MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2018

Washington Post Asks What Becomes Of Democracy When There Are No More Newspapers And No Content To Aggregate

NY Times

Sex Trafficking Bill Heads to Trump, Despite Silicon Valley Concerns on Internet And Free Speech 

hollywoodreporter.com

1,000 Further Jobs On Line As Meredith, Publisher Backed With $650-Million Koch Equity Development Investment, Fires First 200 Time, Inc Workers; TIME, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money For Sale

Abbey Bender Wants Respect For Wild Things As “One of the Last Great Erotic Thrillers”

deadline

China Film Industry Put Under Control of Propaganda Department of Communist Party Central Committee.

Hong Kong Fest Departing Artistic Director Looks Back at Bringing China’s Fifth Generation To the World and At Sad State of HK Filmmaking

“National anthem law will create dilemmas and awkward situations in Hong Kong, rather than love of country”

“Cambridge Analytica sells snake oil. Its ‘psychometric’ voter-targeting systems don’t work. No campaign has embraced them as effective. And Cambridge Analytica CEO Nix even admitted that the Trump campaign did not deploy psychometric profiling. Why would it? It had Facebook to do the dirty work for it. Cambridge Analytica tries to come off as a band of data wizards. But they are simple street magicians hoping to fool another mark and cash another check. o hear Facebook officials complain that they were tricked or victimized by Cambridge Analytica is rich. It was Facebook’s responsibility—by law—to prevent application developers from doing just what Kogan and Cambridge Analytica did. Facebook failed us, and not for the first time.”

LA Times

ICM Partners Buys Just For Laughs

“The Committee has repeatedly asked Facebook about how companies acquire and hold on to user data from from their site, and in particular about whether data had been taken without their consent. Your officials’ answers have consistently understated this risk, and have been misleading to the Committee.”
UK Vs. Facebook

“For two years, it’s been hell inside of Facebook. 51 current and former employees paint a picture of a company grappling with the problems it’s caused, and a CEO whose techno-optimism is circling the drain as he tries to fix them.”
WIRED Cover-Stories Facebook

“The story of how Kogan ended up with data on 50 million American Facebook users sounds like it should involve secret handshakes and black hats. But Kogan actually got his Facebook data by just walking in Facebook’s front door and asking for it.”

“MGM TV chieftain Mark Burnett was annoyed the movie side was not keeping pace, revenue-wise, with his ‘Survivor’ and ‘The Voice’ cash machines and relations were strained between the two men at the top.”
Richard Rushfield 

“I don’t believe in the Auteur Theory. I think it is a fantastic idea but — actually, you know what? Yes I do. I’ll tell you why: because the real Auteur Theory says, ‘The greatest auteur of all times was Hitchcock.’ Hitchcock was considered a popcorn director working for the studios but he part-owned Universal at a stage of his life. He was in such control of his work. And I would say the possibility of that complete control is what drives my projects.”
Luca Guadagnino

hollywoodreporter.com

“I’m doing great. I appreciate if anyone is worried about me but they shouldn’t be. I’ve been busy with meetings at home but I’m looking forward to being back in the office in a couple weeks.”
Eighty-Seven-Year-Old Rupert Murdoch

NY Times

Late Photographer And Documentary Subject Bill Cunningham Left Secret Memoir

variety

Birmingham, England Man Dies After Head Caught In “Gold Class” Theater Seat

Australian Gambling Baron James Packer Steps Down From All Positions For “Mental Health Issues”; Former Partner In RatPac Film Finance With Brett Ratner
With – Details On Packer’s 2017 RatPac Exit
And From April 2017 – “Through Access Entertainment, Len Blavatnik bought an interest in RatPac Entertainment from James Packer, an Australian businessman who founded the film company with movie producer Brett Ratner. RatPac, in turn, is part of a joint venture with Steve Mnuchin known as RatPac-Dune, which struck an agreement with Warner Bros. in 2013 to provide $450 million in funding for as many as 75 movies.”

“We already have plenty of tech and business writers around to flood the internet with bloodless articles about which company is activating the most meaningful impressions. But unlike phones and cars and Facebook, movies are actually cool! They deserve better than being made into fodder for lame industry analysis. More importantly, this kind of stuff is shit to read. For years now, Bill Simmons has name-dropped his idol William Goldman, and has repeatedly parroted his famous maxim that in Hollywood, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ And yet, his entire website seems to be built around a mission to disprove that. Well here’s something I know: They won’t succeed.”

