MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2017

Russia Release of Aleksei Utichel’s Historical Drama Matilda Expects More Violence

“Surviving R. Kelly”: More Abuse Allegations

“A walkout came during Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow at the  54th Antalya Film Festival after a scene in southeastern Turkey in which the word ‘guerilla’ was used in subtitles to refer to an outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant. The screening continued without subtitles for a few minutes after the protest, after which it was halted in the sixtieth minute on grounds of “technical problems.'”

Yasujiro Ozu On “The Unexpected Scent of Salad”

“Federico Luppi is like the Laurence Olivier of Argentina. He’s the greatest Spanish-speaking actor… He is the most elegant, the most precise, the most genuine, and the most human presence onscreen ever. He’s a combination of Burt Lancaster and Christopher Lee! He has the precision of Lee, but with the acting presence of Lancaster.”
Guillermo del Toro

Cinematographer Walter Lassally Was 90; Films Include Oscar’d Zorba the Greek, Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Heat and Dust

Glenn Kenny Criterion Liner-Notes Personal Shopper

“I told him my salary conditions, and he stared at me again and said, ‘Can I fuck you?'”
Producer-Screenwriter Oriane Gay On Harvey Weinstein vid

“And there it was: the romantic’s faith that if you stick with something—with love, work, your parents, skeptical fans, an America that is failing itself with the wrong President—you will make it through, and perhaps what once seemed so daunting may just turn out to be something good.”
Hilton Als on “Springsteen on Broadway”

Patricia Llewellyn, 55, Food Programming Pioneer Launched Careers of Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay

“Period films tend to tell you something about the time at which they were made as much as they do about the time in which they’re set. If you think of something like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, it tells you about 1960s makeup choices as much as it does about the ancient Egyptians.”
Rebecca Hall

hollywoodreporter.com

How Harvey Weinstein Used Book Imprints To Wield Power

“‘Idea’ attracted buzz largely because of Wieseltier’s reputation as an intellectual. His title on the Emerson Collective website was “philosopher.’ Wieseltier was also accused of ‘workplace harassment’ on an anonymous list circulating called ‘Shitty Media Men.”

$5 Million Lawsuit Filed Against WeinsteinCo, Stating Board Had To Have Known Of Payouts

the wrap

Skydance-Warner Geostorm Headed To Making A Hundred Million Dollars Extinct

“Come on pretty baby, we’re gonna rock, gonna roll, until the early light.”
“Founding Father” Fats Domino Was 89

“Fats Domino, a portly piano-playing prodigy from the Lower 9th Ward whose boogie-woogie way with rhythm and blues made him a pioneer in the development of rock ‘n’ roll with songs such as “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blue Monday” and “I’m Walkin’,” was 89.”

Bold Films Extends $50 Million Finance Pact with Comerica Bank

Critics’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award to Errol Morris

“The fear that my former assistant described is part of a volcanic outrage that has erupted over the charred ground of the business this week. Survivors are everywhere. Others are hiding in the ashes. A long-suppressed fury has spread throughout the land. Young women are angry at women like me, too. They feel that we tolerated it. They are angry that it went on at all. They are angry that they don’t feel safe, at work or writ large, given who is in charge, bigly. Everything seems broken and rigged against them and they are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore.”
Lynda Obst

variety

James Toback Serves Word Salad in Face Of Hundreds More Sex Allegations

“I am a guy on TV who sexualizes food. Who uses bad language. Who thinks our discomfort, our squeamishness, fear and discomfort around matters sexual is funny. I have done stupid offensive shit. And because I was a guy in a guy’s world who had celebrated a system—I was very proud of the fact that I had endured that, that I found myself in this very old, very, frankly, phallocentric, very oppressive system and I was proud of myself for surviving it. And I celebrated that rather enthusiastically.”
Anthony Bourdain Becomes A Voice 

“New York magazine successfully shifted public debate from, “Why does the fashion industry tolerate a sexually abusive photographer despite repeated and public harassment claims?” to, “Why does this totally amazing fine artist with a troubling childhood keep getting wrongly accused of being too sexy?”
Anne Elizabeth Moore On Terry Richardson, 2014: “Why the House of Skeeveball Still Stands”

NY Times

Police Close In On Harvey Weinstein’s Italian Miramax Sex Enabler 

hollywoodreporter.com

Hw’d Sex Abuse Film An Open Secret Released Online

the wrap

Kirby Dick And Amy Ziering Examine H’wd As Next Hunting Ground

Robert Guillaime Was 89

“The women with whom I worked are smart and good people. I am ashamed to know that I made any of them feel demeaned and disrespectful ected. I assure them that I will not waste this reckoning.”
Leon Wieseltier-Edited Magazine From Lauren Jobs-Backed Corp Killed Over “Past Inappropriate Workplace Conduct”

daily beast

Daily Beast Reviews The Professional Life Of David O. Russell

hollywoodreporter.com

UTA Fires Bill O’Reilly After Learning Of Secret $32 Million Sex Pest Payout

Condé Nast Int’l Bans Photographer Terry Richardson And Kills All Projects With Him

Jezebel On Charges In 2010

“Terry is disappointed to hear about this email especially because he has previously addressed these old stories. He is an artist who has been known for his sexually explicit work so many of his professional interactions with subjects were sexual and explicit in nature but all of the subjects of his work participated consensually.”

NY Times

“I was due a kick in the arse. I really, really was,” Mr. Farrell, 41, said during a recent interview. “Because I was annoying. I had so much, so quick. I was so cocksure.”

“We’ve been inundated with stories that we are vetting and trying to figure out what is reportable. But people are coming forward. And we’ve published a number of those accounts mostly having to do with Harvey Weinstein. But people are coming forward with their stories. And I think the culture right now is enabling that in a way that we have not seen certainly in the time that I’ve been in journalism.”
Hollywood Reporter Editorial Director Matthew Belloni

hollywoodreporter.com

“I want to publicly break my non-disclosure agreement. Unless somebody does this there won’t be a debate about how egregious these agreements are and the amount of duress that victims are put under. My entire world fell in because I thought the law was there to protect those who abided by it. I discovered that it had nothing to do with right and wrong and everything to do with money and power.”

deadline

Amazon Studios KOs Joe Lewis, Roy Price’s Comedy-Drama Head 

NY Times

“Everybody else laughed at me, but Mom didn’t. Women weren’t scientists. When I was growing up, you could be a nurse, a missionary’s wife, a secretary, and then, oh, how exciting, you could be an air hostess. A lot of people said to me, don’t you want to be an air hostess?”
Jane And Splendid, Splendid Jane Goodall

LA Times

“Meanwhile, Toback’s longtime agent, former ICM chief Jeff Berg, terminated his relationship with the filmmaker.”

“He’s completely impossible,” Regan said. “I wish I had never met him and, from the looks of it, I don’t appear to be the only one.”

Lynda Obst On “What It Took to Succeed as a Woman Producer in the Hw’d Boys’ Club”

Paddington Wants Free Of Weinstein Family And Sex Abuse Scandal Taint

“Brit Marling is a super talented actress and writer. Mr. Weinstein has a different recollection of the events.”
Harvey Weinstein Attests Via Consultation With Mouthpiece From His Isolated Luxury Sex Addiction Spa

daily beast

Daily Beast Rehearses Narrative Of  David O. Russell’s Record Of On-Set Abuse

“I knew that they had come to whatever agreement or understanding that they had come to. She had handled it and she was the first lady of Miramax.”
Matt Damon Knew Harvey Weinstein Sexually Harassed Gwyneth Paltrow

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

MCN Curated Headlines

Archives Comments Most Recent

“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