MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2017

nymag

“If NBC wants to start making amends, it could finally make public any ‘Apprentice’ archival video that sheds further light on its star’s behavior. As AP reported, more than 20 former crew members, editors, and contestants affirmed that Trump repeatedly demeaned women on the show. A former ‘Apprentice’ producer said there are ‘far worse’ tapes than the ‘Access Hollywood’ video.”
Frank Rich

“The conduct of these employees ranged from verbal and sexual harassment to other behavior that is inconsistent with our policies, our values, and the way in which we believe colleagues should work together.”
Harassment Allegations: Vice Fires Three Unnamed Employees

NY Times

“I heard a word used recently about people like this — they’re dream crushers. He took this thing that was such a beautiful thing, this young hope, this sense of promise, and he just ruined it.”
Nine Women Accuse Playwright Israel Horovitz of Sexual Misconduct

variety

Misconduct Allegations: B’wy Casting Director Justin Huff Out; Worked For “Kinky Boots,” “Newsies,” “The Color Purple,” “On Your Feet!,” “Honeymoon in Vegas.”

Key Uber Investor Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Multiple Women

LA Times
hollywoodreporter.com

J. C. Penney Drops Russell Simmons’ Argyleculture Line After Sexual Assault Allegations; HBO Edits Out Of “All Def Comedy”

Laura Kipnis On The Moment

Steve Gravestock On “Circle of Three,” TIFF Founders (And Independent Producers) Bill Marshall, Henk Van der Kolk And Dusty Cohl

“The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always what does the protagonist want. That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants. What gives rise to the drama, what is the precipitating event, and how, at the end of the play, do we see that event culminated? Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama. You break it down into three acts.”
Mr. Mamet Turns 70. Here’s The Paris Review Art of Theater No. 11

the wrap

“Warner Bros. declined comment for this story.”
Unnamed Workers On Justice League Desultorily Describe Frankenstein Monster

“This whole thing from Weinstein to all that’s happening in Hollywood is about an abuse of power. An abuse of the position you have, and what happens is they’ve fooled everyone into thinking it’s part of the job.”
Terry Crews

Why Is R. Kelly Untouchable? Asks Jim DeRogaitis

Richard Schickel Memorial Edition New York Film Critics Circle Awards
Lady Bird; Sean Baker, Director; Phantom Thread, Script; Ronan, Chalamet; Haddish, Dafoe; BPM; Coco; Faces Places; Mudbound, Cinematography; Molly Haskell, Career

How Closing A Hungarian Opposition Paper Was A Worldwide Omen For  Fate Of Publications Like LA Weekly

hollywoodreporter.com

“Repairing the damage will take a lot of time and soul-searching and I’m committed to beginning that effort. It is now my full time job… There is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed.”
Matt Lauer Says He Is Beginning Image Recovery

“I am removing myself from the businesses that I founded. The companies will now be run by a new and diverse generation of extraordinary executives who are moving the culture and consciousness forward. I will convert the studio for yogic science into a not-for-profit center of learning and healing. As for me, I will step aside and commit myself to continuing my personal growth, spiritual learning and above all to listening.”
Russell Simmons After Jenny Lumet Sexual Assault Story

Jenny Lumet Accuses Russell Simmons

New Zealand Likely To Strip Matt Lauer Of His $9 Million, 16,000-Acre Waterfront Estate

“It is a great disappointment to Mr Rush the Sydney Theatre Company has chosen to smear his name and unjustifiably damage his reputation in this way,” Geoffrey Rush said through his lawyers. “Not to afford a person their right to know what has been alleged against them, let alone not inform them of it but release such information to the public is both a denial of natural justice and is not how our society operates.”

“Who Owns LA Weekly? Who owns the publication you’re reading right now? The new owners of LA Weekly don’t want you to know who they are. They are hiding from you. They’ve got big black bags with question marks covering their big bald heads.”
From LA Weekly, At Least Until Dawn

LA Times

“Shalhoup said the print edition of LA Weekly due out Thursday is finished, and her team had prepared to hand off additional articles that are in various states of completion. But if there is to be a print edition next week or a steady stream of stories online, any new staffers will need to figure out a lot of things very quickly.”

