MCN Curated Headlines Archive for April, 2017

William M. Hoffman, 78, Playwright And Librettist; Wrote “As Is” (1985), First Play About AIDS Crisis On B’way

Alexandra Heller-Nichols And Josh Nelson On “White Violence And The Horror Of Representation” In Get Out

EIC Of National Enquirer Tells Anne Helen Petersen About Future Of Us Weekly And Supermarket Tabloids Under Trump

LA Times

Signs Of Progress In Writer-Studio Talks

Albania Looks To Ban Its 200 Communist-Era Movies

“Since our members are funding these films, they should be the first to see them. But we are also open to supporting the large theater chains, such as AMC and Regal in the US, if they want to offer our films, such as our upcoming Will Smith film Bright, in theaters simultaneous to Netflix. Let consumers choose.”

NY Times

“Owning Sky outright would give the Murdochs an important new cash generator to feed the rapacious appetite for growth and conquest that has made their family business the most influential media conglomerate in the world — one that helped hasten Britain’s ‘Brexit’ from the European Union and helped deliver Donald J. Trump to the White House.”
Murdoch British TV Deal Hinges On The Three Words “Fit And Proper”

So How Did Netflix License Its Content To China?

“When you see a big thing in the sky, run for it, because they are a lot smarter than we are, and if you are stupid enough to challenge them, you will be taken out in three seconds.”
Sir Ridley Says It Will Be Unwise To Challenge Incoming Aliens

On Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 Wolfen As One Of The First Pictures To Capture Trump

hollywoodreporter.com

“The first Godfather cost $6.5 million, the second Godfather cost $11-12 million, which if you convert that, it would take a major studio. But it would never get through the process of getting a greenlight. Nothing will get a greenlight today unless it’s a movie where they can have a whole series and a Marvel comics type of thing.”
Coppola & Co. At Radio City Music Hall

Fox And Blackstone Move To Buy Tribune Media And Its Stations And WGN America

“There is no denying that much of the new Canadian film Below Her Mouth qualifies as unmitigated smut.”
Lede Of The Weekend

hollywoodreporter.com

Fanciful Recollections Of Reservoir Dogs By QT And Cast At Tribeca

“Period movies and sci-fi movies step outside of the contemporary moment and you can say things in the past and in the future that you can’t say now. Or you could say now but people would just be like ‘ugh, that feels like a bit preachy’ or ‘it’s too close to what’s happening in this moment.’ I’ve done three period movies in a row now and I think the next one we’ll do will be a sci-fi.”

Profiling Former NYPost Film Critic Rod Dreher As Prophet Of “Modern Monasticism”

It’s Not Charlie Kaufman: Film Blogger Retails Story Of Reluctant Russian Bride

How Reaction To Silence Of The Lambs Challenged (and Changed) Jonathan Demme

hollywoodreporter.com

H’wd Experience Of Incoming MPAA Head Includes Ten Years At Jim Henson Productions

NY Times

“This time, negotiators are locking horns over more routine employment matters, including the shoring up of a faltering healthcare plan. The talks have been tense but not openly hostile. A federal mediator has not stepped in. And production companies have done almost nothing to prepare for a strike, which seems to signal that they may ultimately be prepared to offer a deal palatable to the writers.”

“Demme was also blessed by a larger liberalism: the imaginative outreach, hard to discern in the rampant studio movies of today, which assumes that everybody is worth stopping for—that there will always be folks who repay the camera’s attention. What he radiated, before or behind the lens, was an unstinting curiosity, and a faith that the most reliable map of character was the human face.”
Anthony Lane On Jonathan Demme

Tallahassee Lawmakers Backpedal On Funds To Miami Art School That Fostered Moonlight And “Hamilton” Talent, From Defunding To Only A 23% Slash

Emily Yoshida Down On Portrayals Of Tech Addiction In “The Circle,” The Book And Box-Office Disappointment

K. Austin Collins On Films About The L. A. Riots, Twenty-Five Years On

deadline

Writer-Studio Talks Will Continue Sunday

Leading Brit Producers Ask That UK Film Tax Credit Rise To 40% For Local Independent Films In $2.6-$13 Million Range

“Documentary Filmmaking Became Jonathan Demme’s Oxygen,” Writes Thom Powers

Luc Besson on Le Pen & The Great Illusion

nymag

“Let’s just do it and be legends.”
Testimony From A Woman Who Escaped The Oncoming Conflagration Of The Fyre Festival

Florida Lawmakers Move To Eradicate Miami School That Educated Makers Of Moonlight And “Hamilton”

“It was 1969, I was only three, and as Dad stood at the back of the crowd, watching the bidding, he seemed to escape his body and floated up to the ceiling from where he watched for a while longer before slipping back into his body again. Only then did he realize one of the bidders was him. He’d bought the property without knowing that was his intention when he walked in. He describes it a surreal moment in his life when he didn’t know he was moving to Ireland at all.”
Charley Boorman Has Tales To Tell

variety

It’s Logan‘s Turn To Go Shiny And Chrome In Theaters

LA Times

MPAA Dodd Out In September, Replaced By Charles Rivkin From Obama Admin

thestar.com

Peter Howell Checks Fact For Fiction At Hot Docs

François Ozon On Nationalism, Avoiding Sex And Frantz

Shel Silverstein’s Sausalito Houseboat, A Converted Balloon Barge, Yours For $390,000

NY Times

“Lost City Of Z”‘s David Grann Says Trump Should Read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”

“With the death of Demme, American cinema loses one of its greatest humanists. His work didn’t simply glow with a generosity of spirit. You got the sense that he understood people — that he understood us. He was a kind of secret-sharer, a creator of cinematic worlds where anything was possible and anything could be said.”
Bilge Ebiri‘s Swell Reminiscence Of Jonathan Demme

Kathryn Bigelow On Her Elephant Conservation VR Film

hollywoodreporter.com

“To get younger audiences interested in the actual news, you have to play that up. Half of what I do — well, on social media specifically — is fucking with people.”
Words From The Internet “Troll” With The White House Press Credentials

NY Times

Laura Poitras’ Risk Gets Additional Edits On Evolving Story Up To May 5 Release

George Miller Says Next Two Mad Max Scripts Are Ready

Performance Art Impresario Vito Acconci Was 77

Did Falling Down, Filmed During L. A. Riots 25 Years Ago, Predict Fox News Reign?

Tribeca Announces Jury Nods

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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