Tom Stempel is writing about the Academy Museum again, but this time with a happier outlook, then reviewing a good new movie ‘Babes,’ and then a not quite so good movie ‘The Idea of You,’ and finally some not-so-good miniseries ‘True Detective: Night Country,’ ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,’ and ‘The Regime.’
TOM STEMPEL | JUL 2, 2024
There is Hope at Last.
If you have read this column for the past couple of years, you may remember that I have expressed my disappointment with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum here and here.
I trust you will be as glad as I am to know that things are looking up at Wilshire and Fairfax.

Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Photo by: Josh White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation
A couple of months ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who works for the Academy, but not for the Museum. The conversation at one point turned to the Museum. I expressed my disappointment with the Museum. They said it was undergoing “growing pains.” I mentioned they still had not delivered the exhibition on Jews in Hollywood they had been promising since before the Museum opened. They told me it was due to open this summer.
Lo and Behold, a week or so after our conversation, I was invited to a reception for the opening of the exhibition. (Please do not get the idea that I am a Hollywood bigshot. I am just a Patron, which means I donate a small [in Hollywood terms] donation every year.) I took my son-in-law Daniel along as my plus-one. He is Jewish and is involved in GIS (Geographical Information Systems – computer mapping to us civilians). We got into the exhibition, which is called Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capitol before the doors were officially open.

Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Los Angeles: From Film Frontier to Industry Town, 1902–1929.
Photo by: Josh White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation
Daniel, the map guy, went straight to the most spectacular element and was transfixed by it, as I was and you will be too. It is a LARGE three-dimensional tabletop map of Los Angeles County, but with assorted lights and images projected on it. On the wall is a film timeline of the events of early Hollywood from 1902 to 1930. Every time a new year comes up, there are images on the timeline, and synchronized with that are the lights and other stuff on the map. I do not know who came up with the idea for this, but the curator of the exhibit, which is the first permanent exhibit in the Museum, is Dara Jaffe and she deserves all the credit she will get.
There is also a 30-minute video about how the Jewish people in the business had to deal with anti-Semitism in American life at the time. I only got to see the last half of it, but it uses the techniques of film and video to enrich our understanding beyond what the wall exhibits can do.
However, there are a large number of Jews in the industry who are appalled by the exhibit. An article in the June 13th Los Angeles Times describes an open letter to the Academy from a group called United Jewish Writers, signed (at the time the article was printed) by 350 people. The letter complains that the exhibition is too critical of the Jewish founding fathers and the video seems to promote anti-Semitic attitudes. I had the opposite reaction to the video (although granted I have not yet seen all of it), and as a historian, I think mentioning the bad as well as the good side of the founders is more accurate. A museum should show not only the good but the bad. The academy announced that there will be changes made in some parts of the exhibition.
Daniel and I could not stay longer because the reception was starting, but I did tell one of the guides that I was a film historian and did not find any errors in the exhibit. She was impressed.
Needless to say, I am going back to see the exhibit, as is Daniel, who was impressed by the whole exhibit.
The exhibit is not the only good thing at the Museum. They ran a smallish film series celebrating the 100th birthday of Marlon Brando. Instead of showing the obvious A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Godfather(1972), they picked lesser-known films. One they showed was The Fugitive Kind(1960), an adaptation of an obscure Tennessee Williams play, which co-starred Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Have you ever seen it? Or even heard of it? That’s what museums are for.
Another film series was Funny Girls: Fanny Brice and Her Legacy, about Jewish women in front of and behind the camera. The first film they ran was a recent favorite of mine, Shiva Baby (2020). You can read my review here.
These changes come with an announcement of change at the top. Jacqueline Stewart, who has led the Museum since its opening in 2021, is leaving to return to her academic post at the University of Chicago. I do not know if she jumped or was pushed. For all my quibbles about the Museum in her reign, she got the damned thing up and running. That is no small accomplishment, for which she deserves thanks from all of us.
Her replacement is Amy Homma. Homma’s past work has been at different museums and her job at the Academy Museum was the Academy Museums Chief Audience Officer. To me, that is a very good sign. One of my complaints of the first years of the Museum is that they were running academically laudable programs that would necessarily get the rubes into the tent, in the old show business term. She ought to know how to do it. I of course am rooting for her and the Museum to succeed.
And I still think they ought to do a big exhibit on women screenwriters.
One for the Big Screen.
Babes (2024. Written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz. 104 minutes)

