Colman Domingo and bonus Danny Ramirez

This is the overlap week, the meat of the fall festival season, with Telluride ending on Monday, TIFF kicking off Thursday night, and Venice happening throughout the week, too. I know people who are hop-scotching through all three fests, which sounds nightmarish to me. The scheduling alone! I can barely handle my TIFF schedule! 

Anyway, Gus Van Sant’s new true crime film, Dead Man’s Wire, premiered at Venice last night, bringing out most of the cast, including Colman Domingo, accompanied by his husband, Raul Domingo. Colman showed up in custom Valentino with gold-bedecked fringe:

This is minimal for Colman, which is still a helluva lot more than anyone else does. The film’s star, Dacre Montgomery, also wore a belted jacket, and it didn’t work nearly as well, mainly because the hem of his pants is tragic.

Puddle pants look good on no one.

Dead Man’s Wire will next play at TIFF, where it does not fit into my schedule at all. That legit bums me out, because it’s about a crazy kidnapping story from the 1970s in which a disgruntled bank customer—so an everyman type—took a mortgage broker hostage by looping a “dead man’s line” from his shotgun’s trigger to his hostage’s neck. It was bonkers. There’s a really good documentary about the case called Dead Man’s Line, and a podcast with Jon Hamm called American Hostage. I much prefer this story to the pizza bomb collar case because this story has a happy-ish ending (no one dies). 

At one point, the film was supposed to be directed by Werner Herzog and star Nicolas Cage—a collaboration we deserve!—but it ended up in the hands of Gus Van Sant, who cast Bill Skarsgard as the kidnapper, Tony Kiritsis, and Dacre Montgomery—who looks unrecognizable in the film—as the hostage, Richard Hall. Colman Domingo co-stars as a friendly radio DJ, and the film also stars Cary Elwes, Myha’la, and Al Pacino, who, along with Skarsgard, was not in Venice.

You know who WAS there, though? Danny Ramirez.

I’m never mad at seeing Danny Ramirez, but he’s there for a specific reason: his production company, Pinstripes, is marking its debut with Dead Man’s Wire. His partner at Pinstripes is Tom Culliver, Cary Elwes’ protégé (Elwes’ Elevated Films is also a producer on the film). We’ve been gossiping about Danny Ramirez during the celebrity summer romance season, but don’t take your eye off his actual business, either. Danny Ramirez, like pretty much all the younger cast connected to Top Gun: Maverick, is making power moves behind the scenes, too.