MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2012

Ira Deutchman Looks To Europe’s B.O. Returns And Says, “Let’s Focus On The Grownups”

NY Times

“In effect, News Corporation had evolved into a successful entertainment company with a newspaper problem.”

wsj

NewsCorp’s WSJ Says NewsCorp Board Took 90 Minutes To Approve Split Into Two Entities; Ink And Entertainment

variety

SleepySkunk Assembly Of 25 Minutes Of The Amazing Spider-Man Disappears From Parts Of The Internet, But Leaves Issues Swinging

The 1998 Website For You’ve Got Mail

NY Times

Alessandra Stanley Sez Nora Ephron Had A “Happy Ending”

LA Times

Joan Scott, 91, Fronted For Husband Adrian Scott During 1950s Blacklist

NY Times

Benh Zeitlin Narrates The Introduction Of “Hushpuppy” In Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Pia Zadora In The Vegas Spotlight

wsj

Wall Street Journal Intern Replies To NPR Intern And David “Cracker” Lowery About Paying For Music

Roeper On Tuesday’s Ephron Twitter Deathwatch

Tyler Perry Says Tyler Perry Was Disappointed In Prometheus; Tyler Perry Will Make Tyler Perry’s Own Science-Fiction Film

The CJR Considers The Case Of The “David Carr” That David Carr Supposedly Wouldn’t Like

NY Times

“If I had an editor or a publisher, maybe I wouldn’t have done it.”
Liz Smith Sez She Pronounced Nora Ephron Dead Because “I didn’t want to bother the family“

“Sample everything. Do not get tied down with the inadequate. Make a firm commitment to the best. It is the story of Nora.”
This article has been removed at the request of the estate of Nora Ephron
And – “I once heard a swell story about Gary Cooper.”

Soderbergh On Working Now, Not Later

LA Times

Fritz Sez That Besides Being A Hit, Julie & Julia Saw Ephron Negotiating New H’wd Economic Realities

LA Times

NBCUniversal Expects To Lose Money, Perhaps As Much As $100 Million, On The Branding Glory That Is The Olympics

Ben Sachs Misses Chicago’s Worst Movie Theater

Schoonmaker Sez It’s Digital From Here On Out For Marty

NY Times

“A guy in a unitard pummels another guy—pow!—and saves the day, the girl and the studio.”
 Dargis & Scott Consider The Ubiquitous Comic Book Screen Hero

Phil Coldiron‘s “Counter-Reading Of Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls'”

NY Times

Maslin Retrieved From Pop-Book Beat To Briskly Encapsulate Ephron’s Career
And – Blog Post Calling Ephron “Queen Of Quips” Doesn’t Dig Very Deep

guardian

Remembering Susan Tyrrell

Good Dr. Bordwell Introduces The Tenth Edition Of His And Thompson’s “Film Art: An Introduction”

NY Times

“Nora Ephron Never Forgot The Food”

guardian

Sigourney Sez James Cameron Will Shoot Three More Avatars At One Time

Ariel Levy: “Ephron’s voice was funny, frank, self-effacing but never self-pitying, and utterly intimate”

guardian

“She had a reputation for sharpness, but my experience of Ephron was that she was absurdly, extravagantly kind. She was also brilliant. Movies, of course, were what made her famous, but she was by constitution a reporter–sarcastic, irreverent, suspicious of orthodoxy.”

Marking The Passing Of British Underground Filmmaker Jeff Keen

Patch Kicks Hamster Wheel Into Gear For Local Editors; Can AOL Hold On?

“In an old issue of Esquire, there’s a story about Helen Gurley Brown that made me fall more in love with Helen Gurley Brown but even more than that it made me fall in love with Nora Ephron. It was just cool, it was a cool story about a cool woman written by a cool woman. It made me sad that there aren’t more of them around, but it made me grateful that Nora Ephron was around.”

The Taste, And Serious Eats, Of Nora Ephron

NY Times

“Nora was so funny and so interesting that you didn’t notice that she was also necessary. I think a lot of her friends and readers will feel that.”
Charles McGrath‘s Obit For Nora Ephron
And – “I’ll Have What She’s Having” (2’53”)

“When she is sitting, Ephron folds in on herself—she crosses her legs and holds her chin in her hand—and becomes very compact, a little origami of a person.”
Ariel Levy Profiles Nora Ephron (2009)

NY Times

The Times’ Archive Of Hundreds Of Articles Across The Decades Of Nora Ephron’s Writing Life
And – The New Yorker Foregrounds Five Of Her Essays For The Magazine

“People have only one way to be.
You can’t be friends with people who call after 11pm.
The plane is not going to crash.
Write everything down.
Keep a journal.
Take more pictures.
You can order more than one dessert.
Back up your files.
Overtip.
Never let them know.
There are no secrets.”
“What I Wish I’d Known,” By Nora Ephron

nymag

“Charm was her stock in trade and saving grace.”

NY Times

Ephron Op-Eds “All The President’s Girls” (2003); “Who Are You?” (2007); And “The Six Stages Of E-Mail” (2007)

Arianna Huffington Will Have You Know About Arianna And Nora (And A Little More Arianna)

“Take notes,” Nora Ephron’s mother advised her as a child. “Everything is copy.”
NORA EPHRON WAS 71
Oscar-Nom’d For Silkwood, Sleepless In Seattle, When Harry Met Sally

How Buzzfeed Needs Reddit For Its Success

hollywoodreporter.com

“I was told this morning that she was dying, but I can’t confirm it,” Smith said. “I have had to put everything in  the present tense.”

NY Times

NPR Blogger Queries, “How Does The Film Industry Actually Make Money?”

Chair Of Nat’l Endowment For The Arts Rocco Landsman Sez There Are Too Many Damn Theaters

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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