MCN Curated Headlines Archive for April, 2018

“Because we care so deeply about the important work of journalism, we must all together work to elevate it. Is it appropriate that we invite a celebrity to launch a relentless, and often vulgar, attack on the very people we cover? As if we can go back the next day to don our cloak of impartiality and all is well? I know you agree our credibility is far too important to compromise over a 20-minute abdication of the high road and a few cheap laughs.”
Gannett-USA TODAY Publisher Comes Out Swinging Against Comedian Michelle Wolf, In Spirited Defense of Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders

“We did not act carelessly or in any way ‘force matters’ as Mr Juan Branco has said in the press. Our entire profession knows that ‘forcing matters’ has always been Mr Branco’s favourite method, and we should recall that he organised a press conference a few years ago where he denounced the Festival de Cannes because it had not kept a ‘promise to select’ one of his films. This was an accusation which didn’t go anywhere, because the Festival does not make promises to select films: it either selects them or it does not.”
Cannes Sets “Urgent Hearing” On Status Of Closing Night Film, The Quixote Of Gilliam

“I have no common place in contemporary film, not then, not now. I never got the Hollywood deal, I never went to film school, I never went to big Hollywood parties, I never had a PR person, which is probably why I used to call myself Captain Autonomous-Anonymous. I was never in favor with any group, be it audiences or critics or the financing system. They and I didn’t hear the same tune from the beginning. I barely had an agent half my career, and for me to go out begging for money at this age – some old guy no one’s ever heard of, and if they have, they don’t like his movies anyway! – I find it ridiculous.”
Alan Rudolph’s Got A New Alan Rudolph Movie

nymag

“The New York Establishment will ignore unscrupulous acts to serve its interests — just look how it treated Roy Cohn, onetime lawyer to the president.”
Frank Rich Cover-Stories America’s Great Satan

“It’s increasingly impossible to make a living in theatre.”
Brit Playwright Hannah Khalil

NY Times

“The Profound Normalcy of a Day at the Movies in Saudi Arabia: ‘It is truly a revolutionary time'”
Haifaa Al Mansour

hollywoodreporter.com

“Marvel spent 10 years methodically and carefully creating a universe of characters, worlds and stories that all led to this and, in doing so, created an event unlike anything the business has ever seen.”
Disney Distribution Chief 

“You’re not suggesting that I made this up, are you? I understand that there’s room for skepticism. I’m not a skeptic. I don’t make films or move through my life as a skeptic. I’m not interested in skepticism, that’s something you’re either born with or acquire as you live. You don’t know a damn thing, and neither do I. Nobody knows if there is an afterlife, a heaven or hell. What is our purpose here? Nobody knows that! We have no idea!”
William Friedkin

nymag

“One Has This Feeling of Having Contributed to Something That’s Gone Very Wrong.”
VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier on Silicon Valley Politics and What Went Wrong With the Internet

NY Times

“I‘ve seen what happens when we pretend that these guys can simply disappear once they’ve been pushed out. In my experience, they resurface elsewhere, often to prey on others.”
The Problem With “Passing the Trash”

thestar.com

“I don’t like its sterility. I like a film with a little more emotional balls, just as a movie, to get involved in. But as a work of art, I love it. It had an had an enormous, enormous impact on me, at a certain point.”
James Cameron Rejects 2001: A Space Odyssey

“When I first came up with the idea of utilitarian music, it was very, very unpopular. It meant Muzak. It was music reduced, stripped of its fundamental cultural importance. And that was my biggest hurdle. Artists were supposed to want people’s 100 per cent attention. But what was the least that I could do with music; how much could I leave out? What if I made music that was just like an atmosphere?”
Brian Eno

“The global adoption of one language form – in effect a standardization of mass audiovisual media – is a central issue of the media crisis. It means, for example, that a documentary film can basically have much the same form and narrative structure as a Netflix drama series.”
Peter Watkins Looks At “The Dark Side Of The Moon” At The Age Of Eighty-Two

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

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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