Randy Quaid, Armchair Movie Executive

At the time of this writing we are hearing quite a bit about the recently announced plans for a sequel to the 1990 Tony Scott-Tom Cruise film Days of Thunder. Much of it has to do with Randy Quaid, living down to the public image he has acquired in a half century long career of playing witless oafs who are "not quite right in the head" shooting his mouth off about the inappropriateness of the casting of Anne Hathaway as the female lead of the film. He appears to have made his judgment on the grounds of her being pregnant (Monsieur Quaid gives the impression of thinking pregnancy is a permanent condition, or that the movie will be made instantly, such that one wonder if the septuagenarian husband, father and veteran actor knows anything about where babies or movies come from); his view that Ms. Hathaway is not "sexy" ("sexy" is admittedly a relatively subtle trait, as against physical beauty, for example, but a great many men of impeccable sensibility in such matters disagree with Mr. Quaid very strongly on this point); and that Ms. Hathaway's having publicly expressed "woke" opinions will count against her with what he claims to be the NASCAR-loving target audience (as if people judged movie releases like this one by their stars' politics, as if the obsession with "wokeness" in movies and the people who make them were going as strong as it was a few years ago; after all, weren't Quaid's fellow travelers celebrating Victory-Wokeness Day just a while back?).

Of course, the media is attending to Quaid's all too characteristic stupidities because as those who don't get any publicity (ahem) know all too well that with very few exceptions any publicity is better than none, Quaid's complaining about the early publicity for this yet-to-be-made movie is not one of those exceptions, and the backers of this film want their publicity damn it. The coprophages reporting Quaid's words also do so because, per the norm for their "profession," they regard anything a famous person says, no matter how stupid, as deserving of respectful attention, the more in as, in this case, the stupidity is probably harmless to the project that Paramount so wants to publicize. (Would you pass on a movie just because Randy Quaid didn't like the lead?) And the media are doing it because if Quaid's stupidities are unlikely to make any difference to the movie's prospects they are nonetheless (especially insofar as they stoke the kulturkampf that is part of this game) a convenient distraction from those things they do not care to cover, such as the world's descent into ecological collapse, economic calamity, war and fascism demonstrates. (Thus amid protests against ICE and the run-up to "Epic Fury" said media gave us "All Nancy Guthrie, all the time!" while on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and with it THE BIRTH OF THE NATION WITH ALL THE REFLECTION UPON THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE MOMENT THAT THAT OUGHT TO ENCOURAGE it instead inflicted on us endless breathless coverage of every minute detail of Taylor Swift's wedding!)

Indeed, attention to Quaid's stupidities even distracts from the not very important (but still somewhat more important, and for the box office and cultural analyst, more interesting) matter of whether anything about this greenlit film project makes any sense, and the possibility of the kind of publicity that even the folks at Paramount would see as bad for their movie. Certainly from their standpoint it is far better to have people arguing over whether Ms. Hathaway's having been pregnant at some point in her life, not appealing to Monsieur Quaid's sense of "sexy" (or so he tells us in public), or whether her political opinions ought to disqualify her from playing an as yet unspecified female lead for an unmade film than to have us talking about what the studio executives probably did. That is, instead of making an artistic judgment about whether she is a good fit for what may be a fairly hazy project at this stage than their playing the old game of "Who's hot right now?" as, with the idiocy of Hathahate in apparent abeyance, with Ms. Hathaway having just had a good summer season with The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey both huge successes in their different ways, casting her seems like a good bet according to their superstitious mode of "thought." The attention to Quaid's remarks has also kept people from discussing the matter of whether pouring what is almost certain to be nine figures into the production, marketing and distribution of a Days of Thunder sequel starring anyone whatsoever (as they likely sign away a good deal of the revenue to Cruise in return for his coming back if Top Gun 2's "participations" are anything to go by) makes any sense at all as a commercial proposition. As I have ended up writing so much about the stupidities of Quaid and the media which covers them, and knowing the ever shorter attention span of the Internet user; I elected to take up the matter of that particular stupidity in a separate item here.