David Andrews

Having had a book pre-sale advertised on Amazon before, let me say that you can't lay any casino bets on the accuracy of their release date announcements. Also, November 17 is just a weezy bit too close to the anniversary date, in retail marketing terms. If you see a press release announcing that date for that purpose, then believe it.

Some Amazon-government involvements: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/31/amazon-defense-cloud-computing-pentagon-jeff-bezos https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/13/amazon-war-cloud-pentagon-project-halted-microsoft

Daniel Marvin.

And one question would be: With all this poppy available for export, processing and distribution, who's lacing US-sold heroin with Fentanyl and other chemical opioids that cause overdose and death? With all that first-generation product to harvest and sell, why cut with synthetics and kill people? I thought this was about making money.

If you read around on the internet (because I can't remember where I read this), the Brooks-Wilder friendship was strained by Young Frankenstein. The studio nixed the film Brooks pitched after Blazing Saddles, and wanted Brooks to direct Wilder's YF project instead, which Wilder's agent had pitched to them. Though the script is credited to both, they clashed on the set, with Brooks famously having to be argued into shooting the Wilder-Peter Boyle tap dance routine. Wilder became a breakout comedy star in films he directed himself, or with other directors, and never worked with Brooks again. Something was lost in that.

Well, of course I'm going to have to watch it again now, grumpier than Ward Bond as I go. The thing is, in They Were Expendable, Ford's trying to prove he's an artist and a patriot. You know what happens next. If you want to see real Ford nonsense mayhem, try Donovan's Reef with Wayne and Lee Marvin. If I wanted to prove myself a critic, I'd say that Ford's sense of comedy (and, Oh, Christ! it nearly scuttles The Searchers.) descends from early 20th-century theater and the silent films, and Ford will revert to playing to what he thinks are the expectations of those phantom audiences when he can't do better, or feels the script needs livening. After Griffith, he's the long-lived director most affected by theater conventions. And now we know what happens next when one tries to prove oneself a critic.

I disagree about THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. I believe it's a masterpiece, one of Ford's greatest films, and a somber elegy for the men left behind in our nation's worst defeat up until that time. I hear you, Joseph, but the thing's unwatchable. Not even a decent love story to it. If it had been playing at the Texas Theater, Oswald would have escaped in all the boredom. I honestly prefer a put-up job like The Wings of Eagles, which is at least enlivened by Maureen O'Hara and by Ford's hero worship of Spig Wead. It's a vanity project, but it doesn't stagger under its self-importance like Expendable. Expendable is too somber by far. I understand a war was involved, and that Pappy saw some of it. But real war isn't like that movie. Good propaganda isn't like Expendable, either. It's more like Allan Dwan's The Sands of Iwo Jima. There's a reason that the latter picture endures.

It's like Francois Truffaut said: at the end of The Searchers, when Wayne carries Natalie Wood home instead of killing her as he vowed to, you forgive him everything. Though I think Wayne was smart enough to anticipate that.

John Wayne and Ward Bond ducked WW II service, but made They Were Expendable (1945) for John Ford, the most solemn, self-important and boring war movie ever filmed, enlivened only, and too early, by this memorable drunken ditty, "The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga." Trust me, this is the high point of a film that makes Ford's later docudrama The Wings of Eagles, on his drinking buddy, pilot Frank "Spig" Wead, look like Metrocolor genius: Expendable co-star Robert Montgomery aspired to become a director, an ambition he eventually achieved in spite of John Ford. When Montgomery asked Ford if he could direct a simple shot of a PT boat approaching a dock, Ford let him do it, then tore the film out of the camera, threw it on the planks, and hollered, "There's your shot!" Ford, Wayne and Bond were a tight and mean crew. At 2 hours and 45 minutes, Otto Preminger's 1965 Pacific War movie with Wayne, In Harm's Way, moves faster than the 2 hour, 15 minute They Were Expendable.

Remind us who snatched Bond. wouldja?

It was Raoul Walsh and John Huston. They could open tombs in those days.

When the saloon fight spills over onto the next soundstage, where a Busby Berkeley-style musical is being filmed. When the snitty director expresses outrage, Slim Pickens says before punching him, "P*** on you! Ah work for Mel Brooks," Now I have to download this.

I know, but, see, Kerik was one of the few guys who played ball for that team and got double crossed for it. Only John O'Neill at FBI (another "counterterrorism expert" HQed in NYC), was also hounded by investigation. Anybody see dogs unleashed on Giuliani, Philip Zelikow, Jerome Hauer, Michael Chertoff, Marvin Bush, Buzzy Krongard? The brass at FBI and CIA (Freeh, Mueller, Michael Scheuer, Paul Blee)? Who had it in for Bernie, and why? WHO? WHO? WHO?

I tend to think Kerik's targeting for prosecution is more interesting than the pardon in 9/11 terms. Why, for instance, was Kerik in Israel "to discuss counterterrorism" in August 2001? Who was against his climb up ranks within the Bush admin two years later?

I read in an entertainment gossip site that not only was John Garfield badly troubled by the HUAC pressure, but that unfortunately he had a cocaine habit, both of which contributed to his early, sudden death.

Good place to drop free samples of Maryland's Finest. I wonder if those disease lab scientists sit around and wax sentimental about their greatest strains, like acid chemists or bourbon distillers.

Developed in Wuhan? Not at Fort Detrick?

