Movie City News Archive for July, 2015

Canada Appears Ready To Bow To U. S. Copyright And Patent Demands

Canada Appears Ready To Bow To U. S. Copyright And Patent Demands

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Sue Kroll Adds North America To Worldwide Distribution Job At Warner

Sue Kroll Adds North America To Worldwide Distribution Job At Warner

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“Everyone involved on the right side of the Savile argument has been forced out of the BBC.”

“Everyone involved on the right side of the Jimmy Savile argument has been forced out of the BBC.”

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Rolling Stone Managing Editor Out After 19 Years (And A Fatally Flawed College Rape Cover Story)

Rolling Stone Managing Editor Out After 19 Years (And A Fatally Flawed College Rape Cover Story)

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Kavanaugh Offloading Malibu Estate With Relativity Crunch

Kavanaugh Offloading Malibu Estate With Relativity Cash Crunch

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 Post-Lafayette, Perennial Presidential Aspirant Bobby Jindal Joins Call For Guns In Moviehouses

Post-Lafayette, Perennial Presidential Aspirant Bobby Jindal Joins Call For Guns In Moviehouses

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John Hughes’ Original National Lampoon “Vacation” Story More Interesting Than Current Incarnation

John Hughes’ Original National Lampoon “Vacation” Story More Interesting Than Current Incarnation

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Venice Selects Guadagnino, Egoyan, Kormákur, McCarthy, Sokurov, Kaufman, Loznitsa, Bellochio, Doremus, Gitai Laurie Anderson, A Short By Scorsese, And A Doc On DePalma By Baumbach And Paltrow

Venice Selects Guadagnino, Egoyan, Kormákur, McCarthy, Sokurov, Kaufman, Loznitsa, Bellochio, Doremus, Gitai Laurie Anderson, A Short By Scorsese, And DePalma Doc By Baumbach And Paltrow

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Mark Harris Says There’s An Oscar That Should’ve Had Tom Cruise’s Name Engraved On It

Mark Harris Says There’s An Oscar That Should’ve Had Tom Cruise’s Name Engraved On It

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Upon His 88th, A Musing On The Moviegoing Dark By John Ashbery

Upon His 88th, A Musing On The Moviegoing Dark By John Ashbery

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Sam Fragoso Has An Hour With Woody Allen For NPR

“I think some people are wonderful, but they are so many of them that are not. I was one of the few guys rooting for the comet to hit the Earth. Statistically, more people that deserved to go would go.” Sam Fragoso Has A Fragrant Hour With Woody Allen For NPR

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Warner Head Of Distribution Fellner Stepping Down After 37 Years At Studio

Warner Head Of Distribution Fellner Stepping Down After 37 Years At Studio

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Jon Stewart Among Interviewers Limiting Their Questions To Tom Cruise

Jon Stewart Among Interviewers Limiting Their Questions To Tom Cruise

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Meryl, Mamie, Diablo And Ricki And The Flash

Meryl, Mamie, Diablo And Ricki And The Flash

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Colin Farrell On Fame And “Delusion”

Colin Farrell On Fame And “Delusion”

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1927 Children’s Songbook May Finally Propel “Happy Birthday” Into Public Domain

1927 Children’s Songbook May Finally Propel “Happy Birthday” Into Public Domain

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Glenn Kenny w/r/t DFW And The End Of The Tour

Glenn Kenny w/r/t DFW And The End Of The Tour

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Lindsay Bahr Moderates Jason Segal And Jesse Eisenberg Talking Idols And Fame

Lindsay Bahr Moderates Jason Segal And Jesse Eisenberg Talking Idols And Fame

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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist Ted Rall Says LA Times Fired Him At LAPD Behest

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist Ted Rall Says LA Times Fired Him At LAPD Behest

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Miramax-Veteran Awards Strategists Set Shingles For Upcoming Season

Miramax-Veteran Awards Strategists Set Shingles For Upcoming Season

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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?

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