Movie City News Archive for April, 2015

Charles Benton, 84, Public Media Advocate, Late Of Films, Inc., Home Vision Entertainment And Encyclopedia Brittanica

Charles Benton, 84, Public Media Advocate, Late Of Films, Inc., Home Vision Entertainment And Encyclopedia Brittanica

Read the full article »

Robert Downey, Jr. On Why He Will Not Be In Your Small Indie Movie

Robert Downey, Jr. On Why He Will Not Be In Your Small Indie Movie

Read the full article »

“How Photography Was Optimized For White Skin Color”

“How Photography Was Optimized For White Skin Color”

Read the full article »

After Secret’s Shushed And Twitter Slacked, Circa Seeks Cash Sufferance

Startup Stutters: After Secret’s Shushed And Twitter Slacked, Circa Seeks Cash Sufferance

Read the full article »

POV’s Simon Kilmurry Shifts After 16 Years To Exec-Direct IDA, The Int’l Doc Ass’n

  INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES POV’S SIMON KILMURRY AS EXECUTIVE DIRECTORThursday April 30, 2015 – Los Angeles, CA – The International Documentary Association (IDA) is proud to announce the appointment of Simon Kilmurry to the position of Executive Director. Kilmurry will relocate from New York to Los Angeles to begin work on July 6, 2015.   Kilmurry…

Read the full article »

John Sloss On A Boyhood Sequel And The Virtues Of Self-Releasing

“The real question becomes where do people see films first more than whether there are too many features being made or too many features being released.” John Sloss On A Boyhood Sequel, The Virtues Of Self-Releasing, And Proper “Windowing”

Read the full article »

Peter Cowie Remembers Richard Corliss

Peter Cowie Remembers Richard Corliss

Read the full article »

AT&T Charges 83-Year-Old Man $25,000 For AOL Dialup

AT&T Charges 83-Year-Old Man $25,000 For AOL Dialup

Read the full article »

Calum Marsh Considers The Marvel Factory As An “Anticipation Machine,” With The Movies Almost Beside The Point

“What’s alarming is the climate of which the plan is symptomatic. We’ve come to prefer anticipation to reflection—to thinking idly about a film that’s coming soon than to thinking seriously about one that’s already out. Publications tease and rumor-monger rather than digest and analyze; release dates and casting decisions are more widely shared and read…

Read the full article »

A 1968 James Blue Interview With Satyajit Ray On The Directing Of The Non-Actor, On The Occasion Of The Apu Restoration

A 1968 James Blue Interview With Satyajit Ray On The Directing Of The Non-Actor, On The Occasion Of The Apu Restoration

Read the full article »

How Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray Inspired A Young Poet’s New Book

How Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray Inspired A Young Poet’s New Book

Read the full article »

Filmmaker Michael Galinsky On The Shifting Fates Of His Doc, Who Took Johnny

“While many people talk about the way that the Internet has democratized things, the film world is still stuck in old-media based patterns that rely on gatekeepers to keep things flowing. The flood of well-made films that was unleashed by the increased availability of the means of production has only made this pattern more entrenched.”…

Read the full article » 2 Comments »

Why Are So Many Movies Laughing At Sex Now? The Filmmakers Reply

Why Are So Many Movies Laughing At Sex Now? The Filmmakers Reply

Read the full article »

Remembering Mountaineer-Filmmaker Tom Taplin, 61, After Everest Avalanche

Remembering Mountaineer-Filmmaker Tom Taplin, 61, After Everest Avalanche

Read the full article »

THR Sets Down 100 Powerful H’wd Attorneys

THR Sets Down 100 Powerful H’wd Attorneys

Read the full article »

Furious 7 Most Successful Film Ever In Sino Kino

Furious 7 Most Successful Film Ever In Sino Kino; Parking On 70% Of Chinese Screens And 90,000 Daily Showtimes Could Be Factor

Read the full article »

Nadja Tesich Remembers The Paris Of When She Starred In Eric Rohmer’s 1964 Nadja à Paris

Nadja Tesich Remembers The Paris Of When She Starred In Eric Rohmer’s 1964 Nadja à Paris 

Read the full article »

Surveying How The Studios And Stars Address The California Drought

Surveying How The Studios And Stars Address The L.A. Drought

Read the full article »

Avengers: Ultron: It’s Liberal! It’s Conservative! It’s Peacenik! It’s Pro-War! It’s Two Constituencies In One!

Avengers: Ultron: It’s Liberal! It’s Conservative! It’s Peacenik! It’s Pro-War! It’s Two Constituencies In One!

Read the full article »

Robert Greene Thinks Up Another Customarily Thoughtful Doc Thinkpiece

“If we can get people to watch documentaries better, with a better comprehension of the inbuilt complexities of the form, perhaps we can get them to watch the news better, or to be better equipped to deal with the often crude narratives they’re presented with daily.” Robert Greene Thinks Up Another Customarily Thoughtful Doc Thinkpiece

Read the full article »

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?

Quote Unquotesee all »

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