MCN Curated Headlines Archive for November, 2017

NY Times

“Well, we’ve almost finished the cut of Quixote. We’re just fiddling now, figuring out a few things here and there so it’s pretty much what it is. We’ve got still months of work to do on visual effects, sound, music. But as far as the tale, it’s pretty tight now and it’s surprisingly wonderful.”

variety

“He is a beloved figure, so I’m scared to speak out,” said one of numerous former employees, all of whom refused to be identified by name for fear of career repercussions. Many described the culture at Pixar as toxic for women. “It’s sexist and misogynistic,” said a former employee.”“

hollywoodreporter.com

“Some women at Pixar knew to turn their heads quickly when encountering him to avoid his kisses. Some used a move they called ‘the Lasseter’ to prevent their boss from putting his hands on their legs. ‘To sum this up as unwanted hugs is belittling and demeaning. If it was just unwanted hugs, he wouldn’t be stepping down.'”

John Lasseter On Six-Month Leave From Pixar And Disney Animation Over Sexual Allegations 

hollywoodreporter.com

“I don’t think there’s been a moment in any of our lifetimes when the entertainment industry has been so entirely consumed with one issue that has shaken it all to its core. We go to bed one night and wake up the next morning wondering, “Who’s it going to be today? What victims will come forward? And whose hitherto illustrious career will be henceforth seen through the prism of some sexual depredation? Whose future obituary, which once would have begun, ‘Joe Schmo, two-time Academy Award winner, Tony Award winner and actor in some of the most important films of his era’ will now lead with, ‘Joe Schmo, whose starry career as a leading man went up in flames after years of predatory sexual behavior came to light in 2017….’?”
Todd McCarthy

PBS Statement On Severing Charlie Rose

“I do get a touch of joy—which I immediately mitigate, because I am too embarrassed to feel joy about something I’ve done. But there is a sense that they’re making a movie, there is a musical score, there’s a beautiful image, a beautiful cover to the book taken from the movie—I am very happy. And then it just withers away.”
André Aciman on Call Me By Your Name

“Things got shaken up a little bit and there is a lot of light being thrown into places where there were shadows and that is kind of healthy. It’s painful, but I think pain is a precursor to change.”
Mel Gibson Promotes Daddy’s Home 2

“I only know what Harvey told me, and basically what he said was he was fooling around with two women and they were asking for money. And he didn’t want his wife to find out, so he asked me if I could write a check, and so I did, but there was nothing to indicate any kind of sexual harassment.”
Two Harvey Weinstein Accusers Paid Off By Bob Weinstein in 1990s, Ronan Farrow Reports

variety

Spirit Nominations: Call Me By Your Name Takes Six; Good Time And Get Out Five; Lady Bird And The Rider Four

hollywoodreporter.com

“Producer Adam Fields Accused of Sexual Harassment by Multiple Women”

CBS News Fires Charlie Rose

hollywoodreporter.com

“Oprah called me and said, are you okay? I am not okay. After reading that article in the Post, it was deeply disturbing, troubling and painful for me to read. The women that have spoken up, the women who have not spoken up because they’re afraid. I’m, hoping now they will take the step to speak up, too.”
Gayle King

“I don’t understand why the cigarette is so important in French cinema.”

hollywoodreporter.com

“C. K. has agreed to take back the film, and unlike many of the others caught up in the wave of accusations, he might be best poised to return to the entertainment fold without a studio or network middleman.”

“I think it’s really important to our filmmakers to know that if they’re doing the best work of their life and it turns out to be the best film of the year, that they can compete fairly for that Oscar. The Academy should be celebrating the art of moviemaking in all of its forms, not the art of distribution and what room a movie may or may not be seen in.”
“Netflix, the Oscars and the Battle for the Future of Film,” By Nicole Sperling

Shell Of Ziegfield Theater Reopens As Midtown Banquet Hall

“A Storied Camera: Gregg Toland’s  Citizen Kane Mitchell BNC Restored”

