MCN Curated Headlines Archive for October, 2017

“I later sat in my hotel room alone and wept. I wept because I had gone up the elevator when I knew better. I wept because I had let him touch my shoulders. I wept because at other times in my life, under other circumstances, I had not been able to leave. Because at other times in my life, under other circumstances, I had not been able to leave… I was able to leave Harvey Weinstein’s hotel room because I had entered as an actor but also as a writer-creator. It was the writer who stood up and walked out. Because the writer knew that even if this very powerful man never gave her a job in any of his films, even if he blacklisted her from other films, she could make her own work on her own terms and thus keep a roof over her head.”
Producer-Screenwriter Brit Marling

NY Times

New York Attorney General Begins Weinstein Co Civil Rights Inquiry

“Can Michael Fassbender survive his year of flops?” (Yes?)

NY Times

“Is Anna Faris ‘Unqualified’?” (No.)

“An Oral History of David Pumpkins”

“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… I was made to feel ashamed for disclosing his behavior and assault, and expected to name those I had spoken to, as if they too were guilty of something.”

“How Movie Theaters, TV Networks, and Classrooms Are Changing the Way They Show Gone With the Wind“

“Godard was a sadist really, and he liked to see how far he could go with somebody and that didn’t show immediately. He would test and see if you yielded. He would make people move around in a restaurant… I would make him buy my Gitanes cigarettes. And he would complain against me smoking, as he thought it would waste the time of the editing team.”

NY Times

“O’Reilly and Weinstein may come from different ends of the political spectrum, but it turns out they have a lot in common. They rose to positions of power around the same time and used big, bullying voices to secure leading roles in American culture. Both men worked in industries that put up with gross behavior from male executives for decades, and both now stand accused of lording their status over women. Mr. O’Reilly, late of Fox News, and Mr. Weinstein, late of the Weinstein Company, share something else. They kept their alleged misconduct under wraps with the help of the nondisclosure agreements included as part of the numerous out-of-court settlements that allowed them to admit to no wrongdoing. The sums they paid their accusers bought them silence.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Hw’d’s Female Crewmembers Suffer Harassment Without the Platform of Stardom”

John Carpenter Sez Making Music Is More Fun Than Making Movies

LA Times

“It was Bob and Harvey Weinstein against the world. Then they turned on each other.”

NY Times

“When you say you go to a film school in America or France, you would probably go to a lecture where they teach you about German Expressionism and show you what these German Expressionist films are. But in Korea there was no systematic education I could be exposed to. It was sporadic, haphazard. And maybe that’s why my films have ended up in this strange form, where it feels like it’s a mishmash of everything.”
Alexander Chee Profiles Park Chan-wook

NY Times

“A pointillist, she creates pinpricks of emotion, but can easily go bigger than life, as she did to play Sydney, a con artist in the lollapalooza American Hustle.”
Manohla Dargis on Amy Adams

“I understand Jann Wenner, I think, in some ways that he doesn’t even understand himself. But I knew I had to write a book that would make him live on the page. And this is the life he lived. Even his own sister said she didn’t know how Jann would deal with the book, because part of his story is that he didn’t always treat people right.”

China’s Billion-Dollar Television Industry Includes Explosive Growth Of Online Streaming And “50-Cent VFX”

“‘Big Little Lies’ Didn’t Wind Up on Amazon Because Exec Wanted More Nudity”

Xuelin Zhou On Chinese Youth in China Film From Founding of PRC to Today

“It is surely no coincidence that insiders flushed out Weinstein, now 65, as his award-winning streak ebbed. As screenwriter Zack Stentz noted on Twitter: ‘We’ll know Hollywood culture has changed when a predator at the height of his power is taken down, not just someone already in decline.'”

Willem Dafoe: “I’ve thought about murder many times”

Oh, What Could Have Been Done

NYPost Rumors Sexual Content Of Now-Shooting Woody Allen Picture

LA Times

“I felt like a prostitute, an utter disappointment to myself, my parents, my friends. And I deserved not to tell anyone.”
SHOCKER!! Nearly Forty Women Attest To Sexual Harassment By James Toback explicit

Gawker’s Adrien Chen Covered In 2010

Spy Was All Over Toback’s “Squirm-a-Rama” NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO

“‘I’ve never pushed Seth Rogen to give me a back massage or tried to get Paul Rudd in the tub,’ Apatow added.”

