The Academy might choose to ignore this and give Best Director nods instead to Stephen Daldry (THE HOURS) or Denzel Washington (THE ANTWONE FISHER STORY), or perhaps to Phillip Noyce (THE QUIET AMERICAN) or Rob Marshall (CHICAGO), or someone I'm not seeing on my radar just yet. But the Scorsese opportunity seems pretty ripe this year.

All it will take to win one for Marty, assuming GANGS makes the grade, is a strong campaign by Miramax. All they'll have to say is that Marty's earned it, cumulatively speaking, and it's time to cough up and no more excuses. There will be no real argument against this (short of GANGS being off-putting, or not being good enough) and I doubt anyone would care to make one if there is.

Early critical reaction to GANGS, which will begin showing sometime later this month, will tell the tale. My sense at this stage, having finally seen that 20-minute preview reel, is that GANGS is going to do better with non-acolytes than, say, BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, KUNDUN or THE AGE OF INNOCENCE.

Non-acolytes like me, I mean. If I had written Christopher Moltisanti's line in that early episode of THE SOPRANOS when he sees Scorsese walking into an exclusive New York club, it would have been, "Marty? KUNDUN -- didn't like it!" In fact, I haven't been on the Scorsese boat since GOODFELLAS...but I've never stopped hoping for a reason to change my mind.

(IL MIO VIAGGIO IN ITALIA, Scorsese's four-hour documentary on Italian cinema of the '40s, '50s and early '60s, was a chip off the old block. Set aside an evening and watch it some time.)

Scorsese's publicist, Lois Smith of PMK, agrees that playing the career-achievement card with the Academy is "a definite plan...you're absolutely right," although she doubts that any potential nominee "would want to be judged on the basis that he hasn't gotten an Oscar." She claims that GANGS is "wonderful...wonderful," but says the most important thing for now "is for Miramax to start showing it, and then we'll go from there."

Smith says Scorsese is still fine-tuning the film, but that it should be screenable "in about two weeks."

Monkey Man

Nine years ago I met Moonwatcher, the monkey who threw the bone into the air in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Soon after, I ran a piece about him in the LOS ANGELES TIMES. Now he's got a book out called MOONWATCHER'S MEMOIR -- A DIARY OF 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Carroll and Graf), and in it he offers a stunning revelation, which is that during filming, Moonwatcher was on smack.

That's right, hockey fans. The mime who played that lithe and snarly man-ape with the watchful eyes and bad teeth -- the first crouching biped in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic to figure out that bones were good for killing prey and scaring off enemies -- was leading a private life that was closer in spirit to William S. Burroughs' JUNKIE than anything in the writings of ape naturalist Jane Goodhall or anthropologist Desmond Morris.

But that was 35 years ago, and it's been 31 years since Moonwatcher -- who later became a confidante of John Lennon and Yoko One, and later a husband, a father of two and a respected businessman -- kicked horse altogether. He's also been sober since '85 and has turned out pretty well in other respects.

His street name is Dan Richter. He's now 63 and vice-president of the Burbank-based Entertainment Partners, one of the largest payroll companies that service the film industry. He lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Sierra Madre, northeast of Pasadena, and has a couple of grown kids -- William, 22, and Joanclaire, 17. He's a friendly, amusing guy with a relaxed, confessional way of sharing thoughts and telling stories.

Why should anyone care about MOONWATCHER'S MEMOIR with all the other Hollywood tell-alls out there? Epochal significance. I honestly believe that 50 or 100 years from now, more people will have a clear digital recall in their heads of Dan Richter's 2001 footage than those who will know who Meryl Streep or George Clooney or Tobey Maguire were.

Two of Richter's 2001 scenes are burned deeply into the common wood. The one in which Moonwatcher is inspired by the black monolith to use animal bones as a survival tool, to the strains of "Thus Spake Zarathrusta." And Moonwatcher's famous bone-toss into the air, which happens at the end of the 18 minute-long "The Dawn of Man" sequence and results in Kubrick's 4-million-year jump-cut to a shot of a space shuttle.

