a researcher ends up talking to the crowd at Baker's festival, maybe they should gently refuse to endorse or discuss Baker's tale about how she once took Lee Harvey out on a couple of dates. That would be fair enough. But by and large I imagine the crowd that turned up at Baker's festival to hear various speakers talk aren't really there because they think that Baker's thwarted love life is a huge, ongoing national security issue. They're there because they think the fact a good President got whacked and the media and government covered it up after the event is something that should make people angry. At least I'm guessing that's why they're there. Maybe I'm wrong.

Baker wants to make money and she's discovered that the best way to sell her books is to build a small publicity empire on the back of more legitimate researchers, so she can sell herself as an important figure and move more copies of ME AND LEE. I fully understand why people wish things were different, and wish that she wasn't doing this, but she is, and probably isn't going to stop unless the research community hires Michael Palin from A FISH CALLED WANDA to drop a piano on her head, or if she passes away in the throes of a torrid romance with Jim Fetzer in the back of a taxi. Since she's going to so much trouble to arrange a speaking venue, sell tickets, and get members of the public interested in the assassination to walk through the gate, researchers should probably just say "Thanks Judy" and then basically ignore her while they talk to the crowd she's hustled up.

I figure people can say whatever they want, but there would be a big crowd at Baker’s conference who have never followed the details and might have easily ended up attending CAPA under different circumstances. If you’re a writer trying to get the word out, why throw them all out with the bath water.

An idea which will never happen but which would have been good to see. Both sides should have a detente on the retail side of things and have everyone’s books available under a big tent somewhere, so people can buy Jim D’s book, Hyman’s volume from Trine Day, Newman’s latest, other good ones, and I guess Bakers if they were dumb enough. But obviously this will never happen.

Possibly Walt doesn’t want to be choosy and they made him a nice offer, like, how about we publish your book. Do authors turn down publishers that often? I thought it was usually the other way around.

Vince - re above - fair enough. 
 

James Corbett has run some big 9/11-related semi conferences with a week or more of participants. He did it all over Skype for free and chucked everything on YouTube for everyone to watch at the end of the week.

What hypocrisy?

Just because Walt doesn’t like Baker’s books, doesn’t mean he has to sever ties with her publisher. 

By and large I think people can do whatever they want to do. If Baker wants to run her conference, fine. CAPA should continue to run theirs too. That said if someone paid for Stone’s plane ticket and he spent more time next door, I can see why someone would be irked. But that’s really on Stone. I wasn’t there, and even if I was, I probably wouldn’t have been the guy who paid for his ticket, so likely wouldn’t care either way.

CAPA is doing good stuff and I see a lot of good work coming out from the participants these days so it would be a shame if they all packed it in.

What do they have to fold for?

Trine Day was publishing conspiracy stuff long before they published Baker’s stuff. If Kris hadn’t found that hot pic of Baker to stick on the cover of ME AND LEE I doubt this whole chain of events would have started. That noted, if someone can mock up a backyard photo of Oswald with a rifle, Kris should spend a few days with Photoshop putting together the 70’s adventures of Baker with Elvis Presley. He’d get a few more book sales and keep the operation running.

Anyway, why does CAPA have to fold? Maybe tell the guests to show it a bit more love next year or something.

If it does fold it would be grimly funny to see the only remaining conference be one where Baker rules the roost and everyone pays lip service to a relationship and narrative that clearly never happened.

I’m guessing Walt Brown views the Trine Day Baker stuff with a shrug. Skyhorse also publishes a few dumb books alongside their many good ones. 

