As I was packing to head out of town for the Thanksgiving weekend, imagining all the long lines at the airport, delayed arrivals and endless taxi rides, my mind seamlessly went back in time to the world's greatest Thanksgiving comedy, John Hughes' enchantingly wonderful "Planes, Trains and Automobiles."
Made in 1987, it stars Steve Martin as a tightly wrapped ad exec who endures a series of comic misadventures trying to get home to see his family in Chicago (Hughes' own hometown). Most of the madcap misadventures involve his costar, John Candy, who plays a garrulous shower-curtain salesman whose attempts to be helpful always lead to further complications.
Frankly, pretty much every moment in the film between the two guys is a hoot--they're the perfect distillation of Hollywood's odd-couple comedy matrix: Martin, cool and edgy; Candy, warm and exuberant. The movie also offers great guest shots by Michael McKean as a state trooper and Edie McClurg as a car rental agent (she goes toe-to-toe with Martin in a scene you'll have to go see on YouTube for yourself, since Martin uses an expletive 18 times in just over a minute--when you blog for a family newspaper, you can't link to any nasty words). Hughes always had a knack for showcasing cool music in his films, so if you rent the movie, watch for a comical highway misadventure, involving Candy driving the wrong way on a freeway, orchestrated to Ray Charles' "Mess Around."
At one point in the story, the two men, stranded in Wichita, end up spending the night in a cheap motel, which is where the following scene begins as they wake up in the morning, locked in an uncomfortable embrace. Happy Turkey Day!
Sharon Waxman posted a great scoop on her WaxWord website earlier this week, revealing that a huddle of Hollywood stars (notably Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Nick Nolte) had a secret meeting last month where they gave up a thumbs-up vote endorsing an actor's strike. Citing an unnamed source, Waxman (a former top-notch New York Times reporter) says the A-list actors were even given pieces of paper to write down their views as to how or why a strike should occur.
It sounds wonderfully cloak and dagger, especially since this was far in advance of any strike vote from the rank-and-file SAG membership. But was the story too good to be, well, true? This morning, with most of the Thanksgiving turkeys still in the fridge, Nikki Finke weighed in on her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog claiming -- gasp -- that the meeting never took place. She takes apart Waxman's post, referring to the alleged event as an "imaginary meeting," quoting an unnamed insider saying that Waxman must have confused the secret meeting -- which she initially described as happening last month, a reference now deleted from her update of the original posting -- with a SAG meeting that happened last June before the guild contract had expired. But that meeting, Finke says, was for a different purpose, to gather names for a solidarity statement during the last weeks of negotiations between the guild and the studios.
Finke also accused Waxman of deleting the post, though Waxman says she inadvertently left the post in "draft" mode overnight while doing some additional fact checking. Waxman has now amended a few facts in her original post, notably leaving out any specific time frame for the meeting. Finke concludes: "All I can say is that this doesn't bode well for her future blog endeavors." That prompted a Waxman response saying that Finke had devoted so much energy trying to debunk the story because she was eager to embarrass a fellow journalist.
What's going on here? In short: Who knows? Waxman and Finke were once quite friendly, but clearly Finke, who was the first to establish herself as a major Hollywood blogger, isn't especially hospitable to any competition. I've been on the whip end of a few of her lashings myself, so I know all too well how easily she can overreact and distort a competitor's story. On the other hand, Waxman does seem to have a hole in her post. When I e-mailed Waxman to ask if she knew when the meeting took place, she acknowledged that she hadn't pinned it down yet. The timing is pretty crucial -- if it did occur before the June 30 contract expiration, as Finke contends, it feels like very old news, if news at all. If it was over the summer, say in August or even September, it raises the question: what bearing did the meeting have on a strike vote call in late November, if any bearing at all?
The real issue here, as always, is the nutty environment of Hollywood blogging. Call me old-fashioned, but as a reporter, if I only have one source for a story -- and can't even use that source on the record -- I don't think that gives me enough credibility to run the story, especially when, as in this case, no one can say exactly when this alleged secret gathering even happened. The reporting standards for blogs are inevitably different from the standards for newspapers -- they are essentially two different mediums -- but some of the same standards still apply equally.
One in particular: You've got to nail down the story before you print it.
Photo: Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. Credit: Scott Nelson / Agence France Presse.
