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Thanks to Kaitlin Collins of CNN for bringing this to social media.
Donald Trump had someone print out a sign that says “The Oval Office” and tape it to the outside of The White House.
This is in case he forgets where The Oval Office is on the property.
Dementia patients will appreciate this touch.
Of course, Trump might not recognize the Oval Office since it’s been drenched in gold ornaments purchased at Target and Michael’s. It does resemble Mar-a-lago, and that may be the reason for all the fake gold in the first place. A dementia patient would be comforted by seeing a reminder of home.
The sign is so tacky, it looks like it’s also going to list the names of dentists working in the building.
Upstairs in the private quarters, I’m told Melania has all of her doors labeled with “Do Not Enter.”
Donald Trump is crowing this morning about his “60 Minutes” ratings on Sunday.
The newsmagazine scored 13 million viewers, the most since 2021.
But sorry, Donald. The reason for those ratings was the preceding show, the lead in on CBS.
That was the NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs.
The game scored a record 30.8 million viewers.
So actually, the Trump interview was down 57% from the football game. More than half the people watching CBS tuned out rather than stick around to hear Trump lying like a rug to Norah O’Donnell.
“60 Minutes” on its best days can do around 9 million viewers, but 7 is the average for a promoted newsworthy show. To get 13 million, there has to be a big football game.
And do note: the game was a big hit despite the absence of Taylor Swift. She did not shuffle off to Buffalo!
Forget his two bestselling dozen albums, and sold out concert tours in stadiums and arenas all over the world, his top hits still in rotation all the time.
Bruce has also had a bestselling memoir, and a sold out run of a hit Broadway show. He’s won Oscars for his songs, not to mention Grammys.
So it must be odd for him to see the movie based on a chapter of his life collapse at the box office.
Scott Cooper’s “Deliver Me from Nowhere” should have been a hit. Jeremy Allen White, a star from “The Bear,” playing Springsteen as a young man. Oscar nominee, Tony winner Jeremy Strong as Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau. Cooper, who directed Jeff Bridges to an Oscar in “Crazy Hearts”: On paper, “Deliver Me” seemed like it would be huge.
What could go wrong?
Everything. Critics who were not avowed Springsteen lovers didn’t like it. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 59% rating. The movie addresses the making of Bruce’s “Nebraska” album in 1982. Bruce is depressed, agonizing over his next step. He’s going to make “Born in the USA,” but first he has to go through this creative catharsis.
A lot of the movie is Bruce brooding, retracing his life, having a therapy session. It’s not the wild, the innocent, and the E street shuffle. Nor is it Greetings from Asbury Park. It’s more who should I be now?
In the end, very little is delivered no matter how much Cooper tries to craft a beginning, middle, and up beat end.
The result is that the box office is $16.6 million in the US, $30.8 million worldwide. It may never hit $18 million in the US. “Deliver Me” cost $55 million.
It cost more than that. Everyone involved invested their heart and soul. Bruce has made countless appearances supporting it around the world. He’s been very Bruce, a total mensch.
“Nebraska” was not a hit in 1982, and few are nostalgic for it. A movie about “The Rising” — that would have been really interesting. A movie about Bruce falling in love with Patti Scialfa — okay. Anything about the making of the first three albums. “Nebraska” — acoustic, Dylanish, interior. No Clarence Clemons. It just didn’t work.
“Deliver Me” will still pick up some action from the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. Its Oscar chances are fairly diminished, unfortunately. It may have a good life on streaming and on DVD.
Meantime, there’s an irony here. The original “Nebraska” album is number 13 on iTunes and 63 on amazon. Not bad. But the expanded box set, with the special “Electric Nebraska,” hasn’t caught on. It should have, and I don’t know why it didn’t. But it came right after the “Tracks II” box set, and that may have stretched budgets.
Try and see “Deliver Me from Nowhere” before it’s out of theaters. I loved it, but I wanted to. You may want to, also.
Chanel — the fashion house launched decades ago by Nazi sympathizer Coco Chanel — really wants to get in to Hollywood.
They’ve been spending like drunken French soldiers on leave, underwriting A list parties for a few years now, plying celebrities with booze and gourmet food and loaning out their wares.
Often they use London publicist Charles Finch to host parties for them, especially around the Oscars. They take over the Beverly Hills Hotel with velvet ropes and top security.
