Thomas F. Cook

I see a lot of theatre but not as much that’s out there, and a lot less than I used to when I worked for a theatrical law firm that represented many of the major Broadway musicals.

I’ve thought a lot about this production and although it got good reviews, I think it misses on several levels.

It chooses to be multi-cultural as you can clearly see from the program, but it’s confusing in the way it’s chosen to be multi-cultural. There is a white family and a black family, but I couldn’t tell (and it’s not in Wilder’s script anyway) whether this was meant to be non-traditional casting or whether they were actually white and black families.

Opera, oddly enough, doesn’t have this problem of non-traditional casting because singing is basically color blind. So with opera, you can have, for example, Leontyne Price singing Madama Butterfly — and no one blinks an eye.

But in this piece — and I read the director’s note carefully — he decided that it shouldn’t be “our town,” but “our universe,” or “our world.” Cast in a way that reflects the audience of today. I don’t object, but it created confusion — primarily because the Gibb family was all black actors and the Webb family were all white. So then I was thinking that the relationship between George and Emily was an interracial one rather than simply non-traditional casting. That, in itself, creates another tension that I don’t think really reflects the play’s theme — which leads to my other problem with this production.

The huge wall at the back. Our Town, though it’s like about 100 years old, is considered avant garde because it’s usually produced on either a bare stage or a blackened stage — with almost no props at all. The opening monologue by The Stage Manager (Jim Parsons) goes on and on about what props and sets you would be looking at if this were a traditional play. But Wilder was a genius, perhaps, and he knew that if he put anything on that stage for the actor to play with or for the audience to look at — other than the actors themselves — you would completely misunderstand the powerful 3rd Act where Emily tries to “relive,” like Scrooge, a moment from her past life. And that’s exactly what happened. Your eye kept being drawn to the massive back wall, which was painted to look like a barn wall. And in one of the most critical scenes — I believe it’s the end of Act I — where Emily says she wrote or received an envelope addressed to, so and so, on such and such street, in the town, in the United States, on Earth, in the Galaxy, in the Milky Way and the Eye of God — this hugely important speech was spoken through a whole in this wall, like the tv show Laugh-In. It’s one of the reasons, in fact, that the production has “partial view” seats, because the side seats, where I was almost sitting, can’t see that far back.

That scene, which establishes the relationship and love between George and Emily, needs to be tender and full blooded and right up front — as close to the front of the stage as possible. They are ostensibly talking to each other from the upper floor windows of their homes, which are next to each other. But there was no chemistry in this production between those two. And they are, ultimately, the main characters — at least the ones we are prone to follow.

The other (probably not the final or only) problem, was the choir master who is meant to be a stand-in for Thorton Wilder himself: an outsider and a homosexual who has probably never acted on his feelings, like Henry James. It’s there in the script, when (I think) Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) says, “A small town is no place for a man like Mr. Stimson.” He is talking about the reason that almost every young gay man heads to a city. But in this production, the Stimson character is just enraged that his church choir can’t sing. At least that’s all I was able to pick up.

I’ll have to look through all my old Playbill programs — (I have every single one except “Scapin” by Moliere) — to see which of the revivals I saw before. I’ve seen “Our Town” at least 4 times, including my high school production. I won’t say this was the worst, but in my opinion, it was the least coherent and one that completely lost sight of Wilder’s insight: that human beings are too alive to know what life is; that we spend every moment taking it for granted; and that we can only understand life through death; and even after, that we must spend eternity trying to forget it.

First, I want to note that many gay men will laugh in sympathy at things that straight people may not ever understand. I think the first time it happens in this movie is when Lee (Daniel Craig) sees Allerton (Drew Starkey) in the corner of a cafe and makes an incredibly awkward and probably inebriated bow to him. The camera turns to Allerton and Allerton just slowly moves his head to look through the window. All the men in the audience laughed but it’s because we know what it’s like to be rejected and in such a cold manner.

