It's not an interview, but I really admire his monologue from way back about how he wasn't going to do any Britney Spears jokes back during her very public meltdown. Somehow managed funny, classy, confessional, heartfelt all the same time. Masterclass.

Yeah, I'd buy a good-natured ribbing for sure, much more so than 'the biggest fuck you.' Especially as Shampoo itself was conceived in part (and with Beatty's full knowledge) as a similar such ribbing.

For the record, here's an excerpt from Nick Dawson's Ashby bio, re: Ashby's dying days (p336):

I've never heard this story (having done a fair bit of reading on Ashby). Ashby and Beatty did have a contentious relationship on the set of Shampoo, but they also made up (Beatty not only insisted on Ashby getting medical treatment for his cancer a few years later, he paid for much of it). And the claim that Ashby…

The script for Being There was co-conceived by Ashby and Bob Jones, with Jones actually doing all the writing, including this scene. Due to WGA rules, Jerzy Kosinski got sole credit for the screenplay, but actually didn't write a word of it (try to find some of Peter Sellers's promotional interviews where he's quite…

Yes, and furthermore (in line with what you've said), everbody in the film is a caricature. Mrs Rand's pent-up sexual frustration, Benjamin Rand's captain of industryisms, the President's Fordian daftness. All of which, tied to the rampant TV watching, has something to do with an increasing inauthenticity in…

As stage-bound as much of the film may be, it does exhibit a few exquisite moments of Hollywood trying to return something like an unchained camera. Crawford is amazing in it - funny, wounded, beautiful. I much prefer her performance to Garbo's (their supposed hatred of each other is famous).

Barrymore's final scene in Dinner at Eight is one of the most fantastic things I've scene from the early sound days (and it has virtually no dialogue) - the framing, editing, lighting, and his acting are phenomenal (as is what I guess you'd call early sound design). And that the film shows him take the act to…

Subtitles suck in general. I mean, I'll go see a subtitled film over a dubbed film any day (my mind is changing on this, but dubbed films don't really come out in English anymore), but subtitles suck. They're shit for conveying subtlety (which is part of why they're so bad for comedy), they give away plot points, they…

It's not the subtitled versions that they think are "better," but the dubbed versions. Not only because they think they're written "better," but because the dubbing actors are almost always famous, or at least well-known, Hungarian actors, who always do voicework for the same foreign actors. So, for example, the same…

Just chiming in here to say I really love Shakespeare in Love. I'm not sure how it's "badly told" except that it attempts to be somewhat Shakespearean with all of its silly shenanigans. I can understand that not being one's cup of tea, but otherwise the plot's pretty direct, the dialogue really is very clever, and the…

Those three are tops, no doubt, but For Better or For Worse was also a really cool comic strip to follow in the '80s. It's serialized nature and the way the characters actually aged (plus, it's well-publicized political content) made it a pretty cool strip mixed in with your Nancy's and Mary Worth's . . .

Actually (to be that guy) what this article is talking about is the "long take." A "long shot" is sort of the opposite of a close-up (sometimes referred to as a "wide shot," although they can be different). Surprised the AVClub mixed them up.

Yes and No. It's demographic but because everyone who built the place left last spring . . .

I'm really glad that moment didn't get spoiled for me because seeing it with no advance warning still ranks as one of my favorite TV moments.

She's also pretty great in The Spanish Prisoner.

Yes!

I've been trying to find a clip of an excellent appearance that Richard Harris made on David Letterman in the early '90s. As was his wont, Harris strung the story out, but the gist was, they were in a play together in London and there was a brief stretch when both were off-stage, and they'd regularly take the…

Seven
The Matrix (although, not for "capturing the '90s" reasons)

That scene on the train is one of my favorite film moments . . . when she finally lights his cigarette, and the way she does it . . .