Movie City News Archive for October, 2014

20 Weeks To Oscar: Sell Short

In the real world, where studios are just selling movies with massive marketing campaigns, the marketing windows have shrunk in recent years. Big TV buys can wait for 3 weeks out if the awareness has been pumped up via publicity for the months and months before. Have Oscar campaigners taken this lesson to heart? Are the early September festivals just an awareness play, followed by a 6-to-8 week window of lingering, and then the real campaign in the course of just a few weeks?

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Beatrice Welles On Completing Her Father’s The Other Side Of The Wind

Beatrice Welles On Completing Her Father’s The Other Side Of The Wind

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Despite Chances Of Extradition To L. A. County, Roman Polanski May Shoot Next Film In Poland

Despite Chances Of Extradition To L. A. County, Roman Polanski May Shoot Next Film In Poland

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Google CEO And Co-Founder Larry Page Has Larger And Larger Ambitions

Google CEO And Co-Founder Larry Page Has Larger And Larger Ambitions

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The FT Characterizes Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige

The FT Characterizes Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige

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

134 DOCUMENTARY FEATURES SUBMITTED FOR 2014 OSCAR® RACE LOS ANGELES, CA – One hundred thirty-four features have been submitted for consideration in the Documentary Feature category for the 87th Academy Awards®. The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are: “Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq” “Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case” “Algorithms” “Alive Inside” “All…

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After Nightcrawler, Steve Rose Asks If There’s Any Big-Screen Portrait Of TV News Gatherers That’s Not Warped

After Nightcrawler, Steve Rose Asks If There’s Any Big-Screen Portrait Of TV Newsgatherers That’s Not Warped

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Stephanie Zacharek On “How John Wick Restored My Faith In Violent Movies”

Stephanie Zacharek On “How John Wick Restored My Faith In Violent Movies”

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Admire Three-Minutes, Fifty-Two Seconds Of The Best Blinding Lens Flares

Admire Three-Minutes, Fifty-Two Seconds Of The Best Blinding Lens Flares

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Iain Sinclair On London’s Lost Cinemas

Iain Sinclair On London’s Lost Cinemas

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Katie Rife Watches All 9 Hellraiser Movies

Katie Rife Watches All 9 Hellraiser Movies

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Joy Horowitz Asks, “Too Jewish?” On The Making of “Fiddler On The Roof”

Joy Horowitz Asks, “Too Jewish?” On The Making of “Fiddler On The Roof”

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Sarah Kerr On The “Weird, True Story” Of Wonder Woman

Sarah Kerr On The “Weird, True Story” Of Wonder Woman

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Cinematographer Elle Schneider On Why There Ought To Be More Women Behind The Camera

Cinematographer Elle Schneider On Why There Ought To Be More Women Behind The Camera

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NYT Sunday Magazine Cover-Stories Chris Nolan At Almost 7,000 Words

“Regardless of the visionary question, however, it’s pretty much impossible to think of a film that grossed more than a billion dollars and is better than The Dark Knight—or, to think of it in the way that Nolan prefers, a better film that was seen, so many times over, by so many people.” NYT Sunday…

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US Officials Rebuffed In Attempt To Extradite Roman Polanski While Visiting Opening Of Jewish Museum In Warsaw

US Officials Rebuffed In Attempt To Extradite Roman Polanski While Visiting Opening Of Jewish Museum In Warsaw

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J. R. Jones Backlashes Whiplash

“If you’ve ever played in any kind of improvisational group, you know that the key to making it work is listening to your fellow players, not trying to vanquish them.” J. R. Jones Backlashes Whiplash

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What Do Michel Gondry And “Weird Al” Yankovic Have In Common?

What Do Michel Gondry And “Weird Al” Yankovic Have In Common?

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Brooks Barnes Checks Peter Chernin’s Progress As Well-Financed But Successful Independent Producer

“It ain’t a lot of fun to make failed movies, and to be successful you have to be in the attention-getting business. Actually, attention-getting is the dominant thing that has taken over the media business over all.” Brooks Barnes Checks Peter Chernin’s Progress As Well-Financed But Successful Independent Producer

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Cinematographer Reed Morano On The Fight Against TV’s “Smooth Motion” Setting

“By allowing it to exist as a default, we are throwing away our freedom of artistic expression as filmmakers because someone else is deciding that our work will be seen completely differently in the end.” Cinematographer Reed Morano On The Fight Against TV’s “Smooth Motion” Setting

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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