In her article, those words you quoted appear in the context of a second FBI guy telling Sibel what a third unnamed informant - who was on the FBI’s payroll for a decade or more - had suddenly decided to tell them, based on information that the third guy had received from source number four - unnamed informants in Pakistan and Afghanistan who aren’t given any description whatsoever.

https://www.newsbud.com/2011/02/01/the-fbi-“kamikaze-pilots”-case/

And other than hearing what a great guy this anonymous, government funded informant was, we are told he was really reliable and trustworthy, although the specifics about what and why aren’t really noted. The guy then gives an ominous reminder to the assembled FBI folk at the end of his interview with them that his own sources are really reliable and that everyone should make sure his important info is passed on. The FBI folk who hear the story then type up the details, and add a helpful yellow sticky note to the sheet of paper reading ‘VERY URGENT - Kamikaze Pilots’, and then give it to their superior, who never does anything about it, and then the FBI folk get on with other things. Two months later the dramatic informant comes back and asks if the FBI are taking his warnings seriously, and the FBI guys get ‘exasperated and impatient’ with the question, and tell the informant they did all they could, presumably because they added that sticky note to the file they typed up. That’s the end of the story until 9/11, when one of the FBI guys locks eyes with another in front of the TV screens showing burning buildings, gives an anguished speech about how the FBI has failed the country by ignoring the informant’s warnings, and cries ”Why!? Oh God...” before running out of the room, then a second FBI guy three days later avoids eye contact before finally confessing  that the FBI commander had called everyone into his office and given them all a direct verbal order to cover things up, which is presumably how cover ups work there among the staff. This article appears a year before Edmonds’ first book, which is published two years before Edmonds’ second book, THE LONE GLADIO, which is a long, fictional account of a modern Gladio variant - Gladio B - which has never been referenced in any document.

Edmonds seems a nice lady and her anti war articles have been helpful, but her work gives me a headache and I could see her doing really well on a joint book tour with Judyth Baker. That noted, I don’t blame you for staying out of 9/11 stuff Jim, and I often ponder the same notion myself.

I dunno if there is a ‘major disagreement’ between John N. and Jim D - maybe there is, but it hasn’t stood out to me - as Newman has evidently been doing a solid job of indicating that Veciana was duplicitous about his bio. And it looks like Newman is building a case that this was done to point the finger away from Army Intelligence and military involvement, and towards the CIA. Newman’s book that apparently will go into this doesn’t come out till 2021, and it’s not even the final volume, so if anyone asked me to break Newman’s thesis down further, I couldn’t.

But does this really prove or disprove anything about the CIA’s ultimate involvement? Maybe the CIA and military were both involved. You’d figure it’d be easier to kill a sitting President with the combined help of the military and CIA, rather than the military running the whole show themselves as best as they could with the CIA sitting on the sidelines with surprised looks on their faces. I’ll defer to others but from what I’ve read of Newman’s stuff (I haven’t finished book 3) he hasn’t disproven the CIA’s involvement yet.

More strange commentary from Rob.

Quote

You're missing the point getting into all this minutiae...

Your point is very nebulous, but let's have a look.

Quote

the point was, he blames doing JFK for ruining his career

When has he ever said this? Googling OLIVER STONE JFK RUINED MY CAREER brings up nothing at all. Outside of his earlier low to middle budget work, Stone had directed just a couple of big studio pictures before JFK. He then went on to direct at least ten big studio pictures afterwards. 

More to the point, looking at the combined budgets, after Stone made JFK, the big studios proceeded to give him more than $550 million dollars in funding to continue to make movies. I'm not sure how many directors with a ruined career  - which typically means they can't make movies - have been given half a billion dollars afterwards to continue to make movies. Please post the link where Stone says that JFK - one of his most successful films ever at the box office, and a perennial seller afterwards for nearly 30 years on home video for Warner Bros - ruined his career. The number of directors in the history of the world who have had as successful a career as Stone did after he made JFK, is probably less than 1% of the number of directors in history who have ever made movies. That's some career ruination for you.

Quote

I'm merely saying maybe it was poor script choice rather than Hollywood "blacklisting".

Not to ask you to justify these bold claims, but where has Stone ever said he was 'blacklisted' from making movies? I can find a link of him on the Jimmy Dore show saying the big networks blacklisted his Putin interviews, but otherwise things seemed to have been better than normal for him.

