MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2017

“I’m not man-bashing. I’m not even newspaper-bashing. I just want to get to where this nonsense feels as archaic as smoking on planes—we put up with it, it harmed us, and we don’t miss it. I turned eleven years older over Thanksgiving. You should listen to me. I’m a straight up wizard.”
Kate Beckinsale, Straight-Up Wizard

deadline

“I find these views emerging: If you rule out confessed rapists and chronic abusers (the Harvey syndrome), the imposition of lifetime bans on artists and executives whose offenses date back many years seems like a throwback to ‘Les Misérables.’ Clearly some of the behaviors of a generation ago are unacceptable today. But must ‘a new civility’ be accompanied by a Stalinist-like blotting out of art – or careers? Must art be condemned because some of the artists once behaved reprehensibly? I understand the rush to erase Harvey Weinstein’s credits from current projects, but that doesn’t mean that projects that he fostered must forever live in a shadow.”
Lately, Peter Bart Obsesses On “Les Misérables” And Stalin

“Getting fired is a real distinction in broadcasting and I’ve waited fifty years for the honor. All of my heroes got fired. I only wish it could’ve been for something more heroic… If I had a dollar for every woman who asked to take a selfie with me and who slipped an arm around me and let it drift down below the beltline, I’d have at least a hundred dollars. So this is poetic irony of a high order. But I’m just fine. I had a good long run and am grateful for it and for everything else.”
Garrison Keillor Breaks Out His Trademark Wit

“How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly? I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that this reckoning that so many organizations have been going through is important, it’s long overdue and it must result in workplaces where all women, all people, feel safe and respected.”
NBC Fires Matt Lauer; Trump Gloats

variety

“Darren just had these ideas and these metaphors. I thought it was amazing, and I trusted him. If he’s got some bombastic idea, like writing God as a narcissistic artist, it’s going to be pretty cool. So I was in before I read anything. The first time I read the script, I threw it across the floor. I didn’t even want it in my house. I thought it was so fucked up on such a deep level. But I knew that’s what he was doing. That’s the only way to say what he needed to say.”
Jennifer Lawrence

ew

“Honestly, there’s an issue at the moment where there’s a lot of people being accused of things, they’re being accused by multiple victims, and it’s compelling and frightening. With Johnny, it seems to me there was one person who took a pop at him and claimed something. I can only tell you about the man I see every day: He’s full of decency and kindness, and that’s all I see. Whatever accusation was out there doesn’t tally with the kind of human being I’ve been working with… It’s a dead issue.”
Director David Yates On Not Recasting Johnny Depp

indie wire

“Rodriguez and his filmmakers will have just two weeks to shoot their new features, and Rodriguez is apparently still eager to see if he’s got what it takes to make it work. So are we! The finished series will air on Verizon Media’s go90 (their “premium mobile entertainment destination”) and the Rodriguez-led El Rey Network.”
Indiewire Promotes New Robert Rodriguez TV Series (And Verizon)

“Christian viewers propelled God’s Not Dead to rank as the sixth most profitable film in cinema history.”
Vice Takes Income Claims Of PureFlix Church-Driven Productions At Face Value

“What makes a collaboration between siblings so compelling is exactly that kind of shared history. It forever defines aesthetics, ambitions, influences, dynamics. For the most part it’s implied, informing the work quietly. It’s rare for siblings to direct each other, as James does with Dave here, and also to co-star alongside one another. But it’s what makes the Franco x Franco collab work. The particular thing that The Disaster Artist is adding to the annals of sib flicks is a winking riff that’s palpable.”
“Why The Disaster Artist Needed The Franco Brothers”

“Of course dialogue is important, but Guillermo and I were thinking very much about the old style Hollywood way of making movies. For us it was important to tell the story by painting with light and painting with the camera.”
Cinematographer Dan Laustsen On Shooting Shape Of Water

Mystery-Cloaked National Board of Review Selects The Post; Director Greta Gerwig; Coco; Jane; Foxtrot; Laurie Metcalf, Willem Dafoe, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep; Disaster Artist, Phantom Thread Scripts

MCN Curated Headlines

“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