Happy Birthday Claudia Cardinale.
Back in 1983 or so she was seated at the table next to me in a restaurant in Montreal. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
Leone was in town shooting Once Upon a Time In America and I think she was there to pick up an award at the Montreal Film Festival.
I wonder what Richard Dreyfuss said about the Me Too Movement.
A few years ago he posted that he was proud of his son Harry for coming forward about Kevin Spacey persistently touching his thigh, even sliding his own hand under Harry's hand when Harry tried to "block."
Harry Dreyfuss was 18 at the time, and Kevin Spacey was directing his father in a play.
Somehow, I wonder if these statements made weren't made because Dreyfuss is, by any standard, long since washed up in Hollywood. He hasn't had a major part in a praised film since 1995, the year when he got his second Oscar nomination. His attempt to do TV (The Education of Max Bickford in 2001) failed despite having a great timeslot (CBS Sunday night, right after 60 Minutes), so did the movies he was in since then. If anything, that level of frustration combined with what sounds to be a sizable ego could easily lead to vitriolic rage against absolutely anything and everything, not necessarily just what got him into hot water the other night.
The woman he was disparaging in that comment was Barbra Streisand, his co-star in 1987's Nuts, which seems really strange since she didn't say a word against him in her autobiography last year. (Which is more than could be said about one or two others of her co-stars, so she probably would have reamed him too if she felt like it). So if he was fine in 1987 when it came to her, what exactly changed since then?
As for the metoo movement, I am pretty sure that someone complained to the press that he made an offensive comment while making one of his movies, and that got him lumped in with the Weinstein group. (I might get into hot water for saying this, but I always wondered a bit about the #metoo movement, given that most the big-names that were taken down because of it were people who either hadn't had a hit for a long time, had already been rumored about as being extremely difficult, or had long been points of past scandals. So in other words, only damaged goods already so to speak. They never really took out someone who was still a big, bona-fide star name who appealed to many. Weinstein's company would have folded even if the exposes about his misbehavior hadn't been published as he had a terrible batting average with the Oscars in the last 3 years of his Oscar Campaigns, the company was awash with debt, and he was known for hacking movies by himself without directors' approval)
We don't have a transcript, but from what has been posted on X (aka Twitter) he supposedly said that Barbra Streisand was a genius but that he didn't listen to her direction because women shouldn't be in positions of power.
HoldenIsHere wrote: ↑May 27th, 2024, 8:42 pm
We don't have a transcript, but from what has been posted on X (aka Twitter) he supposedly said that Barbra Streisand was a genius but that he didn't listen to her direction because women shouldn't be in positions of power.
Which in itself is an odd statement because, while Barbara starred in and produced Nuts, Martin Ritt was the director, and he definitely wasn't a woman. Babs actually did want to direct the film, but having already signed on as a producer, she couldn't direct after the original director (Mark Rydell) left, due to some rule the DGA put in after Clint Eastwood took over The Outlaw Josey Wales after a fallout with the original director of that film, Phillip Kaufmann. So because of the DGA rule, she couldn't order the final shots on that film on how it was staged in any way.