If it's true that Clint Eastwood is hanging up his acting shoes with "Gran Torino," he couldn't have offered us a nicer swan song. Directing himself, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a crusty retired assembly plant worker who, recently widowed, seems peeved at just about everyone in the world. He's totally exasperated by his family ("There's nothing anyone can do that won't disappoint the old man -- it's inevitable" says one of his sons) and unleashes a fusillade of paint-blistering racial invective on all the Hmong immigrants and people of color who live in his dilapidated neighborhood. I don't want to tell too much about the story, except to say that Eastwood manages to offer us a final reprise of his legendary Dirty Harry character and a heartfelt portrait of human redemption, all in the same film.
The script was so well crafted and understated (and the credits went by so fast) that after seeing the picture, I immediately called Bill Gerber, one of the film's producers, to find out which one of the many A-list screenwriters who must always be knocking down Eastwood's door had penned the story. "Are you sitting down?" Gerber asked. He had quite a surprise. The writer, Nick Schenk, who lives in Minnesota, had never sold a feature script in his life. In fact, the only writing work Schenk had done was for "BoDog Fight," a mixed martial arts TV show, a game show called "Let's Bowl" and some comedy sketches collected in a DVD called "Factory Accident Sex." ("That title doesn't exactly help my career, does it?" Schenk jokes.)
Schenk says he wrote the script, using a pen and a pad of paper, sitting at night in a bar called Grumpy's in northeast Minneapolis. It was a good release for Schenk, who was holding down a series of day jobs, driving a fruit truck and doing construction work. "I just scribbled away every night," he told me. "The bartender there is a friend, so sometimes I'd ask him questions about where I was going with the story as I was writing. When it came, the words just came. One night, I knocked off 25 pages right there in the bar."
Schenk shares story credit with Dave Johannson, another Minnesota guy who's a good friend of Schenk's younger brother. When I naively asked if Dave was also a screenwriter, Schenk laughed. "Not exactly," he said. "Dave sells furnaces for the gas company."
Schenk says he was told over and over not to write a script that had an elderly guy as its center. "They said it would never get made, because you're not supposed to write about old people, especially a guy that sounds like a super-racist," he explains. "But I'm not the kind of person that listens to that stuff. I just knew this character well. When I was working construction, I'd meet a lot of guys like Walt Kowalski. Because I liked history, I'd always be the one that the older guys on the site would tell their stories to.
"Walt is like a lot of shop teachers and coaches that you have in school. He's the kind of guy who's just waiting for you to screw up so he can roll his eyes at you. I had no idea that Clint's character in 'Dirty Harry' drove a Gran Torino. I wanted the car to be a Ford, because there was an assembly line near me. It could've been Crown Victoria, but I liked the sound of Gran Torino better."
Still, Schenk barely knew anyone in Hollywood. How did he beat the million-to-one odds of getting his script to Clint Eastwood? And how many words of the script did Eastwood change before he began filming? Keep reading:
Having heard that I saw "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" the other night, people keep asking me: What's it like? Can it possibly make its money back? (Estimates of the film's budget begin at around $150 million.) Is it an Oscar movie?
The real insiders tend to ask a more knowing question: Is this the movie that proves that David Fincher actually has a commercial sensibility? Or is it a $150-million art film?
It's a fair question. If you asked me to name the pantheon directors of our time, I'd put Fincher right up at the top, along with Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood. But since Fincher's breakthrough hit, "Seven," way back in 1995, the director has made four films. Only one--the 2002 thriller "Panic Room"--was a hit. None of the other three, "Zodiac," "The Fight Club" and "The Game," made more than $48 million in U.S. box office, even though they were bold and amazing films. The rap on Fincher is that while he's a brilliant technician, he's emotionally cool--so much so that if you enter "David Fincher" and "cold and chilly" in Google, you get 15,700 hits.
Written by Eric Roth, "Benjamin Button" was supposed to be different, giving Fincher a more life-affirming canvas to work with, telling the epic saga of a man who ages in reverse, born old, but growing younger every day. But for all the film's impressive work--it's full of bravura filmmaking, from start to finish--I found it somewhat remote, perhaps because its hero, played by Brad Pitt, is largely a passive observer of events around him. He's something of a second cousin to Forrest Gump, the hero of another Roth-penned film, who like Benjamin Button has a syrupy Southern accent and largely floats through life like a feather, more of an observer to events than a real protagonist, though the mood of "Button" is far different than "Gump," more melancholy than whimsical.
