MCN Curated Headlines Archive for August, 2012

LA Times

Whipp On Teaming Rian Johnson And Gordon Joseph-Levitt

NY Times

“He was subdued at first, reluctant to reopen old wounds and wary of speaking on the record to a newspaper he regards as an old adversary.”
Lim Interviews Cimino After Venice Preem Of Heaven’s Gate Re-Edit

NY Times

“Mr. Eastwood was scheduled to speak for about five minutes but stayed onstage much longer, throwing off the schedule for Mr. Romney, a stickler against tardiness.”
Romney Aides Defer Credit For Booking Mr. Eastwood’s “Strange,” “Weird,” “Absurd” Chatauqua
And – “At the age of 82, Eastwood is fighting a battle for relevance. The smug little bow with which he left the podium was a painful, Chaplinesque gesture, one that simultaneously called attention to his undue servility (he did, after all, seem to be singing for his supper) and that—for all the implicit “go f— yourself” hints in his performance—had the caustic force of giving the finger both to those who presume to judge what he did and those who ate it up.”

A Look Into A Glimpse Inside Coppola’s The Mind Of Charles Swan III

Remembering Documentary Producer Brian Gerber, Who Was 41

NY Times

The Tenuous Glamour Of Still-Standing Old Beirut Cinemas

Oogieloves Destined To Remain Unknown, Posting Nonattendance Records

variety

Nordic Region First To Get HBO Without Pay-TV Subscription

Missing: Syrian Filmmaker And Festival Head Orwa Nyrabia
And – Lawrence Wright On A Syrian Filmmaker, Disappeared

Academy Approves New Music Rules For Oscar, Including 5 Original Songs

Telluride Sets The Show

Canadian-Jewish Feminist Shulamith Firestone, Subject Of 1997’s Award-Winning Shulie, Was 67

Monica Bellucci Likes To Explore The Dark Side

NY Times

Steve Franken, 80, Comic Actor, Drunk Waiter In The Party; Chatworth Osborne, Jr. In “The Loves Of Dobie Gillis”; Also Which Way To The Front?, Hardly Working, The Missouri Breaks

TIFF12: “Protecting Sarah Polley’s Secret”  full-on spoilers

indie wire

Jon Voight Brings His Popular Take On The News To Tampa Bay For RNC

Brian Gerber, 41, Producer And Head Of Digital Hollywood Content Summit, Drives Car Off Angeles Crest Highway

Jacques Bensimon, 69, Documentarian And Former Head Of National Film Board Of Canada At A Crucial Time

indie wire

Two Unproduced Kubrick Scripts Headed For The Box

Slavoj Žižek Goes 4,000 Words On The Politics Of Batman

Fire Walk With Me Turns 20

wsj

Silent Star “Baby Peggy” At 93

Just-Released Gov’t Documents On Thirty Dark Zero Appear To Disprove Conspiracy Theories

wsj

Killing Me Softly Co-Producer Files For Bankruptcy

“Social distance can cause a 55-year-old climate change sceptic with a job and a mortgage to behave like a spastic donkey with strange malicious behavior.”
What Do The Internet’s Extreme Trolls Get From Their Private Sport?

A 2005 Report Of The Kentucky Incident That Inspired Compliance spoilers

variety

Looper, Cloud Atlas, Iron Man 3 Could Be Affected
China Cracks Down On “Co-Productions” Meant To Get U. S. Product Onto Local Screens

wsj

Oscar-Winner Geoffrey Fletcher’s Financier, His Hedge-Fund Manager Brother, Faces Losses On Violet & Daisy

indie wire

“You don’t see Eamonn at Magnolia, you don’t see us—the two pioneers in the changing of the windows—coming out and reporting our numbers on a weekly basis. Magnolia and IFC Films invented the wheel five or six years ago.”
IFC’s Sehring On The VOD-Theatrical Business Model, As Well As A Recut Of On The Road

wsj

John Canemaker Remembers Animator Tissa David

“He loved actors. He loved us! The reason his death hurts so much isn’t because we loved him. It’s because he loved us. And now he’s gone. And who’s going to love us like that now? Can you tell me? In this cold, unforgiving business, who is going to love actors as much as Tony Scott did?”
Kevin Corrigan Remembers Tony Scott

indie wire

Kelly And Tarantino Talk Tony Scott After L. A. Double Feature

Art Of The Title’s Fresh David Fincher Credit Sequence Look Back

Fire Hits Tyler Perry Studios Again

hollywoodreporter.com

“Sign it! Sign it, or the dog will die!”
Joyce McKinney’s Alarming Tabloid Lawsuit Vs. Errol Morris 

“Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.”
GOP Platform Sets Sights On Porn

variety

IFP Chief Vicente Offers Lessons In Survival

hollywoodreporter.com

“The filmmakers contend that Obama’s America was excluded last week from a number of film guides published in newspapers across the country.”

telegraph.co.uk

Moore Says Craig Best Bond

variety

TIFF12: Restored Bloor-HotDocs Theater Goes Doc/Vanguard

NY Times

“His surfing was competent, but it wasn’t his surfing that made him distinctive. It was his personality.”
Tubesteak Tracy, 77, Surfer Inspired Gidget‘s Big Kahuna

“After doing a TV show for eight years and a cartoon for more than a decade, you are, financially speaking, in a very lucky position where you don’t have to work for the sake of working.”
Mila Kunis And James Franco Have Interview Mag Cover Story Chat

NY Times

Cieply Sez 2016OA “Arrived As A Box-Office Event”

Rumoring Wachowskis For “Justice League”?

Good Dr. Bordwell Enumerates The Ways Art Films May Have Their Own Conventions

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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