"It was a breakthrough, I think," Richter says about the physical look of 2001's man-apes. "Up until then, any time a movie tried to fake it, it always looked like a man inside a monkey suit." Having trained as a mime at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts under instructor Paul Curtis, Richter was hired by Kubrick in November, 1966, and stayed with 2001 for more than a year.

Richter says he "knew from the time I met Stanley this was going to be special. The whole project had a feeling of grace behind it."

Kubrick, he says, "allowed me to do a great deal of work on casting and research and making it look right. I said to Stanley, the crux of the problem is one of performing, not choreography. We'll never fool the audience into thinking we're not actors - we have to get them to go along with it."

Richter's other qualification was his slimness, a characteristic that all 35 or 40 man-apes cast for the "Dawn of Man" sequence had to possess. Most of his choices came from the Young Generation dancers who were appearing at the time on British TV, and from the ranks of male jockeys, he recalls. Each man-ape also had to be short, the one exception being the 5' 10" Richter -- towering by simian standards.

The filming of the "Dawn of Man" sequence, at MGM's Borehamwood Studios outside of London, took a little over one month during the summer of 1967.

"Hitting the bones was a big moment," says Richter, referring to the black-monolith awakening scene. "The first time I hit them, I hit the edge of one and it went flipping into the air. That got Stanley really going. He said, 'That's great, can you do that again?' 'Sure,' I said. We did it for Hours. Stanley paid attention to detail."

And the famous throwing-of-the-bone sequence "was a problem to shoot because the slow-motion cameras kept breaking down," he recalls.

The bizarre wrinkle in all this was the monkey on the monkey's back. "When Stanley found out he became very involved in trying to help me quit," he says. "But I was a legal addict...I wasn't breaking any laws. I was getting it on prescription from drug stores...and that's what it was. But I've been clean for decades, and I have nothing to hide. I talk to people [with drug problems] all the time about what I went through and tell them if I can kick it, they can too."

MOONWATCHER'S MEMOIR is based on 1500 pages of interview transcripts and is "written in entirely in the present-tense," says Richter. "It's all dialogue, with the idea being to recreate the feeling of being there" during the preparation and making of the film.

Richter's life after 2001 until the mid-'80s was marked by ups and downs. He ran John Lennon and Yoko Ono's film operation for four years (FILM NO. 4, FLY) "until they retired into the Dakota." (His next book, which he's already begun to write, will be about his John-and-Yoko experience.) He worked on the 1975 concert film LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE ROLLING STONES, and then formed an improvisational theatre, Absolute Reality

In the mid '80s he began designing computer monitoring systems for film production companies and then formed his own company, Production Systems. Richter sold the company in '88 to the West Coast-based Entertainment Partners, which hired him as their VP of Commercial Sales.

The MOONWATCHER'S MEMOIR page is here. Anyone in the Los Angeles area who wants to say hello to Richter (I recommend it) can catch him at a book signing at Studio City's Bookstar at 12136 Ventura Blvd. on Wednesday, October 30th at 7:30 p.m., and at Barnes and Noble in the old town section of Pasadena (111 W. Colorado Blvd.) on Thursday, November 14th, also at 7:30.

Bend in the River

At the ripe old age of 23, Heath Ledger is looking to me like damaged goods. Not as a working actor, but perhaps as a top-of-the-heap, girl-attracting, big-swinging-dick, make-sure-he-gets-the-script-before-Jude-Law type.

That's a fair way of putting it, I think, after the recent D.O.A. debut of THE FOUR FEATHERS. The Miramax-Paramount co-production cost at least $110 million but took in a piddling $6.8 million when it opened on September 20th, and has since ascended into legend as one of Hollywood's biggest all-time flops.

Did Ledger cause the failure of THE FOUR FEATHERS? Nope. The guilty parties are director Shekhar Kapur, screenwriters Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini, and the Miramax and Paramount executives who felt that remounting some old-school hodgepodge about white colonialists meeting African anti-colonialists on the field of battle would fly in today's marketplace.