In fact, that awkward bow and the cold as ice rejection is probably the central theme of this movie. Even though Eugene Allerton has a number of sexual experiences with William Lee, and accompanies him on trips to South America with a kind of “well why not,” he never gives into the intimacy that Lee is seeking, rather desperately.

Addicts stories are often utterly boring, though they can be funny. They are almost always stories of redemption and recovery and they are alike in as many ways as you can think of. William Burroughs wrote about addiction in a completely different and interesting way. He often wrote about the joy of finding unfettered access to his drug of choice, which was heroin. There are several nods to that in this movie, including a scene where he gets prescribed 3 ccs of liquid opioids, which is enough to keep him from withdrawal, and an extended journey into the Ecuadorean jungle to find a woman who is experimenting with Ayahuasca. In fact, this last sex scene that Lee and Allerton have while high (it’s not really a “high” per se, but it is a hallucinogen), is where the writer makes it clear to the reader that being on drugs can open one’s heart and mind. I never quite saw anything like it, but while they’re having sex, you basically realize they are melting into each other. You sometimes see their hands stroking each other underneath their skin. You sometimes see their heads merge into each other’s flesh. It’s an incredible feat of film making and (i took efforts to notice) they were clearly completely naked. After the hallucination ends, they are both shirtless but wearing jeans. And the reality of distance and distrust returns. Leslee Manville, who is an utter beauty, plays the botanist and is made up to look almost like a witch. After their night of intimacy she says to Allerton, “the door is now open, why would you look away?”

But he does. Their relationship, such as it was, is over. The intimacy was experienced once and is gone, and in a series of somewhat hallucinatory scenes, Lee ages and eventually dies, still thinking about the man he loved.

I’m going to see it again. I do not understand what happened to Jason Schwartzman, who played a character named Joe, who was fat and sloppy and quite funny, always picking up men who robbed him. It’s just hard to recognize him anymore because of the weight gain.

I think I’ll just have this one as a pinned one, because so often in New York, you’ll spot a celebrity in just about anywhere. Sometimes I remember them.

Upper East Side, probably north of Bloomingdale’s, my mom and I were looking in a window of these old watches and clocks and suddenly, behind me, looking in the same window was Yoko Ono. My mom pretended to push me into her. I think that was in the 80s.

University Place and 8th Street. Lucas Hedges was walking across the crosswalk with a friend and he said, “That’s fantastic,” or something like that to his friend. He seemed genuinely excited.

Once at The Lincoln Center Theatre Bathroom and later in a theatre. Christopher Reeve. He was coming out of the bathroom as I was going in and boy was he tall. Like other actors, he stared and had an intense stare. The occasion was the famous production of Waiting For Godot starring Steve Martin, Robin Williams and F. Murray Abraham. Plus Bill Irwin and Lucas Haas. That was in 1988 at the Mitzi E. Newhous Theater which was a tiny tiny theatre and the run sold out immediately. But the audience was especially populated with the famous and probably half the seats in the theatre were house seats. Katherine Hepburn made her way down the steps with the help of her lover. The other time I saw Christopher Reeve was when he was also in the audience of a play. This was after his accident and he was in the wheelchair at the end of the row. When I went to the back to get a drink or something, he again stared. It was as if he remembered me. The other time I saw him was when he was onstage in Fifth of July. It was ironic that he played a character who had lost his legs and had prosthetic ones which were pretty useless. He was also a gay veteran in that play and I think he publicly stated that after a kiss between he and his lover, it took like 5 to 10 minutes to get the audience back. When I saw it, there were verbalized groans and yucks and one woman near me said, “Oh my God.” Later at the end of that performance I realized Lanford Wilson was sitting behind me. He had, for a while, been my hero.

But I don’t really like to talk to celebrities or go up to them for an autograph or anything. I get too flustered and act like an idiot.

I’ve written about Tammy Faye before, specifically “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” starring Jessica Chastain.

This musical failed in NYC, while it was a smash hit in London, and there’s a big question of Why?

