MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2017

Jeremy Piven Denies Allegation

Page Six Alleges Harvey Weinstein Told Confidant “‘he was born to take the fall for his behavior in order to “change the world.” He is resigned to his punishment — as a martyr for social change.'”

LA Times

“I never knew of anything where Jimmy assaulted or bullied or pressured. I’ve never heard anything other than that Jimmy was somebody who hit on a lot of women in a very vague way. He had an appetite for going up to women and saying salacious and provocative things to them and introducing himself with his credentials and so forth and laying that on people to seduce them. I never knew any details of what he did that was assault in nature or rape in nature or criminally actionable. Never, never, never.”
Alec Baldwin Calls Glenn Whipp To Talk James Toback

Rob Hardy, Dean Cundey And Jim Hemphill On The Thing

“I feel like movies are presents, and credits and fonts are bows and wrapping paper. I like everything to feel like it was given a lot of time. I hate it when I watch movies and it seems like they just went and picked a font and, like, called it a day… I put into her the sheer confidence and the id I find in 8- or 9-year-old girls. They’re just brash, and they don’t know that they should feel anything but great about themselves.” 
Greta Gerwig Conversing In The Wilds Of Manhattan

“I wish I could convey to you just how thrilling this movie is. I wish I could quote all of the jokes and recount the best offbeat bits. I’m tempted to catalog the six different ways the ending can make you cry. I’ll settle for one: the bittersweet feeling of having watched someone grow in front of your eyes, into a different and in some ways improved version of herself. “
A. O. Scott Leads Team Lady Bird

John Carpenter Returns to Halloween

Egyptian Filmmaker Reem Qotb, Recent New York Academy Graduate, Reportedly To Be In Prison For Almost A Year For Drone Camera In Luggage

hollywoodreporter.com

“So I sent Tommy Lee the screenplay down in Texas, and two hours later, he calls me up and he says, ‘I don’t get it.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you reread the fucking thing and remember that the Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones is playing the fucking role!’ And I hung the phone up. A few hours later, he calls back and says, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ And then he got on a plane and flew into Burbank the next day, and we went to work. No management. No nonsense. The deal was obviously going to be worked out.”
Late Producer Peter Macgregor-Scott On The Making Of Batman & Robin

“Yeah, we’re working on the best approach to getting to know the clients and getting to know who’s behind the entities that are signing up for advertising.”
Facebook, Twitter, Google Offer A Lot Of  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ To Congress

“We are aware of the media reports and are looking into the matter.”
CBS Looking Into “Entourage”-Era Allegations About Jeremy Piven

Screenwriter Robert Getchell Was 81; Screenplays Include Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Bound For Glory

variety

“Digital platforms are taking top projects off the table, new ventures including Endeavor Content are helping finance sales companies’ transformation into producers, and online dealmaking and fests such as Toronto are turning film buying into a 365-day-a-year business that could become far less dependent on markets or sales agents.”
Before AFM, Gregg Goldstein On Int’l Distribution In The Amazon Studios-Netflix Era And How AFM Attendees Are Getting Squeezed And Maybe Even Shafted

hollywoodreporter.com

London Metropolitan Police Investigating Harvey Weinstein Allegations By Seven Women Over 11 Incidents From The 1980s To 2015

How The Grauniad Found 800,000 Paying Readers

Joint. Joint Venture: MGM and Annapurna Pact Joint Deal For U. S. Distribution; Bond In Play?

“They are two weeks into a production schedule that would extend well into 2018 even if they had not shut down Tuesday. Contracts totaling millions of dollars for everything from actors to catering are already signed. Who eats all that financial loss if production never resumes? Even the best insurance won’t cover all of it.”
“House of Cards” Production Suspended Indefinitely

IMG_9326NPR Top Editor Accused of Sexual Harassment

hollywoodreporter.com

“I might have kissed somebody on the cheek to say goodbye and then licked them. That’s my thing.”
Andy Dick Fired From Movie

Producers Guild, In Unanimous, Unprecedented Move, Bans Harvey Weinstein For The Rest Of His Life

“The picture is very long. It must have been cuttable and should have been. They can’t do better because they can’t play it more than three times a day because it’s just too long, which is of course self-indulgent at the very least, arrogant probably. It’s criminal.”
Blade Runner Co-Producer Michael Deeley

“Late in the process, I was sitting next to the producer, Andrew Kosove, and he made a comment which I thought was brilliant about the opening line of the film, K saying ‘I hope you don’t mind me taking the liberty. I tried not to drag in any dirt.’ Andrew said it’s a kind of mission statement for the production – revisiting a much-loved 35-year-old film and hoping not to contaminate it.”
Getting Blade Runner 2049 Down To 164 Minutes From Four Hours And Two Parts 

hollywoodreporter.com

Protesters Whisked Away From Polanski Cinémathèque Retrospective

“Pinhead represents the Faustian bargain: the things we desire will come at a price.”
“How We Made Hellraiser“

hollywoodreporter.com

“PMS was the total filmmaker. He knew every aspect of production and postproduction. Peter knew everyone’s job and what they needed to execute their craft with finesse. He cared for the well-being of the stars and the craft service personnel with equal concern.”
Producer Peter Macgregor-Scott Was 69; Films Include The Fugitive, Best Little Whorehouse, The Jerk, Revenge Of The Nerds, Death To Smoochy

“Pretty much everyone within a 1,000-mile radius of the biz is well aware that Sex-for-Work is Standard Operating Procedure in Hollywood. As Quentin Tarantino recently explained, in its treatment of women, Hollywood has been “operating under an almost Jim Crow-like system.” Precisely. Within this system, men are subjects and young women are objects for gratification/consumption.”
Filmmaker Nina Menkes

Gawker-Defamer Reported On Kevin Spacey Rumors In 2015

Facebook: We Served Russia-Backed Content To 126,000,000 Americans During The Election, Or One-Third Of The U.S. Population

Marshall Curry’s A Night At The Garden Is Seven Horrifying Minutes Of One American Moment In The Face Of Nazism

“I think that many people in the theatre and in the creative industries have been aware of many stories of many people over a lot of years, and Kevin Spacey would be one of the people that people have had concerns about, yes.”
Victoria Featherstone, Artistic Director, Royal Court Theatre

“Figuring out how to work within your resources and still be true to the story, still be true to the vision, it’s a trick, and it’s something a producer and a director really have to do together at some level.”
Dana Stevens Profiles Indefatigable Producer Christine Vachon

variety

Amazon Studios, IMDb, Amazon Video Moving To Culver Studios

“To use an allegation of attempted sexual assault against a child as an opportunity to come out? How dare you, Kevin Spacey. When celebrities respond to scandals, they have a team of experienced PR representatives to help craft statements. And what do PR representatives try to do in these circumstances? They try to deflect attention by introducing a new story. In this case, it was their client coming out. Spacey has injured a minority he has publicly refused to associate with until a few hours ago.”

“I am sorry that Kevin only saw fit to acknowledge his truth when he thought it would serve him, just as denial served him for so many years.”
Zachary Quinto

variety

“Believe me, I would love the pain to stop today. This is about creating a cycle of awareness, this is about opening people’s eyes and minds that this is a problem that exists. The soonest that I can have protection, I don’t have to wait until the film is done… the most important thing now is that I have securit … this is no joke. I am fearing for my life.”
Corey Feldman Says He Will Release Names Of Hw’d Offenders In Crowd-Funded $10 Million Feature

“Kremlin steps up online crackdown with VPN law”

variety

“Media Rights Capital and Netflix are deeply troubled by last night’s news concerning Kevin Spacey. In response to last night’s revelations, executives from both of our companies arrived in Baltimore this afternoon to meet with our cast and crew to ensure that they continue to feel safe and supported.”
Netflix Won’t Produce More “House of Cards” After 2018 Binge

NY Times

“We’ll drag you through the mud by your hair.”New Harvey Weinstein Accusations Reach Back To 1970s

the wrap

NBC News Fires Mark Halperin

“Peak Michael Douglas’ is the pathology director David Fincher has made his career exploring and criticizing.”
Jessa Crispin on “David Fincher’s Antisocial Network”

Male-Driven New Republic Takes Action After Publisher Ham Fish V Charged With Sex Harassment

Anthony Rapp Levels Kevin Spacey Charges explicit

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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