Geoffrey Rush Denies Wrongdoing During “King Lear”

“I would like to add that I am troubled by how quickly and brutishly some have taken my comments out of context and attempted to blame my generation, my age, or my mindset, without having read the entirety of what I said.”
Angela Lansbury

“I didn’t hack anyone. I didn’t do anything that I was not authorized to do,” he told us when we met in Germany. “I didn’t go to any site I was not supposed to go to. I didn’t break any rules.”
The Eleven-Minute Man Speaks: Bahtiyar Duysak On Deactivating Donald Trump

NY Times

“At some point, she said, she passed out with her pants pulled halfway down. She woke up on the floor of his office, and Mr. Lauer had his assistant take her to a nurse.”
Matt Lauer Alleged Sexual Abuse Story Updated

“At the end of the ballet season, Day-Lewis decided he needed to build a couture piece from scratch.”

NY Times

“The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death,” Writes Farhad Manjoo

ew

“There’s no time for pondering,” Scott says with a grin. “Sometimes you’ve got to lay down the law. You have to!”
“I think it was about time. Harvey definitely was way overdue. There will still be a few more people out there gritting their teeth who are way overdue.”
Sir Ridley

NY Times

Ken Shapiro, 75, Created The Groove Tube

Minnesota Public Radio Strips Keillor Past Episodes From Broadcast, Cuts All Commercial Links, Will Rename “A Prairie Home Companion”

Harassment Allegations: “Flash” and “Supergirl” Showrunner Andrew Kreisberg Fired

NY Times

“Now that Mr. Weinstein faces a mountain of damning corroborated evidence, his tactics seem tinged with malevolence, fronts for a man who abused women and used the promise of Oscar gold as bait. He might be gone, but his protégés remain.”
Cara Buckley Ponders Post-Weinstein Shape Of Oscar Three Months Before Broadcast

“I just hate to see some of these men’s careers, I mean, guys like Charlie Rose, these are terrific people and I hate to see it happen… These people’s careers are being ruined and we just hope and pray that these women are telling the truth.”
Pat Robertson, 87-Year-Old Billionaire Broadcaster, Expresses Concern About Men’s Careers In Face Of Harassment Allegations

NY Times

“The inquiry found that the relationship was inappropriate because the woman worked on the Android team while Mr. Rubin was leading it.”
Harassment Allegations: Andy Rubin, Android Creator

A Cornucopia Of Aggregated Tweets About Matt Lauer’s Day

“There are at least three major trends contributing to this dismal media moment. They all point to the same solution, and it’s something everyone in journalism should know by now: News publishers have to get better at making money outside of advertising. There are too many publishers and not enough ad money; Media companies accepted VC money. Now they’re accepting VC reality; Donald Trump is the Ghost of Christmas Future.”

NY Times

“Even when professing solidarity with survivors, many people still balk, still recoil and insist, ‘I don’t know anyone who would ever do that or has ever done that.’ You do now, kind of.”
“Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and the Sexism of Morning TV” By James Poniewozik And Margaret Lyons

Goodbye, LA Weekly, Goodbye

“Of course, we should applaud the erosion of bigoted, racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes wherever we find them. But we should not be cowed by the fear of causing offence. Comedy should shine a light in dark places; it should expose our nasty prejudices and complacent attitudes. I don’t want a cosy hug of humour, I want a walloping slap in the face. I want to be challenged by ballsy, brave, inappropriate material — the type of jokes that make me squirm with discomfort because they expose my own appalling truths. But more than anything else, I just want to bloody laugh.”

“Lauer whispered to Couric on set in 2006, ‘Keep bending over like that. It’s a nice view.'”
A Short History Of Matt Lauer’s Publicly Known Bad Actions

NY Daily News

Harassment Accusations: Producer Of Jake Tapper’s “State of the Union” Fired By CNN

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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