I think in part, and this is without having seen it, it’s because they are elevating her to almost a gay rights activist, for the very simple reason that she dared to speak to a gay man with AIDS on her television hour. She wasn’t in the room with him. He was in his apartment or some studio in California. Her sympathy for the guy was thousands of miles apart.

She was a stupid and greed-filled religious televangelist. The real story behind her and her husband’s rise and fall is the damn television show and the station they built. It was PTL (Praise The Lord) network — and it was far more successful than CBN (Christian Broadcast Network), Pat Robertson’s network, which only had a few thousand viewers. There were a whole lot of transactions that went on between the Bakers and others, but when they became hosts on CBN of a show called The 700 Club, it ended up becoming the flagship program on CBN. When they left that network, they started their own network and it left other televangelists in the gutter. Everyone was jealous of them: craved their ratings, their world satellite network, and so on. So when scandal hit because of Jim Baker and a woman named Jessica Hahn, Jerry Falwell stepped in to become the chairman of the network and Jim and Tammy left or were tossed out. Not unsurprisingly, the donations to the station completely dried up and Falwell had to contribute 20 million to keep it afloat. He had lied to Jim Baker that Jim would get control back and instead called him “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” Of course that just shows what an idiot Falwell was too. Christianity didn’t begin the day Christ died. In fact it wasn’t until 400 some years had passed that the four main gospels were codified, the apocrypha created, and Rome turned away from paganism. So 1600 years to be more precise. And of course there was Judas who you could accuse of being a stain on Christianity if he and Jesus weren’t, in fact, Jewish.

But never mind that. Falwell is dead and we are all better off for it. Tammy Faye died but Jim Baker still lives on, has repurchased the PTL name and logo and is trying again. But why did this show fail? Not sure. But I have a feeling it really gets the story of these two totally wrong. Jessica Chastain’s portrayal was probably closer. It might also be a much more amusing show in England, whose people, I sometimes think, are continually perplexed at the United States as a nation.

I sometimes watched the Jim and Tammy show for laughs and one time, to the very apparent annoyance of her husband, Tammy told a story about shopping in the middle of Indiana in this mall that must have been 500 years old. That is how stupid she was.

He has said the inspiration for this WWII movie was a picture of a little light skinned black child walking by himself during the Evacuation of the children of London. He wanted to remind everyone that the German’s attack on London was not solely an attack on pasty people, but that there was a lively and vibrant black community living there, including interracial couples.

This is true I think. But the really good thing about this movie is that it accepts the interracial aspect and doesn’t pound it over our heads. The little boy experiences prejudice, hatred, because of his color, but the main story is about the gallery of rogues he meets when he decides to jump the train and run home.

Getting home is far more difficult than he realizes, and he’s got almost nothing but a sandwich and a tiny bit of pocket change. Eventually, the authorities realize that he hasn’t arrived at his destination family, and have to tell Siorsese Ronan, his mother, that he is missing. This is unfortunate as far as the script goes because she then goes out to “find him,” but London is a sprawling town and there isn’t that much she can do. This sort of gives her character a kind of pointlessness, where earlier in the movie she had an urgency that was more palpable.

I think the jury is still out on Steve McQueen. I sometimes can’t understand what his movies are really about. The first one that I saw was Hunger, where Michael Fassbender played Bobbie Sands, the hunger striker who died during the Thatcher era. Even though it was a grueling depiction of what the British did to the Irish political prisoners in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, I sometimes felt he just wanted to see Fassbender be as naked as possible. Then Shame, the next one I saw, didn’t seem to me to depict shame at all and Fassbender, again, was walking around naked with his huge floppy cock. 12 Years A Slave won for best movie that year but it did catch some criticism, especially the movie critic Armand White, who called it torture porn and got himself kicked out of The New York Film Critics Circle for heckling Steve McQueen for this very reason. I always thought White was perhaps one of the worst critics out there, back when he wrote for the New York Press, but there was, indeed, a kind of over the top quality about 12 Years A Slave, especially the whipping scene, which I assume was the scene White was referring to as torture porn. And then this one, where some real ghoulish grave robbers play with dead bodies and laugh about them as they steal their valuables. He might go too far, but in spite of that I don’t think I really know what his movies are about or who they’re for. But hell, he’s had a full career already and he gets great actors.

