MCN Curated Headlines Archive for April, 2017

The Boondoggle Of Google’s 25 Million Digitized Books No One Is Allowed To Consult

“It has become a matter of concern among industry observers who believe a healthy, robust film market should allow for diverse moviegoing choices. Indeed, China seems to be turning into a one-weekend market where moviegoers rush to see the next big release each weekend, and films that don’t perform are at risk of completely disappearing from screens by the following Friday.”

Cameron Crowe Takes New Direction From Harry Styles

LA Times

How Veteran Producer Denise Di Novi Turned Director For Unforgettable

Erin Moran Was 56

indie wire

Eric Kohn Says Tribeca Docs Cover Inconvenient Subjects

“I often wonder if we are not shouting into a self-congratulatory drum. This was a suspicion I felt when I worked in entertainment in Los Angeles, and the thought arises when I attend many a well-funded documentary event in the U. S.”
Full Frame Fest’s Director On Getting Documentaries To Audiences That Don’t Care

indie wire

Transcribing Scarlet Johansson’s Tribeca Interview With Jon Favreau

“Soldier-turned-screenwriter Chris Roessner watched Platoon while living in Saddam Hussein’s palace and decided to write his own war movie, Sand Castles.”

NY Times

“There are calls for regulators to consider the sex harassment allegations at Fox News Channel that led to the ousters of Ailes and O’Reilly.”
Britain Delays Until After Snap Election Regulator Consideration Of Murdochs’ Control Of 60.9% Of Sky TV Which Is Not Already Owned

“Sure, if you whittle Moonlight down to its barest emotions and thematic underpinnings, you can deem it universal. Loneliness, desire, and coming into your own identity are common experiences. But to say that Moonlight is universal ignores how these experiences are filtered through identity.”
Angelica Jade Bastién On Moonlight

Visiting With Elsa Dorfman, The Center Of Errol Morris’ B-Side

Susan Leber On Surviving As An Independent Producer Today

NY Times

Margaret Atwood On “The Handmaid’s Tale” In The Time Of Trump

Bob Colacello On The Dozens Of “Deluxe Modern Traditional” Homes Fixed And Flipped By Sandy Gallin

NY Times

“Gallin was part of the team that booked the Beatles for their first appearance on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ He woke up in the middle of the night to Richard Pryor calling from jail. He oversaw Cher’s transformation from rock balladeer to disco dancing club diva. He jetted to London with Elizabeth Taylor to stage a painkiller intervention for another of his clients, Michael Jackson.”
Talent Agent-Turned-Manager Sandy Gallin Was 75
With – AD On Some Of The Finer Homes Gallin Flipped Or Fixed Up

“It is hard to understand why films offering richer depictions of elderly life are not being made: the incentives are there. The membership of most awards bodies still skews older. Financially the case is even stronger, with older Americans now making up a significant portion of the moviegoing public.”

variety

John Waters’ Summer Camp To Offer Cigars, Bloody Mary Bingo, Scotch, Burlesque Instruction

Avatar Announces 2020, 2021, 2024 And 2025 Sequel Releases

“Focusing on character and dialogue neglects what made Avatar a hit in the first place: the power of its images and of its ideas. If Avatar’s stock has dropped in the years since its release, that’s partly because the home viewing environment doesn’t do its three-dimensional splendor justice; if you’re watching it in two dimensions, you’re missing half the movie.”

NY Times

“Paper. I like the weight of the book, the cover, the text on the printed page. Especially if I paid full price for it at an independent bookstore I love.”
John Waters Talks Books

hollywoodreporter.com

Supreme Court Petitioned To Save Abbott & Costello Estates’ Rights To “Who’s On First?” Routine

Raw‘s Julia Ducournau On Making Horror As Creepy As Possible

ew

“There’s no one component that hasn’t been done before. There have been advancements in technology that make it a lot easier to get a movie out in 3,000 screens than it was even two years ago. The economic model is pretty simple. You sell the foreign to cover the cost of the negative. We sell nontheatrical to cover the cost of the P&A, and that’s it. People have done this before. The distribution part is only a little different because we control it in a way that you normally don’t get to control distribution.”
Soderbergh To Be Own Film Distributor