Ilana Glazer as Eden in Babes (2024).
Courtesy Neon
You have certainly already noticed that this is a strange summer for moviegoing. Partly a holdover from the pandemic, and very much a holdover from the strikes last year, the big studios do not have a lot of big releases this summer. Tom Cruise is not running in any theatres anywhere.
The Fall Guy (2024) was being hyped as though it was going to be the first big summer blockbuster and when it wasn’t people assumed it was a flop. In fact, it was a hit, but a modest one.
The theatre owners are having trouble getting enough films. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It means they are taking chances on smaller films that might otherwise have gone to streaming.
Babes is one of those films, although I am not sure it will make a bundle of money for theatre owners. But it should be seen in theatres on a large screen. No, it is not a special effects-laden film. Empires do not crumble and CGI-created creatures do not run amuck.
The story is relatively simple and beautifully structured. Eden and Dawn are 30 or 40-something women who have been friends since childhood and are still close. But now they are at slightly different points in their lives. Eden is a single woman who runs an aerobics studio. Dawn is married and has one child and another on the way.
Oops, not just on the way, but arriving while Eden and Dawn are in a theatre watching their annual Thanksgiving movie. Dawn thinks every seat she sits in is wet. Eden finally checks in a scene I do not recall ever seeing in a movie, and realizes Dawn’s water has broken. (Guys are probably going to see a movie titled Babes thinking it will be about chicks in bikinis at the beach. Guys, it is not, but you will learn a lot about women from this film, and what you learn will make you better boyfriends, husbands, and fathers.)

UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Two OK Films, One Great Miniseries
After the baby is born Eden tries to bring several bags of sushi to Dawn in the hospital, but the nurse will not let her in. So Eden gets on the subway with her sushi, meets a gorgeous looking guy who loves sushi. After riding the rails for hours they end up in Eden’s apartment. Eden figures, what the hell, she cannot get pregnant during her period. So they make love.
Guess what? Yep, you can get pregnant during your period. It’s rare, but it happens. And, yep, Eden is in the family way. And decides to keep the baby.
She expects Dawn to help her out the way she’s always helped Dawn out. But Dawn is overwhelmed with two small children and going back to work as a dentist.
Here’s where the structure of the film really grabs you. The pressures build up on both women and we feel for both women and when things are finally resolved, we are happy for both of them.
By now you have already wondered what this has to do with seeing it in a theatre on a big screen. The two-word answer is Ilana Glazer. She first came to attention with the web series which became a Comedy Central series, Broad City (2010-2011) (2014-2019). She was the co-creator and co-star with Abbi Jacobson and they wrote 23 of the 44 episodes together. One other episode was written by Josh Rabinowitz, who was also a producer on the show.
The show was a 22-minute comedy about two young women and their adventures in New York. You can see how Babes grew out of that. But it is more tightly structured than the few episodes I saw, so it is not just a big screen version of their previous work. It goes more deeply into the characters and situations than the show did.
What that means is that Glazer, who plays Eden, is now performing at a higher level than that show required. Her performance here is astonishingly rich and detailed.
Her performance reminded me of the performances of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953). I had seen it when it first came out but the many other times I have seen it over the last decades I have seen on my DVD. A few years ago I saw it in a theatre and was gobsmacked by their two performances. William Wyler caught astonishing nuances. The director here, Pamela Adlon, whom you may remember from Better Things (2016-2022), which she co-created, wrote for, directed and starred in, has a real feel for the material, the characters, and actors.
Together they all make a picture you will want to see on the biggest screen you can find.
OK, not IMAX, but you know what I mean.
Why is This One Not on the Big Screen?
The Idea of You (2024. Screenplay by Michael Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt, based on the novel by Robinne Lee. 115 minutes)

[L-R] Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes and Anne Hathaway as Solène in The Idea of You (2024).
Courtesy Amazon MGM Studios
The star of this one is Anne Hathaway. She is a movie star. A BIG movie star. So why is this film going straight to video? Part of the reason is that it was co-produced by Amazon, who obviously preferred to have it on their Video Prime system.
But another co-producer is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which has been known over the last century to release a few pretty good movies in theatres. But these days MGM does not have the clout it used to. Given the current scarcity of films in theatres, I think this would have been an obvious choice for a theatrical release. It is at least a little bit better than some of the stuff in theatres these days.
A cynical explanation for its lack of a theatrical release might be that Hathaway is now 42 years old and is playing a 40-year-old, so the guys in the suits may have been appalled that she is playing a 40-year-old who falls in love with a 24-year-old guy.
I still think they could have made a buck with this one in theatres, given that Hathaway gives a knockout star performance.
Unfortunately, that’s the only major strength of the film. The script is not nearly as sharp as the script for Babes. There is so much more that could be done with the basic situation.

UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: All Over the Place
Hathaway’s Solène is a single mom who has to take her daughter and the daughter’s friends to Coachella when her ex bails out at the last minute. Solène has a cute meet with one of the singers, Hayes. He is played by Nicholas Galitzine, who pretty much holds his own with Hathaway, although when they are in two-shots you are always looking at her. They fall in love.
There is a lot that could be done with this situation that the script does not do. How about a scene of Solène teaching the kid how to really make love to a woman? How about getting into how she and her daughter really feel about the situation?
The script does get into what happens when social media learn about this, but only in the most obvious ways.
Two of the better scenes are near the end. Solène has an interesting conversation with Eva, her ex’s second wife, with a great closing line. And there is a terrific scene several years later when Solène is watching Hayes on television. It should have been the last scene in the film (like Hepburn and Peck in the last scene of Roman Holiday, or the scene in the car, or…) but there is another scene tacked on after that for all the wrong reasons.
Some Not-Quite-So-Good Miniseries.
Usually, when I review miniseries, I do the very good ones, like The Old Man (2022, reviewed here) and A Gentleman in Moscow (2024, reviewed here). But like the not-so-good film books I reviewed a few columns ago, there are miniseries with flaws. Here are three of them.
True Detective: Night Country (2024) is the fifth season of the anthology series. This one takes place in Alaska in the dead of winter, hence the subtitle. So the show is very, very dark. All the time. It gets rather depressing.

[L-R] Jodie Foster as Liz Danvers and Kali Reis Evangeline Navarro in True Detective: Night Country
Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO
Part of the problem I had was that one of the plotlines, about an Indigenous woman who was killed some time ago, was similar to a better written version that was done on Alaska Daily (2022-2023) a series that alas only ran one season.
The characters in Night Country are not nearly as compelling. The strength of the show is the powerhouse performance by Jodie Foster as the cop investigating the case. She is a rough-hewn character who does some things you do not admire, but whom you cannot not watch. I did not find Foster’s performance enough to save the show.
Feud: Capote vs The Swans is an 8-episode series based on Truman Capote’s friendships with a number of rich, entitled New York socialites in the Seventies. It is way too long at eight episodes, but I am not sure it would work shorter. The problem is that all the characters, including Capote, are rather monotonous and are very tiresome to be around for so long. The actors are good, but do you want to spend this amount of time with them playing these characters?

Tom Hollander as Truman Capote in Feud: Capote vs The Swans (2024).
Courtesy FX Network
The Regime (2024) is a flamboyantly over-produced series about a woman dictator in a fictional European country. The characters and the situations are nothing we have not seen before done better. The creation of the country and its political situation is simply not very fresh.
Elena, the Chancellor, is played by Kate Winslet, and she is way, way over the top. I mentioned in my review of A Gentleman in Moscow that the sets were perfect for the script. Here the sets overpower everything, which I suspect is why Winslet is so excessive. With sets of this size and grandiosity what actor could resist chewing all that scenery?

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BY
Tom Stempel is a Professor Emeritus at Los Angeles City College, where he taught film history and screenwriting from 1971 to 2011. He has written six books on film, five of them about screen and television writing. You can learn more about his books here. His 2008 book Understanding Screenwriting: Learning from Good, Not-Quite-So- Good, and Bad Screenplays evolved into this column. The column first appeared in 2008 at the blog The House Next Door, then at Slant, and then Creative Screenwriting before it found its forever home at Script. In the column he reviews movies and television from the standpoint of screenwriting. He looks at new movies, old movies, and television movies and shows, as well as writing occasional other items, such as appreciations of screenwriters who have passed away, plays based on films, books on screenwriting and screenwriters, and other sundries. In September 2023 Tom Stempel was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement in the Service of Screenwriting Research by the international organization the Screenwriting Research Network