I wasn’t eager to see this because of Kieran Culkin and the really reprehensible character he played on Succession. They were all disgusting people but his character was so dismissive and awful, I just knew going in that a lot of that energy would be in this character as well. And I guess I just didn’t want to be reminded of it.

But I like Jesse Eisenberg and once saw him when crossing the street — he coming in the opposite direction. He stared at me and he has a very intense stare and he is also as thin as a rail.

In this they play cousins whose mutual grandmother, a holocaust survivor from Poland, has died and left them money with the request that the visit her homeland. Benji (Culkin) lives in Binghamton and David (Eisenberg) lives in Brooklyn. But they are vastly different personalities and I think the poster shows that pretty well. They are basically sharing a room on a holocaust tour guided by a British man (Will Sharpe) with a life long interest in Eastern Europe and that area of the world. Sharpe does a great job distancing himself from his recent character on The White Lotus (the one married to Aubrey Plaza) and you don’t feel that anything is exploitive about the movie, even the visit to the nearby Majdanek Concentration Camp which is just a few miles from Lublin. They intent to visit their grandmother’s home, parting ways with the others in the group.

But the conflict comes because Benji is, basically, a depressed and out of control nut while Eisenberg is a comfortable Brooklynite with a small family. And much of the very moving parts of the movie aren’t the holocaust related visits, it is Benji and David’s different ways of relating to being third generation jewish people. (3rd generation from the initial holocaust survivors, that is.) This whole notion of 3rd generation is repeated in various forms and I think it frequently comes up because it isn’t possible for the 3rd generation of any group to understand what the 1st generation went through. You can try. You can empathize. You can read books and wikipedia articles, or letters from that generation. But to really get at that core, (the real pain of the title), is not really possible.

Anyway it’s a wonderful movie and well worth the time to see it.

Okay, so a tiny little piece of me is incredibly jealous of Sean Baker and mainly because he went to NYU Tisch School of the Arts to learn filmmaking, and I went to NYU’s (at that time) Washington Square University College — now renamed College of Arts and Science. Or maybe it’s just Arts & Science. In any event, I took a number of movie classes that were offered by Tisch, and even a law class on the first amendment offered by the Law School. The reason I am jealous is because he is so freaking talented. And he’s not just a talented director, he is a talented writer.

He wrote and directed two movies I really loved: The Florida Project and Red Rocket. I probably would have loved Tangerine too, but I didn’t see it. He often writes about sex workers or people on the fringes of our worlds. In this, Anora, (she calls herself Ani or Annie), is basically a lap dancer who tries to do tricks on the side, outside the club. The club, incidentally, comes off in the movie, like something of a haven for women who like stripping and like getting naked for men. Because of her background, she’s asked to dance for the man in the photo, the son of a Russian oligarch who lives in the most expensive mansion in Brooklyn. It’s in the area called Mill Basin which looks, from the overhead view on Google Maps, very unnatural. They proceed to fall in love.

But if you actually know anything about human nature, the son of a Russian oligarch who doesn’t want to return to Russia, you know that when he asks her to marry him and offers to give her a four carat diamond ring worth, if it was lab grown, about $14,000 and up to $60,000 if it was a real diamond (although one of that size is rarely found in mines) — you know that he’s an absolute bull shitter. He’s also not a nice person — not a nice kid. Spoiled rotten, to the absolute core. There’s a couple of guys who are his father’s goons who live nearby and try to make sure he doesn’t get into trouble — or at least too much trouble. The movie turns pretty wildly when these three find out that he has married her at a church in Las Vegas. (Vegas also becomes a plot point in the movie.)