I can see it now, 100 years after us: History textbooks list Coronavirus as one of the causes of The Second Great Depression. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/18/hsbc-to-cut-35000-jobs-worldwide-as-profits-plunge-coronavirus

Who stole Ward Bond's body? This sounds like a Coen Brothers comedy, with Tom Hanks as John Wayne: "Put his boots on him!" Ron, if you want to see a great Abe Polonsky movie, see the idiosyncratic film noir Force of Evil, with John Garfield. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040366/?ref_=nm_knf_i4 It takes the kind of jaundiced view of American enterprise that can help get a man blacklisted.

Deryabin memo starts at .pdf page 145 here: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10406-10113.pdf The memo is from Helms's DP division to Hoover's office, and is "passed on without comment" by the DDP. It relies on Deryabin's interpretative speculation about Oswald's Soviet experiences, and shows no Communist connection for Ruby. Suspicious minds might say it reads like a blueprint for setting up Oswald and Ruby as KGB, using the policy changes of the LBJ admin as partial justification. But to what end for CIA? In the following document, Tennent Bagley suggests that Deryabin be set up to pose as a Russian interpreter for the FBI in interviewing Marina Oswald.

This is the movie thread. If JFK wanted consideration here, he should have joined SAG.

Edited for Clarity Jim - it was only a few posts above that you said Lawrence was not a political film, and called the political elements window dressing, while I defended them, and am defending them here. My point is, if the scene structure is a Michael Wilson creation, then Wilson is responsible for reducing the politics to a level where they could be accused of being window dressing. It may in fact be the 90% of new dialogue Wilson attributes to Robert Bolt that defines the political atmosphere of Lawrence, despite its reduction for dramatic purposes. If Lean and Bolt also chose to emphasize the edgiest part of Lawrence's psychology, they were following Lawrence's lead in Seven Pillars, and the gossip about Lawrence that emerged from his anonymous service in the RAF after the war. Thanks to the Lean film. reconsiderations of Lawrence's autobiography and its psycho-sexual elements began to be published by the mid-1970s. As far as Raiders of the Lost Ark goes, I merely mentioned that Lawrence is an influence on the adventure directors of that generation, including the Lucas of Star Wars (wherein Howard Hawks is also bountifully referenced), and the Spielberg of not only Raiders, but of Empire of the Sun as well. And in both the Raiders series and the second Star Wars trilogy are exotic "foreign" caricatures that owe as much to Anthony Quinn in Lawrence (not to mention the characters Da'ud and Farraj) as they do to the heavily-accented stereotypes of 1930s-1940s movie serials. They come off a bit like the Arab characters in Ben-Hur of the year before. Old habits die hard. The Spielberg wisdom has been kicking around Turner Classic Movies for years; I'm hardly reinventing the wheel. He alludes to the stereotyping of Arabs in the first clip.

Joseph, quoting, if I may, from your Michael Wilson article: Wilson said in a 1964 interview, "The film was at the point of being shot when I found myself again in conflict with David Lean over questions of the film's themes and the nature of the character. We had arrived at an impasse and I withdrew... My version of Lawrence's character was more social and political than that of Robert Bolt, who preferred the psychoanalytical side--the sadistic, masochistic, homosexual aspects of his character." After receiving a copy of Bolt's screenplay just over a month before the film's premiere, Wilson wrote Spiegel on November 7, 1962: "It is clear at once that little of my dialog [sic] remains in this screenplay, certainly less than 10 percent. I assume that the dialog was written by Robert Bolt, and through you I must congratulate him on a job well done. He is a gifted man. If screen credit were determined on the basis of dialog alone, I could not claim recognition for this picture. "However, more goes into the writing of a motion picture than the spoken word. Structure, selection, continuity, plot, invention, and characterization--all these factors form and define the final product we see and hear... Why, then, is the screenplay attributed to Mr. Bolt so much like mine, to a degree that it virtually coincides with mine in terms of continuity? The story that Robert Bolt tells is the story that I told. He has chosen different words with which to tell it." I don't doubt (I never did) that Wilson deserves co-writing credit on Lawrence, but his assumption of creating the film's structure seems to attribute to him the condensations and fictionalizations that would trouble Jim Di Eugenio into calling Lawrence's politics only window dressing, and might prompt me into calling out the film's figures of the Arab Revolt as mere steps in the sand away from the caricatures of 1959's Ben-Hur (adapted from the desert exoticist Lew Wallace by Gore Vidal, among others). We'll never know, so long as the draft remains an archival item. Also - here sounding like a period letter writer to the London Sunday Times - I'll mention that it was El Aurens himself that brought the homoerotic aspects of his psychology to the fore, endlessly weeping in print and to "confidential friends" that, with a groan of "delicious warmth," he gave his "precious bodily integrity" up to the Turkish Bey, in a scene that, however much it later galvanized a generation of Saturday-matinee American schoolboys (Steven Spielberg among them), probably masks Lawrence having confronted his sexuality amid consensuality in a land where rough desire, like murder, lay just to the other side of good manners and voluminous robes. I don't blame Robert Bolt for running with it and afflicting that generation, as Lawrence certainly ran with it first, and flamboyantly, as if in his first Arab costume. Still, Jim, it's a political film. Without the Arab Revolt, it's just the tale of a repressed future Oxford don gone troppo on an extended holiday. It's possible that the major sin here lies in not foreshadowing well enough how Lawrence would be impressed into betraying the Arab nationalist agenda at Versailles, a process that perhaps inspired Lawrence's later desires for anonymity, hermitage, and self-punishment.

So hot, I forgot the 35-year floor. Don't we have an Amendment process for such exigencies?

I'm hoping for a Bernie/AOC ticket, so the losers will be truly beautiful.