Richard Serrano has a great story in today’s LA Times about former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover‘s obsession with Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jack Nelson throughout the early 1970′s. Hoover heard Nelson was planned on outing him as gay, and spent his later years (and who knows what kind of FBI resources) compiling a dossier on the reporter and his editors. Hoover even used to slander Nelson in the margins of departmental memos.

From the Times:

“Nelson is a mental case,” Hoover wrote on one memo.

“He is a rat,” he scrawled on another.

“A jackal.”

“A lice-covered ferret.”

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Film awards watchers are buzzing about Michelle Williams‘ Best Actress win last night at the Hollywood Film Festival. Not so much because of the award itself, but rather as a result of the person who presented it to her.

Per the Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg (and others), Don Murray—Monroe’s co-star in the 1956 romantic comedy Bus Stop (pictured)–drove down from Santa Barbara with his wife to make the presentation at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Since the Williams film, My Week with Marilyn, is set during the time that Murray worked with Monroe, his evaluation of Williams’ performance is in many ways the only one that counts. Said the 82-year-old Oscar nominee from the podium:

“She [Williams] created some moments that were so intimately familiar to me because I spent 14 weeks with Marilyn… I know that Michelle studied everything — read every book she could find — about Marilyn… and the amazing thing is that there is not one thing in that film that is not truthful… it was just a revelation… she holds the mirror up to nature and she gets into acting that is beyond acting, that is being… Michelle’s performance made me appreciate Marilyn.” Afterwards, in the green room, he reiterated to me: “She nailed it.”

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Wall Street Journal contributor Michael Judge is the latest journalist to make the pilgrimage to Carmel, California to chat with former mayor Clint Eastwood. He does a nice job of painting the picture of what it’s like to sit down with the 80-year-old Hollywood icon on the actor’s home turf.

In the comments section, several readers debate Eastwood’s declaration that his upcoming biopic of J. Edgar Hoover starring Leonardo DiCaprio will not really address allegations that the FBI chief was a closeted homosexual and cross-dresser. While some comments reflect disappointment and surprise that this would be the case with a screenplay written by Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black (Milk), others like Sally Wilson applaud the non-salacious focus:

Many years ago my spouse pleaded with Richard Pryor concerning a planned biographical film on the legendary Charlie Parker. To make his point he sent Pryor a tape of varied musicians of the thirties and forties to show… that the curse of drugs and racism though existent in Parker’s life was not the essence of his genius and his demons. Pryor did not produce the story.

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The unsurpassed anonymous source that brought down the Nixon administration and fueled vigorous debate for decades as to his true identity, has died. Mark Felt, the FBI’s ‘number two’ man, a protege of J. Edgar Hoover, gave information to young WaPo scribes Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex.

Woodward always said that the identity of Deep Throat would not be known until after he died. Our money was on it being Pat Buchanan (but put that in the pile of things we’ve been wrong about). But in 2005 – they let the proverbial cat out of the bag and for a month all we could read about in the newspapers were the phrases ‘deep throat’ and ‘number two man’.

On a lame note, the LAT obit was written by recently laid off staffer Johanna Neuman. Cough.

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