Quote

Other than JFK, his "political thrillers" have been duds monetarily.

Do you care about the content of the movies, or about how much profit they made for studio stockholders? Once again, I'm not sure why you're so obsessed with how much NIXON and SNOWDEN made at the box office. The former had to suffer the sad fate of only receiving four Oscar nominations, and the latter only played globally and made back most of its budget. Some dud.

Rob - who cares how much SNOWDEN made theatrically? First you tell us it didn’t get a cinema release. Now you concede that it actually did but it’s problematic that it didn’t sell more cinema tickets. I’m sure they would have liked to but what does that have to do with the merits of the film? Maybe some audience members were waiting to buy it on Blu-Ray, or catch it on streaming. Because the majority of folk are watching movies at home these days rather than driving out to the cinema.

TRANSFORMERS made way more money than SNOWDEN did, but I don’t feel that Stone is at fault for making a political movie about a whistleblower, rather than a CGI toy commercial of robots fighting. And SNOWDEN made nearly ten times as much as KILL THE MESSENGER did, so for a political movie it didn’t do too badly.

Quote

Snowden, which didn't even get a theatrical release

I'm not sure what you're talking about there. SNOWDEN was released theatrically in 2,443 theaters in the US, and also released theatrically in numerous countries worldwide. 

Quote

Nobody cares about South African politics

Maybe. Stone's documentaries were about South American politics though. And please don't respond that 'nobody cares about South American politics' as I'm sure if pressed I could nominate some South Americans who feel differently.

And yes, anyone could have directed ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, but they probably wouldn't have directed it as well as he did. I'd rather watch ANY GIVEN SUNDAY again before some of his other movies, and I like those other movies - though JFK is my favourite. And I think $40 is a decent price to see Stone give a keep-at-it-guys speech in person at a banquet, if they included a decent meal with it. Why hasn't he done more stuff like JFK? Stone did mention onetime a big, thoroughly prepared fictional movie he was trying to do on the My Lai massacre, with what he described as one of his best scripts. From memory, it wasn't made because the lead actor got cold feet at the last minute. So it doesn't seem like Stone just gave up on things with a shrug.

I have read DESTINY BETRAYED. The documentary will still be something new, as I don't recall seeing 20 or more JFK assassination experts discuss elements of the case, with accompanying archival footage, while I made my way through the book. And most of the big JFK assassination researchers - and pretty much all of them with a good new book to promote - appear on BLACK OP RADIO reguarly, so I'm not sure how many are falling through the cracks and just doing conferences only.

Parts of the podcast are funny. Rob wonders why Stone didn’t make any more ‘edgy’ political films after JFK, somehow forgetting that Stone made NIXON, multiple documentaries on South American politics, and has a new long JFK series in production right now. So I’m not sure what Rob was getting at there. And skipping political stuff, I like ANY GIVEN SUNDAY a lot.

He makes some good points about Baker and Trine Day using the event to make some bucks. But I personally wouldn’t disregard the collegial benefit some of these conferences have. Some members of the community are probably glad to know they’re not pursuing things solo. And at Greg Parker’s JFK conference a few years back I learned as much from fellow attendees as I did from the presentations.

Stone's positive comments about the book are from 2017. I still need to read Metta's book, which recently came out in a new edition.

That documentary was well regarded by many - I haven’t seen it - but reportedly Hank Albarelli thought it soft-pedalled some of the more damning stuff that he’d included in his book about Olsen, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE. Trine Day posted a cover for a future book, WORMWOOD EXPOSED, that Albarelli and Kris Milligan were going to bring out, but Albarelli passed away before anything could happen with it.

Morris also directed this self-satisfied mini-documentary on the JFK assassination for the New York Times. I think any time he approaches really contentious conspiratorial subjects about state crime, assassinations and the like, he digs just a little, but doesn’t go too deep. Alex Cox later published a rebuttal video over Tink Thompson’s chuckling dismissal of the Umbrella Man as a subject of interest.

