MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2017

variety

“The plan that has gathered the most steam would involve movies for $50 a rental some 17 days after theatrical opening, available for 48 hours.”
Studios Prepare Revision Of Suicide Note For Exhibitors

Danny Leigh On Paul Verhoeven And Park Chan-wook Not Needing H’wd To Be Good

“I must say, the pacing that I’ve been doing for the past few years is too much. I cannot go on like that. I need space between movies. I love to work, obviously, but I did learn so much during that first period of time when I took a break, when I tried to have a bit more time to dream between movies, to reflect on what actually happened. To evolve as a filmmaker and to avoid repeating myself.”
Denis Villeneuve Will Have A Moment Off

“What pisses me off is filmmakers who are unwilling to interact with genre works on their own terms. There is a palpable sense of fear and shame from these arty ‘updates’ and ‘fresh retellings,’ as if the director is afraid of getting tarred with the “genre film director” brush. An auteur placing themselves above a genre, not within it, never, ever works. Instead of making a decent movie based on a true understanding of what makes genre work, they force their own artistic aspirations on the audience, missing the point of why audiences love genre. Now, Arrival may not be the worst contender…”

NY Times

Molly Haskell Examines Late Sam Shepard

Glimpse The Art Deco Sets Of Oscar 89 If You Dare

Fire Walk With Me May Well Hold Keys To The Course Of “Twin Peaks” Season 3

“Zootopia is a decent enough movie, but suggesting that it has a part to play in healing the centuries-old legacy of racism or the more recent trauma of Trump’s election and the resurgence of open white supremacy is grandiose—and when that idea is deployed in the service of getting the film an Oscar, mildly obscene.”

Arts Groups Mobilize Against Trump Intention To Eliminate Arts

indie wire

Anne Thompson Says It’s 9 For La La Land

Peek Inside Chicago’s Renovated Davis Theater, Once A 1918 Vaudeville House

Canadian Startup Analysis Sez Movies That Star Women Have Greater ROI

LA Times

A Look At FilmNation, Financier-Producer Of Arrival, The Founder, The Big Sick And Malick Movies

hollywoodreporter.com

David Geffen And Others Long Pursued Illegal Prints Of Goldwyn-Preminger Porgy & Bess That The Gershwin Estate Hoped To Eradicate For Being “A Piece Of Shit”

Michael Gerson OnThe Work Of Filmmaker Stephen Cone And “How Evangelical Gays Are Finding Their Place”

California Universities Release Their Latest Diversity-In-H’wd Statistics

From – The Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, “2017 Hollywood Diversity Report: Setting The Record Straight” 86-page pdf

And – San Diego State University’s “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” 4-page pdf

“Chazelle doesn’t seem to know that a lot of us — including every woman, like Emma Stone’s character, who’s ever had jazz explained to her by a man — are happy that the culture hasn’t stood still. [The film] ignores the painful history of highways that native Angelenos try to forget, the one where the city essentially barricaded off poor neighborhoods with concrete pylons, ensuring segregation would be planned into the our very structure; highways literally divide races and classes here.”
LA WEEKLY Asserts La La Land Is “Propaganda”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Content is king again because there are so many pipelines to fill. I can go after television projects, miniseries, small features and big features. The downside is you have to sing for your supper and find money. I actually wish more studio executives sang for their supper. Sometimes they will put you on the spot and say, ‘How is this film going to make half a billion dollars? That’s what our slots are worth.’ If it isn’t tentpole, I’m never sure how to answer that.”
Michael De Luca Talks Oscar And Producing

Trump FCC Votes To Eliminate Open Internet Transparency; “Thousands” Of Small And Medium-Sized ISPs No Longer Required To Detail Broadband Prices, Speeds And Fees

NY Times

Paterson Poet Rod Padgett On How To Spend A Sunday

“Trump’s fixation on being a ‘winner’ fits perfectly into a culture that spends half of each year obsessing over which movie is going to win a statuette.”
John Powers On Oscar And Obsession With “Winning”

variety

Some Oscar Ads May Be Deemed “Political” For Themes Of Cooperation And Compassion

hollywoodreporter.com

“We want to make it a little easier for the media to find films, for the industry to do their work and for the business that happens at the festival to take place.”
Toronto Int’l Film Fest Goes South, Dropping Two Northernmost Venues; Scaling Back Programming By Twenty Percent (Or 60 Films) And Cutting Vanguard And City-To-City Sections

“A happy outcome would be for the reduction in total films shown and the dropping of two venues to result in a better chance for screenings at remaining venues to sell out.”

hollywoodreporter.com

John Gay, 93, Screenwriter On Run Silent Run Deep, Separate Tables, Soldier Blue, Pocket Money

“I didn’t really understand anything about cameras. I guess I approached storytelling through composition and editing. Not lighting – I don’t understand lighting. Even by the time we did Silence, I felt I understood something, but I’m not Michael Powell, who could look at the sun and know exactly what time it was. So I stopped pretending that I could, or trying to understand F-stops.”

Academy Announces $250,000 Gift From Walmart For Outreach

variety

Ramin Setoodeh Cover-Stories ABC-Oscar Host Jimmy Kimmel

hollywoodreporter.com

Warner Settles With Innovative Artists Over Alleged Screener Piracy

27 Or So Movies Were Made On 35mm In 2016, Vadim Rizov Surveys

variety

Louis C. K. Joins Martin Scorsese Over At Netflix

LA Times

La La Land Oscar Nominee Ai-Ling Lee Illuminates The Difference Between Sound Mixing And Sound Editing

NY Times

“Either my films were too early or your generation came too late. Either way, the success is coming too late.”
Dennis Lim‘s Times Obit For Seijun Suzuki

Treasury Department Could Kibosh Dick Clark Productions’ Billion-Dollar Sale To China

“Most of us were thinking, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? You have the best job in the world. If I had the role of second-string critic, where you could discover things and make a different kind of mark… I don’t think there was a lot of sympathy for the way he was behaving.”
NYTimes Firing Of Theater Reviewer Of Twelve Years Charles Isherwood Still Mysterious

“Alison Williams is nearly the platonic ideal of idealized white beauty: thin and fair, with a broad smile and eyes that flash like polished glass. Her hair falls in waves, which softens her stately jawline. She is tall enough to not be short, but short enough to not be alienating. She’s feminine and delicate, but she’s also brassy and has got jokes — as well as an Ivy League education. She is progressive, well-bred, well-mannered, and has an esthetic straight out of a Pinterest board.”

Marion Cotillard’s First Kiss

15-Year-Old Maddox Jolie-Pitt Is An Executive Producer On His Mother’s Netflix Feature

Lights Go Down On Longtime Chicago Film Scene Kibitzer Ruth Ratny

“Women In Film, Sundance Institute and 50 Hollywood Leaders Launch ReFrame to Create Sustainable Gender Equity in Film And Television”

“If Trump is not your president, then La La Land is not your Best Picture. But it’s going to win.”
Michael Musto Osculates Oscar Opportunity

hollywoodreporter.com

Angelina Jolie Has Many Plans Before And Behind The Camera

“Steve Bannon is a failed film writer and director. He wrote a Shakespearean rap musical about the LA riots that he couldn’t get made. He made a lot of money off of ‘Seinfeld’.”
George Clooney Says Bannon-Trump Are The “True Elitists” Of H’wd

hollywoodreporter.com

THR Counters Their Anonymous Academy Whiners With 19 Names Who Say Oscar Matters

Slate Discovers That Playwrights Write For Quality Television

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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