I'm hardly alone here. In Contention's Kristopher Tapley called the movie "strangely cold," with Fincher bringing "an arm's length approach to the emotions in the film." Variety's Todd McCarthy termed "Button" "absorbing, even moving, but an emotionally cool film." McCarthy raises a fascinating issue--is "Button's" chilliness a direct result of Fincher's sensibility, or is it possible that "the picture might have been warmer and more emotionally accessible had it been shot on film." Digital, McCarthy argues, is a cold medium while celluloid is a hot one, leading him to wonder if the film, "with its desired cumulative emotional impact, should be shot and screened on film to be fully realized."
While McCarthy makes a provocative argument, I suspect "Button" is the wrong test case for the digital vs. celluloid debate, since it seems obvious that Fincher, for all his gifts, belongs in the Michael Mann school of cinema--he's a filmmaker as cerebral artist, more brainy and visceral than gauzy or emotional. Fincher simply seems to have a cooler body temperature than most of us mere mortals. Perhaps that's why "Button" has such a split personality--its whole conceit, of a man aging in reverse, is a pure movie idea, but the result is part mesmerizing dream, part magic trick. Fincher gets to play with so many visual effects that you sometimes feel he's showing off--when Button is frolicking in the Florida Keys, Fincher can't resist putting a rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral in the background, just to make sure we're paying attention.
Fincher has made a movie that will be endlessly debated, for its storytelling craft as well as for the overwhelming nature of its visual effects. But there's no getting around the fact that the prevailing mood in "Benjamin Button" is one of melancholy, either because it's the tone that best fits Fincher's gifts or because it's the tone that best suits the film's solitary hero--while we're all trudging forward, his body's clock is spinning in the wrong direction.
For years, people in Hollywood have casually dismissed the Screen Actors Guild as the craziest union in creation. Apparently they weren't exaggerating. As my colleague Richard Verrier has reported, after getting nowhere during months of on-again, off-again talks with the studios, SAG has now opted to pursue a strike authorization vote from its 120,000 members. (The union has been working without a contract since June 30.) If this is meant as some kind of threat designed to drag the studios back to the negotiating table, SAG is even more deluded than anyone believed possible.
SAG's goal is pretty obvious. The guild hopes that by getting a big strike mandate from its membership--a strike referendum requires 75% approval from members who cast ballots--it can use the threat of a disruption of the Academy Awards to force studios to negotiate a better deal. But according to most insiders I have spoken to, no one takes the threat seriously--they don't believe the strike will happen. Why not?
1) As James Carville once famously said: It's the economy, stupid. As it is, most SAG members don't work regularly, at least not at acting. They've got real jobs, whether it's at Starbucks, waiting tables, doing construction, teaching or running small businesses. Whatever the gig, they know--like the rest of us know--that the economy is in the toilet. No one wants to risk losing the jobs they have that actually pay the bills. So fewer people have the pie-in-the-sky attitude that usually fuels SAG strike votes from all those members who aren't working TV or film jobs. Normally, they'd say, What have I got to lose by a strike? I'm not working anyway. But too many members are clinging to their side jobs, which has a sobering effect on anyone considering the value of a misguided strike.
2) I was a vocal supporter of the Writers Guild strike because I felt they were in the right. They weren't asking for the moon, and the studios, having boasted for so long about their profitability, had the money to give. But in the midst of a dire economic crisis, SAG is asking for concessions that no other union got in their negotiations last winter. They have been standing firm in seeking an increase in actor residuals from DVD sales, a demand that the studios will never agree to. It's foolhardy, not to mention unrealistic, to expect that SAG members will join the guild leadership in what is obviously a kamikaze mission.
3) The WGA was united. SAG is divided. On one flank, it has AFTRA, a more conservative sister guild that is quietly poised to recruit more actors and gain more clout for future negotiations. On the other flank, it has a group of actors, endorsed by such respected, high-profile SAG members as Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin and Sally Field, who've made it clear that they want nothing to do with a suicidal strike in the midst of hard times. There are even more stars who haven't issued public declarations for the dissidents who privately support their cause. If necessary, the stars will exercise their clout, blitzing members with reminders of the folly of a showdown with the studios.