Cannes Sets 2017 Critics’ Week Lineup

“All films starring actors more than 60 years old seem to be about elderly friends angling for one last hurrah”

“Over scallops in Paris, Charlotte Rampling talks about tragedy on screen and off,silly accents, being scary and the need to ignore politics”

ew

“We could get on a small boat with a number of characters and just shoot IMAX as if we were shooting with a GoPro camera.”
Chris Nolan Has Camera Operators Handhold IMAX

Hulu Takes First-Window Streaming On All NEON Output

hollywoodreporter.com

“Sherry said, ‘How dare you? How dare you put us in this position?’ She turned to Mike Myers and said, ‘We’ll sue you. We’ll take your fucking house. You won’t even own a fucking home. As I’m sitting here with you, there’s a team figuring out how they can take every single thing away from you. If I were you, Mike, I’d go to Lorne’s office right now and stay there until you come up with a new script. We’ll slide food under the door.”

“I’m not a filmmaker, I’m a businessman with a film company, but I cannot be equated to a film expert.”
Wang Jianlin, China’s Major Movie Mogul And Richest Man, Doesn’t Care For Movies, Per Se with 11’12” vid

thestar.com

Canadian Filmmakers Urge Trudeau Not To Toss All Television And Film Support Into One Fund

“We are deeply concerned that if feature film investments are subsumed within a larger agency with a competing and unsympathetic mandate, its independence and efficacy will quickly erode. Merging filmmaker-driven Telefilm with broadcaster-driven CMF would deal a devastating blow to Canadian cinema.”

NY Times

“Joe was so enraged by their version of events he attempted to take his name off the film, but he realized contractually he was obliged to remain silent.”
Cara Buckley On The Forces Behind Two Two Big-Budget Armenian Genocide Romantic Dramas

Prolific Young Filmmaker Nathan Silver Provides Criterion His Top 10

“This is not ‘The Apprentice.’ This is real. Everything he says and does is important and has an impact. It’s not a game. He’s so narcissistic and so self-centered—I don’t know whether he gets it. I don’t understand how he became president. A lot of us feel that way. It’s mortifying.”
De Niro And Rosenthal Talk Tribeca, Disruption And Politics

“This Lawsuit Goes to 11: The creators of This is Spinal Tap, the most influential mockumentary ever made, have been paid almost nothing. The rock gods are angry.”

LA Times

Sharlto Copley: Accidental Movie Star

Film Festival Alliance Sets New Leadership

NY Times

“’In the whole history of the world, I think there have only been two great women directors, Leni Riefenstahl and Lina Wertmüller.’ Has John Simon ever seen a movie by Lois Smith, Maya Deren, Ida Lupino, Agnès Varda, Vera Chytilova, Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Jane Campion, Kelly Reichardt, Lucrecia Martel or Kathryn Bigelow? What kind of documentary positions that statement as authoritative in the 21st century?“

hollywoodreporter.com

Merry Murdochologist Michael Wolff Argues “It’s James Murdoch’s Fox News Now”

Beijing-Based Filmco To Remake Run Lola Run With Zhu Zhu

“A massive financial windfall to broadband giants like AT&T and Verizon, while driving up costs for consumers, because every time you use an ATM or a credit card at the gas pump or grocery store, the transaction takes place over a BDS network. Higher costs for businesses inevitably lead to higher prices for consumers.”
Trump FCC To Punish Small Businesses, As Well As Hiking Broadband Rates For Libraries And Schools

NY Times

“For at least one suitor, Annapurna, landing Bond would be transformative.”
Five Studios Vie For One-Picture Deal For “Bond 25”

hollywoodreporter.com

“I have received your email with its two questions. I would like to reply first to the second of these, which inquires of me the accuracy of a current television series entitled ‘Feud,’ which concerns Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and their supposed animosity toward each other. Having not seen the show, I cannot make a valid comment about it. However, in principle, I am opposed to any representation of personages who are no longer alive to judge the accuracy of any incident depicted as involving themselves.”

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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