MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2016

LA Times

Academy Member Robert Bassing Loses Oscar Voting Privileges At Age Of 91; Co-Wrote Home Before Dark In 1958

hollywoodreporter.com

Disney Developing Live-Action “Snow White” Musical With Secretary Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson

NY Times

Double Tony-Winning Actress Tammy Grimes Was 82; Films Included Play It As It Lays, Slaves of New York, Mr. North

variety

Viacom Names Bob Bakish Acting Prez-CEO
With – A March Interview With Bakish On His Philosophy

Animated GIF Search Engine GIPHY Says It’s Worth $300 Million

Rebecca Mead Profiles “The Cinematic Traumas Of Kenneth Lonergan”

hollywoodreporter.com

“I’m going to push. Not only for better tools, workflow, high dynamic range and high frame rates — the things we are working toward. I’m still very bullish on 3D, but we need brighter projection, and ultimately I think it can happen — with no glasses. We’ll get there.”
James Cameron Promises Tech To Go With The Many Avatar Sequels

“It takes a special arrogance to say the poverty in I, Daniel Blake is unrealistic”

Near 90, John Berger Says He’s A Storyteller Because He Listens

Chinese Audiences No Longer Swallowing Every Western Movie That Gets Onto Local Sreens

Fears Of Kenyan Film Censor Extend To “Orgies Of Lesbians” In Tense Election Year

“We were partly plotting our escape from Akron in the future and we were investigating whatever stuff we could get our hands on that was a little outside. We were Midwestern and suddenly that was, wow, this is our stuff: This is working-class, wild-ass primal music. Yeah, that had a big effect.”
Jim Jarmusch On The Seed Of Gimme Danger

Slate And New Yorker Drop Trash Clickbait Ads

LA Times

James Galanos, 92, H’wd Designer, Dressed Nancy Reagan

hollywoodreporter.com

Doctor Strange A Hit In 45% Of The World

Producer Simon Relph, 76, Former AD, BAFTA Trustees Chair; First Head Of British Screen Finance; Credits On Damage, Hideous Kinky, Enchanted April, Reds

NY Times

“Can an elite, free-spending TV network based in Manhattan find a comfortable home at a Dallas telecommunications company led by an executive who is also the Boy Scouts of America president?”

hollywoodreporter.com

Callie Khouri Has Words For Man Sharing Platform With Trump Who Inaccurately Invokes Thelma And Louise, Wishing Fiery Death For Hillary Clinton

daily beast

In Memoir, Hedren Alleges Hitchcock Sexual Abuse 

NY Times

“For AT&T Chief Randall Stephenson, Time Warner Deal Is the Peak of an Ambitious Climb”

J. R. Jones Is Team Mahershala Ali

Aisha Harris On Barry Jenkins’ Fine Debut, Medicine For Melancholy

NY Times

“The black penis is imagined more than it’s seen, which isn’t surprising. This newly relaxed standard for showing penises feels like a triumph of juvenile phallocentrism — it’s dudes peeking over a urinal divider and, as often as not, giggling at what they see. Not all of that peeking is harmless; some of those dudes are scared of what they’ve seen.”
Wesley Morris Rocks Out With His Pop Out, Essaying The “Last Taboo: Black Male Sexuality”

Jennifer Lawrence Hails Jodie Foster As “My President”

“Astaire is clearly not an experimental dancer like Twyla Tharp or Pina Bausch, but he is surreal in the sense of surpassing the real. He is transcendent. When he dances a question proposes itself: what if a body moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical question, for no bodies move like Astaire, no, we only move like him in our dreams.”
Zadie Smith‘s Dance Lessons For Writers

Kiva Reardon On The Cost Of Love In Fassbinder, Getting Retro’ed In T.O. Today

hollywoodreporter.com

Fox Film PR Chris Petrikin On Way Out After Decade On Pico

Charting Big Media And All The Many Tributaries, Subsidiaries And Investments

Kyle Buchanan‘s On Top Of 1980s Movie Sex Scenes

telegraph.co.uk

The Modern Morality Tale Of The Murder Of A Bookseller Over A Copy Of “The Wind In The Willows”

hollywoodreporter.com

Hazel Shermet, 96, Comedienne-Actress-Singer, Was On Radio With Milton Berle And Henny Youngman, In 1954 Star Is Born, Voice Of Henrietta Hippo For 196 Episodes

NY Times

Cary Buckley Gets Hours-Long, Largely Off-The-Record Audience With Warren Beatty

Newly Published Anaïs Nin Erotic Stories Consigned To “Adult Dungeon” By Amazon

James Quandt On Fassbinder’s Favorite Films

“Silence, rather than finger-pointing over delays, may be a sign that an agreement is near on ‘The Other Side Of The Wind’ – or at the very least both sides are fully immersed in serious negotiations.

“The Mary Sue thing in itself is sexist because it’s the name of a woman.”
Daisy Ridley Takes Up The Case Of Rey Against The Armies Of The Internet

NY Times

Jonathan Lethem Profiles Doc-Maker Adam Curtis

“Even though it comes near the beginning of Jenkins’ career, Moonlight feels like the fulfillment of an inner world that has been under pressure within him for a very long time.”
Richard Brody Feels A Thrill

“Berlusconi’s nothing compared to Trump, because the action of Berlusconi affects Italy only and the action of Trump would affect the whole world. And I don’t believe that people can be so blinded to vote for him. I refuse to believe that. I would not be able to work in the street or look at people anymore if that happened! F—ed-up souls.”
Francesco Rosi Talks Politics But Says Fire At Sea Is Not Political

Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race, “Ethnic Affinities”; Choice May Be Illegal

145 Documentary Features Submitted For Oscar

NY Times

John Zacherle, 98, Pioneering TV Horror Host

“Chicago locations are used as backdrops to movies and television series, but how many movies get the gritty, rub-it-between-your-fingers texture of the streets and sidewalks and alleyways?”
Ten Films That Capture The Sensations Of A City, By Ray Pride

telegraph.co.uk

Bob Dylan Says, Sure, He’ll Show Up In Stockholm, If Time Allows

Touring Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse

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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