What really surprised me is that it was so funny. But what also surprised me — to a degree, because I think Sean Baker genuinely writes about people who are sincere — is that she, Anora, is just about the only sincere person in the movie. She’s also a truth teller which makes her, almost, a Tennessee Williams character like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar or Maggie in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. These truth tellers never get their way. Maggie wanted a heterosexual husband and by the end of the play, has convinced herself she’s going to turn him straight. Blanche was raped and sent to an insane asylum. Like those characters, Anora ends up not exactly lost in delusion or insanity, but it doesn’t really end well. It’s almost like a mini tragedy, as most of his movies have been. And I think that’s where our exhilaration and empathy begins. We understand, because of what she’s been through, why she sobs.

I hope he has the stamina and creative juices to continue, because film needs people and writers like Sean Baker.

This book was recommended by someone on Facebook, so it wasn’t the most trustworthy of recommends. Generally I find the books I want to read by browsing in a bookstore, reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and then recommendations from people I’m actually talking to or listening to.

And then it turned out to be a memoir, a genre which is very popular right now but one I don’t like too much. Generally speaking, memoirs often blow up the writers trials and tribulations into much more than they are.

This one is about the death of the guy’s lover in the early 90s due to AIDS. And because I don’t read back covers, covers, flaps, jackets, or forwards, there began to develop a strong tension as I was reading whether or not the writer, Tim, was going to die also, or if he made it to the point where he could start taking combo therapies and survive. In fact, there were times I thought that maybe the narrator was dead, like in Sunset Boulevard where the voice over tells you, as you’re looking at a floating body in a pool, “That’s me.”

But it turns out he does not die in the book. And then I read the forward, afterward, which said that he had written this memoir in a frenzy, got it published in 1993 and died shortly of AIDS shortly after. So the book is basically the story of their relationship. And that’s why I hate memoirs.

But in some sense I am pleased to be able to add to my “taken too soon,” list of artists and writers and poets who simply didn’t have enough life span to become the writers they were meant to be. An artist needs time, above all, and privacy, and continual work. In some sense, I am taking my much longer life for granted, and have to stop that, and resume my writing. It’s basically what I planned my whole life for, and just because I never really achieved anything of much significance, I have to stop the self pity party.

So far, in addition to this, which was a mediocre book for me, other artists gone too soon are Donald Britton and Larry Stanton (and ironically, Larry painted numerous portraits of Donald Britton, as well as many other young gay artists who all perished too young.) They all might have achieved great things, but AIDS took them.

Someone who was writing about the joys of The Mineshaft, the notorious bar/sex club, said that it embodied the freedom between Stonewall and the condom. I think that’s a very simplified and probably stupid way of looking at it. Other STDs were off the chart in those days — and there was a pandemic of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia that nobody cared about because you’d just take some penicillin and go out and do some more. And according to the latest science, HIV and Hepatitis C spread almost at the same time, peaking in around 1977/1978. It spread for years before the first cases started showing up. Somehow I only got Hepatitis C which is now cured. But the 2 are almost always seen together. And the fact that Prep is the penicillin, these STDs are rising once again, and HIV is spreading also, because not everyone takes the precautions they should.

Anyway, the book was heartfelt, but really didn’t have much of a punch.

Jason Reitman is the son of Ivan Reitman, the producer of some all time hits like Animal House and Ghostbusters. But Jason Reitman’s films don’t get great reviews and I’ve never quite understood why. His best received work was Whiplash, but in my opinion, J.K. Simmons was the wrong actor to play the part of the sadist. The other: Miles Teller, was perfect.

In fact, I think it’s his and his casting director’s ability to find actors that are on the cusp — like you know who they are but only vaguely. It makes watching the movie not an exercise in watching a famous person try and fail to convince you that they ARE the character. Unknowns don’t bring the baggage of their fame.

So, for example, you think “where have I seen that actor playing Lorne Michaels before,” and it turns out to be The Fabelmans, where he played a 16 year old Steven Spielberg. Or “why does the guy playing Chevy Chase look familiar,” and it’s because you saw him in May/December where he played the older (probably gay) son of Julianne Moore. I’m not suggesting this always helps. In this case, every actor is playing someone more famous – even in death – than they are now.

