Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2014

The Academy Lists The 134 Docs Submitted For Oscar 2014; Shortlist Of 15 Comes In December

Mark Harris On “The Curse of Crash: The Narratives That Doom Oscar Movies”

“Much of my time with Boseman went like that. ‘You’ve got to watch what you say,” he admitted, which is why I can’t tell you much about the hilarious pick-up lines he suggested he’d woo Rihanna with. (They were all immediately retracted, and amazing.)”

NY Times

James Marsh On Directing The Theory Of Everything 2’20” vid

daily beast

“On the whole I kind of quite like my films without watching them every night like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. But I do actually think they are alright. A lot of filmmakers say ‘I can’t watch myself’ and, very often it is because the film that got made isn’t the film they wanted to make because a few people had their hands all over it and f—ed it up.”
Mike Leigh Regards Mike Leigh

Theory Of Everything‘s Stephen Hawking Joins Facebook

Oscar Producers Zadan And Meron Set 3-Year Development-Production Pact With B’wy’s Shubert Organization

hollywoodreporter.com

Behind The Scenes With Fox’s Worldwide Marketing Co-Chieftains, With Stories About Gone Girl And Pictures Of Eccentric Memorabilia

“Honestly, I’m going through exactly what Riggan is going through in this movie. I go, ‘Oh, you think you’re the greatest.’ Then someone says, ‘You’re the greatest. You’re wonderful.’ Then 20 minutes later, I’m going, ‘No, you’re not any of those things. You’re just plain Michael Keaton.'”

“The infinitude of time as conveyed in Birdman’s unbroken stream of visuals is its most prescient conceit; were this a drama about radio or cinema, it would not work. On the stage where there is no barrier between performer and audience, where the performance—like life—unfolds without edits in a fluid stream of happenings (and non-happenings), there is nothing but now, no state of being but on.”
Fine Young Filmmaker Barry Jenkins Oh-So-Admires Birdman

Jeff Jensen On-Sets Interstellar

Emma Stone On Not Messing Up Birdman

NY Times

Michael Cieply Sez World War II May Be Battle That Wins Oscar

variety

Variety Cover-Stories “Saint” Bill Murray

wsj

“I was always thinking about labyrinths. Backstage and the dressing rooms and all those corridors are like an infinite labyrinth.”

Benedict Cumberbatch Says No Need For Gay Sex In Imitation Game

NY Times

“Given my choice between allowing portrayals of women who are sexually manipulative, erotically aggressive, fearless in a deranged kind of way, completely true to their own temperament, desperately vital, or the alternative—wallowing in feminist propaganda and succumbing to the niceness plague—I’ll take the former.”
Maureen Dowd Is In True Rare Form As She Loves, Loves, Loves Amazing Amy spoilers, of course

“Perhaps Gone Girl‘s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe.”
Try And Top “Marriage Is An Abduction,” Elif Batuman‘s Superb Take On Gone Girl, Book And Film

telegraph.co.uk

“This is the kind of stuff it’s very hard to make a cinema audience engage with, because we’ve got this whole —-ing ‘likeability’ thing that people are so concerned with. They reserve their empathy because they don’t want to fall in love with someone whose body is going to end up in a 50-gallon oil drum. They don’t want to be charmed by someone who might have hacked his wife up and put her in the crawlspace.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon