MCN Curated Headlines Archive for February, 2018

Jones “often spent his time shirtless, and endlessly leering…at female employees and guests,” a “disgusting, hostile environment”
Infowars Potentate And Trump Advisor Alex Jones Accused Of Discrimination And Sexual Harassment 

LA Times

“I’ve been working on this script for five years, as well as living in Los Angeles County most of my life, including in 1969, when I was 7 years old. I’m very excited to tell this story of an L.A., and a Hollywood that don’t exist anymore. And I couldn’t be happier about the dynamic teaming of DiCaprio & Pitt as Rick & Cliff.”
QT9 Gets DiCaprio, Pitt And A Title: “Once Upon A Time In Hw’d”; Release Date Will Be The Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Manson Murders

variety

“Streisand, on some level, feels that Trump shares the blame for the recent Florida high school shooting, which claimed the lives of 17 students and teachers. ‘I think even that shooter was affected because Trump brings out the violence in people. He says, “It’s OK — rally, lock her up.”‘”
Ramin Setoodeh On An Audience With Barbra Streisand


Kevin Smith Does A Good Twenty Minutes On Being Alive

The Int’l Documentary Association Looks Behind The Nominated Shorts: Edith + Eddie; Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405; Heroin(e); Knife Skills; Traffic Stop

“Industry analyst predicts just three major film studios by 2023”

Greta Gerwig Floats Four-Chapter Sacramento Extended Cinematic Universe

NY Times

“I used to say about Cynthia [Heimel]’s writing, and her being, that she had the soul of Janis Joplin in the voice of Hedda Hopper. She was a voice for liberation with manners, freedom without regret and the blues with a grain of salt.”

“The lighthouse is surrounded by crystal trees that resemble the synapses of the brain. This lighthouse is desire, as with Virginia Woolf, and also the frontier that separates our own minds from others’. Here we see an embodied meditation on subjectivity and trauma. Lena finds the meteor that has punched through the lighthouse’s wall, and climbs down the wound it created, into the subconscious.”
Josephine Livingstone On Annihilation

variety

“Franklin has been accused of being verbally abusive to staffers and making inappropriate statements in the writers’ room, including making sexually charged comments about his personal relationships and sex life. Franklin has not been accused of directly sexually harassing or engaging in physical misconduct with any staffers.”
Netflix Fires “Fuller House” Showrunner Jeff Franklin; Warner Bros. TV Severs Deal Over Complaints

“There’s been a huge refusal in many quarters to criticize the CIA for fear of undermining the morale of the agency. I find that to be a kind of cheap excuse. It’s time the agency was held to account, because I don’t think anyone has done that.”
CIA Publicly Indicates Displeasure With “The Looming Tower”

Phantom Thread Got Some Bad Takes. Pick One.

variety

Guadagnino “is similar to me in that he often uses cinema rather than reality as the point of departure for his inspiration. There are many directors who use reality as their basis. Luca’s reality is in the films that precede him, the cinema that he loves. So since he loves my body of work, it’s possible that he has taken it as the basis of his reality. For him, reality is cinema.”
Bernardo Bertolucci

CBC, Canada’s Public Broadcaster, Closing Music Library, Digitizing And Destroying CDs

variety

Last Man In Aleppo Producer Gets Visa To Attend Oscars

Of Course Paul Thomas Anderson’s Got A Mixtape For 70mm Showings Of Phantom Thread

Twin Cities Theater Awards Group Shutters

variety

“The Walking Dead” Profit Participation Lawsuit Sparks To Life Once More

variety

Visiting With Lina Wertmüller, Still Directing At 89

George S. Kaufman, 89, Revived Astoria Studios

variety

Shyamalan Series To Apple 

Argentine Director Hugo Santiago, 78, Films Include Invasión, With Adolfo Bioy Casares And Jorge Luis Borges; Robert Bresson’s Assistant Director 1959-66

Santiago On Bioy Casares And Borges 24’43” video

Alex Jones Begs Parkland Survivor To Help Prevent YouTube From Banning InfoWars Far-Right and Inflammatory Content

hollywoodreporter.com

James Dean Cherry-Red Rebel Without A Cause Windbreaker Expected To Yield As Much As $600,000

OSCAR VOTING HAS CLOSED.

 Francis Coppola’s Got A Notion About That There Future

Oscar Spots More Stars As Presenters

“When I was in preproduction and then shooting it and then editing it, it really felt like ‘this is what I always wanted to do’. I got to draw on all the experience that I had and the work that I’d done in learning to make movies. All of that kicked in, which was tremendously satisfying and what I had hoped would happen! But the truth is you never know until you’re there.”
Greta Gerwig

Hilton Als On Tiffany Haddish

Producer Benjamin Melniker Was 104; Batman Was A Life’s Pursuit; Was Major Figure At MGM, Making Deals Including Ben-Hur, Dr. Zhivago, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gigi

A Sweet Conversation With Martin Short About Now And Then And Now

“Three Billboards is a film that both benefited enormously from its timing and been hurt by it. It went into wide release on November 10, just over a month after the first Harvey Weinstein story broke, as it was becoming clear that the flood of stories about powerful men who preyed on women with impunity was not going to slow down anytime soon. In that context, a movie in which a woman’s rage is portrayed as operatic, in which Frances McDormand’s speeches are less like rants than like arias, is immensely cathartic.”

Rotten Tomatoes Gets New Editor-in-Chief

variety

MoviePass Sues Rival

“At Sundance, we had such a diverse crew of all-female department heads, and every executive producer is a white man. And they’re great fucking white men! They invested in this movie and gave me all this freedom. They’re perfectly awesome. But I was like, Wow, the money still lives in one place. And I think that’s true not just of my film, that’s true in all of Hollywood. The money’s still trickling out down to us from them, despite all the changes. Luckily there are some good ones. To speak to their generosity, I don’t think any of them were like, “We need to make our money back on this.” I think they were getting into it to support the art.”
Josephine Decker

Stan Lee And Alain Resnais Nearly Made A Monster Movie 9’22’ vid

hollywoodreporter.com

“Endless sexual miscommunication and bitter rancor lie ahead. But thanks to the miracle of technology, most of the great movies of Hw’d history are now easily accessible — a collective epic of complex emotion that once magnificently captured the magic and mystique of sex.”
Camille Paglia Weighs In On Movies And Modern Communication

Spin Puts Its 1993 “SNL Takeover” Issue Online, With Contributions From Adam Sandler, Julia Sweeney, Tim Meadows, David Spade, Dan Aykroyd, Todd Rundgren And Dana Carvey.

“Hw’d Film Industry Insider Franklin Leonard Threatens Georgia If Anti-LGBTQ Bill Passes”

hollywoodreporter.com

“U.S. cable powerhouse and NBCUniversal owner Comcast’s $31 billion bid for European pay TV giant Sky would significantly expand the company’s international reach and revenue abroad, something observers say Wall Street has increasingly been expecting the company to do.”

“You must just acknowledge deep in your heart of hearts that people are supposed to fuck. It is our main purpose in life, and all those other activities — playing the trumpet, vacuuming carpets, reading mystery novels, eating chocolate mousse — are just ways of passing the time until you can fuck again. Well, maybe not eating chocolate mousse. If it is made with good Swiss chocolate and topped off with Devon cream, eating chocolate mousse is almost as good as fucking.”
Writer Cynthia Heimel Was 70

Kevin Smith On Near-Death

« Older Entries

MCN Curated Headlines

Archives Comments Most Recent

“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