MCN Curated Headlines Archive for September, 2015

“We need to accelerate our evolution. We will announce changes in how we deploy personnel, schedule stories and plan coverage.”
Tuesday LATimes Memo To “Comrades” Does Not Assuage Widespread Firing Fears
And – Al Jazeera Expected To Cut 1,000 Jobs, One-Quarter Of Worldwide Workforce As Oil Prices Tumble

Geoffrey O’Brien Criterion-Notes Moonrise Kingdom

Mildred And Patty Hill No Longer Party To Longstanding “Happy Birthday” Public Domain Dodge
And – Kartemquin Says The $5,000 It Took To Include In Hoop Dreams Inspired Their Fair Use Campaign For Documentarians

indie wire

“It doesn’t matter if you’re white and gay. You can’t alter history because you feel uncomfortable with identities outside your insanely delusional and privileged one.”
Peter Knegt Blasts Six-Minute-In-The-Writing Rant Toward Roland Emmerich

David Lipsky Talks DFW

“The Intern has all the trappings of a Meyers joint. (I laughed out loud when Jules’ fabulous kitchen is revealed.) The movie is filled with gorgeous brownstones, first-class airline seats, and swanky hotels, and while the characters have their problems, nobody ever seems particularly troubled or bothered. It’s like a Restoration Hardware catalog come to life, and with the same amount of depth.”

“You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people. I found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, Danny is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. Straight audiences can feel for him.”
Roland Emmerich Explains Stonewall

Tribune Publishing Value Falls Farther After Pleading Case To Investors

Paul Verhoeven Looks Back To “The Most Elegant Movie I’ve Ever Done,” Showgirls

“I will never be afraid to be in spaces where the truth is spoken. These threats are an attempt to silence us, to manifest fear in ways that limit community-building. I remain as unafraid as I have ever been while remaining aware of the context within which we struggle.”
Social Media Shooting Threat To Black Panthers Documentary Shut Baltimore’s Charles Theater On Saturday

“There’s no use to try and make a film about the past; it’s stupid and impossible. Cinema is always the present. Old mistakes are today’s failures. History is always now.”

Dennis Lim Criterion-Notes Kieslowski

daily beast

Jen Yamato On Set With The Backstreet Boy Zombie Western

Here Comes Bond… And Daniel Craig For Heineken

“All the way through. All the way through, negative inference. The whole way through and I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it, darling. You’re probably not even aware that you’re doing it, the negative inference, the negative inference. I’m a very good reader of character.”
DeNiro Ankles Radio Times Quizzing

telegraph.co.uk

Carey Mulligan Won’t Be Cossetted By Corset

The Little Lebowski Shop Leaves The Village

John Lahr Sees Julianne Moore As “The Sphinx Next Door”

hollywoodreporter.com

D. M. Marshman, 92, Co-Writer Of Sunset Blvd. With Billy Wilder And Charles Brackett; Thus Oscar Winner On His First Screenplay Before Turning To Advertising As Career

NY Times

“The 8 3/4-inch capital letters in ‘David Geffen Hall’ are taller than the capitals in ‘Home of the New York Philharmonic’ by 4 3/8 inches.”
It Took 61 Signs To Transform Lincoln Center Venue Into “David Geffen Hall”

hollywoodreporter.com

Howard Rodman New President Of WGA West

Oz Animator Yoram Gross, 88, Animated “Blinky Bill”

Guy Maddin Cites Electic Sextet Of Books That Matter To Him

telegraph.co.uk

Who’s The Booziest Bond?

German Publisher Axel Springer Thinks Business Insider Is Worth $560 Million

“The editor-in-chief warned me not to adapt to the organization; instead, he said, the organization needed to adapt to me. (I was naïve not to understand immediately that this would be impossible, especially when my own boss explained in private soon thereafter that the company was a living contradiction, one whose employees frequently said one thing and did the opposite. He himself would not prove an exception to this rule.)”
Devon Maloney On Why She Quit As LATimes Pop Music Editor After Only Four Months

la observed

Deputy Editor Stephen Randall To Step Sideways After 34 Years At Playboy, 25 Of Them Wrangling The Interview

New Aussie PM Turnbull Appears Ready To Reverse Draconian Internet Intentions Of Banished Abbott

Behind The Strategies Of The Success Of It Follows, Including “Straight Up Lie”

hollywoodreporter.com

Jia Zhangke Objects To China Foreign Language Film Submission Of Jean-Jacques Annaud Picture

LA Times

Warner Slates Chinese-Language Film Co-Finance Venture

In UK, Netflix To Open Beasts Of No Nation At Curzon Cinemas A Week Before Streaming

“I should have told the producers that, before we even started, we were a million pounds over budget.”
Julien Temple On The Making Of His Mad Musical, Absolute Beginners

Cinematographer John Bailey On Silent Movies, Both Lost And Saved

NY Times

A Look At Modern Indian Film Beyond B’wd

Disney Invests In Virtual Reality Startup

NY Times

Actor-Librettist-Screenwriter-Producer Jack Larson, 87, Also Played Jimmy Olsen

How Are Industry Attitudes Toward Netflix Changing?

NY Times

Hoberman On Lumet And Costa-Gavras

NY Times

“He was welcomed with good will, but when faced with the reality of a large, complex business like Time Inc. he had no clue what to do except spend millions on multiple consulting firms. He was very threatened by strong players who pushed back so he replaced them with small-timers who, like he, weren’t up to the task.”
NYTimes On LATimes And TribCo Filled With Sorry Details, Including 80 More Jobs To Be Axed From Newsroom And $10 Million From Budget

variety

Debruge + Chang Youthquake TIFF

Sarah Silverman Goes Beyond The Funny

“We’re still far away from being ‘progressive’ enough that a stand-alone unruly woman comedian in a mainstream venture (that is, film or network television) can be a common phenomenon.”

Euro Media Bosses Advise Brit Politicos To Stop Meddling With BBC
And – Veteran BBC Presenter Attacks Adversaries Of The Broadcaster, Including In The Press

Buy Nancy Meyers’ Set Dressing From The Intern

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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