MCN Curated Headlines Archive for August, 2016

Art Of The Title Credits David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers

“Monetizing the significant assets of Tribune Media’s real estate portfolio is a strategic priority for the company and we are extremely pleased with the outcome of this sales process.”
Chicago Tribune Tower Sold Off To Redeveloper

hollywoodreporter.com

Dauman Exits Viacom

variety

Composer Justin Hurwitz On Writing Six Original Songs For La La Land

“Terrorize This”: Michael Pattison Revisits Team America World Police

John Bailey On Joseph Mankiewicz And All About Eve

NY Times

Twenty-Three Roald Dahl Adaptations Are In The Works

And The Awards Campaign Season Commences
“I’m honestly crying with happiness. That film no-one makes any more? Damien Chazelle just made it.”
And – “La La Land is a film you simply never want to stop watching. It has wisdom and joy and sadness and such magic, from the evocative power of music to the transportive power of movies.”
And – “Stone fits the part beautifully: something in the hesitancy and even frailty of her singing voice is just right. Both actors are also very accomplished dancers within a shrewdly limited range.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Handicapping The Oscar Producer And Host Selection

“When, a quarter century from now, a pop-music visionary refers to Men Go to Battle or For the Plasma or Krisha or Viktoria or Kate Plays Christine or another under-the-radar low-budget film of imagination and ingenuity, woe unto the critics who were here at the time and didn’t pay attention.”
Richard Brody On “Why Movies Still Matter”

Pulitzer Winner Margo Jefferson Says “Criticism Demands Authority”

Oscar Stays At ABC Until At Least 2028

variety

Manhattan AMC Theaters Go All Reserved Seating

Reginald Hudlin Looks Back At House Party

NY Times

Wesley Morris On Gene Wilder’s “Understated Nuttiness”

Dauman Offloads Remainder Of His Viacom Stock

“Hollywood at large is reluctant to embrace the low-budget horror strategy, instead rolling the dice on more mediocre big-budget productions. Ultimately, despite these eye-popping returns on investment, horror’s overall slice of the pie isn’t big enough.”

NY Times

Mike Birbiglia Offers Six Tips For Keeping It Small

“Movies Don’t Owe Anybody A Living”

Vulture Gets A Gold Poster And Considers Its Potential For Awards Gold

nymag

“It is fun to speculate how the famously comic Wilder might have interpreted the dramatic role of Rene Gallimard. But when I think of Gene, I am lucky to remember him as more than the brilliant performer who brought the world so much joy. I can think of him, not only as a major actor, not only a comic genius, but also, as a great lover.”
David Henry Hwang On Gene Wilder

“‘I would say that the biggest change the world is going through is the liberation of the female,’ says Beatty.”

“I came away believing that no other city in the United States would be a better setting, intellectually and artistically, for the Lucas Museum.”
After Rejection By Chicago, George Lucas Opens Part Of Art Collection To San Francisco Chronicle

LA Times

“I say this in full awareness that the only thing more tedious and predictable than sequels, remakes and reboots is a critic who complains about sequels, remakes and reboots.”
Justin Chang Chews Over Summer 2016 At The Movies

Jonnie Rosenbaum Criterion Liner-Notes Orson Welles’ Immortal Story

Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve And Her Things To Come

Two Votes For Late Woody
Screenwriter Matthew Wilder On “Darkness, Lightness and Other Anxieties of Influence”
And – Chadd Harbold Says “The Woody Allen Fan Club Is A Lonely Place To Be”

NY Times

NYT Magazine On The Snowden Trail, With A Second-By-Second Spoiler Of The Ending

LA Times

Trump Campaign Manager Steve Bannon’s Hw’d Adventures Touched Upon “Seinfeld,” The Indian Runner And Titus; Seinfeld, Sean Penn, Larry David, Alan Horn, Rob Reiner, Michael Ovitz No-Comment

An Excerpt On Oliver Stone’s Early Filmmaking From Matt Zoller Seitz‘s Epic Tome

“Any idiot can write a monster leaping out of the darkness and get a momentary scare from the audience. The real scare you want is the kind that lingers for days, that becomes a dull buzz in the viewer’s head even long after the end credits have rolled.”

hollywoodreporter.com

Richard Linklater Sequelizing The Last Detail With Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne

Willie Wonka, Technology Critic

Charles P. Pierce On Ireland Going After Apple For Billions In Back Taxes

“What is there to say, really, when someone so uniquely good takes his final bow? ‘Thanks for the laughs’ doesn’t begin to cover it. Still: Thanks for the laughs.”
Michael Phillips On Gene Wilder

“Why Everybody Was Wrong About Warcraft“

LA Times

AFI Fest Opens With Preem Of Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply

John Cleese May Sign For BBC Sitcom

“Wonders In The Dark” Film Blogger Allan Fish Was 43

NY Times

What’s Up With Tronc’s Battle Against Gannett Bid?

Wby Does Edinburgh Theatre Thrive?

Gene Wilder‘s 1991 Goodbye To His Wife Gilda Radner

Academy Announces 2016 Student Academy Award Winners

telegraph.co.uk

“Gene Wilder’s characters were less loose cannons than untethered hosepipes, that could uncoil at any given moment.”

daily beast

In Anticipation Of Radio City Music Hall Gig, Mel Brooks Talks Blazing Saddles 

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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