Bilge Ebiri‘s Review Of Pacific Rim: Uprising Comes From The Distant Future With Foggy Portent

Three Billboards Could Return $21 Million To Co-Producer Channel 4

Salon

“You turn on the TV, and it’s ‘Russia, Russia, Russia!'”
Sanders chimed in, “And don’t forget Stormy Daniels!”
“These are all shiny keys to distract us. We should know about the West Virginia strike. What an inspiration that would be. But they don’t show this, Bernie, because, what would happen if they did?”
Michael Moore Joins Bernie Sanders Streamer To Assail “Corporate Media” 

“The tendency toward classifying art as newly pertinent—whether in promotions of the movies or in reviews that fall for the marketing bait—makes clear that people haven’t been paying attention to the reality of women’s lives.”
“We Shouldn’t Ask Art to Be Emblematic of the #MeToo Movement,” Writes Hazel Cills

deadline

“Penn first released the gonzo journalism-style novel as an audiobook in 2016 under the pseudonym ‘Pappy Pariah.'”
Sean Penn Pens Fiction, Takes Up El Chapo, Takes On Me Too

“Five women say the private Manhattan club is where they were sexually harassed and assaulted by a longtime member, the movie director and Harvard University alumnus James Toback. They are demanding an apology and answers from the club and the university — which does not own the club — about how Toback’s behavior seemed to go unchecked for decades.” 
After – SPY Tried In 1989

“Even though the Marvel series are TV shows, Netflix has become entranced by this notion of the ’13-hour movie’ when developing a season. This format mashup does a disservice to both mediums. Television’s strength lies in episodic structure, which allows writers to explore different tones, characters, story structure and conflict. Movies allow a filmmaker to hone in on one or two central themes, attack it from multiple angles and get out. Netflix’s model takes the most incompatible parts of each and slaps them together, creating a lumbering mutant medium. The ’13-hour movie’ model means we don’t get the brevity of a film or the variation of television; it means we get the singular focus of movies stretched out to television length. It’s exhausting and it does these heroes no favors.”

“In trying to ‘protect’ young people from online porn, the UK film censor is doing the reverse: The British Board of Film Classification’s arbitrary cutting and rating of mainstream movies exposes its doomed attempt to regulate pornography.”

“Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.”

Twenty-Fifth Hot Docs To Focus On Women, Including Slotting Women-Directed Films As Half Its 246-Feature Programming

deadline

Oz Judge Rules Out Chunk Of Defense In Geoffrey Rush’s Defamation Case Against Murdoch NewsCorp

Women in Bill O’Reilly Defamation Suit Ask Settlement Agreements Be Made Public

NY Times

Playboy Model Karen McDougal Sues to Revoke 2016 “Catch and Kill” Deal with National Enquirer Parent Company And Trump Pal Pecker Silencing Her Story of Affair With Trump

Two Steven Seagal Accusers Detail Assault, Rape Allegations At Press Conference

variety

MGM Fires CEO Gary Barber

New York Gov Responds To Allegations of Harvey Weinstein Privilege Afforded by DA Cy Vance, Jr

variety

WeinsteinCo Releases Its Employees From NDAs; Bankruptcy Filed

NY Times

“Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation”

variety

Michel Legrand Scoring Orson Welles’ Latest Movie, The Other Side Of The Wind


Barry Jenkins’ SXSW Keynote 64 minutes

nymag

“While NYPD Special Victims Division commander Michael Osgood cannot talk about the case his team built against Harvey Weinstein, sources close to the investigation provided the first detailed account of its inner workings — and how the police became convinced that district attorney Cy Vance, Jr.’s office was systematically working to derail the investigation.”

“Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. tends to give rich and powerful people (including Harvey Weinstein, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr.) a break from prosecution — particularly if they or people close to them have donated to his election campaign.”

The Full Time’s Up Call For Investigation On Alleged Negligence By NY District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr. In Handing Harvey Weinstein

“Both women say they were drawn to late night meetings by the promise of financial reward. After these encounters, both described being frightened and taken by surprise, as well as fearing that their business ventures were in jeopardy.”
“Former Tronc Chairman and Investor Michael Ferro Accused of Inappropriate Advances by Two Women”

Jack Torrance’s Jacket From The Shining For Sale
And – “Cinema Memorabilia Stanley Kubrick” pdf

variety

Facebook Loses $38 Billion In Market Value

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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