MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2014

Beatrice Welles On Completing Her Father’s The Other Side Of The Wind

telegraph.co.uk

Despite Chances Of Extradition To L. A. County, Roman Polanski May Shoot Next Film In Poland

Google CEO And Co-Founder Larry Page Has Larger And Larger Ambitions

The FT Characterizes Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige

The Academy Lists The 134 Docs Submitted For Oscar 2014; Shortlist Of 15 Comes In December

After Nightcrawler, Steve Rose Asks If There’s Any Big-Screen Portrait Of TV Newsgatherers That’s Not Warped

Stephanie Zacharek On “How John Wick Restored My Faith In Violent Movies”

Admire Three-Minutes, Fifty-Two Seconds Of The Best Blinding Lens Flares

Iain Sinclair On London’s Lost Cinemas

Katie Rife Watches All 9 Hellraiser Movies

Joy Horowitz Asks, “Too Jewish?” On The Making of “Fiddler On The Roof”

Sarah Kerr On The “Weird, True Story” Of Wonder Woman

indie wire

Cinematographer Elle Schneider On Why There Ought To Be More Women Behind The Camera

NY Times

“Regardless of the visionary question, however, it’s pretty much impossible to think of a film that grossed more than a billion dollars and is better than The Dark Knight—or, to think of it in the way that Nolan prefers, a better film that was seen, so many times over, by so many people.”
NYT Sunday Magazine Cover-Stories Chris Nolan At Almost 7,000 Words

variety

US Officials Rebuffed In Attempt To Extradite Roman Polanski While Visiting Opening Of Jewish Museum In Warsaw

“If you’ve ever played in any kind of improvisational group, you know that the key to making it work is listening to your fellow players, not trying to vanquish them.”
J. R. Jones Backlashes Whiplash

What Do Michel Gondry And “Weird Al” Yankovic Have In Common?

NY Times

“It ain’t a lot of fun to make failed movies, and to be successful you have to be in the attention-getting business. Actually, attention-getting is the dominant thing that has taken over the media business over all.”
Brooks Barnes Checks Peter Chernin’s Progress As Well-Financed But Successful Independent Producer

“By allowing it to exist as a default, we are throwing away our freedom of artistic expression as filmmakers because someone else is deciding that our work will be seen completely differently in the end.”
Cinematographer Reed Morano On The Fight Against TV’s “Smooth Motion” Setting

NY Times

NYT Sunday Profiles Go For Neat Ledes
“Even the horses were afraid of Steve Carell.”

“Here’s how much of a bookworm Reese Witherspoon is.”

Mark Harris On “The Curse of Crash: The Narratives That Doom Oscar Movies”

hollywoodreporter.com

Stan Lee Media Barred From Asserting “Spider-Man” Rights Claim

“With the restored health of the publishing industry and having some sense of where this sort of Isis-like distribution channel, Amazon, is going to be buried and in which plot of sand they will be stuck, publishers will be able to raise the author’s digital royalty to 40% or 50%. Writers will begin to make enough money to live.”
No Love Lost Between Literary Agent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie And Amazon

“Six Ways Franchises Go Terminal”

“Jacques Tati, Historian”

“The use of 3D with this explosion of images is what makes this film by an 83-year-old seem so much younger and freer than most films by directors in their twenties.”
Filmmaker David Barker Goes For Godard’s Gaga

daily beast

Bilge Ebiri On Jennifer Lawrence And What It Means To Be The Biggest Female Star
And – Debra Granik On Finding Lawrence And Life After Winter’s Bone

NATO And MPAA Set “Zero Tolerance” For Google Glass And Other Wearable Recording Devices

VICE Media To Launch $100 Million 24-Hour Channel In Canada

NY Times

On The “Profound Unprofitability” Of Facebook’s $21.8 Billion-Valued WhatsApp

Apple CEO Tim Cook Writes, “I’m Proud To Be Gay”

Moscow Film Museum Endangered Again

After NYFF, Stuart Klawans Ponders, What Are Movies Good For?

deadline

Feds Find “Midnight Rider” Producers Didn’t Warn Crew Of Denial Of Permission To Shoot On Railroad Tracks

“Really, comic-book movies have destroyed the foreign sales market. But the people want it; it’s an efficient market. That’s why I wish something like The Matrix would come out now–that was an extraordinary film. We need something like that to remind people that they can have a big movie that’s also smart and exciting.”
Hw’d & Fine Talks Hope For Fine Movies With Tony Gilroy

Haley Joel Osment, Grown Up

Isabella Rossellini Looks Back On The Sex Lives Of Animals

NY Times

Judge Rules Against Noriega Vs. “Call Of Duty: Black Ops II”

indie wire

Anthony Kaufman Queries, “Has Independent Film Jumped the Shark?”

Peter Lauria Pictures “The Richest Man In China And The Most Powerful Man In Hw’d”

How Jake Gyllenhaal “Wrecked” Himself For Nightcrawler

“Much of my time with Boseman went like that. ‘You’ve got to watch what you say,” he admitted, which is why I can’t tell you much about the hilarious pick-up lines he suggested he’d woo Rihanna with. (They were all immediately retracted, and amazing.)”

J. Hoberman On “Grotesque, Garish, Exuberant American Art”

daily beast

“Your Sex Confession Is Her Screenplay’

NY Times

Pulitzer-Winning Poet Galway Kinnell, 89, Peer Of The Beats

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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

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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