MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2012

variety

And – Variety’s Aggressively Spoilered FIRST! Review Of Prometheus: That Is, If You Really Wanted To Know

“I bet Harvey would give a great massage. I think he’s so sexy and smart and he’s very giving. Plus, whatever he does, you know he’s going to do it well.”
The Price Got High For A Massage Auctioned By Harvey At Cannes

wsj

“Maybe we should cut the pirouette with the finger up your butt and just have you say the line. Maybe simpler is better.”
Mike Nichols On Bringing “Death Of A Salesman” Back To Life

NY Times

“He is single-handedly responsible for the extraordinary increase in acoustic flat-picking and fingerpicking guitar performance. His flat-picking style has no precedent in earlier country music history.”
Blind Songwriter-Guitarist-Singer Of Bluegrass, Folk, Country, Blues And Gospel, Arthel “Doc” Watson, Was 89; Music Appeared In Convoy, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

telegraph.co.uk

Stieg Larsson’s British Publisher Looks To Business Without Dragon Tattoo Profit

variety

Relativity Media Reported To Have Raised $250 Million For Expansion Plans

“Items on the syllabus of adolescent male samizdat used to go like this: Mad magazine at 13, Vonnegut at 15, Salinger at 17, Hunter Thompson at 18, Kerouac at 20. (When you got real big, you read Kundera.)”

Brody Reports 86-Year-Old Claude Lanzmann’s Next Film Is About The Moral Responsibility Of Jews Who Worked In Death Camps

NY Times

Anderson On Women And The “Invisible Art” Of Editing

“All the ribbons in Battleship were appropriate and worn correctly.”

Sragow Calls Ridley Scott’s First Film “Brilliant”

Explaining Wes Anderson’s “Somewhat Eclectic Films” To Those In Ad Biz

indie wire

Screen Int’l Editor Goodridge Scrams Scribe Tribe For Motion Picture Biz

Walter Cronkite’s “Most Memorable Reporting Experience”: Texas, 1937

British Humourists Create Posters That Tell “The Truth” About Summer Films

Gary Hustwit’s 10 Great Web Tips For Documentary Filmmakers

Meet The $3.2 Million Screenwriter Of Snow White And The Huntsman

How Dr. Google Collaborated On “Fifty Shades Of Grey”

Chicago Tribune To Set Complicated Paywall Right After Next Announced Round Of Firings

telegraph.co.uk

World’s Smallest Bodybuilder Tries Luck In H’wd

“As the end drew near, Ms. Goldmark mouthed something toward those around her. It was ‘Rosebud.’ And she smiled as she whispered it.”
 Kathi Goldmark, Beloved Literary Impresario, Was 63

NY Times

“I love movies. I don’t want to see a movie in any form go in the garbage.”
NYC Immigrant Communities Still Entertained By VHS

“When I film ’84 Up,’ I’ll be 99!”

hollywoodreporter.com

New Venice Director Sez Fest Likely Less Showy, Hopes For Anderson, Malick, DePalma Pics

“I see myself as someone who can’t stop talking.”
Ai Weiwei: “Why Do They Still Have To Spy On Me?

“Is Ridley Scott the most macho man in movies?”

Erich Von Stroheim, Footage Fetishist

guardian

“I am not a creature of the red carpet.”
Capturing Kiarostami In Cannes

Cannes Clicks From Caitlin Cronenberg Of Brandon And David Cronenberg

VOICE Profiles Politicos Who Hope To “Ruin The Internet”

The Personal Histories Behind The Entertainment One-Alliance Films Machinations

NY Times

Sino Remedies: “Crackdown On Chinese Bloggers Who Fight The Censors With Puns”

“Big worry: Breaking the daily habit makes newspaper companies far less essential far more quickly.”
Ken Doctor On “New Orleans’ Forced March To Digital”
And – “It’s not always trees that grow back. It’s a lot of scrub.”
“What Print Cuts At Times-Picayune Mean For Papers”
Plus – “What digital newspapers need to consider is how to sift the content to tell the reader what is important and what is not.”

William Gibson On His Early Memories Of Science Fiction

hollywoodreporter.com

Mexican 2,800-Screen Cinepolis Theater Chain, World’s Fourth Largest, Spending $300 Million To Go All-Digital

Hilton Als Whispers Mightily At The Feet Of Actress Jemima Kirke

Canada’s Largest Newspaper Publisher Slashing Newsroom Jobs, Kills Sunday Papers In Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa

thestar.com

Canadian Distrib Entertainment One Hoping To Buy Goldman Sachs-Owned Alliance Films

nymag

Toback And Baldwin, Seducing And Abandoning Cannes

Gavin Rothery On “A Matter Of Electric Sheep”

“If Jim Cameron hadn’t fallen in love with something about Alien, then a sequel wouldn’t have been made. No one really wanted to touch it. Luckily, Jim wanted to make his own movie.”

Film Critic-Programmer Aaron Hillis Falls Into Another Fading Biz, Buys Brooklyn Video Store

nymag

Behind Barry Diller’s Latest Hope To “Blow Up The Box”

NY Times

David Carr On The Doomed Daily Paper (And Earnest Online Experiment) Of New Orleans

“Fifty Shades Of Grey” Stimulates Sex Toy Trade

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“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.”

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

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?

WEEKEND READS ON MEDIAQUAKE

Tribune Trolley Problem

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