LA Times

DGA Initiates Harvey Weinstein Disciplinary Charges

Sexual Harassment Allegations Accelerate In Multiple Industries And Companies, Moving Beyond Fox News And WeinsteinCo

“Harvey Weinstein, accused by dozens, specifically disputes Lupita Nyong’o’s harassment claims”

Wim Wenders Exhibits His Polaroids

NY Times

Argentine-Spanish Actor Federico Luppi Was 83; Films Include Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, Men With Guns

“The job gets harder the longer you do it. You fall into patterns, even something as specific as certain words you overuse. But even beyond that, every week you go to the well. A lot of films that are just mediocre. Sometimes people ask, is it easier to write about a film you really love or a film you really hate? I always say, those two are the easiest. It’s the ones in the middle, which are kind of okay—which is 90% of them—those, to me, are the challenge. Usually there’s one good performance, and that’s the thing that saves me, because I love looking at actors and trying to describe what they do. It’s not that I’m not interested in movies technically, but it’s always about faces for me. That really is the essential thing in cinema, going back to silent films.”

NY Times

Fox News Renewed O’Reilly Contract After Vast New Harassment Claim Settled

21st Century Fox’s Reasoning On The Additional $32 Million

Fox News Embraced O’Reilly Three Weeks Ago With Around-The-Clock Promotion For Hannity Hug

NY Times

“Given the brief to pitch directing a Thor buddy comedy that he would help write, Waititi suggested “Withnail & I in space,” “just these two people who happen to be superheroes making their way across the universe.”
“Taiki Waititi: The Superweirdo Behind Thor: Ragnarok“

“I thought having more money would make things easier, but I learned that no matter the budget, you never have enough money. Things were very tight, but we were responsible, kept things on-budget, only had one hour of overtime the entire shoot. And I still found ways to make it hard for everybody! I wanted to make a movie with a lot of kids; I wanted to shoot on 35mm film; and I chose to shoot in Orlando in the middle of the summer. Those are three really difficult production challenges.”
“Sean Baker Became This Year’s Oscar Favorite By Going Broke Again and Again”

NY Times

Spotlight Now Falls Onto Bob Weinstein

“The book is more nuanced and has a more interesting 1960s’ understanding of what psychiatry was then. The number one thing I take away from ‘Marnie’ is how the seeds planted in childhood translate into adult life. That’s interesting for me as an American, because we are super-fluent talking about psychiatrists, whereas people in the U.K. really don’t want to have that conversation.”
Composer Nico Muhly on Taking on Marnie and Hitchcock

“‘I’m as mad as hell’: Lee Hall on bringing Network to the National Theatre”

“It is astounding that Harvey himself has reviewed the file, in violation of the customary practice that executives do not have access to their own employment files so that lower level employees are not discouraged from complaints out of fear of retribution. “Harvey’s decision to engage a phalanx of lawyers and law firms to address a mere request for his HR file and his unyielding unwillingness to produce the file speak volumes about what it contains.”

“TWC ‘never made a profit’ and generated a loss of $65 million in 2015.”
“Weinstein board members claim lawyers hindered sex probe; Independent directors fear they were misled when access was blocked to personnel file in 2015″

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Farrell. “The feel-bad movie of the year! The Killing of a Sacred Deer is actually the nightmare that a character in The Lobster may have. You’d wake up relieved to be in the world of The Lobster if that was your dream.”

“The Director and Stars of BPM Open Up About Sex, Activism, and the Power of Words”

“French Drama BPM Shows Hw’d How to Capture Gay History”

How BPM Director Robin Campillo Made The Ecstatic, Devastating 90’s AIDS Crisis Film

“Poverty Row independence could foster innovation in style and subject matter, though not infrequently it settled for imitation.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“Over 200 people of the animation industry have signed an [anonymous] open letter insisting on an end to sexual harassment in the workplace.”

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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