Don’s book was well received, and his comments on DPF were friendly and useful. But if he really wants to point out a research community that is fractured and unproductive, he should mention the 9/11 truth movement. It’s aggressively fractured, and has been spinning its wheels for several years.

In contrast, the JFK research field seems to have picked up and is getting somewhere.

Don’s article seems to be an exercise in venting his spleen rather than a considered assessment of where things really are right now. 

Looks like Don got out of the wrong side of bed this morning. 

Paul, I'm not sure if you've read it, but Walt Brown scattered repeat references to Army Intelligence being a key part of the plot throughout his JFK Chronology. He has also said as much on podcasts, and at the end of the final volume of his chronology he has a few pages arguing that Dallas Police were part of the plot.

But I only know this as I've read the work in chunks and browsed the ending, as the entire work is around five times the length of Bugliosi's RECLAIMING HISTORY and contains appendices that are multiple times as long again. I have it in Word doc form and if you printed it out, you'd have a pile of phone book sized volumes with a small font that could be stacked on the floor to make a pile as high as your waist. So consequently most people have never read it. I'll note that Bill's Army Intelligence commentary here is more detailed - Brown largely follows Jack Crichton (and maybe one or two others), looks at Oswald's links to Army Intel, and makes a general case about the role they played in the plot. But I recall it being a thoughtful summary, ditto Brown's comments about Dallas Police at the end of the final volume.

I'm assuming Brown realised most people would never read the whole work in the shape it was currently in, so he's begun reformatting it, and the Judyth Baker ebook - which slams Baker - is the first of those. 

I hope Bill's presentation was filmed as it looks to be something that should be considered in detail.

Or he could also read Walt's book, linked just above by Larry- if he hasn't already. That said, I don't think this hurts Stone's credibility that much. If he spends a heap of time down the track pushing Baker's book to the same extent that he pushed JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE, maybe it would somewhat. But I'm not expecting that to happen, no matter how many pictures he poses for this week. I'm still looking forward to the series, obviously.

Sean Stone is a smart guy, and a good interviewer, but he covers the conspiracy field much more broadly than Oliver Stone does, so I wouldn’t take his interviewing JVB as any sort of endorsement from Oliver. 

With due respect to the many fine folk working at the HSCA, Fonzi, according to his book, spent a week or more shuffling through papers in a giant trash pile after a spook led him to it during a pointless wild goose chase, and a bunch of private investigators sat around in a room doing nothing for weeks and weeks after Robert Blakey gave them repeated assurances that if they just waited a bit longer - up to the point that they were all fired - they could go and start investigating.

So I wouldn’t necessarily think that they would have been able to see through the misdirection of Veciana, as there are instances of them being successfully misdirected by others. And in the cases where the HSCA was making progress - such as with Dan Hardway and Eddie Lopez looking at Mexico - other methods were introduced to shut things down.

Newman has some years still to go with his project, so if his thoughts on Veciana are correct, he has plenty of time to make a more detailed case. Hopefully his presentation will turn up online soon.

Just guessing that Stone's bigger goal is to avoid the division that typically wastes so much energy among researchers. If a blurb from him appears on the back of Trine Day's next Baker book (they haven't announced one but I'm sure she'll do another one) then I'll start shaking my head. But keeping good relations with Baker means he can communicate to everyone watching or attending her conference. And it's good he's back pushing the subject again so I don't want to knock.

Maybe Oliver was just being polite and the camera failed to record his eye roll when he was walking off to his next appointment. Stranger things have happened.

I’m somehow not expecting Stone’s upcoming documentary series to stop midway for a long segment of Baker telling her tale.

Yikes.

Jim Hougan wrote the following in 2005 about the Felt story.