But then Ledger looked like an idiot caught in the headlights in those British military outfits he was sporting, and with that awful short haircut they made him wear, which emphasized his little jar ears and that bulbous, mashed-in nose. The bottom line is that he didn't pull in his young-girl fans -- the presumed core supporters of romantic dramas -- on the first weekend, and there's no way this helps the guy.

Add to this the relatively tepid performance of A KNIGHT'S TALE, another sweeping romantic confection with Ledger in the lead. All right, it "opened," but only grossed only about $56 million domestically, and it stunk and I hated it. Didn't everyone?

Ledger recently finished Gregor Jordan's THE KELLY GANG, is currently tilling the soil of 33-year-old MULHOLLAND DRIVE star Naomi Watts (or so I hear), and will presumably continue to live, eat, drink, enjoy life, drive cool cars, and find gigs and adventure. But his reputation as a hot, ascending movie star with a loyal female fan base is clearly being re-evaluated.

Are the shelf lives and fame cycles of Hollywood's hot young male stars getting shorter and shorter these days? Or is it the media's fault for burning through the young Hollywood hunks faster than usual -- breathlessly building them up and then coolly watching them fall upon the rocks when their movies underperform?

"Are you saying [Ledger's] the new Kip Pardue?," a guy who works for a news-gathering organization asked yesterday.

Ledger's quasi-reign lasted three years. It began with his costarring role as Mel Gibson's son in the mostly painful THE PATRIOT in '00, following a buildup that had begun a year earlier with a catchy performance in the teen romancer 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU. (His first score was in Jordan's surreal Australian crime film TWO HANDS, which was seen at film festivals but never opened in the U.S. theatrically.) Between TALE and FEATHERS Ledger also took a small role in the widely-respected MONSTER'S BALL.

He was also mentioned last year as a possible candidate to play Alexander the Great for director Oliver Stone, before Colin Farrell stepped in

"I don't think [Ledger's] on life support at all," says talent manager Tom Denko of Hofflund-Polone. "He's got an international name through THE PATRIOT and A KNIGHT'S TALE, and he just needs to take a secondary role in a good film or two -- like Brad Pitt's role in SEVEN -- and he just needs someone to help him through it, and he'll be fine. He can be the great partner, and then he'll learn how to carry the film. He's got plenty of room left in his career...and the fact that he did MONSTER'S BALL shows me he's got good taste."

On the other hand, a publicist told me on Monday she thinks Ledger "has some work to do" in the wake of FOUR FEATHERS, and that he "looked like an Auschwitz victim" in the short British haircut he wore during the film's first act. An industry veteran put it more bluntly by saying Ledger has had his shot and "he missed it."

A friend feels it's "evil" of me to be bringing this up and "trying to kill this kid." I'm not trying to kill anyone. The wipeout of THE FOUR FEATHERS produced a huge mushroom cloud in this town, and fallout dust has been sprinkling down the last couple of weeks. I'm just reading what looks to me like the writing on the wall.

Pacino Abroad

"I just read your Friday story about Al Pacino's PEOPLE I KNOW opening in Rome before the U.S., and wanted to tell you that it was also released in Mexico three weeks ago. It got good to mixed reviews but kind of flopped. Now that I've read more good reactions on the net I want to see it, but it's only playing in very few theaters because it's quickly vanishing. A pity." -- Pepe Ruiloba, Vera Cruz, Mexico

"This excellent film starring Al Pacino in his best performance since DOG DAY AFTERNOON and SERPICO has already opened even here in Brazil to rave reviews. It's difficult when a Hollywood film opens here before the US, but that's the case with some polemical films. Poor Americans -- missing an opportunity to check a rare intelligent film for grown-ups. This sort of thing is precious nowadays. Strangely enough the film was a huge success, being third in Brasil's Top Ten earners, after SIGNS and CITY OF GOD." -- Andre Roquete, Rio de Janeiro

Which Alexander?