That’s all good, but I’m sure the celebrities aren’t aware that the IRS has revoked Chanel’s 501c3 status standing as a charity.
According to eintaxid.com: “The federal tax exemption for Fondation Chanel Inc was automatically revoked on 15 May, 2023 for not filing a form 990-series return or notice for three consecutive years. On 14 August, 2023 the IRS posted the notice of organization’s automatic revocation on IRS.gov.”
The last filing was for 2019-2020.
At that point, Fondation Chanel said it had a fair market value of $4,311,799. They had had revenue of $10.2 million and expenses that totaled $9.7 million.
They certainly had nothing to hide. The bulk of their expenses was to other charitable organizations around the world that came to $9.2 million.
But in the time since they became a Hollywood party thrower, Chanel has not again filed a form 990 with the IRS. Consequently, the revocation.
There are some clues about what’s happened to Fondation Chanel thanks to their reports to the British Charitable Commission. In their report to the UK, Fondation Chanel reported a drop in gross income from 2023 to 2023 from 100 million pounds to just 2.43 million. Meantime, total expenditures dropped from 25 million pounds to 19.7 million.
Today Chanel underwrote what looks like a blockbuster lunch in Hollywood for dozens of female celebs. The occasion was the Motion Picture Academy’s program to support emerging women filmmakers — a worthy cause. Some of the guests included Kate Hudson, Patty Jenkins, Felicity Jones, Riley Keough, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Emma Mackey, Leslie Mann, and Diane Warren. (There were a lot more.)
Meantime, the Fondation has slipped into the abyss, at least in the US where, according to the IRS, they are gone. Even though the New York office is still open, the foundation has moved its headquarters to London. In the consolidation, the French office, ironically, was closed.
Sunday night’s tussle between Norah O’Donnell and Donald Trump was a big success.
“60 Minutes” scored its highest numbers since 2021 with the Trump interview in which he lied, dodged, or hallucinated to every question.
Trump will crow that he “saved” the show, but the NFL lead in game between the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs insured the high numbers. The total was 13 million.
The Bills won their game, and O’Donnell bested Trump if only because she persevered in some kind of quest for the truth. If only she’d been tougher in getting answers and questioning Trump’s lies.
The producer of many, er, wild TV series may have finally hit bottom with a new show called “All’s Fair.”
So far, critics on Rotten Tomatoes have given it a zero.
Are we surprised? Kim Kardashian is the star. The Hollywood Reporter describes her as “Stiff and Affectless Without a Single Authentic Note.”
Kim stars as the owner an all-female law firm in Los Angeles.
The other lawyers are top notch actresses like Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, and Niecy Nash. Sarah Paulson, also a Murphy regular, is the actress who had to find out from Kardashian — in real life, during make up — that the 1969 Apollo moon shot was a fake. Paulson’s reaction was better than anything in the series.
But you can only cover up a mess with so much gilding. Kardashian is not an actress, she’s a social climbing celebrity whose entire career is built on dross.
So there you have it.
For Hulu, “All’s Fair” is a severe drop in quality. They produce Emmy nominated shows like “Only Murders in the Building” and “The Bear.”
Hulu is part of Disney, like FX, which is where Ryan Murphy’s shows usually air. They include things like “American Horror Story,” which also scrape by with preposterous premises and top notch actors. Kardashian was already in one of those.
The Times of London said: “It thinks it’s a feminist fable about spirited lawyers getting their own back on cruel rich men but is in fact a tacky and revolting monument to the same greed, vanity and avarice it supposedly targets.”
The UK Daily Telegraph: “Ryan Murphy is the high priest of tacky, tasteless television, and this year he has outdone himself with a show of mind-bending horror sure to trigger nightmares in the unsuspecting viewer.”
You can only get away with this stuff for so long, I guess.
keep refreshing…in case the Rotten Tomatoes rating could drop below zero!
UPDATE: On Election Day I wrote a story about Zohran Mamdani using a Bob Dylan song for one of his videos that morning. The song was “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and it made it seem like Dylan had endorsed the Democratic Socialist candidate for Mayor of New York.
Dylan did no such thing. As I wrote that morning, that would never happen.
The great music writer from the New York Times Ben Sisario got the answer.
Ben found out that the Mamdani campaign asked for permission to use the song, but were denied. Apparently they didn’t care.
