"Fly Me to the Moon" and the Persistence of Lunar Lunacy

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum meet cute en route to the Moon.

Fly Me to the Moon is an ahistorical comedy about the selling (and near selling-out) of the Apollo program. I spoke to my National Air and Space Museum curator friend Margaret A. Weitekamp about it, and to NASA Chief Historian Brian Odom, for this Smithsonian piece about why some people just won’t accept that America went to the Moon.

Best in Show: Round House's "Topdog / Underdog," reviewed.

Ro Boddie and Yao Dogbe as Lincoln and Booth. (Margot Schulman)

My review of Round House’s Topdog/Underdog, a sublime production of the 2001 psychodrama that made Suzan-Lori Parks the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, is up at the Washington Post. A couple of months back I had a day where I went directly from interviewing Ms. Parks for this Smithsonian piece into a Pop Culture Happy Hour recording session wherein we discussed Doug Liman’s Jake Gyllenhaal-headlined remake of Road House. Like Dalton, Road House ‘89’s inexplicably famous “cooler,” I contain multitudes.

"Outlaw Posse" and the Endurance of the Black Western

Melvin Van Peebles’ son can shoot in two directions at once.

For the day job, I wrote about Black westerns on the occasion of Mario Van Peebles’ new one, Outlaw Posse. No relation to his prior western, 1993’s Posse, except for the familial kind.

Egg McGuffin, or the Xenomorph-or-Egg Paradox

The 1991-2 production of Alien 3 was by all accounts more of a slog than this photo of Sigourney Weaver and her tall, dark plus-one would suggest.

Here’s a Smithsonian piece wherein I put my lifelong independent study of xenobiology to good use by documenting curator Ryan Lintelman’s quest to sleuth out exactly which ALIEN flick the big prop egg in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. It’s not the first time I’ve recounted the tortured history of of Alien 3, a less imaginative exponent of the visual and thematic ideas that had made the first two pictures in the slime-dripping series so widely admired.

"M*A*S*H" at Fifty for Smithsonian

September 17 marked the 50th anniversary of the debut of M*A*S*H, a pioneering TV series that was a little before my time (says the guy who co-hosts a show about an older a much more obscure series) but which has its share of latter-day acolytes. I spoke to a couple of them for my Smithsonian piece about the show’s legacy.

Deleted Scenes: Edward Norton on "Motherless Brooklyn" and the Ghosts of New York

Cinematographer Dick Pope and director/star Edward Norton shooting Motherless Brooklyn in 2018. (Glen Wilson/Warner Bros.)

Here are some outtakes from the interview Edward Norton I had on Smithsonian this week, where we talked about his long-gestating adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn , out this week. The book is set in the present of when it was published, but Norton has, with Lethem’s blessing, set his version of it in 1957 in an attempt to make something like New York City’s answer to Chinatown. Anyway, I was sorry to see these exchanges go, so I clipped ‘em out and saved ‘em.

I was trying to remember if there are any signposts in the book that mark it as taking place in the present, or in the present of when it was published 20 years ago. I don’t think there are any until we get to the passage where Lionel is talking about how much he loves Prince, and he hears in extended remixes of Prince songs a sort of reflection of how his condition makes him play with language in a way he can’t control. 

You do a version of that in the movie in a jazz club scene where Michael K. Williams’ character is performing, and Lionel can’t stop himself from trying to contribute verbally to the music.

Yes, that's a very intentional transposition of a part of Jonathan’s book that I loved. The idea of music being a beautiful expression of compulsion. And I thought we could have a lot of fun with jazz and especially Bop, in that era, because if you were ever to say, “What is the Tourretic impulse writ into music?”, it’s Bop. It sounds Tourretic to me, in that it’s impulsive, it’s improvisational, and it loops on itself. It takes things and, just as Lionel says about his brain, it twists them around and reforms them. 

Obviously you have to make things cinematic in a film. It has to be visceral, not cerebral.

The cast you’ve assembled for this film—Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Williem Dafoe—I know many of these are people you’ve worked with before, but they have very particular faces. They look like they could have been movie stars in the 50s.

Yeah. When you watch movies like Citizen Kane or Twelve Angry Men, the people have this heft. Sometimes I think our generation has what I would call an attenuated youth. Past a certain point, there’s a gravitas to actors from that era. I wanted people who have that quality.

And obviously it’s not just masculine, because Cherry Jones and Leslie Mann… Leslie feels to me like Judy Holliday or Barbara Stanwyck. I think you could put her in any 40s screwball comedy, or any gun-moll thing, and she would fit right in. And Cherry Jones just seems like a Bronx nun, like she was in John Shanley’s play Doubt. She feels like exactly like a career socialist, do you know what I mean? She probably belonged in the 30s to an American socialist org, and she’s still fighting the good fight. She’s got that toughness.

And Alec has that Shakespearean actor’s gift for the fluidity and language of language. He can take text and drive through the idea that’s within it, he pulls the thread of a complex idea in an absolutely beautiful way. He said to me when he read [the script], “This is like what Lee J. Cobb would have done.” Lee J. Cobb was Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront; he was in Twelve Angry Men; he was in the original Death of Salesman. Not a lot of people have that force of lethal intimidationand charm that Alec has.

And he’s your Noah Cross.

Well, John Huston is great, but he’s weird. He feels like an alien to me. Alec has a dangerous seduction in him. Alec has this capacity to make you want to come to the dark side because he makes it sound like it makes so much sense. John Huston in Chinatown, he’s not trying to win anybody over. He’s looking down and saying, “You are a fly, my friend, and if you think you can affect what’s going on, you will be swatted.”

Alec’s character in this is much more like a Jedi Knight who has gone dark, but he’s reaching across to Luke and saying, “What we’re doing here can’t be understood by everybody, but you understand it. Come with us.” That’s a different kind of danger. If you can’t recognize someone in the cloak of the public servant who really hates people, very dangerous things can happen.