I ran a piece last week about the two Alexander the Great movies supposedly being prepped -- Oliver Stone's with Colin Farrell in the lead, and Baz Luhrman's with Leonardo DiCaprio, which won't be rolling until Leo finishes a Howard Hughes biopic, THE AVIATOR, which is expected to occupy him from April until the late summer of '03.

Anyway, I asked readers which Alexander they're more interested in seeing...

"Right now, Baz Luhrmann is a much stronger director than Oliver Stone. Baz's three films are handsome, exciting, rapturous and lyrical, whereas Stone's last few efforts have been heavy-handed, overlong, obnoxious, and uncertain. DiCaprio and Farrell are both talented actors, but I don't care about them so much as the man behind the camera, and if I could only see one Alexander biopic, it would have to be from the man who has done Shakespeare and musicals, not the one who has done football operas and Nixon gasbags." -- Zach Ralston, Los Angeles

"I guess I'd rather see Stone's version because I know that he can capture the ambition and ferocity of the Macedonian conquest, even though Colin Farrell is an iffy choice for the lead role -- why did Heath Ledger drop out anyway? While Baz's epic could be visually arresting, my gut says it'll become over-the-top and devolve into his trademark operatic goofiness. Still, Leo might make a better Alexander than Farrell. If only Stone and Leo could've teamed up to start with." -- Jim Bookman

"I would rather see Baz Luhrman's Alexander than Oliver Stone's. Though I do occasionally find DiCaprio to be a tad irritating and his last pairing with Luhrman (ROMEO + JULIET) unsatisfying, I've always found Oliver Stone's films to be overly pedantic, overlong, and for the most part boring. They're both known for their kind of beat-you-over-the-head-with-the-theme styles, Luhrman at least paces his movies so they never tire. And he doesn't seem to approach his films with the same tired, extremely liberal political agenda like Stone does. Even ANY GIVEN SUNDAY had all that Native American music on the soundtrack, which irritated and distracted me to no end(as did most of the rest of the movie, but that's another story)." -- Basil Swartzfager

"I'll see both Alexander movies if they're made, but if I could only see one, I think I'd wait for Baz's. Baz and Oliver are two of the biggest over-rated directors working right now, so it would come down to the actor for me, and I'd more interested in what Leo could do with the role than Colin." -- John English

"Though I'm not sure what Luhrman will do with it, and though I suspect his peculiar style might be jarring or even alienating in the context of a biopic set in the distant past, surely it will be more interesting than what Oliver Stone would do with the story. Can you imagine all the soapboxing about empire and megalomania he'll put into it? Add to that the possibility that Luhrman will decide to play it straight, drop his fascinating gimmicks and make a more traditional historical film. To me that's far and away the more appealing (or at least intriguing) prospect." -- Jennifer Heisler

Streaks

"I absolutely adore your column - it's the single best column out now about the industry. I tell everyone I know about it. Many thanks for the enjoyment. Having worked on SOLARIS and knowing Soderbergh's Oscar pedigree, why hasn't it turned up in your Oscar Balloon? Have you heard negative things, or are you merely withholding judgment?: -- Mike Malone

Wells to Malone: I've seen and heard nothing, apart from some Ain't It Cool News postings which have been hot and cold. I'm worried, though. I think luck comes and goes in streaks, and I think whatever cosmic force or entity that enabled Soderbergh to turn out all those great films one after another (OUT OF SIGHT, THE LIMEY, BROCKOVICH, TRAFFIC) has now come back to him and said, "Okay, it's time to go the other way...the streak is over." I don't care how much money it made; OCEAN'S 11 was a bust for me. And FULL FRONTAL has just collapsed in retrospect. So I'm thinking maybe he's got a curse chasing him. I hope I'm wrong, and would love it if SOLARIS turns out well.