But hey– if you’re a socialist, everything is yours. So they took it anyway.
The song was removed after Universal Music Publishing found out what they’d done.
In a statement to the Times, a spokesman for UMPG said: “As a longstanding policy, we do not license Bob Dylan compositions for projects involving political figures.”
What a way for the Mamdani era to begin! Look out, New York!
MY STORY FROM 11/3: Bob Dylan has not ever endorsed a political candidate.
But Zohran Mamdani has swiped Dylan’s song, “The Times They Are A-Changin'” for his Twitter feed.
It’s unclear if Mamdani secured permission or cleared the copyright. He probably didn’t. The only time Dylan has ever spoken about politics is some praise for Barack Obama.
Dylan is also Jewish, and a longtime supporter of Israel. I doubt he has a positive opinion of Mamdani. And Dylan certainly doesn’t need free bus rides.
I have a call in to Dylan’s management for a comment. Will update ASAP.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott actually thinks New Yorkers give his state a thought.
He says on Twitter that after today’s election, he’ll place a tariff on New Yorkers who want to move to Texas.
This guy is really a joke.
New Yorkers wouldn’t move to Texas if space aliens landed in Central Park.
The state is a backwater, with looney tunes political policies and backwards ideas about race, women, and everything else.
It’s also hot as hell even during the winter.
Seriously, I know a young couple who were pregnant with their first child and lived in Austin. They moved to North Carolina before the baby was born because they were afraid — god forbid — that if something went wrong, Texas’s punitive medical laws could affect them.
The baby, I’m happy to report, entered the world healthy, and happy to be in a halfway normal state.
After the polls close tomorrow night, I will impose a 100% tariff on anyone moving to Texas from NYC.
Abbott is one of the great oafs of the Republican party, an insult to the people of Texas who don’t subscribe to his asinine ideas. Maybe his cowboy hat is too tight.
Yee ha! Listen, Greg, no one’s leaving NYC after the election. We have the Yankees. You have the cheating Astros, case closed. We send you Broadway touring productions. You have to live with the fact that “Oklahoma!” is a famous musical. You’re known for cactus and trying to harm immigrants.
Paul McCartney’s book, “Wings: Band on the Run,” is out today.
The book, edited Ted Widmer, is billed as an oral history of the post Beatles break up, how McCartney got on his feet in 1970 with his self titled first album, then the beloved “Ram,” the first Wings album “Wild Life,” and singles hits like “Hi Hi Hi” and “Live and Let Die.”
There’s a lot of stuff about the records. I didn’t realize my late friend Phil Ramone, one of the greatest record producers of all time, helped Paul make the brilliant single, “Another Day,” and a lot of “Ram.” Now it all makes sense.
Paul reminisces about the “war” he and John had when Lennon recorded “How Do You Sleep?” Paul was hurt. Then he wrote “Dear Friend,” which was conciliatory, and eventually the greatest songwriting duo in history mended their broken relationship. They were at John and Yoko’s apartment in the Dakota in 1976 when Lorne Michaels offered them money live on the air at “SNL” to come down to the show. They almost did it, then laughed it off.
McCartney says he convinced John to go back to Yoko after their 18 month split. John was in a relationship with May Pang, who might not be thrilled to hear Paul take credit for blowing up her life.
There’s a long passage of Paul talking about his 1980 arrest in Japan for trying to get a lot of marijuana through customs. He spent nine days in jail. He was booked for a Wings tour but says now he didn’t think the band was rehearsed enough and didn’t want to be there. He thinks he may subconsciously undermined the tour.
I asked Linda about the arrest in 1990, and I remember her telling me how frightened she and the family were. Paul jokes now that he worried he’d be sentenced and his kids would have to grow up in Japan.
Paul gives an unstinting account of his 9 days locked up, the likes of which I can ever recall reading anywhere else. He talks about the food, the bathing, and life behind bars with enormous candor.
Below are some cuts from the book about the Japan incident.
After the Beatles, what could anyone do to keep a music career going? And a successful one. Until “Band on the Run,” Paul was constantly castigated for not living up to his former life. But the tide turned, and what a career! What a catalog post-Beatles! After Wings folded, McCartney hit another stride with great albums like “Flowers in the Dirt” and “Flaming Pie.”
For McCartney fans, the book is gold. It will be followed this winter by a documentary on amazon.com.