4) When the WGA went out on strike, there was a true sense of solidarity with other guilds, notably SAG, based on the feeling that the studios had pushed their hand too far. In early negotiations, it looked like what the studios really wanted was a rollback in residuals and other guild benefits. The WGA had the high moral ground. SAG today doesn't have similar support. The Writers Guild will surely offer soothing words of solidarity, but the true believers aren't there this time around. SAG will have to go it alone. But timing is everything. And you don't have to read a newspaper or watch TV to know that the timing for a Hollywood actors strike couldn't be worse. The WGA got tons of support from the media, not to mention regular Joes who identified with their cause. But with more people losing their jobs every day, SAG is about to discover that most people will view them as rebels without a cause.
Every writer has a special subject, a passion for a certain kind of story. The same goes for Peter Morgan, who's become Hollywood's favorite British bright-writing light in recent times, thanks to a string of impressive pictures. He's the man who wrote 2006's "The Queen," which nabbed a best picture nomination; "The Last King of Scotland," an indie favorite from that same year; and the upcoming "Frost/Nixon," Morgan's adaptation of his smash hit play about the 1977 TV duel between chat-show host David Frost and Richard Nixon, the ex-president who'd been forced to resign in disgrace after an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the infamous Watergate break-in.
But what I find especially fascinating about Morgan (who also wrote "The Deal," a fine 2003 Stephen Frears-directed film about the ambition-filled rivalry between former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and current PM Gordon Brown) is that his films have essentially the same two characters. One is young, slick, likable and wildly ambitious, often underestimated as a lightweight solely obsessed by celebrity or personal gain. The other is older, more experienced and accomplished, unpopular or socially awkward, but often with a vulnerability that we find surprising appealing. In the end, the younger man tends to emerge victorious, but often having shown more mettle and depth than we'd imagined, while the older character often arouses our sympathy, even in defeat.
In this sense, even though "Frost/Nixon" is directed by Ron Howard, it's really a Peter Morgan movie, revisiting themes he's explored in earlier stories. It also makes for an especially striking dramatic equation, since for people of a certain generation--or perhaps generations--Nixon had a secure place in history as a true villain, a nasty, insecure, conniving politician who'd disgraced his office by his efforts to crush his adversaries. The biggest surprise of "Frost/Nixon,'' which stars Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, is how strangely sympathetic Nixon appears in the film. He's sly, funny and self-aware. As the men are digging into each other's past, hoping to gain an advantage before the interviews begin, Nixon tells one of his aides that he should get some Cubans to find out what Frost is up to. The aide looks at him in horror--that's just what got Nixon in trouble in the first place, hiring some Cubans to break into Democratic headquarters. Nixon coyly lets the tension build before finally wryly exhaling, "It's a joke."
It's quite a compliment, to a dramatist, to say that I often found myself not just drawn to Nixon, but sometimes actively rooting for him against Frost, who until the film's climactic third act comes off as a celebrity-obsessed smoothie in over his head against a formidable foe. The night before the first big interview, instead of going over strategy with his team of researchers, Frost heads off with his girlfriend to a movie premiere. It's not the first time Morgan appears full of compassion for the less likable character in his story. He largely does the same thing in "The Queen," making Queen Elizabeth far more likable and full of flinty charm and Zen-like serenity than her public image. The same even goes for Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland," who is portrayed as far more complicated and vulnerable than the hideous monster of so many media accounts.
Why is Morgan so drawn to the characters who would normally be the scoundrel of the story? He has an intriguing response. Keep reading:
For the past few years, I've made myself something of a pain in the tush to the motion picture academy, arguing that it's time--as in lo-o-o-o-ng overdue--to start revitalizing the Oscars. One of my many suggestions was to take the nominations announcement--which essentially features an academy official and a second-tier celebrity standing at a podium, reading off names at the crack of dawn before a scrum of bleary-eyed publicists and cranky reporters--and turn it into a Big Prime-Time TV Event. After all, it's pretty clear that most of the real suspense involving the Oscars these days involves the nominations, not the actual winners, which have felt somewhat anticlimactic in recent years. So why not stage the nominations at night, when the younger viewers the academy is so desperate to reach might actually watch, or at least be awake?
