MCN Curated Headlines Archive for January, 2018

deadline

“We saw this as an opportunity to create a space for women directors to speak directly to consumers through their work and artistry.”
“Majority” Shingle Launched To Nurture And Employ Female Filmmakers by Senain Kheshgi and Jonathan Ker

Alfonso Cuaron on The Treatment In Mexico of the Latest Film From Amat Escalante

“Starting with Gawker and L.A. Weekly, we’re backing up entire news sites that might be threatened by the ‘billionaire problem,’ in which wealthy buyers can erase coverage they dislike.”
Freedom of the Press Foundation Announces

LA Times

“Zero tolerance does not mean the absence of due process, or that there is a one-size-fits-all punishment for every incident. The WGAW supports a fair and legal process that is consistently and transparently applied.”
Writers Guild Sets “Zero Tolerance” For Sexual Harassment

variety

Ezra Swerdlow, 64, Producer On 21 Jump Street, Hannah and Her Sisters, Wag the Dog, Enchanted, Zombieland, Spaceballs

Salon

“The Resurrection. Big subject. Oh, my God.”
The New Passion Of The Mel

“Money, until the festival approached its end, wasn’t doing much flowing toward films helmed by women directors. Films were being snapped up, but it was only in the second weekend that major deals were done for women-helmed scripted fare like Leave No Trace and The Tale. This may have been a female-driven Sundance, but the narrative that started a few days in and built to an apparently firm verdict by the end was that this year’s festival was a disappointment, a down cycle, devoid of any obvious breakouts. It’s hard not to see these two things as related, especially with unnamed but apparently powerful distributors tellingly grumbling to Variety, ‘Who are these movies for?'”

hollywoodreporter.com

“The staff of Disney Animation Studios will gather on the lot for a ‘Day of Listening,’ with human-resources professionals present. The gathering, which Disney veterans say is unprecedented for the Burbank-based animation unit, comes as sources with ties to both Disney Animation and Pixar Animation Studios speculate that John Lasseter, who oversees both companies but has been on leave since November, will not return from what was characterized by Disney as a six-month ‘sabbatical.'”

“The time is now to listen to these women’s stories and as I was putting it together I realized that that refrain of ‘listen to women’—people kept on saying it like it was a burden to bear. Like, ‘You have to listen to women, even though it’s a bummer,’ and I was like, ‘It’s not a bummer to listen to women!'”
College Roommates Nellie Killian And Jennie Slate Talk About Programming Women’s Voices on Film

“With all the issues that we have going on in the world and the country, to see [the government] focusing in one mill which has complained about unfair pricing seems ludicrous to me. It’s bizarre. I don’t understand it. I don’t agree with it. I think this is one of the things that makes people dissatisfied with government.”
Trump Dept. of Commerce Paper Tariffs Could Cost Jobs at U.S. Publishers

After Sexual Harassment Allegations, University of Iowa Removing Name Of Elderly Gambling Billionaire Steve Wynn From Institute

Rose McGowan To Weinstein: Don’t Try to “Slut-Shame” Me

NY Times

Connie Sawyer, 105, Film’s Oldest Working Actress

hollywoodreporter.com

“Our collaboration will push New York Times stories onto new screens and new platforms.” 
Anonymous Content

variety

Cesar Nominations Go To Au revoir là-haut, Barbara, C’est la Vie And A Record 13 For BPM

Charting The Hit Trajectory Of The Greatest Showman

Alex Balk‘s Fine, Fond Farewell To What The Awl Was And Now Is No More

Much Smaller Village Voice Staff Returning To Paper’s Longtime Cooper Square Haunt

“For years, predating the history of Marvel Studios itself, people asked me about superhero fatigue and if it was a fad or a phase. I say, if they’re all different, if they’re all special, nobody will get tired of these things before we at Marvel Studios will, since we live and breathe these things 24 hours a day. You make films like Thor: Ragnarok, like Homecoming, like Guardians of the Galaxy, certainly like Panther, and the upcoming Infinity War to keep it interesting and change it up. And we will continue to do that.”

variety

Harvey Weinstein Lawyers Say He’s Not A Human Trafficker

SXSW Announces 2018 Features

“Clarity is the abiding virtue.”
Ray Pride On Dave Kehr’s “Movies That Mattered”

“An ode to the audio jack as an engineering marvel”

NY Times

“Is it the long-term enmity showing itself again? He’s not a kid. He’s a gray eminence by now,” said Lester D. Friedman, emeritus professor of cinema at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the author of “Citizen Spielberg,” which examines the filmmaker’s career. “I just think it hit the wrong note in the wrong historical period.”

