Jessica Chastain’s in “Woman Walks Ahead.” Which she’s doing. She’s way out there. On fire despite the red hair.
Photographers crowded the building where her film screened. Others mobbed the room she’d enter. Like a wedding cake, layers of PR types with clipboards, cards, phones, attitudes. Plus bulletins: “Two minutes away . . . she arrived . . . in the elevator . . . coming to you now . . . she’s here!”
“I play Catherine Weldon, a late-1800s portrait painter from Brooklyn who travels to a Lakota Indian reservation for a portrait of Sitting Bull. She gets embroiled in the struggle for their land and lives there.”
What Sitting Bull wore when not sitting, who knows. For sure, her wardrobe living there wasn’t the décolleté black-and-white silk Givenchy with matching high-heel sandals she did at the screening.
A feminist, she’s opined on gender imbalance, passive portrayal of women in films, lack of female movie critics and their limited power positions in Hollywood. On this particular movie, there’s a female director.
“It’s important to speak out and amplify our imbalance in the moviemaking industry. I have experienced no backlash from anyone since making my views public. I certainly wasn’t afraid to do it. Glad I did it. It’s taken a long time to get this far, and I’m out front for those who cannot speak out. We must turn this around.”
In 2011, I interviewed relatively new star Jessica. She was in “The Help” and almost seems to be in most films these past few years. Like months back in “Molly’s Game.”
“I still manage to get time off, but the truth is, I love what I do.”
Please try to pay attention
More Cats are meowing. Now a New York Athletic Club party for John Catsimatidis’ daughter, Andrea, Manhattan GOP chairwoman:
Sean Hannity said he told our president to stop tweeting then tweeted out that fact . . . Divorced Judge Jeanine Pirro is engaged. To whom, who knows? Enough that she knows . . . Donald Jr. poked his head in then poked out since he had no jacket . . . WOR’s Mark Simone said that just to sit there, lawyer Barry Slotnick’s getting paid $1,200 an hour . . . Bushwick. Brooklyn. Boyohboy. Boylesque. Company XIV, new theater outfit behind “Cinderella” and “Nutcracker Rouge,” has opened “Boylesque Bullfight.” A chop suey of burlesque, vaudeville, opera, dance, circus, striptease. Gents lift it off or on — or up — through July 29.
Attention, all PR folks
Koko the gorilla is gone but there’s still koo-koo the ape in terms of PR folk. Might they stop phrases like: The “immortal.” The “celebrated.” And “acclaimed,” “legendary,” “incredibly important,” “absolutely amazing” and “exclusive experience.” Throw out “sizzling,” “record-breaking,” and they know what to do with “incredibly important one-of-a-kind.” Razzle-dazzle names, placed into a release with the delicately handled care of a tweezer — nobody knows half of them.
Talking head
BillOReilly.com is adding BillOReilly.com’s concierge service. It includes his direct email replies, discounts on his books and freebies like a “Take Your Country Back” bumper sticker.
And from his own mouth: “Despite FBI investigator Peter Strzok, Trumpers may believe Robert Mueller’s Russian try to block DJT’s election makes him toast.”
Burp from a Democrat: “You can spot Roseanne’s house. Its lawn has a statue of a Domino’s Pizza delivery boy.”
Only in NYC’s Dem headquarters, kids, only in NYC’s Dem headquarters.