MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2017

hollywoodreporter.com

“Look, if women don’t get to use their full powers, and their full creativity, and their full glory, it’s a waste for the world, it’s a waste. It’s not just Harvey Weinstein; he’s just a very visible symptom of the problem. It’s not about individual men. It’s much deeper than that. It’s about a society in which men’s voices are valued above women’s, men’s bodies are valued above women’s, white people are valued above black people, a certain age is valued above both children and older people. It’s all of these value systems, which are disrespectful to the essential, total human being. And harassment is just one example of a lack of human respect.”
Writer-Director Sally Potter

“True to its values and independent tradition, the Cinémathèque does not see itself as a substitute for the law. We don’t give out prizes or certificates for good behaviour. Our ambition is different: to show the complete work of filmmakers and to place them in the permanent history of the Cinémathèque.”
Roman Polanski Headed To Paris Retrospective

variety

“What happened to me behind the scenes happens to all of us in this society and that cannot stand and it will not stand. I came to be a voice for all of us who have been told that we are nothing. For all us who have been looked down on. For all of us who have been grabbed by the mother—ing p–. No more. Name it, shame it, and call it out. Join me. It’s time to clean house.”
Rose McGowan

“It would have been a lethal compromise, a slow-acting poison that would have eaten away our souls until we ended up like Quentin Tarantino living a life of complicity and shame and compromise.”
Anthony Bourdain On Quentin Tarantino

“TWC’s board of directors has begun to view Bob Weinstein as a “liability”: he’s been Harvey’s stalwart business partner since the startup days of Miramax  and now must carry the taint of the Weinstein surname in a Hollywood forever altered by the scandal.”

hollywoodreporter.com

LAPD Investigating Former APA Agent Over Sexual Assault Allegations

Profitable Alt-Weekly City Paper Shutdown Announced At Same Meeting Where Unionization Recognized, Which tronc’s Baltimore Sun Mysteriously Overlooks

hollywoodreporter.com

Lionsgate Exec Andrew Kramer, Formerly Of WeinsteinCo, Exits On Harassment Allegation

Actor-Director Kathy Burke: “Lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes”

hollywoodreporter.com

The number one casting criterion in Hollywood is that, above all else, an actress must be ‘hot and fuckable.’ The late Don Simpson had his own way of measuring hotness; he bragged about which actresses’ butts he was able to bounce a dime off of.”
Linda Bloodworth-Thomason On Witnessing Four Decades of Harassment in Hw’d

From 2013, Ron Rosenbaum And Errol Morris Dissect The Twenty-Six Seconds And 486 Frames Of The Zapruder Film

variety

“Mr. Weinstein believes that his email account — which is the primary, if not only, account he used during the term of his employment by the Company — will contain information exonerating him, and therefore the Company, from claims that may be asserted against him or the Company.”
Harvey Weinstein Sues WeinsteinCo for Access toHarvey Weinstein Records

From 1978, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71”

Going Oral With “Oz”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Actress, singer and dancer Janis Paige writes about one terrifying night many years ago: ‘Even at 95, I remember everything.'”

variety

WeinsteinCo Amityville Sequel Release Grosses $742 On Ten Screens

“I’m quite happy with how things went, really. I feel like I pretty much hit the lottery with the The Shining. I have seen those kids from ‘Stranger Things.’ That popularity must be dizzying for ’em. I don’t regret trying acting. When I decided to stop, I don’t regret that either. At the end of the day, it’s not a huge deal.”
Danny Lloyd Was Promised He’d Get That Tricycle After Shooting The Shining

Griffin Dunne on Making His Doc About His Aunt, Joan Didion

DoP Erik Messerschmidt Gets As Technical As You’d Ever Want About Shooting “Mindhunter” With David Fincher’s Custom Red Xenomorph

Writer-Director Daniel Waters Reflects On A Storied Career (With Words For Harvey Weinstein)

“The afternoon I spent with the Goons’ inimitable Harry Secombe”

“Halfway through an effervescent confession in a coffee shop, the following words came out of my friend’s mouth: ‘Technically, I don’t think I’ve raped anyone.'”

“Wim Wenders on his Polaroids – and why photography is now over”

“I’m 60 years old. Can I shoot films for another 10 years? There’s not much time left for me. I’m going to devote my limited time to shooting films as I want. I won’t spend time thinking about how to get money out of the audience’s pockets.”
China Director Feng Xiaogang

Glenn Kenny On Late 20th-Century Investigative Journalism At Premiere, Including On Schwarzenegger And The New Line Man-Zoo

“Bill Maher suggests married men sexually harass women ‘because they have shitty sex lives.'”