Bruce Handy‘s Eulogy for New York City’s Lincoln Plaza Cinemas

NY Times

“A sensibility that seemed sweet, skeptical and self-scrutinizing may have been cruel, cynical and self-justifying all along.”
A. O. Scott On The Case Of Woody Allen
And – Times Creates Allen-Farrow-Farrow Timeline

Edinburgh Fringe Festival Among Arts Defunded By Gov’t

“As a general matter, Harvey Weinstein and his attorneys have refrained from publicly criticizing any of the women who have made allegations of sexual assault against Mr. Weinstein…”
From His Sanctuary, Harvey Weinstein Via Spokeslawyer

“An Afternoon with Jerry Lewis: 
Jerry Lewis interviewed by members of the Documentary Film Group of the University of Chicago, January 26, 1971”

Wim Wenders, Photographer vid

Falling Lottery Proceeds Lead To Slashes In British Arts Funding

“The iPad Lost Years for Apple’s Media Partners: How The iPhone Maker Took Newspaper and Magazine Companies on a Detour to a Boondoggle”

telegraph.co.uk

Eric Shorter, 88, Telegraph Critic and Obituarist

“A disaster like The Heretic just makes it very difficult to make your next film, so it’s important in that respect. It didn’t actually lose money, because it had been pre-sold. A success like Deliverance was what allowed me to make Zardoz, but after The Heretic I didn’t work for a while. It took me a while to recover and wait for people to forget it. My judgment was severely dented, it felt that my relationship with the audience was completely skewed. David Lean said to me, ‘Make the films to please yourself, but if they don’t please the audience, then give up.’ So according to his advice I guess I should have given up a long time ago.”

Guardian Explainer Of The Day: Roman Polanski

DOJ Close to Okaying Sinclair-Tribune Media Merger

“I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being. I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it – not my responsibility, exactly, but – like I had had a hand in tempting him. Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier.”
Previewing Rose McGowan’s “Brave”

WV’s Charleston Gazette-Mail, Pulitzer Winner for Pioneering Portrait of Small-Town Opioid Crisis, Declares Bankruptcy
“Follow the pills and you’ll find the overdose deaths. The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town. Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States.”
With – Their Coverage

Sundance Director of Programmer Trevor Groth Joins 30WEST

NY Times

Finance Industry Noses In On #MeToo As Firms Offer Cash Advances on Legal Settlements, Targeting Women in Sexual Harassment Lawsuits

A Banksy Saved In Hull

“Beetle Bailey”’s Mort Walker Was 94

“I finished the script not knowing. I knew that I wanted to direct, but I thought, I think this script is good, maybe I could use it to get to direct a movie later. Surely, there’s no way I could get someone to back me directing it. So maybe I could get someone else to direct it and then it would be successful. At a certain point I approached Richard Ayoade, and he said, “I love the script. But, dude, the only person who could direct this is you.” And I was like, ‘Nobody’s going to give me any money to do it.’ And he said, ‘Look, they’ll just give you less money. It’s clear from the script. You’re already directing the movie.'”
Sundance Breakout Boots Riley

“It’s a similar scenario every time: eulogise the battle won and ignore the war lost. The intention is to project the US as the strong, dependable world policeman when in real life – especially given the present commander in chief – it’s more like Eastwood’s Dirty Harry: brutal, macho, not overly concerned with the rules, and overcompensating for something with its penchant for big guns.”
Grauniad Commissions Clint Hit Piece

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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