MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2016

“Netflix doesn’t have to be profitable. They’re in that glorious stage where you spend $5 billion on content and you don’t have to care what your profits are. I’ve fantasized about having a job like that my whole career.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“What bothers me most is how insulting this is to black people. Did I vote for Sean Penn in Milk because I’m gay?!”
Open-Letters 1986 Documentary Oscar Winner

Warner Rumored To Possibly Exhibit Zack Snyder Superhero Film In 70mm

deadline

Sundance Sponsor Uber Choppers Grounded

Producers Guild Stocks Big Short; Animates Inside Out

hollywoodreporter.com

THR Checks Out Fresh Step Litter’s Main Street “Catdance”

variety

“Casey says it’s like going to your senior prom when you’re 53 and expecting the kids to think you’re cool.”
Before The Sundance Groundswell For Manchester By The Sea, Kris Tapley Talked To Kenneth Lonergan

ew

“All I was trying to do is to address the issues of inequality of opportunity in the industry for women as well (as I am a woman). I never intended to underestimate anyone else’s struggle!”
Julie Delpy Latest Actor To Clarify Diversity Comment

NY Times

Bob Odenkirk Says Other Comics Are Lousy Critics

variety

Chris Rock Still On To Mock Oscar

Don Lewis On Advertising One’s Walkout On Sundance Pics

Jean-Pierre Jeunet On The Ups And Downs And Downs Of His Career (Including Working With Weinstein)

hollywoodreporter.com

Iñárritu Says Academy Can’t Force Diversity In Industry
While – Don Cheadle Says Oscar Is “The Career-Defining Moment” For Chris Rock

LA Times

China Pushes Smog-Free Moviehouses

“In decades or even generations to come, cinephiles will look back on Baz Luhrmann as an Ed Wood-like figure: his work hugely ambitious, insanely hammy and rarely suggesting an understanding of how to go about achieving either style or substance.”

 

NY Times

Sandy Powell On Designing The Costumes Of Cinderella And Carol

deadline

“It would only take a minute, and it could help avoid what presently promises to be the most meagerly viewed Academy Awards show ever.”
Jonathan Demme Urges Academy To “Recalibrate” 2015 Oscar Nominations

“The shocks in The Greasy Strangler don’t just come from the avalanche of profanity, flatulence, fetishized cellulite, nauseating food, cartoon violence and close-ups of phalluses. The shocks come from the winding plotting, which follows a dream logic that could only float through a diseased stream-of-consciousness.”
Jordan Hoffman‘s Eyes Open At Sundance

ny post

A 2013 Anecdotal Survey Of Elder Oscar Voters

deadline

“I can still pat myself on the back and say that I ran the thing like a business. It was not my little backyard artsy thing.”
James Schamus Talks Roth, Indignation, Focus Features & Hw’d

Rebecca Miller Sez Sundance Fights Hw’d “Fear Of The Woman Protagonist”

Old Music Outselling New Music For The First Time

hollywoodreporter.com

“But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough?”
Flashback: Chris Rock On White H’wd, December 2014

indie wire

Laurence Kardish On MoMA’s Charles Silver And His Legacy To Movies

Iceland’s Likely Next Prime Minister,Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Is “Lisbeth Salander’s Real Life Twin”

“Lewis wore a black tuxedo with a white shirt open at the collar. He frequently sipped an orange drink on a small table near his chair. At times, his hands would shake and his voice would quiver. But, mentally he was sharp, especially when telling jokes.”

Sausalito Struggles To Reopen Last Moviehouse

hollywoodreporter.com

Tab Hunter Says Oscar Changes Are “Bull—-“; Mike Medavoy Compares To Packing The Supreme Court; Other Elders Speak Up

hollywoodreporter.com

Stanley Mann, 87, Wrote The Collector, Eye Of The Needle, Damien: Omen II, Conan The Destroyer, Firestarter

hollywoodreporter.com

“I say to all my co-members: Stop acting like spoiled brats. Look to the next awards show for recognition—if you deserve it. As far as Michael Moore is concerned, he is a socialist always looking to insert his brand of racist hatred. Spike Lee—haven’t I heard this from him before?”
Schindler’s List Co-Producer Turned Right Wing Extremist Exec Producer Of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016 Calls Out Academy

NY Times

“I am not interested in writing movies about a sylph looking for love, living in New York in an improbably large apartment with a lot of natural light who never seems to spend much time at an actual job. I am not interested in writing movies about a white man who is on some kind of journey to find himself or avenge a wrong, whether in Brooklyn or the wilds of Montana and South Dakota. I am constantly aware of the iron ceiling above me.”
Roxane Gay Wants To Write Movies

Another Fond Salute To The Frisky Facets Of A24

American Masters Doc Theatrical Label Announced At Sundance

ny post

Lou Lumenick Outlines Lifelong Doom Weighting Midtown’s Single-Screen Ziegfeld

variety

“We don’t do movies for the industry. We do movies for the fans, for the people… You can’t boycott something you never went to. [That would be] crying about not having enough icing on your cake.”
Ice Cube On Oscar

“They’re not considering that for the Oscars even though I think De Niro gave one of the best performances this year. I thought the script was actually one of her best. Right up there with It’s Complicated.”
Tarantino Says The Intern One Of 2015’s Best

variety

“I regret that my comments could have been misinterpreted this week in my interview with Europe 1 Radio. I simply meant to say that in an ideal world every performance will be given equal opportunities for consideration.”
Charlotte Rampling

“Following a two-year study of membership to various academy branches, Gregory Peck and the Board of Governors took away the right to vote for the Oscars from many retired members, and brought in classes of younger members. In all, he changed the status of nearly 500 members.”

Jaime Wolf On The DreamWorks Animation Veteran Who Created China’s $381 Million-Grossing Monster Hunt

10 Sundance Mistakes To Avoid (Not Limited To Clam Chowder)

indie wire

“You work your ass off for 40 years to get enough credits to get into this organization and then they kick you out. It’s a sad state of affairs. I’m done. The Academy is the whipping boy for the industry, which is f—ed up and doesn’t hire women and minorities. And I am paying for it, which is unfair. It kills me.” 

variety

Universal To Set $500 Million 5-Year Slate With China’s Perfect World, Best Known For Television Production

Anthony Bourdain On Food On Film

Chris Carter Calls Edward Snowden Major Influence On Retooling Of “X-Files”

Academy Votes To Reduce Member Term To Ten Years, Adds Three To Governor’s Board, Who Will Be Selected By President Cheryl Boone Isaacs; Intention Is To Double Women And Diverse Membership By 2020

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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