Quote

All y'all,

In the last couple of hours I've gotten half-a-dozen emails, and a couple of phone-calls, about Mark Felt's belated declaration (in the upcoming *Vanity Fair*) to the effect that he's Deep Throat. I've just done an interview with Fox (James Rosen/Britt Hume), and it looks like this is the story de jour.

That said, it's possible, maybe even likely, that you have no absolutely interest in Wategate. If so, put this down as parapolitical spam, and stop reading.

Anyway, here's my take on Felt's declaration:

1. He was badgered into it by family and friends. Felt is 91 years old, and counting. A reporter who recently interviewed him found the interview an incoherent waste of time, and killed his own story. 

2. Felt has always denied that he was Deep Throat until, as we're told, members of his family recently pointed out to him there might be a buck in it, and that his children and grandchildren have bills to pay.

(And there is a buck in it: Bob Loomis told me, 20 years ago, that Throat could probably get a $4-million advance from Random House for his life-story.)

3. Felt wrote a book about his career in the FBI. In it, he goes out of the way to say that he met Woodward on a single occasion. This was in Felt's FBI office, and the upshot of it was that Felt told Woodward that he would not cooperate with him in his pursuit of "Watergate."

4. After a careful study of Throat's relationship to the *Post* and to the White House, first in *Secret Agenda* and subsequently while working with Len Garment, it became clear that *no one* in or around the Nixon White Hoouse was in a position to know all of the things that Throat is alleged to have told Woodward. For example, Felt had no way of knowing about the 18-and-a-half minute gap in Rosemary Woods' tape. This strongly suggests that Throat was a composite.

5. Just as importantly, if Felt was Throat, he betrayed the people for whom he was a source. This is so because the biggest story that anyone could have broken in the Summer of 1972 was Alfred Baldwin's decision to come forward and tell what he knew. An employee of James McCord's, Baldwin told the U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI that he had monitored some 250 telephone conversations from "the Listening Post," his room in the Howard Johnson's motel across the street from the Watergate. The significance of this information was that the public and the press believed that the Watergate break-in was a failure, and that the burglars were arrested before they could succeed in placing their bugs. Because of that, the public believed, no telephone calls were ever intercepted. Baldwin gave the lie to that, and Felt knew it. For him to have withheld that information from the *Post* would not only have been a betrayal---it would not have made sense if Felt's alleged intention (as Throat) was to keep the story alive. (The Baldwin story was eventually broken in the Fall of 1972 by the Los Angeles Times.)

6. What we have here, then, is the sad spectacle of an old man being manipulated. 

For the record, it seems to me that if anyone proposes to identify Deep Throat, or to identify the lead singer in the choir of sources subsumed by the identity of Throat, they must meet a very basic criterion. That is, they must demonstarate, at a minimum, that their candidate met repeatedly and secretly with Bob Woodward. (Throat is obviously Woodward's creation. I don't think Bernstein would know him from a bale of hay.)

The only person who meets that criterion, to my knowledge, is Robert Bennett. Now one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate, Bennett was President of the Robert R. Mullen Company in 1972-3. This was the CIA front for which Howard Hunt worked. (It was also the Washington representative of the Howard Hughes organization.) As I reported in *Secret Agenda*, Bennett's CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, drafted a memo to his boss, Eric Eisenstadt, reporting on his monthly debriefing of Bennett after the Watergate arrests. According to Eisenstadt, Bennett told him that he, Bennett, had "made a backdoor entry to the Washington Post through Edward Bennett Williams' office," and that he, Bennett, was feeding stories to Bob Woodward, who was "suitably grateful." (Williams was the Post's attorney, and attorney, also, for the Democratic National Committee.) 

Woodward's gratefulness was manifest in the way he kept the CIA, in general, and the Robert R. Mullen Company, in particular, out of his stories. (I obtained the Lukoskie memo under the Freedom of Information Act. Eric Eisenstadt's reaction to that memo, which I also obtained under FOIA, was considered so secret that it was delivered by hand to then-CIA Director Richard Helms.

