MCN Curated Headlines Archive for May, 2017

Jeff Bewkes Says Trump Not Factor In Justice Approval Of AT&T-Time Warner Deal

“The racist alt-right’s clumsy embrace of Depeche Mode reminds me of the way that Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia were reclaimed in the 1970s by clueless film-theory feminists who painted Riefenstahl’s contributions to the cinematic arts as undervalued due to her gender — when, in truth, she was just another monstrous opportunist who was fine with Nazism if it meant more power for her. Personally, I’ve always found her films technically impressive but utterly devoid of soul.”
Molly Lambert Connects Dots

“What Abolishing The NEA Will Mean For Women Artists”

Lebanon Repels Wonder Woman At Final Hour Over Casting Of Gal Gadot, With Her Service In Israeli Defense Force

“Our hit ratio is way too high. So, we’ve canceled very few shows. I’m always pushing the content team: We have to take more risk, you have to try more crazy things. Because we should have a higher cancel rate overall.”
Netflix Hastings Says The Streamer Will Start Axing Shows Because They’re Too Successful; Intends To Increase Spending Above Present $6 Billion

hollywoodreporter.com

Legendary Warner Publicist Joe Hyams Was 90: Key to Campaigns For Kubrick, Streisand, Truffaut, Redford, Fellini, Stone, Friedkin, And Until Mystic River, Eastwood

Ray Pride On A Retrospective Of The “Electric Cool” Of Jean-Pierre Melville

indie wire

“The shocking truth is that the Observer has been going down the drain financially for quite some time. The end of what was the remains of a once-vital and responsible New York paper came when [Jared Kushner] threw what was left of a great weekly paper under the bus and lost all interest in bringing it back to life again by focusing his interests on running the White House and digging a tunnel to Russia.”
NYObserver Fires 78-Year-Old Film Critic Rex Reed As It Slims To Staff Of A Dozen
And – Glenn Kenny Remembers Reed’s Riot Acting In Myra Breckenridge

filmmaker.com

World’s Oldest Underground Film Festival Turns 24 In Chicago This Week; A Few Words From Its Artistic Director

“Bond Girl” Molly Peters Was 75

An Oral History Of Radiohead’s “OK Computer, ” 20 Years On

“#WonderWoman: Warner Bros. is gambling $150M with a filmmaker whose only prior big-screen credit was an $8M indie”
The Reporter Tweets What It Really Thinks About Women Directing Studio Pictures

hollywoodreporter.com

Earlier – “Adam Wingard, who made a name for himself with low-budget horror thrillers such as You’re Next and The Guest, is going big for his next movie. Monstrously big.”

Former Mega-Producer Andy Vajna On “Bringing Hw’d” To Troubled Hungary

Farrah Smith Nehme On Lubitsch Silent Masterpieces

Ebony Magazine Blocking Writers It Hasn’t Paid

NYTimes Kills Public Editor

Further Proceedings In Spinal Tap Vs H’wd

Boston Globe Tightens Paywall

Wonder Woman Banned In Lebanon

Tom Carson On “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Film And Novel

deadline

Deadline Would Have You Believe Studios High On Fumes Of Rotten Tomatoes May Curtail, If Not End, Critics’ Screenings Of Product Like Baywatch And The Latest Pirates Of The Caribbean

“The documentary process is the reverse of fiction filmmaking. Every time there was a problem on set or anything went wrong, it was perfect for the documentary and made it more interesting, more vital, more alive. The fiction film experience is the flipside, and it wasn’t fun when things go wrong. I learned to really appreciate what my husband, my daughter, my son — people who work behind the scenes — had gone through, and I gained a lot of appreciation for them.”
Eleanor Coppola Tells Marshall Shaffer About Her Fiction Debut At 81

Lynn Hirschberg With Sofia Coppola On Inspirations

“I was paid a visit at my dorm room at @nyuwinstein and questioned by the CIA because they found the color xerox of my passport in The General’s desk drawer at his residence and wanted to know about my relationship with him.”
Brett Ratner Remembers Manuel Noriega

“Why Is The Edward Albee Estate Afraid Of A Black ‘Virginia Woolf’?” Asks Mark Harris

“In Ramsay’s cinema, emotion is memory, and it feeds the present and the future.”
Bilge Ebiri On You Were Never Really Here

Michael Wood Dismisses Blow-Up As Antiquated “Style”

“But The Bad Batch isn’t a postapocalyptic tale; it’s what Ana Lily Amirpour sees as the inevitable conclusion of the government’s quest to just sweep away the poor and the weirdos.”

LA Times

“Superman had been a favorite movie of mine, even when I was at Cooper Union. People were painting a portrait of the career that I could have as an indie New York filmmaker. The only thing that stood in my way from staying in New York — because I loved New York and I wanted to stay — was something more that I wanted to do that was inspired by Superman. One day I would love to sing a song to the world, to bring something into the world that is beautiful in that sort of way.”
Meredith Woerner Meets Patty Jenkins

Zoe Kazan On Comedy And Fear And Stage And The Big Sick

Changes Coming At Film Freeway And Without A Box, Services Used By Filmmakers To Submit To Multiple Festivals

“If You Bought $14,000 Of Amazon Stock In 2001 You’d Be A Millionaire Today”

John McNaughton On Michael Rooker And Their Possible Production Of “A Hard Man Is Good To Find”

Charles Lane Remembers True Identity Days At Disney

wsj

Blogger-Podder Bill Simmons’ Traveling Roadshow Arrives At Vox

Lou Lumenick On The Man Who Wrote A Pro-Soviet Memoir That Became The Notorious Mission To Moscow, Whose Trademarked Family Emblem, It Turns Out, Was Taken By Trump

Romania Signs New Cinema Law

Two Unnamed Potential Buyers May Challenge “tronc” For Chicago Sun-Times, Reader

“I Love Women Who Hate Men and Hate Men Who Hate Women”
Might Be John Waters For All We Know

hollywoodreporter.com

Tracy Letts On His Next B’wy Play And Becoming A Leading Man With The Lovers At 50

variety

What Are Indie Distribs Looking For At Cannes?

“My remarks have been misrepresented. I did not say I quit cinema. Simply that nobody knows what the future holds.”

Are Photographers Making More Lasting Commentary Of Trump Than Comedians?

NY Times

“After 54 Years, We Fell in Love. After Five Months, I Got Leukemia. I Thought It Was A Romantic Comedy. I Was Wrong About The Comedy.”
Delia Ephron On A Gift Her Sister, Nora Ephron, Left Her

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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