“It’s one of those wondrous Zack Snyder extravaganzas that fulfill [sic] the aesthetic potential of comic-book graphics and achieves essential cinema kinetics. Studio interference and personal tragedy have prevented Snyder from completing his vision on a scale commensurate with the ever-astonishing Watchmen. His imagery is classical, mythic, and erotic… Snyder’s sensuality recalls Josef von Sternberg, whose great films were also misunderstood as camp, even though they contain the essence of cinema as imaginative, photographed experience.”
 Armond White

deadline

“I’m actually sitting here telling you this story, afraid to say his name, because I’m worried about backlash… Oh, fuck it! It was Oliver Stone, and it was The Doors… He wrote this special scene that he wanted me to do for him physically in the casting room, and it was humiliating and horrid.”
Oliver Stone Accused Of Sexual Harassment By Former Screen Actors Guild President Melissa Gilbert

At Trailers From Hell, Larry Karaszewski Summons The Lost “Smokey Is The Bandit”

“As a general rule (and there are certainly exceptions) people (even the wicked) are more thoughtless, morally unheroic, weak-willed and negligent of their obligations than they are diabolically malicious.”

“Lena Dunham Reminds Everyone Why Women of Color Don’t Trust Her”

One Charlie Rose Report Has Been In Works For Seven Years, But No Woman Would Go On Record Until Now 3’29” vid

“She drove her mother’s car from her parents’ home in New Jersey to Rose’s townhouse in the Manhattan. He opened the door to his home in a white bathrobe – like one, she says, that you’d find at a hotel… Rose drove her in his car to a West Village restaurant that he said he frequented, where they ate dinner and shared a bottle of wine. When the bill came, Rose said [he] couldn’t pay the bill and because the restaurant only accepted cash, she ended up paying.”
A Second Report On Charlie Rose Preying On Young Women Interns

PGA Doc Nominees: Chasing Coral, City of Ghosts, Cries from Syria, Earth: One Amazing Day, Jane, Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee

After Bill O’Reilly And Roger Ailes Multimillion-Dollar Sexual Harassment Settlements, 21st Century Fox News Proposes Its Insurance Companies Reimburse $90 Million In Payouts To Benefit Shareholders

Trump-Ajit Pai FCC Going For Complete, Total Revocation Of Net Neutrality Regulations On December 14

“There are jokes I made 15 years ago I would absolutely not make today.”
Sarah Silverman

“Five of the women spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of Rose’s stature in the industry, his power over their careers or what they described as his volatile temper.”
“I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.”
CBS, PBS, Bloomberg Sever Charlie Rose Over Lurid Longterm Harassment Claims

“Mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches very little about society or history – or about human nature. The new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.”
“How A Half-Educated Tech Elite Delivered Us Into Chaos”

NY Times

“I’m sure I have such a strong affinity for dance because, like poetry, it is filled with nuances you only recognize over time.”
Girish Bhargava, 76, Prime Editor Of Dance Film, Including Dirty Dancing And Work By Balanchine, Martins, Fosse, Cunningham, Graham

hollywoodreporter.com

“There was another person in the industry, who had a competing film for the Academy Awards, who decided to release all of the phone records and information. I’ve been told who did it — by several people. Nate had the stuff in his past, which is heinous and tough to get beyond. I get that. But that was when he was 18, and now he’s in directors’ jail. I’m not saying Nate should not have been in trouble. I’m saying that they got in different levels of trouble. And that’s the disparity. It’s like there are two standards for how to deal with someone who has this kind of issue in their past, you know?”
Armie Hammer

“They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.”

Academy President John Bailey On Il Conformista, “The Film That Changed My Life”

Darkest Hour‘s Joe Wright on “Style” vs. “Form”

Forty-One-Year-Old Ukrainian Movie Director Oleg Sentsov Wasting Away In Russia Detention

TRUMP DEPT OF JUSTICE SUES TO PREVENT AT&T-TIME WARNER MERGER; OPPOSITION TO CNN COULD BE FACTOR

Nixon An Earlier President Who Dangled Threat Of Antitrust Action Against Networks That Reported On Him

“Today’s DOJ lawsuit is a radical and inexplicable departure from decades of antitrust precedent. We are confident that the Court will reject the Government’s claims and permit this merger under longstanding legal precedent.”

variety

Tarantino Manson-Era Period Piece Gets $18 Million California Tax Credit

NY Times

New York Times Reporter Glenn Thrush Accused of Sexual Misconduct

Charles Bramesco Streams And Ranks All 62 Feature Films Branded As Netflix Originals

Nylon Rallies For Explicit Sex In Gay-Themed Motion Pictures

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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