And the movie is pure fantasy anyway. There’s a little bit of drama about the show being set up to fail, lining up a rerun reel of Carson, and Dave Tebet who was in charge of finding talent, not destroying it, almost pulling the plug and saying, at the very last second, “Go Live.” It wasn’t his job and he wouldn’t have been in the control room. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.

Maybe it’s nostalgia, but after watching 90 minutes of utter chaos and the kind of script that former cocaine addict Aaron Sorkin likes to write, it all came down to the beginning — the very first sketch on Saturday Night which was Michael O’Donoghue and John Belushi doing a bit about wolverines and then Chevy Chase, (Cory Michael Smith) coming out to say the famous opening line, “Live From New York, it’s Saturday Night.” And that final scene — and also the first scene of the show IRL — just warmed my heart a lot. I felt transported back 50 years to when I was 14 or 15 and watched the first episode of Saturday Night, for I had heard about it.

So house lights up, the original opening montage starts playing along with pictures of the famous cast and their real names. There’s a little sadness there too, because you know that John Belushi is going to die and that Gilda Radner is going to get ovarian cancer, twice, instead of a career, and will open Gilda’s Club to offer support to women with cancer. (That’s now been renamed Cancer Support Community, which seems… forgettable and odd.) West Houston Street is still second named “Gilda Radner Way.” You think about the decades that have passed and cast members that were murdered: Phil Hartman, or were fired: Norm McDonald. Some you hated: Gilbert Gottfried. Some that developed Trump-related insanity: Victoria Jackson.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, but knew, because it was in one of the downstairs theatres at Lincoln Plaza, that it must have bombed.

I wanted to see this before I read any reviews and come to my own conclusions.

Again, a supposedly master director and writer does not do even the simplest thing of allowing the audience to find its way into the movie. All art, including paintings, have this secret method of drawing you in. When it’s left out, or when it’s accidentally omitted, the audience or viewer must work overtime in order to “get” what’s happening. It doesn’t matter that there can be people running around all over the place, a movie, a book, a piece of art and a classical piece of music, must begin with an introduction which serves as a beckoning call.

Coppola chose not to do this, so for a good twenty minutes or so, I was sort of agreeing with everyone and the box office that this was a piece of garbage. After I had found my way in, I found it far more enjoyable, even with the bad casting choices and a distinctly outdated, it seemed to me, of filmmaking. I couldn’t really pin it down — what it was about the film that seemed so much like a 70s movie. Might have been the cinematography. I don’t know.

But all movies — all art actually — is about the artist’s journey. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dumb vehicle like Legally Blond, a historic musical like Les Miserables, or an epic like this. Coppola’s conclusion is that art is supreme and it is more important than affordable housing, various human needs and wants, relationships and so on. At the opening of the movie, he (Adam Driver) is standing on the edge of the Chrysler building, very precariously dangling his foot over the edge. When he starts to fall, he shouts, “Stop,” and the world stops moving and he stops falling, he pulls his foot back onto the ledge and straightens himself up. Then he shouts “Go,” and the world moves again. That is the artist in control of his or her world.

Ultimately, it’s a big fuck you to the movie industry. The character is an architect, but all the people around him can be seen as various types of industry people. The naysayers, the money men, and so on. I think I felt the most depressed about the movie industry when I realized that in order to get your movie produced, you had to pass literally hundreds of people who all have the power to say no. Just one of those people will destroy your chances. There’s just a handful of people who can say yes, and that goes for Broadway as well, and they almost never know what they are doing.

But I don’t think I would have spent $140 million on this. It might have been a long dream but it needed some outside help.

And please don’t hire Aubrey Plaza. She can be good, but when she has to act sophisticated, it’s like watching her and Chris Pratt as Andy as Bert Machlan on Parks and Recreation.