Elliot Gould said a few words Friday night before a BAM screening of Little Murders, the 1971 film based on Jules Feiffer’s play, which Gould starred in and produced for first-time feature director Alan Arkin. The event came towards the midpoint of a retrospective at the Brooklyn theater dedicated to Gould’s 70s-era peak, and the actor seemed humbled by the thought of so many snapshots of an era lined up for quick consumption. “It’s my life,” he said wistfully. Then, with a little wave of a hand and a vigorous shake of his head, he corrected himself: “Well, it’s all of our lives, isn’t it?”

Gould noted that he’d “probably never” seen Little Murders “with a real crowd”–when the film was released in the States in February of 1971, Gould was in Sweden shooting The Touch for Ingmar Bergman, and thanks to its disappointing box office, it didn’t have much of a life for a while. Not that Gould took time out at the time to dwell on its failure. After the screening, Gould’s answers to questions from both the audience and moderator Bruce Bennett continually circled around a kind of “fear” the actor experienced at the peak of his career. After a 1970 TIME Magazine story in which he was anointed both “the urban Don Quixote” and “a star for an uptight age”, Gould worked constantly because he was afraid that if he stopped to catch his breath––or picked the wrong project and fell on his face––his allure would cool off and he wouldn’t be able to find a job.

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• “There’s been a bit of talk lately about Manic Pixie Dream Girls,” writes Matt Prigge. “It got me thinking about a more interesting and reflexive variation on this character: the kook.” Examples include Annie Hall, “most Eric Rohmer women,” and Marcia Rudd’s character from Little Murders, which screens tonight at BAM in Brooklyn with a Q & A with Elliott Gould to follow.
• Laure Parsons has launched Infinicine, a new site with news coverage, discussion boards and other resourced dedicated to “information and dialog about the brave new world of digital distribution.”
• At the FILMMAKER Blog, Scott Macaulay points to Roger Ebert’s three-and-a-half star review of Frownland, which opens in Chicago today. Ebert acknowledges that the film is a tricky sell––”Now why would you want to see this film? Most readers of this review probably wouldn’t. I’m writing for the rest of us”––but ultimately calls the film a “rebirth of the need for expression that inspired the American independent movement in the first place.”

Your blogger’s gotta plow through some stuff this morning. While she’s gone, watch the first ten minutes of Robert Altman’s California Split, embedded above, and/or the wedding scene from Little Murders, embedded below. Yes, when Karina is stressed out, she procrastinates by turning to YouTube to satisfy her obsession with late-70s Elliott Gould. Is that a problem?