Well, someone was thinking what I was thinking, though it certainly wasn't the motion picture academy, which is about as open to advice from outsiders as Dick Cheney is to planet-saving suggestions from the Sierra Club. The recording academy (also known as NARAS) has transformed the nominations for the 51st annual Grammy Awards into an hourlong TV special. Airing Dec. 3 on CBS, which also broadcasts the Grammys on Feb. 5, the nominations have become a live concert, with appearances by such top-flight artists as Mariah Carey, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera, Foo Fighters and blues legend B.B. King. Between performances, co-hosts LL Cool J and Taylor Swift will announce a few of the major Grammy nominations, with the others being distributed to the media immediately after the special ends.
For NARAS President Neil Portnow, turning the nominations into a concert event was a no-brainer. It's a way to help revitalize the awards themselves--which like all award shows, notably the Oscars, have seen their ratings spiraling downward in recent years. Portnow is also savvy enough to realize that in the reality TV era, viewers are transfixed by any kind of competition.
"We've always tried to find ways to build more attention and interest in Grammy season," he told me. "It became obvious that the nominations were a key to the whole thing. It's the point in the process where everyone, both in the media and in the general public, wants to know--Who's up? Who's down? Who's a winner and who's not? Since the interest is obviously there, why not take advantage of it? Like it or not, competition drives the public's interest in these kind of shows. So if we want to re-energize the awards themselves, why do it in the ballroom of a hotel at some ungodly hour of the morning when you could do it in prime time on TV?"
Portnow went to CBS czar Les Moonves, who loved the idea, figuring it would serve as a great promotion for the Feb. 8 awards show. Portnow didn't have any trouble persuading top artists to participate. "Having an hour of prime-time TV in this day and age is a good thing for everybody," he says. "It comes in the middle of the biggest buying season for the music business, so it's great advertising for a lot of artists who have new albums out right now."
The show will help promote the new Grammy Museum, which also opens next month. The proceeds from concert ticket sales all go to the museum. "I'm not saying it's a magic bullet, but we're eager to try some new things to reach our audience," says Portnow. Geez, can you believe it? At least there's one academy that's willing to embrace new ideas. If the Grammy nomination special gets solid ratings, I predict the motion picture academy will leap into action and have its own nomination special ready to go ... in 2014. As everyone knows all too well, in Hollywood, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Photo of Kathy Bates and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis by Al Seib / Los Angeles Times
The New York Post has the scoop that Harvey and Bob Weinstein have made 24 staffers an offer they couldn't refuse, with the Weinstein Co. laying off 11% of its work force today. I can't say this is unexpected, even though the last time I referred to the Weinstein Co.'s financial problems, I got an irate phone call from Harvey, telling me how much money he had in the bank after his big payoff from Disney. I guess this means Harvey isn't putting any of his personal fortune into the company's coffers.
The move apparently cuts the Weinstein Co.'s work force down to 200 staffers. The Weinsteins called employees into a meeting at 2 pm NY time to deliver the grim news. The shaky state of the nations's economy clearly played a role in the layoffs, with company insiders predicting the cutbacks would be a one-time event. But the move is sure to prompt new worries about the Weinstein's future, especially with the company still looking for a big break-out hit. The Post certainly didn't mince words. As it's story put it: "The layoff move is bound to stir a new round of rumors that the studio is on the brink of collapse."
Photo: Harvey Weinstein: Photo credit: Jeff Vespa/ WireImage.com
A bunch of us were crowded in an elevator at the Directors Guild, heading down to the parking lot last night after the first screening of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," David Fincher's much-anticipated epic portrait of a man--played by Brad Pitt--whose life unfolds in, well, the wrong direction. Everyone had a strong opinion of the movie--"It was great!" one guy said. "It stunk!" said another. "Oscars all around!" someone else chimed in.
Alas, we were all joking. It was gallows humor time. About 25 minutes into the 2 1/2 hour film, the screening was aborted. Apparently cinematographer Claudio Miranda (who's worked as a gaffer on nearly all of Fincher's films) noticed with growing horror that one of the digital projector's color channels was out of whack, producing a washed-out image. Not that anyone around me noticed a thing, mind you, all of us assuming that if the film had a slightly pale look, knowing Fincher's fondness for visual trickery, it was surely intentional. But it wasn't. After spending nearly half an hour making adjustments and trying to reboot the computer, the Paramount staff threw up their hands and canceled the screening.
