Movie City News Archive for October, 2016

Academy Member Robert Bassing Loses Oscar Voting Privileges At Age Of 91; Co-Wrote Home Before Dark In 1958

Academy Member Robert Bassing Loses Oscar Voting Privileges At Age Of 91; Co-Wrote Home Before Dark In 1958

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Disney Developing Live-Action “Snow White” Musical With Secretary Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson

Disney Developing Live-Action “Snow White” Musical With Secretary Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson

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Double Tony-Winning Actress Tammy Grimes Was 82;

Double Tony-Winning Actress Tammy Grimes Was 82; Films Included Play It As It Lays, Slaves of New York, Mr. North

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Viacom Names Bob Bakish Acting Prez-CEO

Viacom Names Bob Bakish Acting Prez-CEO With – A March Interview With Bakish On His Philosophy

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Animated GIF Search Engine GIPHY Says It’s Worth $300 Million

Animated GIF Search Engine GIPHY Says It’s Worth $300 Million

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Rebecca Mead Profiles “The Cinematic Traumas Of Kenneth Lonergan”

Rebecca Mead Profiles “The Cinematic Traumas Of Kenneth Lonergan”

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James Cameron Promises Tech To Go With The Many Avatar Sequels

“I’m going to push. Not only for better tools, workflow, high dynamic range and high frame rates — the things we are working toward. I’m still very bullish on 3D, but we need brighter projection, and ultimately I think it can happen — with no glasses. We’ll get there.” James Cameron Promises Tech To Go…

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“It takes a special arrogance to say the poverty in I, Daniel Blake is unrealistic”

“It takes a special arrogance to say the poverty in I, Daniel Blake is unrealistic”

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Near 90, John Berger Says He’s A Storyteller Because He Listens

Near 90, John Berger Says He’s A Storyteller Because He Listens

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Chinese Audiences No Longer Swallowing Every Western Movie That Gets Onto Local Sreens

Chinese Audiences No Longer Swallowing Every Western Movie That Gets Onto Local Sreens

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Fears Of Kenyan Film Censor Extend To “Orgies Of Lesbians” In Tense Election Year

Fears Of Kenyan Film Censor Extend To “Orgies Of Lesbians” In Tense Election Year

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Jim Jarmusch On The Seed Of Gimme Danger

“We were partly plotting our escape from Akron in the future and we were investigating whatever stuff we could get our hands on that was a little outside. We were Midwestern and suddenly that was, wow, this is our stuff: This is working-class, wild-ass primal music. Yeah, that had a big effect.” Jim Jarmusch On…

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Slate And New Yorker Drop Trash Clickbait Ads

Slate And New Yorker Drop Trash Clickbait Ads

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James Galanos, 92, H’wd Designer, Dressed Nancy Reagan

James Galanos, 92, H’wd Designer, Dressed Nancy Reagan

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Doctor Strange A Hit In 45% Of The World

Doctor Strange A Hit In 45% Of The World

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Wilmington On Movies: Inferno, The Girl On The Train

Inferno, the third in Ron Howard and Tom Hanks’ series of Dan Brown-derived high-end action movies, aspires to classy trash. At least it tries — mashing references to the works of the great classical Italian poet Dante Alighieri (“The Divine Comedy”) with the not-so-great works of the financially astute airport bestsellermeister Brown (The Da Vinci Code), amid imagery that suggests a nightmare attraction on the National Geographic Channel.

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British Producer Simon Relph, 76, Former AD, BAFTA Trustees Chair; First Head Of British Screen Finance

Producer Simon Relph, 76, Former AD, BAFTA Trustees Chair; First Head Of British Screen Finance; Credits On Damage, Hideous Kinky, Enchanted April, Reds

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“Can an elite, free-spending TV network based in Manhattan find a comfortable home at a Dallas telecommunications company led by an executive who is also the Boy Scouts of America president?”

“Can an elite, free-spending TV network based in Manhattan find a comfortable home at a Dallas telecommunications company led by an executive who is also the Boy Scouts of America president?”

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Callie Khouri Has Words For Man Sharing Platform With Trump Who Inaccurately Invokes Thelma And Louise, Wishing Fiery Death For Hillary Clinton

Callie Khouri Has Words For Man Sharing Platform With Trump Who Inaccurately Invokes Thelma And Louise, Wishing Fiery Death For Hillary Clinton

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In Memoir, Hedren Alleges Hitchcock Sexual Abuse

In Memoir, Hedren Alleges Hitchcock Sexual Abuse 

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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