Peter Bart Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

At any given moment the most titillating movie intrigues are not about star salaries or director firings, but rather about those grisly details that are well below the radar.

“Deliver a good entertainment, and the audience will come.” That’s what the venerable director Robert Wise told me after defying Hollywood doubters with his hit musical West Side Story (yes, the 1961 version).

Are filmgoers ready for Don’t Look Up? It’s a star-laden satire dealing with hot topics of the moment – everything from the climate crisis to media disarray and the firings of news anchors.

Suddenly it’s The Season: Major films are opening, the machinery of hype is heating up, the screening schedules are intense — even the DVD screeners are piling up.

Tensions in the town’s writers rooms never have been higher, not only for writers of entertainment shows but also for nonfiction practitioners. The mood of their audience is prickly. Dialogue that once amused viewers today offends them.

They were “memorable” or “unforgettable” or even “life-changing.”

It was an imposing opening, and Hollywood loves openings that are grand in concept, star-studded and famously over budget. The new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures finally is complete, and key industry players have paid homage and faithfully scrutinized its exhibits.

With the majors eagerly seeking franchises rather than films, their executives might now pay some attention to a courtly Texan who lives in Paris. For 25 years, Wes Anderson has quietly but systematically built his unlikely and fragile franchise around 10 movies that filmgoers profess to enjoy but not understand. His latest, The French Dispatch, opened last week to a $5.5 million box office gross in Week 1, thus suggesting that “art movies” somehow can survive even amid the challenges of 2021.

To the public, Alec Baldwin’s Colt .45 stands as a symbol of perhaps criminal incompetence, but to insiders it also represents a pathetic epitaph to that mythic genre, the “indie” movie.

Corporate CEOs hate political noise. Comedians thrive on it.

After nearly 60 years of heroics, James Bond today seems more revered than beloved. His newest iteration, No Time to Die, has delivered a welcome jolt to exhibitors worldwide, though to some filmgoers (and critics), the movie plays more like Daniel Craig’s Long Goodbye.

MGM’s Louis B. Mayer famously observed that “no one is born a star, they’re made a star.” I wonder how he would explain Timothée Chalamet, who is starring in three of the most important releases of the next six weeks, breaking every MGM rule in doing so.

It is a sea of red. Its architect calls it his “magic lantern.” Some movie buffs tabbed it the “Death Star.”

Resuscitating a career can be a tortuous process, especially when it involves a star bent on self-destruction. A case in point: Cat Stevens, the folk singer/pop legend who gave us “Miles from Nowhere,” but now has decided he prefers to be somewhere. Hence, a new tour, a memoir, an album and a revised persona.

Autumn’s here, so box office gurus understandably are asking, “Where is our audience?” It’s a question also being asked by Netflix, which saw its new subscribers shrink to 5.5 million in the first half of 2021, down from 25.9 million in the same period a year ago.

Tom Freston, a founder of the MTV network, once observed: “What’s fascinating about the future is that so many people claim to understand it.” In 2006, Freston, then CEO of Viacom, was fired by Sumner Redstone, who explained that “Freston doesn’t understand the future.” As it turned out, Redstone had failed to understand the present.

Tom Cruise, now approaching age 60, has never reacted calmly to frustration. This week his carefully structured life was put on hold by delays of his two heralded mega movies: the Top Gun sequel and the seventh Mission: Impossible.

It was a gutsy pitch – OK, call it brazen. The proposed show would have the same blah cast week-to-week, non-stars with star egos. The storylines would be repetitious, the dialogue argumentative. The winning “entrepreneurs” would be thrilled, but then daunted as they realized how drastically their “asks” would be reduced through confiscatory capitalism.

First, a reality check: We are living in a state of social and sexual angst, and nothing can be written about it without further raising the tension level. Everyone seems permanently pissed off.

If crises continue to mount and late summer box office fails to catch a second wind, Hollywood may have to revisit one of its few remaining sure things: a good dog movie.

Mom on the move! Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost‘s first child together may have arrived weeks before Us Weekly confirmed the news.

Peter Bart and Mike Fleming Jr. worked together for two decades at Daily Variety. In this weekly column, two old friends get together and grind their axes, mostly on the movie business.

Women have owned the Hollywood headlines lately by defying “the rules” – all sorts of rules. Scarlett Johansson has challenged Disney’s dealmaking prowess by filing high-profile litigation.

In case you hadn’t noticed, last weekend marked a rigorous box office rivalry between and . Old won.

As a small boy I remember the media cloud that suddenly descended on our household. My father was outraged: Everyone we knew was installing their new TVs and abandoning their radios. Jackie Gleason on the Dumont Network was instantly compulsory viewing. Gleason? Dumont?

The best reviewed (thus far) documentary of 2021, Summer of Soul tells the story of a 1969 Harlem music festival – one that got zero attention in the media. Its Black promoters, having drawn 300,000 exhilarated spectators to the event, were angry about the blatant snub before realizing they may have been lucky: Another festival, Woodstock, was about to open its doors 100 miles away, and its white promoters were destined to suffer the most savage coverage ever accorded any event of its kind.

Burn Gorman (The Expanse) has been tapped to play the series regular role of Charles Bluhdorn opposite Miles Teller and Matthew Goode in Paramount+’s upcoming limited series The Offer, about the making of The Godfather.

Quentin Tarantino always has been the ultimate alpha director – a man who often likes to do things ass backwards. He depicts historic events in his movies, deliberately scrambling the dates. While many cinemas now stand empty, this week he defiantly purchased his second movie theater in Los Angeles.

A man of formidable ego, Samuel Goldwyn once confided that, while he’d basically invented Hollywood, he disliked the word “movie.” It sounded “dopey and made-up,” he told me.

I found myself having dinner with Frank Sinatra this week; at least it seemed that way. I was in Palm Springs where a dozen restaurants and clubs claim that Sinatra was once a “regular.” Photos of their idol adorn the walls, all showing Sinatra smiling, even though I never remembered a Sinatra smile during our real-life encounters.

This was supposed to be that upbeat, long-anticipated week when masks came off and people reconnected with their social lives. Maybe even considered a return to the office or at least a trip to the movies.

Two decades years ago Edgar Bronfman, Jr., having just acquired control of Universal, took me on a tour of his studio. Pointing to the black tower, he told me: “I hate black buildings. That one will soon be white.”

As both a tentpole and an artifact, the new James Bond movie now belongs to the increasingly voracious Jeff Bezos. Most of it, anyway.

The parties within its walls were glitzy, the arguments were epic and the scandals provided perfect gossip fuel. If only houses could talk: This one, however, is a battered shadow of its proud Regency past, its interior walls torn apart, trucks parked on its tennis court. Its only occasional visitor is David Zaslav, newly minted king of Hollywood, who comes to commune with its ghosts and summon up plans for its glistening future.

The Oscar show tanked. The Golden Globes self-immolated. The Dome shuttered. The vaunted movie museum seemed stuck in push-back mode.

“Gossip nowadays passes for news,” the late Bobby Kennedy once told me. Except I never met him and he might never have said that.