MCN Curated Headlines Archive for April, 2014

NY Times

The Ongoing Legacy Of Steven Wright And His Comedy

wsj

“Acquisition of DirecTV would give AT&T a national footprint in pay television at a time when the telecom company sees video delivery as core to its future.”
AT&T Approaches DirecTV For Conglomeration; Would Be About The Size Of Comcast-Time Warner Combine

Senator Franken Advises FCC Chairman: Pay-To-Play Will Destroy The Open Internet

“I was struck by the profound sense of self-loathing at the heart of all his work. It peeks through in small moments, in brief lines of dialogue. But it’s always there.”
Ebiri On “Why Adam Sandler Matters”

Chicago’s Music Box Theatre To Add A Lounge And Shed The Concession Stand Built By The Propmasters Of Curly Sue

There Are Still More Vivian Meier Mysteries

Seattle Film Festival Sets Its 440-Film 40th Anniversary Marathon

“Without advertising, our televisions and public spaces would be littered with art and useful information. I don’t know about you, but that’s not a world I want to live in.”
Onion To Give It To BuzzFeed And Upworthy In The ClickHole
And – Here’s The Click At The Hole

Untold Stories Of Google’s Larry Page

Lawson Sez Andrew Garfield And Emma Stone Could Defibrillate Ailing RomCom Biz

variety

WGA Members Ink New 3-Year Master Contract

Demonstrating The Almost-Perfect Symmetry, Or “Cinematic Chiasmus,” Of Verhoeven-Neumaier-Miner’s Robocop

Bailey Sez Murder Spider-Man

“If you’re not having fun at the party you’re at, go find another party.”
Potrzebie! One Of The Most Unsung Of Cultural Influencers, Al Feldstein, 88, Ran MAD Magazine For 28 Years Of Its Heyday
With – “Judgment Day,” A Comic Feldman Penned In 1953

hollywoodreporter.com

Oprah Press-Releases She And Geffen And Ellison May Line Up To Bid On Clippers

Nate Silver Tells Young Journos To Code For The Grindstone

“A neuroscientist in California is dreaming up a new visual vocabulary for cinema that could revolutionize the filmmaking business.”

Gopnik On “The Mystery Of ‘The Little Prince'”

BOB HOSKINS WAS 71
And – You Want Screen Acting? Take The Last Scene Of The Long Good Friday

hollywoodreporter.com

Dolce & Gabbana Sentenced To Jail, But It’s Italy, So There’s A Loophole

variety

Latest Cannes Additions Include Téchiné, Mundruczó And Gatlif

“Count this fan as hoping that Kasdan fought hard for a Big Chill-style house party scene on Tatooine with Han, Luke, and Leia. Did they like Motown a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?”

variety

Westwood Gets An Eat-In iPic Kino LuxPlex

Comcast Details Plan To Give Up Customers And Spin-Off New Company—”SpinCo”—To Avoid Antitrust Strictures

Blogger Burned By Buzzfeed Over Ralph Steadman Discovery Offers Choice Rant About “Ad-Infested Listicle”

“Poor George Clooney. Poor tragic, oldster, childless, longterm singleton George Clooney. Did you know he’s over 50? Did you know he got divorced over 20 years ago and has not been married since? Instead, he has lurched pathetically, hopelessly from one failed relationship to the next. I jest, of course. Clearly that is not the way George Clooney’s unmarried life and recent engagement were reported in the media, because George Clooney is a man.”

Zach Campbell On Joe Dante And Film’s Future

Companion Film To The Act Of Killing Nearly Complete

Lupita Headed To The White House

indie wire

MZS Offers Advice To Young Critics
And – Footnoted

“It’s as if 51% of the population cried out in pain, and was suddenly silenced.”
“Hey ‘Star Wars,’ Where Are The Women?”

Spanish Director Promotes New Film By Making It Free In 100 Salles

How Throttled Streaming Will Work After The FCC Eliminates Net Neutrality, In One Bold Graph

A Note On Technicolor Blue And Douglas Sirk

NY Times

Barnes Sez Disney Decided BuzzFeed Wasn’t Nearly Worth A Billion
1. Simoleons
2. Clams
3. Ducats
4. Spondulux
5. Dollars

“Advertisers are increasingly trying to shock to gain attention on social media, but isn’t branding becoming a redundant idea?”

“What will prevent companies like Comcast from abusing this system is real competition in the home broadband market of the kind we see in the mobile marketplace.”
Jonathan Taplin On The Notion Of Two-And-More-Lane Internet Access Post-FCC Laydown

NY Times

The Numbers On Comcast’s Subscriber Swaps On Its Monopoly Positions In Cable Subs In Advance Of Expected Clear Sailing On Time Warner Cable Melding

Screenwriter John August Sez He’s Had This Get-To-Know-Ya Meeting Almost A Couple Dozen Times

30 New Multiplexes In Screen-Starved Romania By 2016

deadline

“The business of movies as a traditional business has been challenged on many levels and it’s not a growth business. TV is a growth business. Short-form content is a growth business. Movies are not a growth business. The stakeholders are trapped in an enterprise that can’t get out of its own way. For it really to grow it needs to break out of the windows that have existed for many generations. And I think that’s 10 years away.”
Hello, Mr. Katzenberg

Kylie Minogue On Not Paying The Talent In Her Latest Video, With “Great Opportunity For Exposure”

“Why are people who were hurt by —-ed-up gender expectations as children now actively perpetuating those expectations as adults?”

AOL Reports Security Breach; Show Your Relatives On Dial-Up How To Change Their Passwords

“This is a land foreign and confounding to born-and-bred New York types like Michael Pitt.”

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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