MCN Curated Headlines Archive for July, 2013

hollywoodreporter.com

China Hasn’t Paid H’wd Studios For Movies Shown In The Communist Republic Since Late 2012

the wrap

“Cheating foreigners is almost a national sport in China. Nobody will rebuke you in China for doing it, and they will often applaud you, so you have to be careful.”

CNN To Produce A Charles H. Ferguson Hilary Clinton Doc

variety

Cohen And Frater On “Mysterious Billionaires And Back-Door Deals: Inside The Sale Of Digital Domain”

Spike Lee Goes After His Kickstarter Critics

“Aggressive men are thought of as ‘agenda-oriented,’ and aggressive women can be labeled ‘—–es.’ On the studio side, there is a concern that if there is too much darkness in your female characters, or a kind of mixed agenda, the audience may reject them.”
The Wolverine Is The Rare H’wd “Bechdel Test”-Friendly Film

hollywoodreporter.com

Jack Kirby “Argo” Concept Art Up For Auction

filmlinc

“Our industry needs these movies to work. Anyone who has our industry at heart is in the business of creating an environment and climate to make these movies as good as they possible can be. You want a confident industry that’s well-resourced and making movies.

LA Times

DGA Adds Internet To Award Categories

NY Times

Carr Cogitates On VCRs Past To Consider Television’s Future

Stanley Kubrick, Cinephile
And – Talking To His Right-Hand Man, Jan Harlan

NY Times

5 Rising Animators

variety

Henry Selick Has Words For Contempo Animation Industry

Counterculture Savant And Novelist Mick Farren Was 69

ny post

Lumenick Explores NYC’s United Palace, AKA The Loews 175th Street

Errol Morris Tells Ty Burr About The Future

guardian

Suddenly, The Fate Of The Internet

“Oscar Grant is what’s missing from movies about young black men.”
Wesley Morris‘ “Strange Fruitvale“: On Martyrs, Trayvon Martin, Obama, “Mad Men,” And Do The Right Thing

guardian

Why Do Writers Drink?

“Being Dumb”

Complex Crowns James Wan Contempo King Of Horror

guardian

“Sewn into the fabric of British life like an ear grafted on to a mouse’s back”
“Alan Partridge: How I became a national treasure”

The Changing Seasons Of The Modern Publishing Industry

NY Times

2 Guns Comic Publisher Bizarrely Shares In Movie Proceeds With Its Creators

Director Of “Sharknado” On TCA Press Tour As Journalist

telegraph.co.uk

 Pop Music Is “Hugely Sexual,” David Attenborough Discovers; Compares Human Voice To Birdsong And Gibbons

The Movie Cricket Sits In On Sundance Documentary Labs

variety

Digital Domain Gets A New Owner Again

“Pacific Rim: Guillermo del Toro’s Fractal Shoes” spoilers

Australian Film Distribution Looking With Hope Toward VOD

guardian

“Look at Comic-Con and then tell me if you think Hollywood is going to cut back on its comic-book dependency. Look at how that event was covered by the critical establishment. By and large, people are like the kids in Pinocchio who still want to go to Pleasure Island.They’re voting to be donkeys.”

“Now we have to export Greek cinema as a pseudo-movement—you see what Europe wants to fund and have to live up to that. Which are basically films about the Greek crisis. And I don’t want to make a film about the —-ing Greek crisis in the way Europe, or the world, thinks it should be made.”

“On Being Alex Karpovsky”

LA Times

Academy Rumoring: Next Topper Could Come From Publicity Branch

“Sooner or later a major film-maker has to give us someone we will never forget. Jasmine is that someone.”
Thomson Purrs For Woody

John Williams Will Score The Next Star Wars

NY Times

NYT Sunday Magazine Humor By Short Film Screenwriter On Losing A “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Says “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” 15 Times But Isn’t All That Cute Itself

Terminally Ill “Simpsons” Co-Creator Sam Simon Giving Millions To Charities; Veganism And PETA Among Concerns

NY Times

Carr And Scott Sweet-Spot Netflix 4’14” vid

“Tony Bourdain, you lying sonofa—–, you owe me a mother—ing cronut.”
Filling The World With Humor, David Simon On He And David Carr Battling Anthony Bourdain For… “Cronuts”

Another Interview With Producer Lynda Obst About Her Book About How The Film Industry Changed By The End Of Her Career

NY Times

“As someone who loved American movies, at some point in 2013 I realized that they were probably dead as an art form. I am late to the game.”
Filmic Bret Easton Ellis

LA Times

“A light-hearted rotund presence amid the knishes and the kreplach… Warner Brothers executives reserved a table every Saturday morning and at times Ginsburg would cater meals for the corporate jet.”
Art Ginsburg, 78, Founded Studio City’s Art’s Deli And Restaurant In 1957

hollywoodreporter.com

Outgoing Academy Honcho Hawk Koch Reassures Nate Silver “will not have any access to members or any polling.”

NY Times

Warhol Assistant Ronnie Cutrone Was 65

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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