What bothers me the most about all this, and what inspires me to write this unforgiveably long email to so many about something so few care about, is the gullibility of "the press"---by which I mean Talking Heads like Jeffrey Toobin---who have bought Felt's story hook, line and sinker.

That Woodward and Bernstein have taken a no-comment stance toward Felt's story is interesting and probably predictable. On the one hand, if I'm right about Bennett being Throat, they have a serious problem where their source is concerned---not just that he was a composite, but that their relationship to him was predicated on a quid pro quo concealing the CIA's involvement in the Watergate story.

Thanks for listening (if you're still there),

Jim Hougan

Joseph Cannon has a decent article on it here.

https://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2005/05/deep-throat-felt-response.html

And the Xymphora site wrote this commentary back in 2005. 

Quote

 

Joseph Cannon has two excellent posts on the 'revelation' that Deep Throat is Mark Felt. Felt may honestly feel that he was Deep Throat, but could not have known everything that Deep Throat knew. He is an excellent patsy to take on the role, as he has Alzheimer's and can't be asked any embarrassing questions.

I imagine the long wait for the identity of Deep Throat was a wait dependent on finding someone with the proper characteristics who could assume the role without having to provide details (i. e., either dead or senile). I doubt very much there ever was a Deep Throat. He was a fictional method of funneling the information that Woodward was getting from whomever he was really working for - likely CIA or Joint Chiefs of Staff - into the stories intended to unseat Nixon, or at least weaken him. Woodward needed a mysterious source to explain how he was getting material that should have been impossible to obtain, and a source who could never be questioned. Deep Throat was a brilliant plan (the name itself, in the context of the times, was brilliant marketing, as everyone got a cheap thrill by being allowed to say it).

We know the Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on Nixon, and that Nixon caught them and let them get away with it. The American Powers That Be were apparently terrified that Nixon, who up to the end of the 1960's was a reliable, crooked, mob-connected political hack, was intelligent enough to realize that his place in the history books would be determined by the substantial good he did. China whet his appetite, and there was a very real danger that the old fool would succeed in approaching the Soviets and ending the Cold War fifteen years early (and billions and billions of dollars in weapons sales early), all in a bid to take his place in history. He had to be stopped, so the barely-literate Woodward mysteriously appeared at the Washington Post, was hooked up with a real, if spectacularly unsuccessful, journalist in Bernstein, and suddenly received all kinds of unexpected help from the Very Establishment Ben Bradlee. A newspaper that you would never expect to even consider challenging the status quo, and very connected to the CIA, was suddenly lauded as the king of investigative journalism, and the savior of the Republic. All nonsense, of course. Nixon's big character flaws, instinctive dishonesty and paranoia, were manipulated to slide him into a completely unnecessary cover-up of a completely unnecessary burglary conducted by a bunch of CIA agents (a burglary Nixon wasn't even aware of until after the fact, with the burglars conveniently getting caught through extreme bungling and conveniently having documented ties to Nixon's crooked political financing system), and Nixon was safely pushed out of office before he could do any real harm. Rather than being a victory for journalism, Watergate was the start of the systematic corruption of the disgusting American media, which continues to do its job in hiding the fact that the United States has been a military dictatorship since November 22, 1963.

 

 The little I've read about Watergate generally reconfirms what Jim just posted further above.

Also THE PARALLAX VIEW, another great paranoid 70’s thriller that had a clear view of what was going on. BLOW UP is excellent, and I’m fond of the foreign retread, Argento’s DEEP RED, where Hemings is again looking for clues and trying to remember what he saw.

DePalma’s BLOW OUT is a clunkier version of the theme that I still enjoy, and which has assassination and conspiracy references aplenty.

Coppola really stuck it to blockbuster superhero movies in an interview last week after Scorsese was gently reprimanded in clickbait articles for doing the same.