MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2013

Suschitzky On How Cronenberg Composes His Shots

Laurie Anderson On Lou Reed’s Last Days

indie wire

Kohn Sez Ender’s Game Is About Edward Snowden, Avant La Lettre

Semley On Cronenberg As “Idea” In TIFF Lightbox Life Exhibition

hollywoodreporter.com

Woody Allen Open-Letters Awards-Givers For Casting Director Juliet Taylor

Jodorowsky, At Length

Wikipedia’s Slow Decline

Murdoch Lectures: Aussie Media Must Become “Disruptive” To Survive with vid

hollywoodreporter.com

T-Bone Burnett On Analog And Taking To Silicon Valley With “Pitchforks And Torches”

“The new footage significantly deepens the film’s misogyny. Though that misogyny was already front and center in the original cut of The Exorcist, the new footage gives a much more comprehensive view of the film’s politics, and its particular take on patriarchal hegemony.”
Uh-oh, Billy Friedkin’s Done It Again

Jonnie Rosenbaum On The Life’s Work Of Near-Unknown Filmmaker Peter Thompson

indie wire

“Why Do Film Festivals Reject Good Films?”

wsj

20 Years On, “What We Lost When We Lost River Phoenix”

Olivia Wilde On How Drinking Buddies Seems To Have Changed Her Career

Gopnik On How We Look At The JFK Assassination 50 Years On

Torrid Brit Newsroom: News Of The World Phone Hacking Trial Brings Sexual Affairs To Fore Before Actual Crimes

VOICE Sheds Last Vet Journo

NY Times

“We are not setting policy for theaters across the country. We are one theater in the West Village, and we have adopted this policy for this one film.”
Los Angeles TV Protest Group Protests NYC’s IFC Theater Letting Teens Into Blue Is The Warmest Color; It’s What They Do

John Carpenter Recalls How To Be Scary As  Halloween Turns 35

“Godard’s status today is precariously suspended between two conflicting fates: overblown iconicity and an almost abyssal and closed anonymity.”
Hoo-boy, Jean-Luc, You’ve Done It Now!

the wrap

Dickey Asks: Will Orson Scott Card See Any Additional Dosh From Ender’s Game Release? Answer: Nope, Nada, Zilch

Richard Curtis, Fool For Love

wsj

“His latest project is the “Zuckerberg Files”: a digital archive of every word Mark Zuckerberg has ever uttered in a public forum.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“It looked great and it was interesting.”
Jason Schwartzman On SNL Spoof Of Wes Anderson

Netflix May Have Thousands Of Subscribers In Australia That It Allows To Defeat Its Geoblock, Harming Local Providers

BBC

“That is not my dog.”
Graham Stark, 91, Acted In Over 100 Films Including Casino Royale, Victor Victoria, Blind Date, Pink Panther Pics

NY Times

The Story Of Augusto Odone, 80, Father Behind Lorenzo’s Oil

Activist Variety Investor Dan Loeb, Who Holds 25% Of The Co., Tried To Get Penske Hire Nikki Finke Fired At Least Three Times

After 28 Years, Ender’s Game Blasts Out Of Development Hell
“Should Orson Scott Card’s extremism lead moviegoers to boycott Ender’s Game, which, after all, has nothing to do with gay rights?”
And – Mark Harris Demurs

“It marks the first time in history that our entertainment industry has managed to stare directly at slavery and maintain that gaze.”
David Simon On 12 Years A Slave

Greek Screenwriter Nikos Foskolos Was 87

Picturing The Many Hats Of Matthew McConaughey

Who Is Paul Debevec And What Did He Have To Do With The Matrix, Avatar, Benjamin Button And Gravity?

variety

Excerpting “The Wes Anderson Collection”

hollywoodreporter.com

Why Did The New Hunger Games Cost So Much More?

variety

“Chalk it up to the sangfroid of the characters and their stone-cold greed.”
Foundas Weighs The Greatness Of His Estimation Of Ridley Scott’s The Counselor

Just Enough About Welles’ Unearthed Too Much Johnson

Oh, It’s A Comedy: Trailering The Wolf Of Wall Street For Christmas Delight

wsj

Awards Season Bonuses Set For Dallas Buyers Club Players

Tom Bissell Talks About Writing About The Room

hollywoodreporter.com

Nigel Davenport, 85, Acted In Chariots Of Fire, Play Dirty, Greystoke, A Man For All Seasons

NY Times

DreamWorks Animation Reassures Wall Street

NY Times

The Resurrection Of The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford By The Patron Jamison McGonigle

Film Producer David Parfitt on Changing Times And Fortunes

NY Times

“Like westerns and baseball films, movies about the experience of black Americans may be seen as too remote by audiences in countries that have little cultural connection to the subject matter.”
Cieply Sweats The Int’l Release Of 12 Years A Slave

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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