Silence

"Has anyone explained why Tarantino did a commentary track with Tony Scott on the just-out special edition of TRUE ROMANCE and skipped chatting on the special edition DVDs of his three directorial efforts - RESERVOIR DOGS, PULP FICTION and JACKIE BROWN?" -- Joe Corey

Wells to Corey: Tarantino's rep Bumble Ward writes that "Quentin is cool with other directors doing commentary on DVDs but doesn't hold with doing them on his own movies. There is actually some brief commentary on RESERVOIR DOGS but this is from an interview he did for the DVD -- it wasn't intended as commentary. I don't know that he did that stuff with Tony but he loves Tony and TRUE ROMANCE is his favorite of the non-QT-directed QT scripts, if you know what I mean. Plus TRUE ROMANCE isn't officially a QT movie so the rules I stated at the beginning apply. Hope this helps -- I'm driving and typing with thumbs."

Bash

"Did SWEPT AWAY really deserve all those horrific reviews? I've heard opinions like "stinky beyond imagination," and I read that New York Daily News gave it an unprecedented zero stars. But I'm guessing even you'll agree that it's not even the worst movie of 2002. It's not the worst Madonna movie either (SHANGHAI SURPRISE takes that cake). In fact, I enjoyed some parts of it, and the audience that I saw it with seemed to be into it also.

"I think the problem lies in Guy Ritchie's writing and directing. He will obviously have problem expanding beyond the style established by his first two movies. I also think the kicking scenes are startling by today's cinema standard and worthy of some discussion if people can get over their uneasiness with the topic.

I think the critics were influenced by or felt obligated to follow the long-leading negative press that came from the U.K. They were eager to bury Guy Ritchie (and I can totally see why). And they've long since lost patience with Madonna, who keeps making sub-par movies but keeps try ing anyway. For what it's worth, I think she did a much better job in SWEPT AWAY than in THE NEXT BEST THING." -- Zheng Wang, Bellevue, WA

Wells to Wang: So you like Madonna, huh? You and ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY critic Owen Gleiberman should get together -- he said she was close to okay in it.

Role Playing

Jason G. Coleman was first to identify Friday's cast. They appeared together in Hector Babenco's adaption of IRONWEED, with the two unnamed stars being Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Today's cast: Una Merkel, Frank Morgan, Walter Pidegon, Hattie McDaniel, Jonathan Hale, Clark Gable, Cliff Edwards, Jean Harlow

What's That Line?

Christopher Conway was first to identify Friday's dialogue, but he didn't provide the basic info so Daniel Jensen gets the prize. It's from Kevin Smith's CLERKS (1994) with lead actor Brian O'Halloran as the clerk, and Scott Schiafo and Walter Flanagan as the Chewlie's salesman and customer, respectively.

Since last Friday's was so easy for so many people, here's another one - why break the streak? Guy #1 is talking to Guy #2 and Guy #3 about helping out another guy, professionally speaking.

Guy #2: You been around, you're smart, you're professional, you know what it takes...
(beat)
We want you to mature the kid.
Guy #1: "Mature" ain't a fuckin' verb.
Guy #3: You go to college or what?
Guy #2: We want you to room with him on the road and stay on his case all year.
(beat)
He can go all the way.
Guy #1: And where can I go?
Guy #2: You can keep going to the [place of work] and keep gettin' paid to do it.
(beat)
Beats hell outta working at Sears.
Guy #3: Sears sucks, [name]. I tried it once. Sold Lady Kenmore's -- it's nasty, nasty work.
Guy #2: Even if it's the Carolina League, this is a chance to play everyday.
Guy #1: (angrily) You don't want a player, you want a stable pony. My Triple A contract gets bought out so I can hold the Flavor o' the Month's dick in the bus leagues?! (more angrily) Fuck this fucking game...I fuckin' quit!

He gets up, walks out, slams the door. Guy #2 and #3 don't react - they sit there, looking at the desktop, waiting. A beat or two, and Guy #1 is back into the office.

Guy #1: Who we play tomorrow?

Name the film, the year of release, the director, the screenwriter(s), and all three actors in the scene. To keep out the pikers, name the real-life New York publicist who has a cameo part as a third-base coach and congratulates Guy #1 in a scene at the end of Act Two as he's rounding the bases. Anyone failing to answer this last question is disqualified. Not so easy now, is it?