MCN Curated Headlines Archive for June, 2012

“I won’t say, “Rest in peace, Nora” – I will just ask “What the hell will we do without you?”
 Liz Smith, 89, Claims Nora Ephron, 71, Is Dead
But – Ephron’s Publisher, Knopf, Says, Not So Fast
While – “Her former close friend Margo Howard also writes on Twitter that Ephron passed away from cancer, and that a funeral is scheduled for Thursday”

“Empty Spectacle Is Where We Find Ourselves”

The Rise Of E-Books And The Weakening Of The Paper Industry

telegraph.co.uk

The Animal Trainer Who’s Taking 18 Months To Raise A Pack Of Mongolian Grassland Wolves

guardian

Rushdie Fatwa Now Iranian Videogame

No “Frank Or Francis” From Charlie Kaufman?

Scorsese’s Introduction To The Age Of Innocence In NYC

NY Times

NewsCorp Newspaper Editors And Publishers Arrive In New York From Many Continents To Discuss Proposed Corporate Split

variety

BAFTA Sets Radical Revamp Of Award Voting System

Screenwriter-Novelist Doug Richardson On Owning Your Words

A Blastr Blogger, An Archaeologist, A Geologist, Two Physicists And An Animal Biologist Walk Into Prometheus…

“I know it’s not customary, but the customary is fading like spit in the sun… one might write a book about these 90 seconds of film.”
David Thomson Spitballs A Reverie Of The Master Bated On Two Teasers

LA Times

Shoah Foundation Completes 18-Year Project Of Gathering And Digitizing Memories Of  52,000 Holocaust Survivors And Witnesses

Michael Chabon: “Why I Hate Dreams”

wsj

NewsCorp Considers Splitting Company, Shearing Publishing From Entertainment; Murdoch Family Control Would Not Be Diluted

NY Times

Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca Oscar For Sale Online; Bids Closing In On $400,000

“Why Porn and Journalism Have The Same Big Problem: Nobody Wants To Pay For Their Products”

“Stop Calling Us Bollywood!”

indie wire

Blogdanoviching John Ford

Mark Harris Sets Showdown Stakes On Marvel Vs. DC

“We’re not at the point (yet) where an animated film can feature an openly gay and lesbian hero or heroine, but Brave takes us one step closer to that inevitability.”

wsj

Atom Egoyan On The Devil’s Knot And “Feng Yi Teng”

Producer Braxton Pope On Casting Lohan And Deen In Schrader-Ellis’ The Canyons

NY Times

“This won’t be a big part of my story,” I assured Lauren Greenfield. “But can you tell me a little bit about the lawsuit?”
Lede Of The Day, By Joe Nocera

Ira Sachs On His Memphis Childhood Movie Theaters

guardian

Paul Mayersberg And Tony Richmond On Making The Man Who Fell to Earth

HBO Puts Mottola’s Pilot Ep Of Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” On YouTube (72’52”)
And – “There are two ways to know that a Sorkin vehicle is about to go off the rails: one, Joshua Malina shows up, and, two, somebody breaks into a chorus from ‘Penzance.'”

“December 28, 1895 was a blustery day in Paris. Many people passing 14 Boulevard des Capucines entered its Grand Cafè for a warm drink…”
 John Bailey On The Bros. Lumière

Behind The Scenes Of Alma Har’el’s Shia LaBoeuf-Starring Sigur Rós Video “Fjögur Piano” vid mildly nsfw

Prada Goes Steampunk For Fall 2012, Brings Oldman, Bell, Hedlund, Dafoe Along

Emerson Is Over The Moon For Moonrise Kingdom’s Punctilious Miniaturism

guardian

“If words fail, use your teeth. If teeth fail, draw in the sand.”
Remembering Poet, Artist And Experimental Filmmaker Jeff Keen, Who Was 88 

“Andrew Sarris, latterday cultist, critic, and Francophile, who once confessed—with a puckish wink to the groundlings—that his conception of the cinema could be summed up in three words: ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!'”
 Kathleen Murphy On Sarris

hollywoodreporter.com

Channing Tatum Sez Stripper Moves All His Own

NY Times

David Carr Media-Equates Sorkin’s “Newsroom” As Template To Cure What Ails Floundering CNN

Mubi’s Efe Çakarel On Getting Worldwide Rights To Legally Stream Movies: Tough Biz

Mitch Albom Has “Become A Prude,” Casting Aside “Fifty Shades Of Gray,” Hysteria, And Turn Me On, Dammit!; Fears The “P-Word”

“Cinema is Another Life,” By Raúl Ruiz

variety

Filmmakers Battle Politicization Of Romanian Cultural Institute

“In Australia, newspaper cutbacks and an ownership shift point toward fewer points of view”

“He once remarked ruefully that he was an academic among journalists and a journalist among academics, but he managed to bridge the gap adroitly.”
Good Dr. Bordwell On Andrew Sarris

Blade Runner Was Released June 25, 1982: Here’s An Excerpt From Shone’s “Blockbuster” On Its Fraught Production

guardian

What Kyle MacLachlan Knows

Edinburgh Film Festival Artistic Director Chris Fujiwara Daily-Blogs Mid-Festival

guardian

Selma Blair Could Be Living In A Castle Right Now With Tom Cruise

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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