A close encounter at their “Saturday Night Fever” peak.

by Greg Mitchell

With a surprising number of people (myself included) watching and enjoying the new Bee Gees documentary airing this month over HBO, I thought I would depart from my usual obsessions to take a lighter look back at my encounter with the group — at the height of their “Stayin’ Alive” popularity back in 1978….

After serving as the number two editor at the legendary rock/culture magazine Crawdaddy starting in early 1971, I had left in the summer of 1977 to work at another New York-based publication(which failed), and then turned to…

WHEN BATTLES AND bruised feelings over controversial reviews and articles emerge, it’s useful to remember that what’s being graded is merely a strip of celluloid, rarely the private life and politics of a film director. Yet there was a time when directors themselves were graded politically, and if they received a ‘’restricted’’ rating they faced, quite possibly, the end of their careers in Hollywood.

The new David Fincher movie Mank focuses on writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, with his younger brother Joe popping in an out. The movie invents a principled stand for Herman — see my New York Times article…

The new David Fincher movie, Mank, just now streaming on Netflix, has brought new attention to muckraking author Upton Sinclair — and only partly because he is (briefly) portayed by Bill Nye, “the Science Guy.” The film shows how Sinclair’s left-wing run for governor of California in 1934 inspired MGM’s Irving Thalberg and newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst to take drastic actions to stop him. This in turn — this is the fictional part — inspired Herman Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, with the title character based on Hearst.

Mank has sent many to asking, So who was this Upton…

In the new David Fincher movie on Netflix, Mank, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) is a key character. His actions in helping to defeat Upton Sinclair in his 1934 race for governor of California helps inspire Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane and base the title character on Hearst. Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) also plays a crucial role. I wrote about all of this, and much more, in my award-winning book on the wild and influential Sinclair race and the backlash it produced, The Campaign of the Century. …

After 75 Years: Only Three Movies

Seventy-five years ago this autumn, Hollywood set in motion its first big-budget movie drama about the making, and use, of the atomic bomb, even as the ruins of Nagasaki were still smoldering. Almost immediately a competing project emerged. Yet today, seventy-five years since the first atomic bomb exploded over the center of the city of Hiroshima, a total of only three movie dramas about this epochal event have emerged from a Hollywood studio. There has not been single one since 1989.

In the same period, Hollywood has produced numerous movies centering on D-Day and…

Seventy-five years have now passed since the United States initiated a policy known as “first-use” with its atomic attack on Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, it was affirmed with a second detonation over the city of Nagasaki. No nuclear attacks have followed since, although many Americans are probably unaware that this first-strike policy remains very much in effect.

And that’s a problem.

The policy signals that any U.S. president has the authority, without consulting anyone, to order a pre-emptive nuclear strike, not merely in retaliation if and when missiles start flying in our direction. Our warheads could…

Seventy-five years ago this month, President Harry S Truman exulted when he heard the first report that the atomic bomb he had ordered dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, by a B-29 bomber, had exploded as planned and on target, most likely devastating most of this large city. Truman was on the ocean, returning to Washington from the Potsdam Conference in Germany, where he had secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to declare war on Japan around August 10. An article in the press the day after the first atomic attack depicted Truman, his voice “tense with excitement,” personally informing his shipmates about the…

In the months after the twin atomic attacks on two Japanese cities, which killed upwards of 200,000 civilians, Hollywood pushed forward with its first cinematic treatment, The Beginning or the End, soon to be heavily revised under orders from the White House and the military. Columnists and commentators weighed in on the implications of the atomic era almost daily, but the subject appeared too unsettled and complex for American novelists. There were no reports of any even attempting to take a crack at it. What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been impossible to imagine, let alone render. …