I can only imagine the backstage drama. Having to pull the plug on your film's first screening is sort of like being at the opening night of a swank new Peter Morton restaurant, with all the critics and glittering guests at the tables, only to discover that the oven isn't working. Miranda was the unlucky person who had to phone Fincher, a notoriously prickly perfectionist, with the bad news. But kudos to Paramount PR exec David Waldman, who was unbelievably cool under fire. He ordered the catering staff to serve as much food and drink as possible, which seemed to quiet the potentially riotous crowd of parched critics and writers milling around in the DGA lobby.
Paramount will take another shot at screening the film Saturday at noon and 6 p.m. Maybe the computer will be more cooperative the second time around. After seeing the first 25 minutes, I'm ready to jump back into the pool. But judging from this post at Sproutblog, Karina Longworth--who saw the entire film at an earlier screening--is not eager to put her bathing suit on again.
Photo of Taraji P. Henson, left, and Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" from Paramount Pictures
Early on in "Toots," the new documentary about the legendary New York saloon keeper Toots Shor (it opens Friday here at the Downtown Independent Theater), we get to see Frank Sinatra recalling the night Toots asked him to come to dinner at his joint with some of Toots' pals. The other pals? Bing Crosby, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. As the four sultans of mid-century America made their way through the restaurant to a private table, the whole saloon spontaneously erupted with applause. If you were a celebrity in New York from 1940 through the early 1960s, the place to be was Toots Shor's, where you'd find sports icons, journalists, actors, mobsters or politicians, all lifting a glass in the same smoke-filled room.
Today's celebrity clubs and eateries are niche joints--the film crowd inhabits one spot, the musicians go somewhere else, the journalists (the ones that still have a job) have a different hangout. But Toots Shor's was a watering hole where everyone rubbed elbows. You'd see Joe DiMaggio at one table, Jackie Gleason at another, the likes of Frank Gifford or Mickey Mantle or Walter Cronkite across the room. On one night, Toots could be seen having a drink with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, then heading across the room to hang out with mob boss Frank Costello. As the writer Pete Hamill says in the film: " 'Toot's' was a part of the imagination of people who had never even walked in there. They knew it existed the way they knew the Statue of Liberty existed."
Made by Kristi Jacobson, Toots' granddaughter, the documentary nicely captures a colorful period in American culture, a booze-fueled age where men cheerfully insulted each other, bet on the ponies and started drinking at lunch and often didn't stop till the sun came up. Toots kept everyone's glass filled to the brim. A giant of a man, he was famously gruff--he used to boast of receiving a letter from an out-of-towner who'd enjoyed the food, but advised that if he wanted to be successful "you'd better get rid of that fat slob of a headwaiter who spent most of his time insulting patrons."
Toots led by example. In the film, Jacobson's mother tells the story of the time Toots breezed into church one morning, determined to be there for her confirmation (Toots was Jewish, but his wife, a former showgirl affectionately known as Baby, brought the kids up Catholic). Toots had been out on the town all night, so he brought along his drinking buddy--John Wayne. Toots wasn't much of a businessman, blowing most of the dough he ever made, but if he ever had problems with creditors, he'd turn to his pal, Frank Costello, who'd manage to set things right. One of the more interesting revelations in the movie is that when Toots needed ready cash to open a second restaurant in 1960, he went to Jimmy Hoffa, who loaned him $7 million from the Teamsters union's pension fund.
The best part of the movie is the great gallery of characters Jacobson assembled to tell all the Toots anecdotes. The Teamsters tale comes courtesy of Gianni Russo. He looks so familiar, I said to Jacobson. Where have I seen him before? She laughed. "He played Carlo Rizzi in 'The Godfather.' " It made me wonder--how mobbed up was Toots? Keep reading:
Patrick Goldstein
has been a film writer for The Times’ Calendar section since 1998 and a contributing writer to the paper since 1979.
His column, “The Big Picture,” offers news and insight on the currents and underpinnings of the film industry.
He also has been a contributing writer to major publications such as Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy, Vogue, the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and British GQ.
He received a master’s degree in English literature in 1976 and a bachelor’s degree in film studies in 1975, both from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
As I was packing to head out of town for the Thanksgiving weekend, imagining all the long lines at the airport, delayed arrivals and endless taxi rides, my mind seamlessly went back in time to the world's greatest Thanksgiving comedy, John Hughes' enchantingly wonderful "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." 
