Movie City News Archive for January, 2012

Friday Estimates, January 27, 2012

Open Road’s first big opening comes with The Grey, which should be in the top 5 of all indie openings for the last year. Meanwhile, Lionsgate returns to HeiglLand, not breaking any records, but continuing to make an argument that Ms. Heigl can consistently open movies to 8 figures. And SummitGate’s Man On A Ledge fell off.

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Still More Questionable Legislation After SOPA: How About ACTA, A Secret Treaty On Intellectual Propery?

Still More Questionable Legislation After SOPA: How About ACTA, A Secret Treaty On Intellectual Propery?

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Bill Gates Brags On His Last Contacts With Steve Jobs

Bill Gates Brags On His Last Contacts With Steve Jobs

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Melbourne’s Astor Theatre Outlines A Digital Projection Keyword Authorization Nightmare

Melbourne’s Astor Theatre Outlines A Digital Projection Keyword Authorization Nightmare

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Jonathan Zimmerman On “The Mythology Of Film School”

Jonathan Zimmerman On “The Mythology Of Film School”

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Screen Actors Guild National Board of Directors Approves Merger Package with AFTRA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE LOS ANGELES (January 27, 2012) – The Screen Actors Guild National Board of Directors today voted overwhelmingly to approve and recommend a plan to merge with AFTRA. The board met in a regularly scheduled plenary meeting in the James Cagney Board Room at the Guild’s Los Angeles headquarters and voted after reviewing…

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DP/30: Sundance 2012 Interviews Sneak Peek

The experience of Sundance is a melange of images, ideas, personalities, and passions. And that’s before you even see the movies. Here is a quick look at some of that energy via the filmmakers.

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Of Course, Any Artist Blooper Reel Would Be Without Dialog

Of Course, Any Artist Blooper Reel Would Be Without Dialog

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Ai Weiwei On Why He Was In Absentia At Sundance Preem Of No Worries

Ai Weiwei On Why He Was In Absentia At Sundance Preem Of No Worries

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Heigl Gets Grouponed For The Money

Heigl Gets Grouponed For The Money And – Midwestern Theaters Tell Lionsgate They Won’t Have Any Of It

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Dargis Just Wild About Beasts Of The Southern Wild

“I heard one industry type wonder aloud if Hushpuppy was ‘retarded or just black and poor.’ Happily for that fool, the festival was dominated by the familiar complement of drifty and droopy white young things.” Dargis Just Wild About Beasts Of The Southern Wild

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Why Don’t We Live In A World Of Trailers Voiced By Women?

Why Don’t We Live In A World Of Trailers Voiced By Women?

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Participant And AFFRM Pick Up Sundance’s Middle Of Nowhere

Participant And AFFRM Pick Up Sundance’s Middle Of Nowhere

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Academy Rules Tree Of Life Can List Academy Rules Tree Of Life Can List Four Producers (Instead Of Just 3); Still, Pitt’s Not ItFour Producers (Instead Of Just 3)

Academy Rules Tree Of Life Can List Four Producers (Instead Of Just 3); Still, Pitt’s Not It

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PRODUCER CREDITS DETERMINED FOR 2011 BEST PICTURE NOMINEE TREE OF LIFe

January 27, 2012 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Beverly Hills, CA – Producer credits for 84th Academy Awards® Best Picture nominee “The Tree of Life” have been determined by the Producers Branch Executive Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The official nominees for the film are Sarah Green, Bill Pohlad, Dede Gardner and…

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JENS ASSUR WINS 2012 SUNDANCE/NHK INTERNATIONAL FILMMAKER AWARD

MEDIA ALERT WHAT: Sundance Institute and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have announced Jens Assur, director of the upcoming film, Close Far Away, as winner of the 2012 Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award. Created in 1996 to celebrate 100 years of cinema, the annual award recognizes and supports a visionary filmmaker on his or her next film….

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Slideshowing The Production Design Of Midnight In Paris

Slideshowing The Production Design Of Midnight In Paris

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Sexual Tell-All Of Old Hollywood!

Sexual Tell-All Of Old Hollywood!

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The Dark Implications Of Google’s Merger Of Private Data From All Its Services

“We may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products.” The Dark Implications Of Google’s Merger Of Private Data From All Its Services

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Charles Simic On “When Movies Kept Us Awake At Night”

Charles Simic On “When Movies Kept Us Awake At Night”

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Movie City News

“I don’t think it’s cruel to say this, because John himself would undoubtedly have turned it into a gleeful anecdote: When he had the stroke that killed him, he was at a local dinner theater. Hell of a review.”

“I am inclined to aver that every activity needs its critics, from narcissists bloviating in Washington to exhibitors of knee holes in their blue jeans by way of following a fad. So, too, tennis players and others wearing their caps backward. There is, to be sure, only fairly innocuous folly in puncturing pants or reversing caps, but for political or artistic or religious twisting of thought or harboring holes in the head there is rather less excuse. I have always inveighed against the bleary journalism practiced by newspaper reviewers, as opposed to the real criticism performed by, well, critics.”

“I often felt a twinge of grief at the idea that John Simon had devoted his life to a method of work that could only make him increasingly unhappy. Here was a man, elegant, articulate, and vastly knowledgeable, fluent in at least half a dozen languages, whose gifts of mind gave nothing back to the arts he wrote about except a few unkind remarks that made fun of someone’s performance, ethnicity, physical attributes, or, with a pun, on his target’s name. (“If this is Norman Wisdom, I’ll take Saxon folly.”) Other theatre critics keep such darts in their rucksacks for occasional use; John lived by them.”

“One person’s critic is another person’s crackpot. That they are not united in their opinions is ascribable to the Latin saying: quot homines, tot sententiae. I myself prefer being considered a creep, but that is what you get for having what Vladimir Nabokov called ‘Strong Opinions.’ It is odd that in a country so wallowing in negativity, starting with mass shootings and climaxing with Trump, such an unimportant matter as theater criticism should generate so much hostility. The only target patently more important is lead in the drinking water.”

Review: Little Women (no spoilers)

The DVD Wrapup: Cold War, Betty Blue, Official Secrets, Demons, Olivia, American Dreamer, Land of Yik Yak

20 Weeks To Oscar: Cinema, Trump, and Oscar

E. Scott Weinberg On Youthful Fangoria Encounters

Rome Bookstore Closes

With a Grauniad-Alleged $300 Million Budget, Could The Yet-Unseen But Surely Weird Cats Pass A Billion Dollars at The Box Office?

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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