“‘I like to tell everybody that The Matrix‘s code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes,’ says Whiteley, a production designer based at Animal Logic. He scanned the characters from his wife’s Japanese cookbooks. ‘Without that code, there is no Matrix.”’

Adam Cook And Shelly Kraicer Celebrate The Spatial Genius Of Hong Kong’s Great Director Johnnie To

Your Weekend James Schamus Double-Header
“Twenty-five years ago, all of us independent filmmakers thought, ‘Oh, fantastic, there’s this new thing called cable TV, and there will be 5,000 channels and narrowcasting, so that if anybody is interested in low-budget coming-of-age movies, like the one I just made, there’ll be a whole channel for them, and then we’ll all make money.’ Then we started hearing about this thing called the internet and about the long tail… I go to panels at film festivals and point out that now, in our business, it’s the people who have the algorithms who have the power. But I actually have no idea what I’m talking about. What am I talking about?”

variety

And – “Last year was the turning point. The actual death knell of the business was heard by those with their ears to the ground…We’re in a fight for the survival of American film.”

Kim Morgan, Rightly Rhapsodic On The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

NY Times

“I have been silenced for 20 years. I have been slut-shamed. I have been harassed. I have been maligned. And you know what? I’m just like you.”
Susan Dominus Profiles Rose McGowan And What Will Rise From The Ashes Of Harvey Weinstein’s Life’s Work

Eccentric, Always Cringey British Cabinet Member Michael Gove Apologizes For Crude Harvey Weinstein Joke On BBC

“Maybe high-powered men will keep their pants zipped and their hands to themselves so that they won’t lose their positions atop the totem pole. For a time. The revelations do matter. But something deeper — more difficult — has to happen, too. Media companies have to address the deep-seated gender inequality that’s at the root of this mess.”
Washington Post Media Critic Margaret Sullivan

“In her book, Faris describes herself as a shy, awkward, and exceptionally short child who was occasionally bullied by the richer and more popular ‘mean girlsl’ in her suburb outside of Seattle because she liked to do weird things like ‘play boat,’ a game in which she sat on her bed in an inflatable raft and pretended she was traversing whitewater rapids.”

“I just want you guys to know Harvey Levin, Harvey Levin a blogger, is very much in bed with everyone from Hollywood to Donald Trump.”
Kathy Griffin‘s Made A 17-Minute Video About Harvey Levin

“The same power that afforded Mark Halperin the ability to allegedly rub up against younger colleagues also meant that he got to shape the nation’s view of a woman whose political story had already been shaped by other men who abused their power, including her husband and her 2016 opponent Donald Trump, not to mention Anthony Weiner.”
“Our National Narratives Are Still Being Shaped by Lecherous, Powerful Men,” By Rebecca Traister

“Lemme be really clear about this. I don’t want to get a pat on the back, but I’ve struggled seriously to make movies with very little money, that I write, that I direct, that mean my life to me. The idea that I would offer a part to anyone for any other reason than that he or she was gonna be the best of anyone I could find is so disgusting to me. And anyone who says it is a lying c——-er or —- or both. Can I be any clearer than that? Anyone who says that, I just want to spit in his or her fucking face. By the way, no one who’s ever worked with me would ever say anything like that. No one.”
Oh, Hai, It’s Me, James Toback

“In March, Annabella Sciorra agreed to talk with me about Harvey Weinstein. I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding him. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly.”

variety

“Gal Gadot has dropped out of an awards celebration honoring Brett Ratner.”

the wrap

“After bids are in, a second round of discussions will be set where the studios can pitch Tarantino directly.”
Tarantino Summons Studios With Money To His WME Agent’s Office To Speed-Read His Opus Number Nine About The Manson Murders, And Offer Suitable Remuneration For His Good Efforts

John Connolly‘s 1998 Premiere Profile Of The Worse-Than-Bad Boys Of New Line Cinema

indie wire

“One man assaulted and harassed me. But it was my fear of an army of corporate litigators that held me enslaved in silence for decades to follow. What I realize now, and didn’t then, was that my exit contract from New Line — garden-variety corporate legalese that had nothing to do with my sexual assault or harassment — constituted the real crime against my person. It was a permanent gag (a chillingly apt term) that ensured my enduring status as chattel of a publicly traded multinational media corporation…That ends now. We no longer consent to tyranny.”
Former Fine Line EVP Of Publicity Liz Manne

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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

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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