MCN Curated Headlines Archive for April, 2016

Art Of The Title Credits Nashville With Dan Perri

Captain America Production Designer Tells Australia To Spend More Cash To Insure Continuity Of Work

NY Times

“I want to reach the status of becoming a mogul. And the only way you get there is by work.When obstacles have been put in front of me, I just get around them and move past them and laugh at them.”
Kevin Hart On What Makes Kevin Hart, Inc. Run

Paul Duane On The Fragrant Mysteries Of Only Angels Have Wings

Coppola Reveals More Projects, Including A 35-Minutes-Longer Cotton Club

NY Times

Paul Feig And His Production Designer On What Was Kept From Original Ghostbusters

Talking Up The Young Fans Of The TCM Classic Film Festival

indie wire

Manhattan’s IFC Center Expansion From Five To Eleven Screens Faces Opposition

“It’s up to critics and editors to acknowledge what was already clear in 1969—the realm of movies, their substance and their distribution, has changed drastically, and the practice of criticism needs to catch up with it.
Richard Brody Says Traditional Theatrical Release Patterns Hurt Independent Films But Critics Can Help

NY Times

Julie Dash’s Daughters Of The Dust, Apparent Influence On “Lemonade,” Restored And To Be Rereleased In Fall

LA Times

Palm Desert Moviehouse Co-Owned By Bryan Cranston To Close Over Battle With Cinemark

“Texas Cut The Budget For Film Incentives. Now Filmmakers Are Leaving To Shoot Elsewhere.”

Documentarian Margaret Brown On Turning To The Short Form

“Since her Oscar win, no white director has cast Lupita Nyong’o in a live-action role that lets her live in her own black skin. Idris, Lupita, Paula, and Zoe have faces that matter.”
Kyle Buchanan Wonders Why H’wd Hides The Faces Of Black Actors

hollywoodreporter.com

“We are training, we are preparing, we are ready. It’s not frightening. What should be frightening is all the videos you see on the Internet, not the coverage of an exercise.”
City Of Cannes Simulated Terrorist Attack Exercise Video Circulates

the wrap

“The only ones qualified to price the content are the studios. Home viewing of a lower-budgeted movie like Brooklyn or The Room might cost $200-$250, while a blockbuster like Jurassic World or Star Wars might be $600-$700.”
Former Ticketmaster CEO Looks Askance At Screening Room Scheme

variety

Comcast Universal In Talks To Buy DreamWorks Animation For Over $3 Billion

hollywoodreporter.com

Purple Rain Expands To 212 AMC Theaters Friday

NY Times

At 75, Leonard Riggio Set To Retire From Barnes & Noble

UK Culture Sec’y Sets Agenda To Privatize Channel 4 After BBC Charter Renewal

“It was clear, in those few weeks that we made something together, that Prince rarely, if ever, lost his vision. That wasn’t because he was a magical, otherworldly being; it was because he was rigorous, and generous, and he knew how to fight for what he wanted. It was a beautiful, constant fight. It was love.”
LIz Meriwether‘s Sweet Account Of Working With Prince On His “New Girl” Episode

“Beyoncé is frequently overlooked as one of the most radical pop musicians of the current century, probably because a) she’s a woman and b) she has an uncanny gift for wrapping up her most challenging ideas up in hugely catchy hooks and smuggling them straight into the mainstream under everyone’s noses.”
Miles Raymer On “Lemonade”

Bilge Ebiri On The Alien Films’ Attack On Humanity Itself

“It used to be that movies would convey very complex messages in very straightforward, speech-y ways. We could roll our eyes at those, and I don’t like those movies all that much, but I like the idea that that’s something we should fight for. I wanted to make a movie that had a point, and has a message. We didn’t know what that message was, but we had a vague inkling of it. I love that Network has speeches in it, where characters say what they feel. We’ve lost the ability to have movies just say, ‘You know what? I’m going to do this right now.'”
Filmmaker Robert Greene On The Modern Indie

Behind The Interactive Technology That Makes Guy Maddin’s Seances Possible

“Criterion Channel will give us a chance to champion and show more films by filmmakers working today, not just the few we have rights to publish on disc.”
Peter Becker Introduction To Filmstruck Streaming Says Hulu Loses Criterion In November

Verizon Wants Yahoo To Make It Third Digital Ad Purveyor, After Google And Facebook

hollywoodreporter.com

Toronto Int’l Takes Nollywood

Filmmaker Bob Byington On “Basic Aimlessness”

NY Times

NYT Editing Office Leaving Paris And Its Strict Employment Laws; 70 Jobs Eliminated Or Displaced

NY Times

“The Ancient One was a racist stereotype who comes from a region of the world that is in a very weird political place. He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people. ‘Hey, you know one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world? We’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political.’”

A Local Interview With The 18-Year-Old Prince About His Ambitions

NY Times

“Jodie Foster Is Still Afraid Of Failure”

Financial Times Latest Legacy Media To Face Up To “Daunting Conditions”

FCC Will Allow Charter To Buy Time Warner Cable

Turner And Criterion Developing Streaming FilmStruck For Fall 2016

hollywoodreporter.com

Reporting From Garry Shandling’s Memorial

Voice Resurrects J. Hoberman’s Paean To Prince’s Under The Cherry Moon

Bruce Handy Cover-Stories Amy Schumer For VF

hollywoodreporter.com

Some Branches Of Academy Asked To Fill Out “Industry Involvement Form”

What Did Rupert Pupkin Teach Donald Trump About Gesticulation? w/vid

“Gannett is well-positioned, because of our place in the industry, to do a great job bringing Tribune into our family. We believe we have put out a very attractive offer.”

David Denby Supports Pre-Code Sex

Michael Wolff Discerns “Borderline Panic” In Online Media

Logan Hill On How He Gets All Those Entertainment Press Bylines

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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