John and I go see Megalopolis the day it opens. There are maybe ten people in the theater. Entertainment gossip outlets have been gleefully forecasting doom for Coppola’s dream project for years. Parasites can’t help but celebrate the misery of others. They never risk saying anything of their own so the failure of those who do is their greatest joy.

I have pretty low expectations going in but the movie blows well past them within minutes. Yes, it’s a big, messy, overly earnest, sometimes unintentionally funny hulk of a thing. But it’s got a heart and it’s sincerely trying to say something. Even if I don’t share Coppola’s optimism about what’s next for this civilization, I have no doubt of his conviction.

Selling off a chunk of his successful wine-making empire to fund a production in a medium that’s dying a very public death is definitely hubris but what else is the guy to do? He’s in his eighties and has dedicated his life to film. If there’s a hill for him to die on, this is it.

Old Jon Voigt deserves to win a bunch of awards too.

A few days later, I bike to the Music Box to see the completely reedited/remixed version of Tinto Brass’s Caligula. For over fifty years, this has been Megalopolis before Megalopolis (even as Coppola has dreamed of his almost that long). I have a dim memory of renting the old version from Videosmith on Harvard Street. It came on two VHS tapes. I chose it because it was a famous trainwreck and because there was porn in it. It’s the reason most people watched it at the time. I don’t recall much except for extravagant, widescreen Roman palace sets and Malcolm McDowell strutting about and leering the way he always does.

The new thing the restorer has fashioned takes out all the porn and puts in a lot of Helen Mirren. It’s worth seeing for that reason, if for no other. It’s a strange, operatic marathon of orgies and bloodletting. I’m glad I saw it as a historical corrective. The people involved clearly strived to right a wrong and in a way they have. There was a good crowd and people applauded when it was over but the larger culture has no bandwidth to sit through a three-hour epic about the rise and fall of a Roman emperor; it’s too busy laughing itself to death in ten or twenty second increments over handheld devices.

The old Rome of Caligula is a lot closer to our own dying light than Coppola’s old hippie vision of rebirth and reimagining. His movie’s a triumph even as the world it proposes to save circles the drain.

Made another little book about the bookstore: original, zine, digital.

Put up some stuff at Wormhole in Wicker Park. It’ll be there awhile.